The So-Called Sneaky Feminist Agenda Finds its Way onto YA Bookshelves

As the landscape of young adult (YA) fiction continues to change in the 21^st century – and the marketcontinues to thrive – attention to the role this body of literature has on gender formation has never been higher. While it’s still significant that it was the Harry Potter series and not the Hermione Granger series, and that even in the 21^st century Rowling, like many female authors before her, chose to write under initials in order to mask her gender (thus appealing to her target audience of boys), the worlds of YA fiction are much more female-friendly than they once were. Of course, not everyone is happy about that.

Armed with old myths about gendered reading practices and skewed statistics, some have bemoaned the fact that women now ‘dominate’ the YA scene, resulting in alarmist pieces like Sarah Mesle’s article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ‘YA Fiction and the End of Men,’ and Robert Lipsyte’s New York Times article, ‘Boys and Reading: Is There Any Hope?’ In his article, Lipsyte complained that ‘boys’ aversion to reading’ was increasing and that males ‘were being treated as a sideshow’ in the literary market. He complained that YA authors were catering to a target audience of girls, and that this existing bias toward female-orientated books was compounded by the fact that such ‘novels are bought by female editors, stocked by female librarians and taught by female teachers. It’s a cliché but mostly true that while teenage girls will read books about boys, teenage boys will rarely read books with predominantly female characters.’ Punctuating his prose with this other apparently horrific f-word, Lipyste reflects nostalgically on the yesteryears of the publishing industry, noting that ‘children’s literature didn’t always bear this overwhelmingly female imprint.’ Apparently progress toward gender equality can be a painful pill for some to swallow.

Of course, Lipyste’s argument is almost laughable and ignores the numerous ways in which the literary world is still stacked in favor of men. For example, the vast majority of books taught in the public school system are written by men. And his tirade simply fuels a myth that ultimately serves as ‘a self-fulfillingprophecy’: the notion that boys will only read books focused on male characters. As Alison Flood notes in a piece for The Guardian, this tired cliché that teenage girls can identify with narratives about boys while teenage boys cannot (or will not) identify with narratives about girls, has been the problematic rationale Hollywood has been using for years to excuse its ‘systematic exclusion of female characters from cinema narratives.’

Lipsyte and others aren’t completely wrong in noting a shift within the YA publishing market, but the scale of that shift is obscured behind hyperbolic rhetoric. For example, The Atlantic ran a piece titled ‘Why Do Female Authors DominateYoung-Adult Fiction’ after NPR released a reader poll for the top teen novels in which 63% of the titles chosen as finalists were penned by women. Meghan Lewit concluded: ‘If the results of the NPR poll are a reflection of the reading populace, the YA world is a place of relative harmony compared to the battle of the sexes being waged in adult fiction,’suggesting that female YA authors are not hitting the ‘literary glass ceiling’plaguing the rest of the market.

But the problem with the conversation surrounding this shift toward more female presence in the young adult literary realm is that it is grounded in shock, awe, and dismay.

It's interesting how a slight predominance of female authors on a list immediately makes people think ‘female dominance.’ If the numbers were reversed, we would perhaps say appreciatively that the list was close to being gender balanced. We expect to find male dominance everywhere – anything else is an unusual occurrence, and as such it stands out. And this affects how we view the world far more than we realise.

Elizabeth Vail, author of ‘The Legacy of Katniss, or Why WeShould Stop ‘Protecting’ Manhood and Teach Boys to Embrace the Heroine,’ took her fellow journalists to task for calling the presence of a female protagonist one of the newest ‘tropes’ to hit YA fiction. She argued, the ‘last time I checked, half the population on earth is female. So saying ‘having a female protagonist’ is a trope is on par with saying ‘having a human protagonist’ is a trope, or ‘having a protagonist who inhales oxygen and ingests organic matter to live’ is a trope.

Further, the statistics being used to make proclamations about women’s supposed takeover of the genre are slightly misleading. A study of the award winning YA books since 2000 did reveal that women penned slightly more of those texts than men (56 per cent versus 42 per cent, with the remaining 2% per cent being co-authored by a male-female writing team), but even within those critically acclaimed texts, 49 per cent of the protagonists were male, while only 36 per cent were female. And even if we were to focus on authorship alone, as the researchers note, we can hardly call a figure like 56 per cent ‘female dominance.’

And while the data seemingly paints a positive picture concerning gender representation in youth literature, it doesn’t actually paint a very comprehensive picture. Other studies have shown that when youth literature is analyze more broadly, this slight female edge – if it can truly be called that – quickly dissipates. A study of 2014 newreleases found that as children’s ages decrease, so does the presence of female characters. While 65 per cent of the literature aimed for 12-18 year olds had female protagonists, in texts marketed to 9-12 year olds, this figure drops to 36 per cent. Studies of children’s literature present an even bleaker picture. A study of nearly 6,000 children’s books published between 1990 and 2000 revealed that ‘males are central characters in 57% of children's books published each year, with just 31% having female central characters.’ The gender imbalance even extends into texts in which the characters are animals, with male animals starring in 23 per cent of the books per year while their female animal counterparts are at the center of only 7.5 per cent of the annual releases.

Regardless of these statistics, perception can be a powerful thing. And since many of the most popular YA texts of the past decade have featured female protagonists, the idea that women are ruling this literary scene may linger on for some time. And while it’s fine to praise characters like The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen, the many accolades she has received for being a strong female character, positive role model, or feminist heroine often eclipse the fact that such exemplar female characters have existed in the genre for well over a century. Before the likes of Hermione and Katniss there were Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1932), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling (1970), Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat (1989), Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl (2013), and countless others celebrated female characters.

So why attend to this literary legacy – to the strong young women tucked into the pages of young adult novels? It’s just escapist fiction meant for teens, and it can’t possibly wield that much cultural influence if it’s only reaching a subset of a specific age demographic, right? Wrong. Part of the reason YA literature is getting all this attention is exactly because it is not just being read by tweens and teens. Adults are rapidly consuming these texts also. Marketing research indicates that approximately 55 per cent of the people who buy literature designated for 12 to 17 year olds are adults and 28 per cent of these purchasers are buying them for their own reading pleasure. Similar to the panic caused by the slight shift from male to female lead characters, the increasing number of adults reading YA texts has caused critics to make apocalyptic predictions about the death of literacy. In an article for The Los Angeles Times, Susan Carpenter notes: ‘It used to be that the only adults who read young adult literature were those who had a vested interest – teachers or librarians or parents who either needed or wanted to keep an eye on developing readers’ tastes. But increasingly, adults are reading YA books with no ulterior motives.’

This apparently is bad news because in 2014 various publications ran articles shaming adult readers for their juvenile reading practices. Writing for Slate, Ruth Graham’s article titled ‘Against YA’ ran with the subheading: ‘Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children.’ A month later, Vanity Fair featured the scathing commentary of The New Yorker’s literary critic, James Wood, who criticized Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning novel, The Goldfinch – a novel focused on a 13 year-old boy who survives a terrorist attack – calling it ‘further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.’ The hits kept on coming with critics from the New York Times, The Daily Review, and The New York Review of Books ‘decrying the demise of adulthood’ and urging the adult readers of YA fiction to ‘grow up.’ Unsurprisingly, these criticisms were matched with a wave of pieces defending the genre and adult consumers’ affection for it. So, the moral of the story: everyone’s reading YA literature, or talking about those who are reading YA literature, so the genre’s reach is not to be underestimated.  Therefore, it’s not surprising that the apparent literary gains of female authors and the visibility of female characters is getting such attention.  Because we wouldn’t want to stray too far away from the all-boys-club of the literary world, right?

Excerpted from Ames & Burcon's How Pop Culture Shapes the Stages of a Woman's Life:  From Toddlers-in-Tiaras to Cougars-on-the-Prowl, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Women Shouldn’t Have Sex & Men Shouldn’t Say I Love You: The Gendered Double Standards found on The Bachelor/Bachelorette

                               

 

As yet another season of ABC’s Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise draws to a close, once again the show broadcast loud and clear the double standards that exist for women and men on the dating scene –onscreen and off.  Last week the star of ABC’s Bachelor, Ben Higgins followed protocol and proposed to contestant Lauren Bushnell.  But two weeks prior he committed a big show no-no:  he said he loved he loved her on camera…. right before he said he loved another contestant, JoJo Fletcher.  While Higgins wasn’t the first bachelor in history to say he was falling in love with two contestants, he was the first to say it directly to the women (while caught on camera at least).  The trope of a bachelor torn between two women, in fact, has sort of become a staple of the program.  Loyal Bachelor fans will certainly remember the iconic balcony scene wherein Jason Mesnick sobbed over his conflicted heart and the more infamous moment wherein weeks later he dumped the woman he selected at the Final Rose ceremony, Melissa Rycroft, on live television in order to reunite with the runner-up, Molly Malaney, whom he later married and started a family with.  Regardless, Higgins’s loose lips infuriated fans.  One viewer (@karachristine16) tweeted “Why on earth would Ben say I love you to two different girls.  Whoever gets sent home is going to be crushed.”  Another (@JacquelyneAnder) posted: “I really can’t stand Ben.  He doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘I love you,’ if he says it to two women.”  While many tweeters were concerned with the ethics behind his multiple confessions of love, others were simply angry that he broke the show’s so-called “rules”:  “Ben’s already broken two rules.  Never say “I love you” & never ever say “I love you” multiple times.  Someone’s in the dog house” (@MrsEllis4Eva).  Higgins defended his actions in an interview with E!News:  “I don’t know of a rule book, maybe there is one, maybe (one) fans out there are hiding… (I) keep hearing I broke all the rules.  I didn’t know there were rules to this.” 

Although his over emoting caused some negative fan reactions over the past few weeks, it paled in comparison to what unfolded during the previous season’s Bachelorette.  On June 22, 2015, the Twitterverse erupted when ABC’s bachelorette had sex with one of her male suitors prior to the show’s pre-approved, pre-scripted timeline. Far from being a PG-rated reality TV program, the long-running show is well known for broadcasting a slew of make-out sessions and an entire episode devoted to speculating on whether the bachelor or bachelorette will have sex with any or all of his or her final three contestants in the fantasy suite. Yet when an episode aired revealing that Kaitlyn Bristowe, the show’s star, and repeat contestant, Nick Viall, had slept together at the close of their one-on-one date, Bristowe faced a wave of criticism from fans through social media. Over 70,000 tweets with the hashtag #TheBachelorette appeared in the 24 hours surrounding this episode and a vast majority of them were negative posts consisting of judgmental quips and derogatory slurs focusing on Bristowe’s sexual activity. These tweeters, the majority of whom were female, were quick to affix all the normal labels used to discuss so-called female promiscuity. Among the tamer tweets were chastising posts like this one: “Kaitlyn needs to learn how to keep it classy & not so trashy” (@otrat_rowyso).

Amid the caustic remarks were also hundreds of tweets defending Bristowe. For example, comedian Amy Schumer (@amyschumer) posted: “Oh no someone slept with a guy they’re dating and considering marrying! Showing love for @kaitlynbristowe.” Tweets that challenged slut shaming began to fill the feed, as did posts that specifically called out ABC’s producers for the ways in which the show was participating in and encouraging such shaming. (For example, the network promoted the episode as “Kaitlyn’s Sex Scandal.”) The attention paid to this episode resulted in some productive social commentary both on and off the twitter feed. Social media users and journalists alike drew attention to the continued sexual double standard that exists – one that is broadcast loud and clear on this show.  Bristowe and Viall both spoke out against the criticism as well. The evening of the episode, Bristowe tweeted: “Just remember, when you judge me, you do not define me, you define yourself,” and Viall posted numerous tweets drawing attention to the problematic ways in which people, particularly women, are judged for their sexual activity. Through a series of posts, Viall praised Bristowe for having the courage to admit on national TV to having sex, “knowing that she [would] be unfairly judged by some,” and further arguing that “sex is not shameful” and that “both men and women have an equal right to have sex without judgement.’” While some important conversations resulted from this sensationalized reality television episode, the initial social media response it provoked reveals how, even in the 21^st century, expectations for single women on the dating market are entrenched in problematic sexual double standards that have remained unaltered for decades. Consider, for example, this live tweet (@HeatherGossman) that aired during the episode: “you can turn a housewife into a hoe. But you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife.” As the negative twitter posts prove, many still believe that certain behaviors determine whether a woman is good girlfriend or wife material, and at the top of the list remains sexual activity.

The fact that Bristowe’s character was torn apart in social media – and she even received death threats! – because she dared to be physically intimate with a man, while Higgins was criticized – albeit to a lesser degree – not for his three fantasy suite encounters with women (which likely involved sex), but for his verbal intimacy is interesting.  Perhaps these reality television tweet-inspiring scenes received such attention because they flip the gender script.  After all, it’s the girl that’s supposed to be overly emotional and the guy that’s supposed to be the horn dog, right?  Sigh.  Maybe live tweeting our reality shows is a new way to police gender norms.

But what is even more telling is how antiquated and uneven the criticisms launched at these contestants are once we step back and view their actions within the context of everyday real dating practices.  Although our romantic ideals tell us that love should proceed sexual relations, for the great majority of people navigating 21^st century relationships, the simple fact is that physical intimacy is often part of the process of determining romantic compatibility.  It is, therefore, more common for someone to be having sex with someone they are dating casually than it is for someone to be proclaiming love to two people simultaneously.  Yet Bristowe was more heavily criticized for doing something relatively normal while Higgins was less chastised for doing something that would be seen as pretty cruel in non-reality television settings.  (Imagine for a second a female friend told you she discovered the man she was in love with was proclaiming his undying love for her and another woman at the same time.)  Again, it is clear that when it comes to judging men and women according to societal norms, women are often held to the more unattainable standards.

What these little blips in the Twitter world indicate is that we not only want to hold reality television stars to standards we ourselves don’t consistently reach, but we also want to do so while turning a blind eye to the problematic aspects of the programs that house them.  After all, isn’t it a bit hypocritical to critique any Bachelor/Bachelorette star for their sexual encounters when the show almost necessitates that contestants who makes it to the end become physically intimate with the star once they reach the fantasy suite stage?  And isn’t it unfair to bemoan the emotional pain a star might cause a constant by expressing feelings when the show itself is structured not only to cause such emotional pain, but also to broadcast it nationally?  Rather than critique those who participate on these reality television programs it seems viewers (myself included) might need to turn inward and consider why we continue watching this show season after season and what it might reveal about how the double standards that still exist for women when it comes to navigating romantic relationships.

Melissa Ames is the author of How PopCulture Shapes the Stages of a Woman’s Life: From Toddlers-in-Tiaras to Cougars-on-the-Prowl (2016), Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in21st Century Programming (2012), & Women and Language: Gendered Communication acrossMedia (2010).

Fictionalizing Ferguson: Recent Televisual Attempts to Work through Racial Injustice & Police Brutality

As someone who has spent over a decade analyzing the ways in which television attempts to work through cultural anxieties – specifically those that surfaced post-9/11 – I was not surprised when the new televisual trend of 2015 seemed to be spawning stand-alone episodes devoted to racial conflict.  The “ripped from the headlines” approach that many primetime dramas take made it inevitable that we were about to see a whole lot of fictionalizations (good and bad) of the tragedies that unfolded in Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island, Cleveland, and too many other cities to list.  As inevitable as it may have been, my cynicism meter spiked especially high when the first of these aired in January of this past year and it’s taken me nearly all of 2015 to decide just how I feel about the social commentary these (mostly well intentioned?) writers, producers, and networks are attempting.  Three early examples of such efforts include special episodes of The Good Wife & Scandal – which have been referred to by media critics as each program’s respective “Ferguson episode” – and ABC’s new show, American Crime, a gritty new crime anthology/mini-series which unflinchingly tackled racial conflict as its first season’s focus. 

The least well received of these was the first to air:  Season 6, Episode 12 of The Good Wife, an episode titled “The Debate,” was broadcast on January 11^th, 2015. It began by projecting disclaimers across two static screens (noting that the "episode was written and filmed prior to the grand jury in Ferguson and Staten Island" and that "all mentions of 'Ferguson' are in reference to the events in August, 2014, after the shooting death of Michael Brown").  The episode then moved directly on to camera-phone footage of a black character, Cole Willis, being shot and killed by two mall police officers.  The faux-footage, as media critic Simon Howell notes, is “very Eric Garner-esque” and, therefore, carries with it some of the same emotional resonance. 

The focus of the episode is Alicia Florrick's (Julianna Margulies) televised debate for the Cook County State's Attorney election against opponent Frank Prady (David Hyde Pierce).  The debate is interrupted within minutes when the jury comes back with a not-guilty verdict exonerating the police officers involved in the murder showcased in the opening scenes.  A protest takes place, police arrive in riot gear, politicians squabble about how to manage the situation, and the fictional dialogue is punctuated with a lot of references to how this could be "another Ferguson" or (how the situation could go "Full Ferguson") if not handled correctly. 

Media critics found plenty of things to criticize within this episode, such as a string of scenes that unfold in the hotel kitchen (where the debate had been held): "Prady and Alicia run into each other and start free-style debate about the  issues in the justice sytem that make tragedies like this one commonplace. Slowly a  group of young men of color (hotel workers) slowly drift in and act as a Greek  chorus, pointing out how ridiculous it is seeing two white people who are running for office arguing about how more people of color need to hold political offices."

                      

                               

Writing for Vulture, Laura Hoffman states that the critique works to some to acknowledge the fact that this story is coming from a television show with an overwhelmingly white cast and creative team).  However, other critics have argued the scene is an "embarrassing moment of 'white- splaining' (especially coming from a show that is usually more nuanced when it comes to political matters).” While the kitchen scene received the most attention by critics, the ending has also been criticized as being overly “tidy” as it closes with Alicia’s husband, the Governor, Peter Florrick, arriving at the scene of the protest with the victim’s widow, both of them urging the crowd to remain peaceful – and, of course, they do.  (This is a relatively common trope for episodes such as these. CSI: New York's finale, “Today is Life,” which predates Ferguson, airing on February 22, 2013, featured a story line wherein a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man suspected of having robbed a jewelry store and it was, similarly, his tear-streaked fiance who helped tame the crowd of protesters.)

  

                                         

Some have suggested that perhaps it was just “too soon” to have an episode like this, but others have argued the flaws were all in how the episode was executed. The episode spent only a fraction of the time really delving into race doing so as it bounced between other melodramatic story lines. But some critics did think it had its moment of worthy critique, for example, showing that canned political statements do little to improve real world racial justice. 

Compared to The Good Wife episode, Shonda Rhimes’s attempt to respond to current race-related events though Scandal was better received. The Season 4, episode titled “The Lawn Chair” aired on March 5^th, 2015 -- the week that the damning report on the Ferguson Police Department was publicly released. In a way that mirrored parallel events, the fictional episode “presented a story that seemed directly inspired by the killing of Michael Brown.” In the episode, Olivia was hired by the Washington Metropolitan Police Department to help control the optics, and curb community outrage, after a black 17-year-old was shot and killed by a white cop just blocks away from the Capitol. Within minutes of Olivia’s arrival, the dead boy's father the dead enters the crime scene, shotgun in hand, demanding to see the cop who shot his son.  As the plot unfolds, Olivia finds herself in conflict with both the police who’d hired her, and a neighborhood activist, Marcus, who condemned her for being on the wrong side of the issue, causing her to confront her own privilege.

                              

   

                              

   

 Ultimately the events of the murder are revealed: Brandon Parker, the murdered teenager, was stopped by Officer Newton while walking home because he matched the description of a suspect accused of stealing a cellphone.  The officer fired his weapon when Brandon reached toward his pocket.  At first the officer plays up his remorse, but as the storyline continues Olivia reveals that the he has planted evidence at the crime scene – a knife by the body to make the accidental shooting seem more justified.  In reality, Brandon was not reaching for a knife but a receipt to show the officer that he had just legally purchased a cellphone.  Newton was eventually arrested but not before delivering a blatantly racist rant in front of his shocked squad room: “[you people are] taught to question me, to disobey me… and somehow I’m the animal.”

Many praised the episode.  Sophie Gilbert writing for The Atlantic, called the episode “a lesson in how to thoughtfully model fiction around real-life tragedy.”  Despite the fact that “the timing of the episode was eerie:  days after the anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death coupled with the release of the Ferguson report,” many critics commended Scandal for its attempt to “tackle police brutality and institutionalized racism.”

Like with The Good Wife, some criticized Scandal for its overly optimistic ending.  In the end, Olivia and her team save the day and despite the fact that he disturbed a crime scene (firearm in hand), the grieving father is not arrested.  Instead he is personally escorted to the White House where he cries on the president’s shoulder.  Aisha Harris criticized this lack of realism and the way the program didn’t push itself far enough.  In an article for Slate, she asks:  

Why did Brandon have to be a standup kid in the end, who didn’t steal a cellphone? And why did Officer Newton have to be an undoubtedly dirty cop? Most cases of this nature are not so easily defined—racism and prejudice are often much more covert than that.  When Michael  Brown, Eric Garner, and many other unarmed people of color are killed by the police, the first thing many defenders will say is that they were “asking for it” by robbing a corner store or selling loose cigarettes, or, oh I don’t know, carrying around a fake gun in an open and carry state. Such viewpoints allow people to avoid empathy and see people of color as less than. 

Writing for Paste Magazine, Shannon Houston spoke out along similar lines: “Scandal did not need to give its huge audience an imaginary world where justice is served because, unfortunately, many people believe that such a world is the America we live in. If you’re going to make a 'race' episode, why support those delusions?” But other critics were more forgiving.  Michael Arceneaux, of VH1, wrote:  “I feel like we needed to see this lie this week.  It’s a fantasy, but it’s great that we were allowed to see a place where Black lives, grief, and anger matter.”  

Since some of the criticism that was launched at these shows stems from the fact that one episode simply isn’t enough to cover such complex issues, it’s not surprising that ABC’s American Crime – a program that devoted an entire season to race relations – was more uniformly well received (with critics saying it portrayed a “more nuanced portrait of race”).  American Crime premiered the same day as Scandal’s “Lawn Chair” episode.  Like the other shows, American Crime was influenced by recent events, a fact that creator John Ridley, who won an Oscar for the screenplay for 12 Years a Slave, noted: "The sad reality is that, unfortunately, these events remain cyclical in our country. It was never our desire to exploit any of these things, and it's not my desire to just merely say things. I really want people to feel things, to reexamine the world around them." 

                    

     

 American Crime is structured similarly to  films such as Crash and Babel, where a number of seemingly disconnected stories and characters come together in a single event. In this case, it's the horrific assault of a white couple living in the bedroom community of Modesto, California — an attack that leaves the husband, military veteran Matt Skokie, dead, and his wife, Gwen, a former beauty queen, in critical condition.  The suspects arrested and charged with the crime are all minorities and so it prompts a critical examination of race and prejudice (between and within racial groups).

While all three programs likely shared Ridley’s goal of trying to get audiences to “feel things” – specifically things related to racial inequality – American Crime was unique in that its overall aesthetic seemed devoted to this goal.  The show’s very filmic audio-visual techniques often reinforced the social critique it was trying to unfold – and it was, indeed, felt (at least by me). 

One visual motif that appears throughout the season is one of division (as can be seen in these screen shots below). Unlike traditional television staging, characters were often placed so that barriers existed between them and other characters, or so that even when they existed as the only character on screen, they were not centrally located, showing an imbalance or isolation. 

                                        

    

      

Another common element was the use of the extreme close up when two people were in dialogue.  In traditional shots both parties of a conversation would be visible, but throughout the show, entire conversations would be shot with only one speaker visible.  Moreover, the audio editing was purposely uneven so that dialogue was often out of sync with the visual of the actor speaking the lines.  The show often strategically used blurring, showing only certain characters in a shot clearly. The results of all of these stylized techniques was a reinforced attention to themes like othering, segregation, and breakdown in communication. 

                                     

 

                                     

 

The 2015 episodes related to contemporary race relations and police brutality did not end with these three shows. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit aired an episode, “Community Policing,” on October 14, 2015 that was similar in some ways to Scandal’s episode (and was met with similar controversy) and Madam Secretary aired an episode (“So You Say You Want a Revolution”) similar to The Good Wife (although slightly better executed) on November 15, 2015 wherein a #BlackLivesMatter related story line acted as a frame for a primary story line unfolding in the show.  So it’s obvious this televisual trend isn’t going anywhere but why might that be important or problematic?

Fictionalizations of domestic tragedies like the murder of Michael Brown or Eric Garner (or too many others to list here), are not easy to tell.  And so most television shows won’t tell these stories (or tell them well). In comparing these shows to the ones I usually study – fictionalizations inspired by the September 11^th attacks – it’s obvious that these episodes related to racial conflict are fictionalizing something that is actually much more real and present than the terrorist-themed dangers presented (or allegorized) in the 9/11-related shows.  As a result, these new episodes have greater power to influence viewers. That is, these shows have the power to do good… and the power to do more damage.

Generally speaking, many of the tragic remediations we are served (on a global or domestic scale) act as wish fulfillment giving us the type of positive dramatic dénouement we wish we had received in reality.  In studying this practice in 9/11-themed narratives for over a decade I’ve debated about whether viewing these shows could be seen as therapeutic or problematic or both. With this new trend of programming dealing with very current, very real racial issues, I’m even more invested in considering the consequences of such programming.  

In many respects, 9/11 is an event completed.  Sure, the larger threat of terrorism is ever-present, but the event of 9/11, while still reverberating in our cultural operations, is one that has reached a sort of tentative closure.  But unlike 9/11, Ferguson (serving as a representation of systemic racial injustice in the U.S. more broadly) is still very much an event-in-progress.  Despite individual rulings and reports, Ferguson is not over.  It’s not over because unlike 9/11 which stands as an isolated incident of sorts, the events surrounding Ferguson are very much linked to a string of similar, cyclical incidents.

So I’m left with many questions concerning these narratives that attempt to remediate (or fictionalize) our domestic tragedies-in-progress.  I wonder:  what does it mean to repurpose a cultural tragedy that is still in motion?  What kind of affectual power does this give to these parallel, fictional narratives?  Can they heal, influence the cultural climate, refine public sentiment? As television scholars have questioned before concerning fictional exploration of other social issues, does watching these narratives actually act to defuse activist impulses rather than stimulate them?  Ever the bad television scholar, these are questions I’m going to leave unanswered here as I may need still another year to ponder them.  

Everyone Prefers a Badass over a Housewife: The Walking Dead’s Social Commentary on Femininity & Maternity

It’s no secret that contemporary television is gutsier than it once was.  It pushes limits, pushes boundaries, and pushes buttons all with the hopes of increasing viewership.  As a result we have less predictable programming – shows that are more filmic in nature and packed full of gratuitous sex and violence in ways that would have shocked viewers even a decade ago.  Despite the reconfigured televisual landscape, in which not much is taboo, some plots are still avoided for fear that they’ll be met with negative viewer reactions: for example, the murder of children. 

Set in a zombie apocalypse, AMC’s The Walking Dead gets away with killing off almost everyone, including children.  But in 2014 the show featured a controversial episode that featured the death of children not by hordes of zombies or villainous humans, but by one of  its central characters:  Carol Peletier.  One would expect massive outcry against a female character who assassinated a child, but her popularity actually increased in the following seasons (which found her again threatening the well-being of a child).  It left me wondering what to make of fan’s celebration of Carol’s transformation into a take-no-prisoners badass character.

Like many fans of The Walking Dead, I’ve been fascinated by the character development of Carol for years and the ways in which the show uses her to carry out its post-9/11 gender commentary.  (For more on this see my previous post.)  As she progresses from the role of the emotional woman (an abused wife and mourning mother) to that of the hardened female (an exiled group leader and child killer at various intervals), she eventually pays the price for deviating from expected (gendered) behavior, and then – surprisingly – transcends such punishment.   The reactions from fans and critics to the season four episode “The Grove,” which debuted on March 17, 2014 – the episode wherein Carol, a surrogate mother figure of sorts, decided to kill the child she was tasked with caring for – is quite interesting.  One might assume that the emotional reactions viewers had to this plot twist would reveal that various societal expectations for women are so ingrained in our culture that even female characters in post-apocalyptic programs about hordes of zombies are expected to conform to them.  However, the fan commentary concerning this character actually reveals the opposite.  For example, the vast majority of the tweets about Carol that posted during and after this episode have celebrates her deviance from traditional gender norms.  This leaves me to believe that, despite its hyperbolic plots and gratuitous gore, the violent landscape of the zombie narrative might actually be an ideal space in which to interrogate conceptions of femininity more broadly, and maternity more specifically.

Carol’s transformation from a meek housewife to a rebellious leader, of course, makes her later transgressions involving children all the more interesting.  It's also interesting how the show shifts in terms of it treatment of Carol as her characterization becomes less and less feminine. For example, when Carol first acts in way that evokes a sense of masculine power and autonomy, she is punished for it (although later in the show such acts are applauded).

This is seen most clearly in season three when Carol begins training the children of her community in survival tactics, causing some characters to question her position as a role model. This season also finds Carol making the call to kill two fellow survivors who were infected by a plague that threatened to wipe out the entire group.  Despite the fact that the group’s leader, Rick, had made morally questionable, unilateral decisions on behalf of the community, he casts Carol out as a punishment for her action. In this example, Carol, who grows away from her status as “emotional woman” and into a symbolic stand in for the “rational man,” making the cold and calculating - but logical - call to protect the group, is punished for not behaving according to social norms. 

This sexist plot development was completely in line with the show’s gender bias, as many have noted the program’s problem with patriarchy.  For example, one critic applied the comic book writer, Gail Simone’s notion of “fridging” to the show.  She coined the phrase “women in refrigerators” to refer to the array of female characters who were “depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator” in popular comics.  Since, feminist comic book fans have adopted the term “fridging” to note the pointless death of a female character in order to fuel a male character’s pain and narrative action. This happens repeatedly on The Walking Dead.  Along these lines, Sara Century, a media reviewer for Bitch Media, notes the shows problematic portrayals of weak women, asking:  “Does someone want to do a tally of how many women in The Walking Dead attempt suicide, go insane, or give up their authority by deferring to men? Because every single female character does at least one of those things. Just giving you a head's up.”  In a piece for Dame Magazine, Laura Bogart analyzed the show’s lack of gender complexity, analyzing the ways in which the show undoes even its strongest female characters. For example,

[The] formidable female warrior, Michonne, is treated like a dreadlocked, katana-wielding Man With No Name—until a rather bland, predictable attempt to humanize, or, rather, feminize her. Of course, [viewers discover she lost] a young child in the apocalypse. Of course, after the loss of her child, she ceases to feel like a person. Of course, the only way for her to heal is to bond with the hero’s baby daughter.

Considering the show’s general treatment of women, when Carol was punished for not towing the gender line, it wasn’t a surprise.  What was surprising, though, was what happened when she returned from exile.

Carol’s ejection from the group is not permanent and when she returns, I would argue the patriarchal center of the show begins to shift.  In season four she reunites with part of the community after they have all been forced (once again) on the run.  She ends up joining one other adult survivor (Tyreese) who has ended up traveling with two sibling girls (Lizzie and Mika), and an infant (Judith, Rick’s daughter).  Despite, having progressed far from her original matronly characterization, these episodes in which she travels with this set forces her back into playing the role of maternal stand in for the children she is protecting.  Her role as surrogate mother to this trio of girls is terminated in the season four episode “The Grove,” which aired on March 16^th, 2014.

An oversimplified summary of the episode would be as follows:  Carol and Tyreese find temporary shelter in an idyllic cottage in the woods.  Carol works to continue developing survival skills in the two sisters:  the gentle Mika is resistant to killing anything (she refuses to shoot a deer, commenting that they could just eat peaches instead) and the troubled Lizzie (who suffers from an unspecified emotional disorder) refuses to believe that the walkers are not human (the opening scene of the episode foreshadows a moment wherein she attempts to play tag with attacking walker).  Even after a group of zombies attack them and they are all forced to defend themselves, Lizzie holds fast to her belief that the walkers are not necessarily dangerous.  So sure is she of her world view that she decides to stab her younger sister to death in order to prove to the adults that Mika could change and not be a threat.  Viewers are only privy to the aftermath of this violent act as they discover this incident just as Carol and Tyreese do, returning to the property to find Lizzie in front her sister’s dead body, still holding a knife with baby Judith in reach and apparently next for the kill.  They manage to lure Lizzie away from the scene, Carol is forced to stab Mika in the head to prevent the change Lizzie so desperately wanted to witness, and a decision is made.  Carol tells Tyreese that Lizzie can’t be around other people and then she takes the girl outside to the field, tells her to “look at the flowers,” raises a gun to the back of her head and kills her.

Fan reaction to the episode pretty consistent:  those live tweeting the episode noted how shocking, sad, and horrifying the episode was but when Carol’s role in Lizzie’s death was specifically mentioned, most voiced sympathy for the difficult situation she was placed in.  For example, one twitter user wrote “Did not see that coming but so good & love Carol even more.” Another wrote:  “those poor girls, but I’d do the same as Carol.”  And others celebrated Carol’s survivalist instincts, seeming less phased by the death of the children:  “She plays no games. Carol will take out any threat at any age.” 

While normally a scene involving a woman killing a child would evoke massive negative reactions (likely directed at the female character), the fans of The Walking Dead – either because they are already have an abnormally high tolerance for violence or because the post-apocalyptic setting recalibrates moral compasses – did not produce an onslaught of blaming tweets. In fact, the line “look at the flowers” instead became a recurrent hashtag associated with Carol in the two seasons to follow, used to not signify a horribly sad incident but instead to celebrate Carol’s status as a badass.

The program continue to put Carol in situations that showed her acting against so-called normal maternal impulses.  In Season Five the reunited group finds shelter within the previously mentioned gated community just outside of Alexandria.  Carol re-invents herself as a domesticized, den mother, baking casseroles and cookies, and sporting knit sweaters and floral shirts.  The show makes it quite clear that this feminine persona is an intelligent masquerade, intended to make the residents underestimate her.   As Century notes, Carol’s performance points out “how gender is something we do – it’s a performative activity that we have to continuously work at because it’s as socially constructed idea. Carol performs this weak embodiment of women in order to be able to sneak around the community and do as she wishes.  At one point Carol even remarks to Rick, ‘You know what’s great about this place? I get to be invisible again.’ Carol challenges the innateness of gender by not only being an extremely strong, capable survivor, but also by masquerading as the opposite kind of woman she has become now.”  And, surprisingly, fans embrace her character evolution whole-heartedly, even when she threatens to kill another child in a less justified encounter (while dressed like “mommy knows best”). 

A young boy, Sam, discovers Carol breaking into the gun repository, revealing her façade.  In a moment of chilling dialogue, Carol threatens the boy, detailing what she will do to him if he tells anyone what he’s seen:

If you [tell], one morning you will wake up and you won’t be in your bed.  You will be         the walls, far, far away tied to a tree.  You will scream and scream because you will be so afraid and no one will come to help because no one will hear you.  Well, something will hear you. The monsters will come… they will tear you apart and eat you all up while you are still alive.  All while you can still feel it.  Then afterwards your mom will never know what happened to you.   Or you can promise not ever to tell anyone what you saw here and then nothing will happen and you will get cookies, lots of cookies.  I know what I think you should do.  (“Forget” 5.13).

In many ways this scene is more disturbing than the one wherein Carol is forced to kill Lizzie, but, yet again, no fan outrage surfaced in the Twitterverse.  In fact, fans jokingly posted tweets like:  “You’re not her first kid, Sam. Watch yourself #Lookattheflowers.” 

In the end the Alexandria residents benefit from the faux housewife in their midst as when their walls are breeched by violent infiltrators, it is Carol who saves the day, trading in one costume for another (stripping off her matronly attire, donning the clothing of a deceased assassin, smearing blood across her face (copying their distasteful war paint), systematically killing the invaders off one by one, shattering the illusion she has crafted for herself in order to save many community members.

Perhaps viewers embrace Carol because of her very divergence from the conventional portrayals of television mothers.  After all, Carol’s character becomes “richer, more complex and formidable when she isliberated from parenting.”  Bogart writes:

Carol’s transformation from battered wife to one-woman assault squad is … radical: She is only able to become her better, stronger self after her child is killed by zombies… Nothing in her characterization now is expressly tied to her identity as a mother.

Perhaps fans don’t balk when Carol shoots a young girl or threatens to feed a young boy to the zombies because women living in post-apocalyptic settings “are exempt from the expectations of unfailing, uncomplaining maternal devotion, because in the hells they inhabit, there are no PTA bake sales that demand slaved-over cupcakes.” What this means is that such narratives provide opportunities for critiques of motherhood that may be resisted in other settings.  Bogart writes:

One of the primary appeals of horror-based entertainment like The Walking Dead… is that it offers us catharsis; the chance to see our most brutal … impulses enacted onscreen. It makes sense, then, that [shows like this] would feature characters that can embody and express attitudes towards motherhood that most women could never feel truly safe admitting. After all, motherhood is often referred to as the toughest job on the planet; but it may be the only job where any random internet commenter or nosy-pants in the grocery store thinks that she or he qualifies as a supervisor, full of ‘constructive criticism’ and ‘helpful feedback.’ And women who fall short of the maternal ideal (or, worst of all, opt out of having children altogether) are made into monsters. This makes women like Carol so essential: They can blast those monsters back to oblivion.

The decades following 9/11 have been ripe with hyperbolic rhetoric concerning the supposed crisis facing masculinity in the 21^st century and conservative calls to put “family values” back at the center of the national fiber.  As media products always have a reciprocal relationship to the cultural climates that spawn them, it is not difficult to read The Walking Dead as attempting to work through the cultural anxieties fixated on women on mothers.  While certain genres like dystopia and science fiction are always ideal spaces for doing such work (and providing cultural commentary on social issues more generally), perhaps the zombie narrative is particularly primed to be a site where debates concerning femininity and maternity are battled out.  After all, by nature such plots draw attention to the body, subtly attending to debates concerning what qualifies as “life” and focusing explicitly on the actual invasion and transformation of human bodies.   If we can look through the dramatized plots and aestheticized violence, programs like The Walking Dead may actually reveal important cultural sentiments – and potential correctives – concerning expectations for contemporary women.