Meta: The Gendering of Jack Harkness
In her review of the fifth episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day, 
azn_jack_fiend made an observation that inspired me to think about the way Jack’s gender is performed in Doctor Who and Torchwood. As I thought about it more, I realized I had a whole meta’s worth to say on the subject.
The gendering of Jack’s sexuality
Before we start with a chronology of how Jack is gendered in Doctor Who and Torchwood, let’s take a look at one of the first things we learn about Jack, and perhaps his most famous attribute: his omnisexuality. It’s important to make the distinction between omnisexuality and bisexuality here, because his sexuality is defined that way from the beginning: in the Doctor’s words to Rose, “So many species, so little time!” His sexuality is clearly not limited by gender or species (though we don’t get an example of this on-screen until he flirts with Chantho in Doctor Who S3). The interaction of Jack’s gender and his sexuality is radical for two reasons.
1) Jack’s sexuality is not about the male gaze.
Omnisexuality is more common in female characters than male, for obvious reasons: the default consumer of media is male, and of course the default male viewer is straight and wants to see women getting it on with people of all genders and species, not men. More than that, the female body is used to encode sex itself: when people say “sex sells” they usually mean “putting female bodies on advertisements and movie posters sells.” Jack’s sexuality is not about that. If anything, given the blatant fanservice throughout Doctor Who and Torchwood centered on Jack, it’s about the female gaze.
2) Jack’s sexuality is not passive.
The other, less obvious reason why omnisexuality is more common in female characters is because female sexuality is constructed as passive. (I do specifically mean omnisexuality here, again; stories of women bedding supernatural and alien beings are common in fantasy and science fiction.)
As an example, check out this magazine article about women’s sexuality. The article claims that women are all omnisexual, deep down, no matter how they identify. To back this claim, it cites a study in which women were shown straight porn, lesbian porn, and a video of bonobos going at it, and used some device I don’t really want to contemplate to measure lubrication of the vagina as the women watched the videos. According to the study, the women had a lubrication response to all of the videos, including the apes fucking, regardless of sexual orientation. The researchers took this to mean that the women were aroused by all of the videos, and are therefore omnisexual.
The flaws in this study are too numerous to list briefly, and I trust that you can figure them out yourself. The point is, this article reveals two things about how we as a society think about female sexuality. First, we think of it as passive. Arousal is something that happens to women, not a sexual act they perform. According to this study, arousal happened to women in response to videos that they themselves reported to be completely unarousing. They have no say in their own sexual response. Second, we don’t trust women to claim their own sexual identities. While the article doesn’t state it in so many words, it is basically telling the reader, “The monosexual women in this study may claim to be straight or gay, but we know that they’re really just turned on by anything remotely sexual that comes their way, because we’re scientists.” (These researchers would apply the same arrogance to asexual women, I’m sure, but none of the women in the study identified as asexual.)
Jack’s sexuality is the opposite. Arousal isn’t something that happens to him; he goes out and seeks partners of all shapes and forms. He resists any attempts by others to categorize his sexuality, thus claiming it as his own to define. This is positive for the bisexual/pansexual/fluid community specifically, and the queer community generally, because it means that sexuality is something that you can own and live and inhabit for yourself, not something imposed on you by nature or science or society or anything else. (I don’t think this view is even incompatible with a biological origin of sexuality; you may be genetically/epigenetically/hormonally disposed toward a certain sexual orientation, but ultimately it is you who decides how to live out those desires, or lack thereof.)
The next step, of course, is to have an omnisexual female character on TV whose sexuality is not passive and not about the male gaze, but unfortunately we have a long way to go before that happens. In the meantime, the way Jack’s sexuality is gendered is a big step forward in queer representation.
“Excuse me, who’s in charge?”: Jack vs. the Doctor in Doctor Who S1
Jack’s sexuality is more than simply active. It’s queer and masculine, which is apparent from the very moment we meet him: looking at Rose’s bum through binoculars, then complimenting Algy on his. He’s wearing a soldier’s uniform and playing the sterotypically masculine role of the Peeping Tom. He’s a dashing rogue come to Rose’s rescue, complete with a steamy heterosexual seduction. While queer men are often portrayed as feminine, or at the very least less than manly, Jack is the embodiment of a masculine trope: the outlaw with a heart of gold who is redeemed into a hero.
Yet his gendering is more complex than that, especially when one compares his masculinity to that of the Doctor. I would argue that both masculinities are queer, though the Doctor’s less obviously so. I’m not talking about the kiss the Doctor and Jack share in “The Parting of the Ways”; that kiss has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with trying to distill a whole relationship into one last farewell. The Doctor has been implied to be asexual since the series’ debut. S1 does muddy these waters with the Doctor’s innuendo-laden talk of “dancing” in “The Doctor Dances”, but ultimately, I don’t think it matters. Whether the Doctor experiences sexual attraction or not, in S1 he flirts with Jabe, Rose, and Jack. Rose is a human woman, Jack is a (presumably) human man, and Jabe is a female tree. Does this remind you of anything? If the Doctor is not omnisexual, then he is at the very least willing to flirt without regard to gender or species, much like Jack. In combination with the ambiguity as to whether the Doctor is sexual or not, I think it’s safe to say that the Doctor’s masculinity is queer, albeit in a very different way from Jack’s.
At first, Jack is presented as more masculine than the Doctor. In “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” Rose is pleased to meet a man who treats her as a sexual being, in exactly the way the Doctor does not. We can argue the finer points of whether Rose is in love with the Doctor at this point, but again, I think that’s irrelevant. Whether she’s in love with him or not, or even attracted to him, the Doctor does not, until this point, treat her as a sexual being. That has nothing to do with attraction; after all, a high school health teacher acknowledges her students as sexual beings when she gives them comprehensive sex education, but that doesn’t mean she has any desire for them. Rose even tells the Doctor that Jack is like him, but with dating and dancing, and implies that he’s less of a man than Jack:
ROSE
Okay, so he's vanished into thin air. Why is it always the great looking ones who do that?
DOCTOR
I'm making an effort not to be insulted.
ROSE
I mean… men.
In the hilarious testosterone-fueled pissing contest between Jack and the Doctor at the beginning of “The Doctor Dances”, Jack also comes off as more masculine: he does, after all, have the bigger sonic tool. Yet at the same time, a dynamic of alpha vs. beta male establishes itself very quickly between the Doctor and Jack. Jack may come off as more masculine in their struggle over who will be the “alpha male”, but it’s the Doctor who leads this trio from the moment he switches Jack’s sonic blaster with a banana (emasculation metaphor, anyone?). His takeover as the alpha male, though, is not a hostile one. Jack is amused rather than affronted by the switch of banana and blaster, and cedes leadership to the Doctor with good humor. This order of alpha and beta male remains firmly in place for the rest of the season, all with Jack’s playful consent. Recall the exchange in “Boom Town” when Jack comes up with a plan and the Doctor reminds him who’s in charge. Smiling, Jack replies, “Yes, sir,” and the Doctor then instructs everyone to follow Jack’s plan. This is the very picture of a hierarchy established by mutual consent and respect. Jack is able to play the role of “beta male” without tarnishing his masculinity or his self-respect. Just because he accepts the Doctor as his leader doesn’t mean he can’t be a leader himself, as we see in “The Parting of the Ways” when Jack visits the people trapped on the Game Station and leads a ragtag volunteer army in a last stand against the Daleks.
There’s one last scene from S1 that I’d like to examine through this lens: the famous scene in which Jack kisses Rose and the Doctor before going off to his death. The image of a warrior saying farewell to his love before going off to battle is a classically masculine one, of course, but this scene is not gendered that way at all. I’m not just talking about the fact that Jack has two loves, not one, and only one of them female. In the classic scene of the warrior saying goodbye to his love before certain death, the love (always female) exists as an accessory to the warrior. She is present in the story to give the warrior one last thought of love before he dies. She is worshipful of him and views him as a hero, tearfully wishing for his return. Jack’s farewell is a subversion of that trope: he, the warrior, is the worshipful one. Watch how reverentially he cups the faces of each of his loves in turn, gazing at them with a wish shining in his eyes: go on without me. Don’t give up. Live. The Doctor and Rose are no accessories to his story of doomed heroism. If anything, he views himself as an accessory to them. He fights for the sake of the universe, yes, but most of all he goes to his death with the hope that his sacrifice will allow them to continue their story. Jack’s reverence toward his beloveds, so often associated with a woman’s worship of her male lover, is what gives that scene its heartbreaking poignancy.
“You people and your quaint little categories”: the badass leader of Torchwood S1
In Torchwood S1, Jack’s gender role is much less ambiguous than in Doctor Who S1. Though he is still unabashedly queer, Jack comfortably occupies the role of angsty, mysterious, long-coated, badass leader of a secret organization. He is far more closed off, emotionally, than he once. He leads, when he once followed. Even his role in his sexual relationship is more conventional than his role in his relationship with the Doctor and Rose: the leader sleeping with his pretty employee. Sure, the pretty employee is male in this case, but the gendered role is still present. There’s a lot to be said about how Ianto is gendered, too, but I’ll look at that in more detail in seasons 2 and 3, which show a lot more of the Jack/Ianto relationship than S1.
There are a couple of moments with interesting gender dynamics from this season. (If you can think of any others, please tell me in the comments!) The romance between Captain Jack and the man from whom he took his name is an interesting contrast to the Jack/Doctor and Jack/Ianto dynamics. While the Doctor is definitely Jack’s leader, and Jack is definitely Ianto’s, these power dynamics fall away in the Jack/Jack romance. I think the reason why this story works so well is because they are mirrors, both soldiers who understand the meaning of sacrifice. Yes, Jack has knowledge of Original Jack’s future, but I don’t think that gives him any power over his counterpart, because Original Jack understands that any day in battle could be his last. So much of masculinity is about power. Because Jack and Original Jack are on equal footing, they enter into their relationship alike in gender, perhaps more alike than any other relationship Jack has in Doctor Who and Torchwood.
The other moment I’ll look at is Jack’s death in “End of Days”. Gwen’s vigil over Jack’s corpse is both conventionally and unconventionally gendered. A woman keeping tearful vigil over her sick male lover is a classic. And when she brings him back to life with a kiss just as it seems all hope is lost, well, see the ending of every Disney movie ever. Yet Jack is a very pretty corpse in this episode. Creepy as it is, our culture seems to have a preoccupation with beautiful female corpses, often involving a scene where a man looks upon the beautiful pale body of his female lover in her casket and shedding a single perfect tear of manpain. This is the only instance I can think of in any work of fiction when this fetishization of death is applied to a man. And then, of course, Gwen awakens Sleeping Beauty from his lovely death with a kiss.
“Oh look, it’s the girlie and the freak”: the agonies of Doctor Who S3
In this season, we have the return of the Jack/Doctor relationship. How do their masculinities compare now, as opposed to S1?
The power dynamic between them remains; Jack never disputes the Doctor’s role as leader. Yet this hierarchy isn’t founded on the same mutual respect they had together in S1. Whether you ship Jack/Doctor or not, it’s undeniable that they had an easy, flirtatious banter going between them in S1, as well as a sort of emotional generosity with each other that’s rare in depictions of male friendship. These elements queered their relationship. All that is gone in S3. They are in a state of gridlock, emotionally closed off to each other. They’re only able to say what they really feel to each other when there’s a heavy metal door and a roomful of deadly radiation between them. This is much more reminiscent of male friendships as they are usually depicted, based on acting in concert toward a shared goal rather than emotional openness. Of course, the reasons for this are different here than they usually are. Movies, TV, and the like don’t show emotional openness between male friends because that kind of intimacy is read as potentially homoerotic, in a way that the same openness between female friends is not. Meanwhile, the reason for a newly guarded relationship between Jack and the Doctor is that the Doctor has caused Jack so much pain, and is in so much pain himself, that they can’t bear to share their burdens with each other.
Throughout season 3, Martha occupies the role of the woman who longs for a man who is emotionally and physically unavailable and doesn’t notice her affection at all. There are many examples, of course, of unrequited love from men toward women, but usually the woman notices, and the reason why the love is not returned is usually not because the woman is emotionally unavailable (that would imply that the woman has an emotional life of her own, that has nothing to do with men, and we can’t have that, can we? ). There have been many criticisms of how Martha was assigned to this role, and I think many of them make good points. That said, I find it refreshing when Jack and Martha get to know each other better and acknowledge that when it comes to the Doctor, they’re in much the same (female-coded) position.
As alluded to in the title of this section, the Master does make a gendered insult toward Jack. While this is not the first time Jack’s queerness is remarked upon, it is the first time that anyone has implied Jack to be anything other than masculine.
MASTER (to Jack and Martha)
Oh, and look, it’s the girlie and the freak. Although, I’m not sure which one’s which.
This isn’t the only gendered term the Master uses for Jack; he calls him “handsome Jack” in the same episode. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I have the feeling that the Master uses both epithets to mock Jack’s sexuality, not his gender, though I still haven’t figured out why the Master feels the need to do so. It’s not as if Jack has any insecurities about his sexuality whatsoever (or about his gender, for that matter), so what does he expect to accomplish? Is it an indirect jab at the Doctor, somehow? If anyone has ideas about this, please tell me in the comments.
“It’s always about the size of the wrist strap”: queer masculinities in Torchwood S2
Torchwood S2 is fertile ground for examining masculinity, make no mistake: there’s an over-the-top willy-waving contest between Jack and another man within five minutes of the first episode. And as one might expect when Jack is involved, the testosterone-fueled showdown is the most homoerotic one imaginable.
The contest between Jack and John in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” contains echoes of an earlier such confrontation between Jack and the Doctor. In the immediate aftermath of the fight, John does show his throat to Jack in a few ways: admitting that he was the “wife” when they were trapped in a time loop for five years, and acknowledging that his wrist strap is a little smaller than Jack’s (I cannot type this without sniggering). But he does it ungrudgingly, with good humor. In the next scene he tells Gwen, with the same nonchalance, that she can call him Vera if she likes. Yet these concessions, while superficially emasculating, serve only to highlight how secure in his masculinity John is.
Another way in which Jack and John compete over masculinity is with respect to Ianto. In many ways, it reads like a classic romantic rivalry between men, with Ianto as the woman being fought over. Jack and John are rivals. John finds out that Ianto is Jack’s lover, and makes sexually predatory moves toward Ianto as an indirect way of hurting Jack. Yet at the same time, it also reads like a completely different kind of romantic rivalry: the old flame who resents her former beau’s new lover. That is a gendered narrative, the old flame’s simmering jealousy and spite toward the new lover coded as distinctly feminine. When a man’s former female lover starts seeing a new guy, the man tends to view the new guy as a rival, which is not quite the dynamic between John and Ianto. Either way, Ianto occupies a feminine role in the drama of this episode.
At the same time, John occupies female roles throughout this season. The move he pulls when he kisses Gwen with killer lip gloss is classic femme fatale. John’s goal in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is to get Jack to abandon his new-found purpose in life and run off to the stars with him to their old life of reckless hedonism. This echoes countless stories about men who leave behind a life of sin to a respectable new existence, only to be haunted by his past in the form of a woman he once loved who hasn’t moved on from their old, childish lifestyle and wants him to return to it. Like Jack, the hero virtuously rejects the temptation, and the woman is duly punished for her inability to settle down into the “right way to live” as the hero has done. Except this time it’s John, with a queer sexuality even more aggressive than Jack’s, which comes off quite differently from the oozing sexuality that typifies the women who fill this role. Even his return in the S2 finale is a feminine trope: the fallen woman who is captured by the hero’s enemy, who manipulates her to serve his wicked ends. When the hero rescues her from his nemesis, it sets her on the road to her own redemption. (Interestingly, James Marsters plays this same role of a former love interest from the hero’s sinful past who comes back to haunt him in Angel S5, even though he isn’t actually a former love interest.)
Before we move on to Jack/Ianto, I’d like to touch upon another pissing contest between Jack and another man in S2, namely with Rhys over Gwen. Superficially, it seems obvious that Jack would win this contest. After all, he’s the mysterious longcoat-wearing immortal badass leader of a secret alien crime-fighting organization, while Rhys is a family man who owns a trucking company. More than that, Jack leads Gwen, while Gwen leads Rhys, which would seem to put him firmly below Jack in the hierarchy. Yet in “Meat” when Jack and Rhys argue over how to bring down the space whale torturers, Rhys’ idea turns out to be a good one, which Jack admits to his face. More importantly, Gwen always chooses Rhys over Jack. I find this whole rivalry over Gwen quite odd, myself, since it seems clear to me that Jack would never act on the mutual attraction between himself and Gwen so long as she was in a monogamous relationship with someone else, yet he still perceives there to be some kind of competition between him and Rhys over her. This isn’t much in keeping with his character, because as masculine as Jack may be, he is never masculine at the expense of female agency. It is obviously Gwen’s choice whether to be with Rhys or with Jack. She consistently chooses Rhys despite her attraction to Jack. In every other way, Jack holds Gwen’s agency in high esteem, yet it seems to me that his rivalry with Rhys at least indirectly denies Gwen’s right to choose freely between the two men. I find it hard to believe that Jack would try to score “manliness points” against Rhys at Gwen’s expense - but if you have any ideas on how to explain this, please let me know.
Now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The Jack/Ianto relationship, while not the emotional or dramatic center of the show, is certainly the center of the fandom. I would be remiss if I didn’t try to compare and contrast the way Jack is gendered in fandom vs. how he is gendered on the show, particularly with respect to his relationship with Ianto. While their relationship is present on the sidelines of S1, it’s in S2 that it really starts to come to the fore.
It won’t surprise you to hear that Ianto embodies many traditionally feminine roles within his relationship with Jack. In fanfiction, he is most often coded as the more feminine partner in the pairing. Straight female writers of slashfic are most likely to identify with him and project their emotions onto him. But there is a difference between Ianto occupying feminine roles and being feminine. When I say Ianto occupies a feminine role, I only mean that he fills a role that is usually filled, in stories of various media, by female characters. I don’t mean that his gender expression is feminine, or that he exhibits stereotypically feminine characteristics, or that he performs a submissive or receptive role during sex. When I say that fanfiction codes Ianto as the more feminine partner in the pairing, I mean that Ianto behaves in ways that men are socialized not to behave. Men, as they grow up, are told over and again that they shouldn’t cry, show weakness, or open up emotionally. They’re told that real men should struggle with other men for dominance, along with a whole slew of other fucked up messages. Unfortunate as it is, most men internalize these messages so deeply that they can never unlearn them entirely, which causes them to act in certain ways: they have trouble expressing emotions freely, even within intimate relationships, they don’t allow themselves to be vulnerable, etc. etc. When Ianto is coded as feminine in a fanfiction, he behaves as if he were not socialized in this way, which is unrealistic, given his family background and the way he’s shown on screen. I hope I’ve made the distinction clear.
Perhaps the most obviously gendered dynamic between Jack and Ianto is their attitudes toward commitment. Ianto is by no means under the illusion that what he has with Jack will last forever, or even long-term. But Jack is so terrified of any kind of emotional commitment that even going on a date pushes the boundaries of what he’s willing to accept. This kind of emotional unavailability and fear of commitment is classically masculine, as we saw earlier with how the Doctor treats Martha and Jack. The courtship between Ianto and Jack in “Fragments” is also highly gendered. Ianto transparently uses his sexuality to try to charm the boss into hiring him. Remember what I said about “sex sells”, and how that usually means “female bodies sell”? In this case, it’s Ianto’s body, and his seductive use of it, that helps sell his way into a job at Torchwood.
Yet Jack/Ianto isn’t simply a heterosexual relationship projected onto two men. The power dynamic of boss/employee exists between them, but that dynamic doesn’t necessarily correspond to male/female. The relationship between Jack and Ianto is part of a long tradition of masters and butlers. Ianto brings Jack coffee and puts on his coat for him, which calls to mind manservants and butlers, not maids. This isn’t the first time there’s been homoeroticism underlying the master/manservant relationship (I suggest you check out the P.G. Wodehouse fandom) and it won’t be the last. The manservant may be submissive to his master in power, but he’s submissive in a distinctly masculine way. There are very few accepted ways to be both submissive and masculine, and Ianto occupies one of them. Again, I hasten to add that I don’t mean that Ianto is submissive in his sex life with Jack, nor that Ianto is an unassertive person. The way I see it, the power play between Jack and Ianto with all these little gestures of serving coffee and putting on coats is exactly that: a game. It’s a dance they perform together because they both enjoy it.
One last note on Jack’s gender in S2 that has nothing to do with sexuality: Jack as father figure. His reaction to the deaths of Owen and Tosh in “Exit Wounds” didn’t strike me as that of a boss losing his trusted employees, or a mentor losing his proteges, but a father losing his children. I mean father, specifically, not parent. As we see in “Fragments”, Jack tried to give Tosh and Owen new lives, and the skills they would need to succeed in their new lives, but he was never nurturing. That would require more emotional openness than Jack is willing to risk.
Which segues quite nicely into…
The sins of the fathers: masculinity and loss in Children of Earth
In a season that goes in brilliant and radical directions with its female characters (must restrain the urge to insert three paragraphs of squee about Gwen and Alice and Johnson and Lois and Bridget and…) Jack remains in largely uncomplicated masculinity. Which is not to say that his relationships are uncomplicated - the ones we see with Ianto and Alice are anything but - but he plays roles that we are used to seeing men play: the parent who is forced by the dangers and demands of his job to absent himself from family life, the emotionally closed off lover who is unable to share his true feelings with his beloved until it’s too late, the hero who must sacrifice someone he is morally responsible for in order to save the world.
I’m interested in how manpain works in Children of Earth (for more on this subject, check out this meta). Manpain is the fetishization of a man’s emotional pain in reaction to the death of a person he feels responsible for. This person is nearly always a woman, except when it’s the man’s child, in which case it’s usually a son, for the simple reason that sons are more valued than daughters. Picture this scene, which you have seen played out a hundred times in movies and TV and comics: the hero holds the body of the woman he has lost, and the camera lingers on his face as his eyes twist with inward-pointing knives at the angst of his soul. And, of course, tears. Lots of tears. The woman dies in order to advance the male character’s emotional arc/plotline; she is an accessory to his story.
Steven’s death in Children of Earth seems to fit this trope very well: he’s not an important character in his own right, only because he’s Jack’s grandson. The camera lingers deliberately on Jack’s face as Steven dies, showing his horror and his self-loathing and his tears. Yet what subverts this instance of manpain is the equally intense focus on the reaction of Steven’s mother. One of the tenets of manpain is that women’s pain relating to the same traumatic events that cause manpain is ignored. The pain of the man affected is more important than that of any women also affected. The classic manpain version of Steven’s death would focus on Jack’s pain at the expense of Alice’s pain, which would be clearly absurd because she’s his mother. But Children of Earth saves the day with its rock-solid respect for and valuing of female characters by showing us absolutely soul-wrecking images of Alice trying in vain to save her son as he dies, then weeping and holding his corpse. If anything, I think the show is telling us that Alice’s pain is more important than Jack’s, and a large part of his guilt is over how he badly he hurt his daughter, not just his responsibility for his grandson’s death. That, to me, exemplifies Jack’s masculinity: he shoulders the weight of responsibility and power, but not at the expense of women’s agency.
The other instance of manpain is when Ianto dies. As I said, the object of manpain is usually female, but not always. Almost every instance of manpain over a man’s death relates to a father or father-figure. Ianto’s death, of course, doesn’t fit. His death scene is like that of a female lover who dies in her man’s arms: the dying admission of love only when it’s too late, the one last kiss. The difference, though, is that as a man, his death gets to mean something beyond its effect on Jack. He died fighting for something he believed in, knowing what he was getting himself into. That’s a lot more than most women who die for manpain get. Jack’s reaction, though, is about standard for a man who loses his lover in this kind of traumatic way. He weeps openly for a little while, then he internalizes the pain where no one can see it. In Jack’s case, though, he doesn’t internalize the pain because he thinks he’ll look weak or unmanly if he does; I think it’s because after so many decades of loss after loss, it’s all he knows how to do anymore.
“You’re Category Jack”: the rescuer and the rescued of Miracle Day
When Jack returns to Earth in Torchwood: Miracle Day, he thinks of himself as a knight coming to Gwen’s rescue. Something bad is going down on Earth, and he has to protect his only remaining teammate. But as Jack should have learned a long time ago, Gwen doesn’t need his protection. She defends herself and her family. By the time the first episode is over, Jack realizes he’s the one who needs to be protected. His gender role has decidedly flipped: instead of the dashing knight coming to the rescue, he is the princess in the tower, as
azn_jack_fiend so aptly pointed out:
The moment between Jack and Vera and Esther was so touching. He's changed from being the badass-in-charge to the... there's practically no gender-neutral way I can say this. To the princess. He's special and he has to be protected. The narrative role is fascinating. It reminds me a bit like Yorick in Y: The Last Man. There's this dynamic where Jack has all these strong women protecting him. The gender dynamics are such the polar opposite of Moffat's disturbingly sexist reign on DW that it's not even funny.
We can discuss the contrast with the gender dynamics of the current season of DW some other time; I just included that sentence as food for thought for the reader. The point is, he’s transformed from the most invulnerable man in the universe (physically, at least) to the most vulnerable person on planet Earth. Before Esther and Vera leave to go be HBICs at the overflow camp, Esther warns him to stay at home, because he’s Category Jack, and they can’t risk putting him in harm’s way. Of course, Jack being Jack, he goes out anyway, but how often is it a woman or girl who is told by a man to stay at home, out of harm’s way, who then sneaks out to have an ill-advised adventure of her own while the men go out to do their Big Important Mission? And let’s not forget when Gwen had to rescue Jack on the plane. That scene strikes me as subversively gendered. The crew made great use of makeup. He goes to the bathroom mirror as he tries to figure out what’s wrong, and his ill, wan face fills the screen, forcibly showing you how much worse he looks than his normal, pretty self. Loss of physical beauty is often used as an indicator of illness or similar for female characters: “Oh noez! What happened to her lovely face? She needs help!” That’s not to say that a glance in the mirror isn’t used to show physical malaise in characters coded as masculine; Rex looks in the very same bathroom mirror as he grimaces in pain and gulps down painkillers. But there’s something about the way they used makeup on Jack when he was poisoned that really rang some “damsel in distress” bell in my brain. If you can figure out what exactly it is, please do share.
Another moment when Jack played a feminine role in Miracle Day is episode three, when he calls Gwen drunk after his steamy hook-up with the bartender. That image of calling one’s best friend drunk, after sleeping with a stranger, to Talk About Feelings is associated in my mind with women. Men aren’t supposed to have complicated feelings they want to talk to their friends about after they have a casual sex encounter. They’re supposed to congratulate themselves and fall asleep. Women are given more latitude to experience and express these feelings.
I wonder about the implications of Jack’s newly vulnerable role in Torchwood. Is it a metaphor for his emotional vulnerability following the events of Children of Earth? Will it change his outlook on life and the way he performs his masculinity? Does his feminine role have something to do with why his sexuality has, thus far this season, been shown as primarily directed toward men? How does Jack’s vulnerability make Gwen feel? In what ways, besides the obvious, does Jack’s unconventional expression of his gender and sexuality make Rex feel threatened?
I’m excited to find out.
This entry was crossposted at http://joking.dreamwidth.org/92796.html.
azn_jack_fiend made an observation that inspired me to think about the way Jack’s gender is performed in Doctor Who and Torchwood. As I thought about it more, I realized I had a whole meta’s worth to say on the subject.
The gendering of Jack’s sexuality
Before we start with a chronology of how Jack is gendered in Doctor Who and Torchwood, let’s take a look at one of the first things we learn about Jack, and perhaps his most famous attribute: his omnisexuality. It’s important to make the distinction between omnisexuality and bisexuality here, because his sexuality is defined that way from the beginning: in the Doctor’s words to Rose, “So many species, so little time!” His sexuality is clearly not limited by gender or species (though we don’t get an example of this on-screen until he flirts with Chantho in Doctor Who S3). The interaction of Jack’s gender and his sexuality is radical for two reasons.
1) Jack’s sexuality is not about the male gaze.
Omnisexuality is more common in female characters than male, for obvious reasons: the default consumer of media is male, and of course the default male viewer is straight and wants to see women getting it on with people of all genders and species, not men. More than that, the female body is used to encode sex itself: when people say “sex sells” they usually mean “putting female bodies on advertisements and movie posters sells.” Jack’s sexuality is not about that. If anything, given the blatant fanservice throughout Doctor Who and Torchwood centered on Jack, it’s about the female gaze.
2) Jack’s sexuality is not passive.
The other, less obvious reason why omnisexuality is more common in female characters is because female sexuality is constructed as passive. (I do specifically mean omnisexuality here, again; stories of women bedding supernatural and alien beings are common in fantasy and science fiction.)
As an example, check out this magazine article about women’s sexuality. The article claims that women are all omnisexual, deep down, no matter how they identify. To back this claim, it cites a study in which women were shown straight porn, lesbian porn, and a video of bonobos going at it, and used some device I don’t really want to contemplate to measure lubrication of the vagina as the women watched the videos. According to the study, the women had a lubrication response to all of the videos, including the apes fucking, regardless of sexual orientation. The researchers took this to mean that the women were aroused by all of the videos, and are therefore omnisexual.
The flaws in this study are too numerous to list briefly, and I trust that you can figure them out yourself. The point is, this article reveals two things about how we as a society think about female sexuality. First, we think of it as passive. Arousal is something that happens to women, not a sexual act they perform. According to this study, arousal happened to women in response to videos that they themselves reported to be completely unarousing. They have no say in their own sexual response. Second, we don’t trust women to claim their own sexual identities. While the article doesn’t state it in so many words, it is basically telling the reader, “The monosexual women in this study may claim to be straight or gay, but we know that they’re really just turned on by anything remotely sexual that comes their way, because we’re scientists.” (These researchers would apply the same arrogance to asexual women, I’m sure, but none of the women in the study identified as asexual.)
Jack’s sexuality is the opposite. Arousal isn’t something that happens to him; he goes out and seeks partners of all shapes and forms. He resists any attempts by others to categorize his sexuality, thus claiming it as his own to define. This is positive for the bisexual/pansexual/fluid community specifically, and the queer community generally, because it means that sexuality is something that you can own and live and inhabit for yourself, not something imposed on you by nature or science or society or anything else. (I don’t think this view is even incompatible with a biological origin of sexuality; you may be genetically/epigenetically/hormonally disposed toward a certain sexual orientation, but ultimately it is you who decides how to live out those desires, or lack thereof.)
The next step, of course, is to have an omnisexual female character on TV whose sexuality is not passive and not about the male gaze, but unfortunately we have a long way to go before that happens. In the meantime, the way Jack’s sexuality is gendered is a big step forward in queer representation.
“Excuse me, who’s in charge?”: Jack vs. the Doctor in Doctor Who S1
Jack’s sexuality is more than simply active. It’s queer and masculine, which is apparent from the very moment we meet him: looking at Rose’s bum through binoculars, then complimenting Algy on his. He’s wearing a soldier’s uniform and playing the sterotypically masculine role of the Peeping Tom. He’s a dashing rogue come to Rose’s rescue, complete with a steamy heterosexual seduction. While queer men are often portrayed as feminine, or at the very least less than manly, Jack is the embodiment of a masculine trope: the outlaw with a heart of gold who is redeemed into a hero.
Yet his gendering is more complex than that, especially when one compares his masculinity to that of the Doctor. I would argue that both masculinities are queer, though the Doctor’s less obviously so. I’m not talking about the kiss the Doctor and Jack share in “The Parting of the Ways”; that kiss has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with trying to distill a whole relationship into one last farewell. The Doctor has been implied to be asexual since the series’ debut. S1 does muddy these waters with the Doctor’s innuendo-laden talk of “dancing” in “The Doctor Dances”, but ultimately, I don’t think it matters. Whether the Doctor experiences sexual attraction or not, in S1 he flirts with Jabe, Rose, and Jack. Rose is a human woman, Jack is a (presumably) human man, and Jabe is a female tree. Does this remind you of anything? If the Doctor is not omnisexual, then he is at the very least willing to flirt without regard to gender or species, much like Jack. In combination with the ambiguity as to whether the Doctor is sexual or not, I think it’s safe to say that the Doctor’s masculinity is queer, albeit in a very different way from Jack’s.
At first, Jack is presented as more masculine than the Doctor. In “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” Rose is pleased to meet a man who treats her as a sexual being, in exactly the way the Doctor does not. We can argue the finer points of whether Rose is in love with the Doctor at this point, but again, I think that’s irrelevant. Whether she’s in love with him or not, or even attracted to him, the Doctor does not, until this point, treat her as a sexual being. That has nothing to do with attraction; after all, a high school health teacher acknowledges her students as sexual beings when she gives them comprehensive sex education, but that doesn’t mean she has any desire for them. Rose even tells the Doctor that Jack is like him, but with dating and dancing, and implies that he’s less of a man than Jack:
ROSE
Okay, so he's vanished into thin air. Why is it always the great looking ones who do that?
DOCTOR
I'm making an effort not to be insulted.
ROSE
I mean… men.
In the hilarious testosterone-fueled pissing contest between Jack and the Doctor at the beginning of “The Doctor Dances”, Jack also comes off as more masculine: he does, after all, have the bigger sonic tool. Yet at the same time, a dynamic of alpha vs. beta male establishes itself very quickly between the Doctor and Jack. Jack may come off as more masculine in their struggle over who will be the “alpha male”, but it’s the Doctor who leads this trio from the moment he switches Jack’s sonic blaster with a banana (emasculation metaphor, anyone?). His takeover as the alpha male, though, is not a hostile one. Jack is amused rather than affronted by the switch of banana and blaster, and cedes leadership to the Doctor with good humor. This order of alpha and beta male remains firmly in place for the rest of the season, all with Jack’s playful consent. Recall the exchange in “Boom Town” when Jack comes up with a plan and the Doctor reminds him who’s in charge. Smiling, Jack replies, “Yes, sir,” and the Doctor then instructs everyone to follow Jack’s plan. This is the very picture of a hierarchy established by mutual consent and respect. Jack is able to play the role of “beta male” without tarnishing his masculinity or his self-respect. Just because he accepts the Doctor as his leader doesn’t mean he can’t be a leader himself, as we see in “The Parting of the Ways” when Jack visits the people trapped on the Game Station and leads a ragtag volunteer army in a last stand against the Daleks.
There’s one last scene from S1 that I’d like to examine through this lens: the famous scene in which Jack kisses Rose and the Doctor before going off to his death. The image of a warrior saying farewell to his love before going off to battle is a classically masculine one, of course, but this scene is not gendered that way at all. I’m not just talking about the fact that Jack has two loves, not one, and only one of them female. In the classic scene of the warrior saying goodbye to his love before certain death, the love (always female) exists as an accessory to the warrior. She is present in the story to give the warrior one last thought of love before he dies. She is worshipful of him and views him as a hero, tearfully wishing for his return. Jack’s farewell is a subversion of that trope: he, the warrior, is the worshipful one. Watch how reverentially he cups the faces of each of his loves in turn, gazing at them with a wish shining in his eyes: go on without me. Don’t give up. Live. The Doctor and Rose are no accessories to his story of doomed heroism. If anything, he views himself as an accessory to them. He fights for the sake of the universe, yes, but most of all he goes to his death with the hope that his sacrifice will allow them to continue their story. Jack’s reverence toward his beloveds, so often associated with a woman’s worship of her male lover, is what gives that scene its heartbreaking poignancy.
“You people and your quaint little categories”: the badass leader of Torchwood S1
In Torchwood S1, Jack’s gender role is much less ambiguous than in Doctor Who S1. Though he is still unabashedly queer, Jack comfortably occupies the role of angsty, mysterious, long-coated, badass leader of a secret organization. He is far more closed off, emotionally, than he once. He leads, when he once followed. Even his role in his sexual relationship is more conventional than his role in his relationship with the Doctor and Rose: the leader sleeping with his pretty employee. Sure, the pretty employee is male in this case, but the gendered role is still present. There’s a lot to be said about how Ianto is gendered, too, but I’ll look at that in more detail in seasons 2 and 3, which show a lot more of the Jack/Ianto relationship than S1.
There are a couple of moments with interesting gender dynamics from this season. (If you can think of any others, please tell me in the comments!) The romance between Captain Jack and the man from whom he took his name is an interesting contrast to the Jack/Doctor and Jack/Ianto dynamics. While the Doctor is definitely Jack’s leader, and Jack is definitely Ianto’s, these power dynamics fall away in the Jack/Jack romance. I think the reason why this story works so well is because they are mirrors, both soldiers who understand the meaning of sacrifice. Yes, Jack has knowledge of Original Jack’s future, but I don’t think that gives him any power over his counterpart, because Original Jack understands that any day in battle could be his last. So much of masculinity is about power. Because Jack and Original Jack are on equal footing, they enter into their relationship alike in gender, perhaps more alike than any other relationship Jack has in Doctor Who and Torchwood.
The other moment I’ll look at is Jack’s death in “End of Days”. Gwen’s vigil over Jack’s corpse is both conventionally and unconventionally gendered. A woman keeping tearful vigil over her sick male lover is a classic. And when she brings him back to life with a kiss just as it seems all hope is lost, well, see the ending of every Disney movie ever. Yet Jack is a very pretty corpse in this episode. Creepy as it is, our culture seems to have a preoccupation with beautiful female corpses, often involving a scene where a man looks upon the beautiful pale body of his female lover in her casket and shedding a single perfect tear of manpain. This is the only instance I can think of in any work of fiction when this fetishization of death is applied to a man. And then, of course, Gwen awakens Sleeping Beauty from his lovely death with a kiss.
“Oh look, it’s the girlie and the freak”: the agonies of Doctor Who S3
In this season, we have the return of the Jack/Doctor relationship. How do their masculinities compare now, as opposed to S1?
The power dynamic between them remains; Jack never disputes the Doctor’s role as leader. Yet this hierarchy isn’t founded on the same mutual respect they had together in S1. Whether you ship Jack/Doctor or not, it’s undeniable that they had an easy, flirtatious banter going between them in S1, as well as a sort of emotional generosity with each other that’s rare in depictions of male friendship. These elements queered their relationship. All that is gone in S3. They are in a state of gridlock, emotionally closed off to each other. They’re only able to say what they really feel to each other when there’s a heavy metal door and a roomful of deadly radiation between them. This is much more reminiscent of male friendships as they are usually depicted, based on acting in concert toward a shared goal rather than emotional openness. Of course, the reasons for this are different here than they usually are. Movies, TV, and the like don’t show emotional openness between male friends because that kind of intimacy is read as potentially homoerotic, in a way that the same openness between female friends is not. Meanwhile, the reason for a newly guarded relationship between Jack and the Doctor is that the Doctor has caused Jack so much pain, and is in so much pain himself, that they can’t bear to share their burdens with each other.
Throughout season 3, Martha occupies the role of the woman who longs for a man who is emotionally and physically unavailable and doesn’t notice her affection at all. There are many examples, of course, of unrequited love from men toward women, but usually the woman notices, and the reason why the love is not returned is usually not because the woman is emotionally unavailable (that would imply that the woman has an emotional life of her own, that has nothing to do with men, and we can’t have that, can we? ). There have been many criticisms of how Martha was assigned to this role, and I think many of them make good points. That said, I find it refreshing when Jack and Martha get to know each other better and acknowledge that when it comes to the Doctor, they’re in much the same (female-coded) position.
As alluded to in the title of this section, the Master does make a gendered insult toward Jack. While this is not the first time Jack’s queerness is remarked upon, it is the first time that anyone has implied Jack to be anything other than masculine.
MASTER (to Jack and Martha)
Oh, and look, it’s the girlie and the freak. Although, I’m not sure which one’s which.
This isn’t the only gendered term the Master uses for Jack; he calls him “handsome Jack” in the same episode. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I have the feeling that the Master uses both epithets to mock Jack’s sexuality, not his gender, though I still haven’t figured out why the Master feels the need to do so. It’s not as if Jack has any insecurities about his sexuality whatsoever (or about his gender, for that matter), so what does he expect to accomplish? Is it an indirect jab at the Doctor, somehow? If anyone has ideas about this, please tell me in the comments.
“It’s always about the size of the wrist strap”: queer masculinities in Torchwood S2
Torchwood S2 is fertile ground for examining masculinity, make no mistake: there’s an over-the-top willy-waving contest between Jack and another man within five minutes of the first episode. And as one might expect when Jack is involved, the testosterone-fueled showdown is the most homoerotic one imaginable.
The contest between Jack and John in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” contains echoes of an earlier such confrontation between Jack and the Doctor. In the immediate aftermath of the fight, John does show his throat to Jack in a few ways: admitting that he was the “wife” when they were trapped in a time loop for five years, and acknowledging that his wrist strap is a little smaller than Jack’s (I cannot type this without sniggering). But he does it ungrudgingly, with good humor. In the next scene he tells Gwen, with the same nonchalance, that she can call him Vera if she likes. Yet these concessions, while superficially emasculating, serve only to highlight how secure in his masculinity John is.
Another way in which Jack and John compete over masculinity is with respect to Ianto. In many ways, it reads like a classic romantic rivalry between men, with Ianto as the woman being fought over. Jack and John are rivals. John finds out that Ianto is Jack’s lover, and makes sexually predatory moves toward Ianto as an indirect way of hurting Jack. Yet at the same time, it also reads like a completely different kind of romantic rivalry: the old flame who resents her former beau’s new lover. That is a gendered narrative, the old flame’s simmering jealousy and spite toward the new lover coded as distinctly feminine. When a man’s former female lover starts seeing a new guy, the man tends to view the new guy as a rival, which is not quite the dynamic between John and Ianto. Either way, Ianto occupies a feminine role in the drama of this episode.
At the same time, John occupies female roles throughout this season. The move he pulls when he kisses Gwen with killer lip gloss is classic femme fatale. John’s goal in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is to get Jack to abandon his new-found purpose in life and run off to the stars with him to their old life of reckless hedonism. This echoes countless stories about men who leave behind a life of sin to a respectable new existence, only to be haunted by his past in the form of a woman he once loved who hasn’t moved on from their old, childish lifestyle and wants him to return to it. Like Jack, the hero virtuously rejects the temptation, and the woman is duly punished for her inability to settle down into the “right way to live” as the hero has done. Except this time it’s John, with a queer sexuality even more aggressive than Jack’s, which comes off quite differently from the oozing sexuality that typifies the women who fill this role. Even his return in the S2 finale is a feminine trope: the fallen woman who is captured by the hero’s enemy, who manipulates her to serve his wicked ends. When the hero rescues her from his nemesis, it sets her on the road to her own redemption. (Interestingly, James Marsters plays this same role of a former love interest from the hero’s sinful past who comes back to haunt him in Angel S5, even though he isn’t actually a former love interest.)
Before we move on to Jack/Ianto, I’d like to touch upon another pissing contest between Jack and another man in S2, namely with Rhys over Gwen. Superficially, it seems obvious that Jack would win this contest. After all, he’s the mysterious longcoat-wearing immortal badass leader of a secret alien crime-fighting organization, while Rhys is a family man who owns a trucking company. More than that, Jack leads Gwen, while Gwen leads Rhys, which would seem to put him firmly below Jack in the hierarchy. Yet in “Meat” when Jack and Rhys argue over how to bring down the space whale torturers, Rhys’ idea turns out to be a good one, which Jack admits to his face. More importantly, Gwen always chooses Rhys over Jack. I find this whole rivalry over Gwen quite odd, myself, since it seems clear to me that Jack would never act on the mutual attraction between himself and Gwen so long as she was in a monogamous relationship with someone else, yet he still perceives there to be some kind of competition between him and Rhys over her. This isn’t much in keeping with his character, because as masculine as Jack may be, he is never masculine at the expense of female agency. It is obviously Gwen’s choice whether to be with Rhys or with Jack. She consistently chooses Rhys despite her attraction to Jack. In every other way, Jack holds Gwen’s agency in high esteem, yet it seems to me that his rivalry with Rhys at least indirectly denies Gwen’s right to choose freely between the two men. I find it hard to believe that Jack would try to score “manliness points” against Rhys at Gwen’s expense - but if you have any ideas on how to explain this, please let me know.
Now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The Jack/Ianto relationship, while not the emotional or dramatic center of the show, is certainly the center of the fandom. I would be remiss if I didn’t try to compare and contrast the way Jack is gendered in fandom vs. how he is gendered on the show, particularly with respect to his relationship with Ianto. While their relationship is present on the sidelines of S1, it’s in S2 that it really starts to come to the fore.
It won’t surprise you to hear that Ianto embodies many traditionally feminine roles within his relationship with Jack. In fanfiction, he is most often coded as the more feminine partner in the pairing. Straight female writers of slashfic are most likely to identify with him and project their emotions onto him. But there is a difference between Ianto occupying feminine roles and being feminine. When I say Ianto occupies a feminine role, I only mean that he fills a role that is usually filled, in stories of various media, by female characters. I don’t mean that his gender expression is feminine, or that he exhibits stereotypically feminine characteristics, or that he performs a submissive or receptive role during sex. When I say that fanfiction codes Ianto as the more feminine partner in the pairing, I mean that Ianto behaves in ways that men are socialized not to behave. Men, as they grow up, are told over and again that they shouldn’t cry, show weakness, or open up emotionally. They’re told that real men should struggle with other men for dominance, along with a whole slew of other fucked up messages. Unfortunate as it is, most men internalize these messages so deeply that they can never unlearn them entirely, which causes them to act in certain ways: they have trouble expressing emotions freely, even within intimate relationships, they don’t allow themselves to be vulnerable, etc. etc. When Ianto is coded as feminine in a fanfiction, he behaves as if he were not socialized in this way, which is unrealistic, given his family background and the way he’s shown on screen. I hope I’ve made the distinction clear.
Perhaps the most obviously gendered dynamic between Jack and Ianto is their attitudes toward commitment. Ianto is by no means under the illusion that what he has with Jack will last forever, or even long-term. But Jack is so terrified of any kind of emotional commitment that even going on a date pushes the boundaries of what he’s willing to accept. This kind of emotional unavailability and fear of commitment is classically masculine, as we saw earlier with how the Doctor treats Martha and Jack. The courtship between Ianto and Jack in “Fragments” is also highly gendered. Ianto transparently uses his sexuality to try to charm the boss into hiring him. Remember what I said about “sex sells”, and how that usually means “female bodies sell”? In this case, it’s Ianto’s body, and his seductive use of it, that helps sell his way into a job at Torchwood.
Yet Jack/Ianto isn’t simply a heterosexual relationship projected onto two men. The power dynamic of boss/employee exists between them, but that dynamic doesn’t necessarily correspond to male/female. The relationship between Jack and Ianto is part of a long tradition of masters and butlers. Ianto brings Jack coffee and puts on his coat for him, which calls to mind manservants and butlers, not maids. This isn’t the first time there’s been homoeroticism underlying the master/manservant relationship (I suggest you check out the P.G. Wodehouse fandom) and it won’t be the last. The manservant may be submissive to his master in power, but he’s submissive in a distinctly masculine way. There are very few accepted ways to be both submissive and masculine, and Ianto occupies one of them. Again, I hasten to add that I don’t mean that Ianto is submissive in his sex life with Jack, nor that Ianto is an unassertive person. The way I see it, the power play between Jack and Ianto with all these little gestures of serving coffee and putting on coats is exactly that: a game. It’s a dance they perform together because they both enjoy it.
One last note on Jack’s gender in S2 that has nothing to do with sexuality: Jack as father figure. His reaction to the deaths of Owen and Tosh in “Exit Wounds” didn’t strike me as that of a boss losing his trusted employees, or a mentor losing his proteges, but a father losing his children. I mean father, specifically, not parent. As we see in “Fragments”, Jack tried to give Tosh and Owen new lives, and the skills they would need to succeed in their new lives, but he was never nurturing. That would require more emotional openness than Jack is willing to risk.
Which segues quite nicely into…
The sins of the fathers: masculinity and loss in Children of Earth
In a season that goes in brilliant and radical directions with its female characters (must restrain the urge to insert three paragraphs of squee about Gwen and Alice and Johnson and Lois and Bridget and…) Jack remains in largely uncomplicated masculinity. Which is not to say that his relationships are uncomplicated - the ones we see with Ianto and Alice are anything but - but he plays roles that we are used to seeing men play: the parent who is forced by the dangers and demands of his job to absent himself from family life, the emotionally closed off lover who is unable to share his true feelings with his beloved until it’s too late, the hero who must sacrifice someone he is morally responsible for in order to save the world.
I’m interested in how manpain works in Children of Earth (for more on this subject, check out this meta). Manpain is the fetishization of a man’s emotional pain in reaction to the death of a person he feels responsible for. This person is nearly always a woman, except when it’s the man’s child, in which case it’s usually a son, for the simple reason that sons are more valued than daughters. Picture this scene, which you have seen played out a hundred times in movies and TV and comics: the hero holds the body of the woman he has lost, and the camera lingers on his face as his eyes twist with inward-pointing knives at the angst of his soul. And, of course, tears. Lots of tears. The woman dies in order to advance the male character’s emotional arc/plotline; she is an accessory to his story.
Steven’s death in Children of Earth seems to fit this trope very well: he’s not an important character in his own right, only because he’s Jack’s grandson. The camera lingers deliberately on Jack’s face as Steven dies, showing his horror and his self-loathing and his tears. Yet what subverts this instance of manpain is the equally intense focus on the reaction of Steven’s mother. One of the tenets of manpain is that women’s pain relating to the same traumatic events that cause manpain is ignored. The pain of the man affected is more important than that of any women also affected. The classic manpain version of Steven’s death would focus on Jack’s pain at the expense of Alice’s pain, which would be clearly absurd because she’s his mother. But Children of Earth saves the day with its rock-solid respect for and valuing of female characters by showing us absolutely soul-wrecking images of Alice trying in vain to save her son as he dies, then weeping and holding his corpse. If anything, I think the show is telling us that Alice’s pain is more important than Jack’s, and a large part of his guilt is over how he badly he hurt his daughter, not just his responsibility for his grandson’s death. That, to me, exemplifies Jack’s masculinity: he shoulders the weight of responsibility and power, but not at the expense of women’s agency.
The other instance of manpain is when Ianto dies. As I said, the object of manpain is usually female, but not always. Almost every instance of manpain over a man’s death relates to a father or father-figure. Ianto’s death, of course, doesn’t fit. His death scene is like that of a female lover who dies in her man’s arms: the dying admission of love only when it’s too late, the one last kiss. The difference, though, is that as a man, his death gets to mean something beyond its effect on Jack. He died fighting for something he believed in, knowing what he was getting himself into. That’s a lot more than most women who die for manpain get. Jack’s reaction, though, is about standard for a man who loses his lover in this kind of traumatic way. He weeps openly for a little while, then he internalizes the pain where no one can see it. In Jack’s case, though, he doesn’t internalize the pain because he thinks he’ll look weak or unmanly if he does; I think it’s because after so many decades of loss after loss, it’s all he knows how to do anymore.
“You’re Category Jack”: the rescuer and the rescued of Miracle Day
When Jack returns to Earth in Torchwood: Miracle Day, he thinks of himself as a knight coming to Gwen’s rescue. Something bad is going down on Earth, and he has to protect his only remaining teammate. But as Jack should have learned a long time ago, Gwen doesn’t need his protection. She defends herself and her family. By the time the first episode is over, Jack realizes he’s the one who needs to be protected. His gender role has decidedly flipped: instead of the dashing knight coming to the rescue, he is the princess in the tower, as
azn_jack_fiend so aptly pointed out:
The moment between Jack and Vera and Esther was so touching. He's changed from being the badass-in-charge to the... there's practically no gender-neutral way I can say this. To the princess. He's special and he has to be protected. The narrative role is fascinating. It reminds me a bit like Yorick in Y: The Last Man. There's this dynamic where Jack has all these strong women protecting him. The gender dynamics are such the polar opposite of Moffat's disturbingly sexist reign on DW that it's not even funny.
We can discuss the contrast with the gender dynamics of the current season of DW some other time; I just included that sentence as food for thought for the reader. The point is, he’s transformed from the most invulnerable man in the universe (physically, at least) to the most vulnerable person on planet Earth. Before Esther and Vera leave to go be HBICs at the overflow camp, Esther warns him to stay at home, because he’s Category Jack, and they can’t risk putting him in harm’s way. Of course, Jack being Jack, he goes out anyway, but how often is it a woman or girl who is told by a man to stay at home, out of harm’s way, who then sneaks out to have an ill-advised adventure of her own while the men go out to do their Big Important Mission? And let’s not forget when Gwen had to rescue Jack on the plane. That scene strikes me as subversively gendered. The crew made great use of makeup. He goes to the bathroom mirror as he tries to figure out what’s wrong, and his ill, wan face fills the screen, forcibly showing you how much worse he looks than his normal, pretty self. Loss of physical beauty is often used as an indicator of illness or similar for female characters: “Oh noez! What happened to her lovely face? She needs help!” That’s not to say that a glance in the mirror isn’t used to show physical malaise in characters coded as masculine; Rex looks in the very same bathroom mirror as he grimaces in pain and gulps down painkillers. But there’s something about the way they used makeup on Jack when he was poisoned that really rang some “damsel in distress” bell in my brain. If you can figure out what exactly it is, please do share.
Another moment when Jack played a feminine role in Miracle Day is episode three, when he calls Gwen drunk after his steamy hook-up with the bartender. That image of calling one’s best friend drunk, after sleeping with a stranger, to Talk About Feelings is associated in my mind with women. Men aren’t supposed to have complicated feelings they want to talk to their friends about after they have a casual sex encounter. They’re supposed to congratulate themselves and fall asleep. Women are given more latitude to experience and express these feelings.
I wonder about the implications of Jack’s newly vulnerable role in Torchwood. Is it a metaphor for his emotional vulnerability following the events of Children of Earth? Will it change his outlook on life and the way he performs his masculinity? Does his feminine role have something to do with why his sexuality has, thus far this season, been shown as primarily directed toward men? How does Jack’s vulnerability make Gwen feel? In what ways, besides the obvious, does Jack’s unconventional expression of his gender and sexuality make Rex feel threatened?
I’m excited to find out.
This entry was crossposted at http://joking.dreamwidth.org/92796.html.