What is Feminist Fiction?
July 23, 2010
by Karen
|The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
What is feminist fiction? Feminist fiction is inherently pro-woman, but can fiction be woman-positive without necessarily being feminist?
Many years ago, The Closer premiered on TNT. Its title character is Brenda Leigh Johnson who uses her sharp wits to secure confessions, making trials unnecessary. I love so many things about the series. The show’s creator originally considered it to center around a man, but he made the character a woman to be unique and to explore police drama from a woman’s perspective. I have found Brenda Leigh Johnson to be the most realistic and most three-dimensional character ever to exist on television. She is authoritative and aggressive in her pursuit of justice. She is not merely competent – she is the elite in her field.
Is this feminist? Yet other TV series and also movies have powerful and assertive female characters. Are these others feminist or are they simply woman-positive?
Another of my favorite TV shows, which came out around the same time as The Closer, is Psych about a fake psychic who solves murders. Psych has two powerful and assertive female characters, Police Chief Karen Vick and Officer Juliet O’hara. Everyone in the Psych fandom knows that at the end of the series, Juliet O’hara and central protagonist Shawn Spencer will become a romantic couple. Instead of pairing her with Shawn from the start, the creators of the series have been five seasons establishing Officer O’hara as an individual who can and has existed independently from the protagonist. Juliet O’hara went from being a nervous rookie to becoming a capable and confident cop. Furthmore, Chief Karen Vick is one of the most assertive and commanding leaders I have seen on television. My main disagreement with the series is that Vick has not been in many of the recent episodes. I want to see more of Chief Vick because the producers and writers have done an awesome job at portraying her character. This scene is of O’hara transitioning from nervous rookie to confident cop.
But then again, what about the women in the Die Hard movies? Yes, they were full of action and fighting. In the first, second, and fourth movies, women were captured and held hostage. In the first and second movies, the villains never specifically targeted McClane’s wife when they took hostages. The first movie portrayed Holly as very much the independent woman who wanted to pursue her own goals. Unlike a male hostage who was eventually shot and killed, Holly remained calm and collected. She made reasonable and authoritative demands, considering her captured status among the robbers. In the second movie, she tazered an openly sexist news reporter much to the relief of all the women he slighted.
The fourth movie featured a female villain who was constantly kicking McClane around. He stood zero chance of defeating her in hand-to-hand combat. Some stories have women joining the main badguy by being abused or manipulated. However, in this movie, she and the male villain worked together through common goals and mutual wickedness. She was a villain of her own accord. Also, McClane’s daughter Lucy was deliberately taken hostage to injure McClane. Lucy was defiant throughout the hostage period and was eager to fight the badguys and to see them defeated. My dad said if they ever make a fifth Die Hard movie, it should feature Lucy saving the day. The women in these movies were never victimized or sexually mistreated. Instead, the villains regarded them the same as male hostages or victims.
And then finally, we have the women in the first and second Jurassic Park movies. In the first movie, Paleobotonist Ellie Sattler had some witty lines.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs…
Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth…
And she finally made Hammond realize his massive error in bringing dinosaurs to life:
I was overwhelmed by the power of this place; but I made a mistake, too. I didn’t have enough respect for that power and it’s out now. The only thing that matters now are the people we love: Alan and Lex and Tim. John, they’re out there where people are dying.
When she was face-to-face with a raptor, all she did was scream and run, which was rather sensible considering that the men fared no better. Every man who attempted to fight a dinosaur always died. Lex used her computer-hacking skills to make the park systems fully-functional again and saved Grant, Sattler, and Timmy from a raptor trying to push the door open. She succeeded but then it broke through the glass. In the second movie, Sarah Harding and Kelly Malcolm were both independent-minded women. Kelly used her gymnastics to knock a raptor to the ground while Sarah later shot a T-rex with a tranquilizer.
We do need strong and positive portrayals of women to be featured as the central protagonists so that we can have strong and positive TV role models. I hope my favorite TV series maintains its feminist cred, and I always worry about it. But other stories have strong and positive women without them being in the spotlight. Are Psych, Die Hard, and Jurassic Park feminist, or are they male-oriented yet woman-positive? Perhaps they prove that stories can appeal to men without degrading women. Perhaps in this regard, they are able to appeal to both men and women.
I am happy to see one of your articles this morning, Karen, as I love media stories and you always bring out the comments. I remember when the Closer premiered and they did a real marketing push that it was a show for women. I went out of my way to Tivo it and looked forward to watching it. Within the first 5 mins of the first show there was an extended close up of a nude bloody dead woman, that did it for me, I stopped the show, deleted it and haven’t watched another. I have always wondered why attractive women always die nude and posed in TV/movie world. It is a malecentric convention I can’t swallow. But I do agree that shows can be more woman positive than average and still not feminist. Jurassic park was a good example. I also refuse to watch shows where the lead female character works as a prostitute or stripper, so that rules out another 75% of movies for me.
As far as I remember – and I have seen nearly ALL of the episodes – that was the first and only time Closer had a nude female victim. I cannot recall any other instances. The first season was like an experiment in learning how to be feminist. The creators genuinely wanted to be feminist/pro-woman, and they succeeded very well in the second season. The second season was much better, and each season was just better than the last, so I hope it will continue to maintain its high-quality. I am always nervous every season.
I thought this was funny and clever:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys-jKCF6u5w
I’d be happy if TV would stop portraying women as helpless victims and stop celebrating violence against us as the country’s number one form of entertainment.
yttik: Good to see a female character display a little realism.
Karen: Well maybe I will give the Closer a watch again sometime and I will be sure it is season 2. That totally nude, bloody female crime victim in the first few minutes of the show was breathtakingly stupid of them since they spent so much money on marketing the show as feminist and then to have the lead shot be a sexist cliche. I always ask myself did none of the women in the show or on the set recognize how stupid that was and say something? Or do women in Hollywood really have that little power. It always cracks me up when you read that some movie maker hired an expert in native culture, or an expert in medicine etc, to make sure their show was authentic, did it never occur to them to hire an actual woman to make sure their portrayal of women is first not offensive and hopefully authentic? Apparently not. “The Closer” concept as marketed was attractive even though the show didn’t live up to it’s marketing (until possibly the second year).
Hi Yttik thanks for that u-tube link.
just bythe way, my 9 y/o daughter who is going to music camp and learning to play clarinette, moon dance and what not told me, that next year she wants to be enrolled in adventure camp with the boys. why? they go rock climbing and shooting.
You forgot Buffy! Definitely feminist–all of the female characters are three-dimensional, strong, interesting, and different. One of my favorite tv shows of all time
It’s unfortunate that shows with male leads would ever be marketted as “for women” while at the same time considering shows with male leads “for everyone”. Actually video games with female main characters are very popular among males. Men like to, and actually want to be women. The roles men force on us is hte role they imagine they would like being if they were a woman; rather than simply considering us human beings. Theres male feminism and then theres actual Feminism. Male Feminism (when men try to be feminist) is always male oriented, and therefore, not feminist, such as the sexualizing of women as a reaction to the prudish sexual repression of women and of the stereotypical housewife. There are some feminist aspects to the women in 80’s movies, when dehumanizing women was mainly by oversexualizing her, the liberal male Feminist left, but this period also brought up important Feminist notions of female athletics, and freed women to pursue athletics; at the time very Feminist because it was unwomanly prior to that. If you see in movies like Die Hard, and in movies like Total Recall, the Feminist woman, the athletic woman who has her own opinions and agenda is selected for. So the movies have many cultural dimensions unlike popular TV shows today like CSI where you have mainly one dimensional, stereotypified characters and a lot of female victims, sexualized victimhood. It’s like a liberal male psychologist wrote the script for everyone one, and he probably thinks he’s a feminist.
The whole liberal male feminist notion was a great big fail. If they introduced other activities for their female characters it was only to have more ways of sexualizing women. So female athletes were sexualized, female executives were sexualized. And of course all female crime victims die nude and posed sexually.
What I don’t get is with more women than men graduation from college how is it that almost all movie and TV writers are male? They must work hard to exclude women from their ranks.
Also I have been disappointed by “entertainment for women” so many times that I no longer expect to be entertained by TV or movies and I especially think all channels “for women” will suck if not be out right offensive. I read, visit with friends and family or play on my computer for entertainment. I have wasted as much time as I care to on lame TV and Movies. So at this point something truly feminist probably couldn’t succeed simply because women have been let down so many time by corporate media we no longer listen.
Leave your Response
Supporting women.
Ending sexism.
Finding common ground.
We’re in the Media »
Click to see our latest stories in the media
More Stories »Recent Comments
The Latest from our Blog
Archives
Blogroll
Find the New Agenda Online
Subscribe Entries (RSS) | Comments (RSS)
The New Agenda is a 501(c)(4) organization dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls by bringing about systemic change in the media, at the workplace, at school and at home. More...