On female warrior heroes, and body image diversity.
So, monanotlisa posted pics of her awesome Alanna the Lioness costume. (For an office party, no less!!!) In my comments, I started digressing onto why I like Keladry better than Alanna (or some of the other Pierce heroines). My original intention was just to say how I like that Kel is a more chill personality, and doesn't angst like Alanna, but as I was writing, I started to realize that one thing that's really important about Keladry, to me, is her size.
(Note: I don't want to discount or devalue small heroines (or even heroes), and how much empowerment they can bring to people of all sizes. But from here on in, that ain't what this post is about.)
Pierce emphasizes repeatedly that Kel is big. Almost as often as she emphasizes that "Alan" is tiny. I remember on first reading, liking that part of Kel a lot. Female warrior stories being thin on the ground generally (though yay, getting better!), I'm not sure I've ever really realized or thought much about the body images we see in stories like these. Or how they might have been affecting me, personally.
I am a woman who fights with men (and boys) in martial arts. Have been doing so since I was (relatively) little. I've often attributed some of my unconventional gender socialization to the martial arts training. But I was a big kid, and I am not a small adult woman. I'm about 5'7" (~170 cm), and even at my highest levels of fitness (i.e., lots of muscle) I'm about 175lbs (~80 kilos). I've always semi-consciously recognized that a lot of the warrior women I read or saw in fantasy and sci-fi didn't quite match up with me. The rest of this post is me thinking a bit on how (and maybe why) fantasy genres impose certain aspects of bodily femininity on fighting women characters.
Litterchur
In books, obviously, we don't always get a lot of clues about what our characters look like. I can think, though, of a few stories about fighting women that emphasize how small they are, comparatively: Alanna, Buriram Tourakom (also in the Tortall series), Lessa in the Pern books, Talia in the Valdemar books. * Alanna and Buri are at least realistically strong, and often described as stocky. A number of other series with fighting women don't remark on their size at all, but present them without much comment - from which, I think, the default conclusion is that they're within "normal" (i.e., fairly small, curvy, and not visibly heavily-muscled) range for women. Elspeth of Valdemar is clearly smaller than her male counterparts; Queen Thayet is clearly bigger than Alanna, but is also clearly well within the standard of traditional female beauty (she may be tall, but I'm pretty sure she's willowy.)
*(I'm including dragonriders and heralds as fighting women, although both could be borderline. McCaffrey's gender politics in general leave a bad taste in my mouth, and the less said about her "psych-powers" heroines, the better. Lackey is a step up in some ways, but the torture-porn aspects of her books creep me out on re-reading as a grownup.)
Kerowyn from the Valdemar books is notably bigger than some of the other women characters, but we're a little unclear on her size relative to the men around. She most definitely does not conform to gender expectations in behavior or clothing, or angst much about not fitting in, which is different enough in itself. Cordelia in the Vorkosigan books seems like this, too, though we're not as sure about her size, and her physical ability as a fighter is only medium-ish. Droushnakovi is clearly biggish and a kickass fighter.
The "Protector of the Small" series is really unusual in that it repeatedly emphasizes and realistically deals with the fact that Keladry is about as big as the boys and men she trains with, but has a different body structure and has to train differently. I love the covers (at right) of the original US release, but the new ones suck - they're all ethereal and pretty.
Visual Culture
Let's start with the Whedon-verse: Buffy Summers? Small (Gellar is 5'2") Faith? Kendra? 5'5" and 5'4", respectively. As for vamps, Harmony? Darla? Small. Drusilla? Taller, but willowy. The rest of the female cast is also little - Dawn and Cordelia top the list (literally) at around 5'7".I do love me some strong and/or funny women characters (until Whedon kills 'em, which is another whole can 'o worms), but they conform to beauty standards pretty closely.
Breaking from the Sunnydale/LA crew: River Tam is small, and despite being a crazy-good fighter, not even particularly well-muscled. Zoe in Firefly is as big as Whedon women get - muscley, for sure. I thought she was short-ish until I looked up Gina Torres' height: 5'10". (My mental image of Nathan Fillion is that he's short, which is apparently wrong. I think he projects a Napoleon complex...) There's no bones about Zoe being the physically powerful half of her partnership with Wash, which is cool. But I'm not sure that Whedon really thinks of Zoe as a woman, in some ways - to wit, Wash's fate, which is kind of something Whedon usually reserves for women. Also, I think the race/ethnicity thing I mention below might be playing into Zoe's representation. I haven't seen all of Firefly, so I'm hypothesizing WAAY in advance of my data here.
Breaking out into other fandoms - trying to concentrate on characters we see hand-to-hand fighting . Some of these women are bigger, but most still conform more or less to mainstream standards of female beauty in body shape.
ETA - rubmiene points out that I'm mixing categories. I've edited my discussion of the Whedonverse crew to be a little more focused on the fighters. I think Sam Carter will stay where she is, because although she's a scientist, she's canonically career military, so at least in some ways a fighter.
Pontificating
Why do I think so many female fighters are smallish and shapely and so forth? Bits of all of the below.
In conclusion
Finally, let me celebrate a couple of big women fighters:
Just for comparison's sake. Brandi Chastain, footballer, and Wilma Rudolph, runner - note their squarer, angular builds.
And oh my god, can you imagine seeing some kind of brawling fighter character played by anyone who looked anything like as powerful as weightlifter Cheryl Haworth?
So, yeah. I'm out of steam. But I'd be really interested in other people's reactions on this. Who've I left out? What characters break these molds? What experiences do you have that relate to this?
(Note: I don't want to discount or devalue small heroines (or even heroes), and how much empowerment they can bring to people of all sizes. But from here on in, that ain't what this post is about.)
Pierce emphasizes repeatedly that Kel is big. Almost as often as she emphasizes that "Alan" is tiny. I remember on first reading, liking that part of Kel a lot. Female warrior stories being thin on the ground generally (though yay, getting better!), I'm not sure I've ever really realized or thought much about the body images we see in stories like these. Or how they might have been affecting me, personally.
I am a woman who fights with men (and boys) in martial arts. Have been doing so since I was (relatively) little. I've often attributed some of my unconventional gender socialization to the martial arts training. But I was a big kid, and I am not a small adult woman. I'm about 5'7" (~170 cm), and even at my highest levels of fitness (i.e., lots of muscle) I'm about 175lbs (~80 kilos). I've always semi-consciously recognized that a lot of the warrior women I read or saw in fantasy and sci-fi didn't quite match up with me. The rest of this post is me thinking a bit on how (and maybe why) fantasy genres impose certain aspects of bodily femininity on fighting women characters.
Litterchur
In books, obviously, we don't always get a lot of clues about what our characters look like. I can think, though, of a few stories about fighting women that emphasize how small they are, comparatively: Alanna, Buriram Tourakom (also in the Tortall series), Lessa in the Pern books, Talia in the Valdemar books. * Alanna and Buri are at least realistically strong, and often described as stocky. A number of other series with fighting women don't remark on their size at all, but present them without much comment - from which, I think, the default conclusion is that they're within "normal" (i.e., fairly small, curvy, and not visibly heavily-muscled) range for women. Elspeth of Valdemar is clearly smaller than her male counterparts; Queen Thayet is clearly bigger than Alanna, but is also clearly well within the standard of traditional female beauty (she may be tall, but I'm pretty sure she's willowy.)
*(I'm including dragonriders and heralds as fighting women, although both could be borderline. McCaffrey's gender politics in general leave a bad taste in my mouth, and the less said about her "psych-powers" heroines, the better. Lackey is a step up in some ways, but the torture-porn aspects of her books creep me out on re-reading as a grownup.)
Kerowyn from the Valdemar books is notably bigger than some of the other women characters, but we're a little unclear on her size relative to the men around. She most definitely does not conform to gender expectations in behavior or clothing, or angst much about not fitting in, which is different enough in itself. Cordelia in the Vorkosigan books seems like this, too, though we're not as sure about her size, and her physical ability as a fighter is only medium-ish. Droushnakovi is clearly biggish and a kickass fighter.
The "Protector of the Small" series is really unusual in that it repeatedly emphasizes and realistically deals with the fact that Keladry is about as big as the boys and men she trains with, but has a different body structure and has to train differently. I love the covers (at right) of the original US release, but the new ones suck - they're all ethereal and pretty.
Visual Culture
Let's start with the Whedon-verse: Buffy Summers? Small (Gellar is 5'2") Faith? Kendra? 5'5" and 5'4", respectively. As for vamps, Harmony? Darla? Small. Drusilla? Taller, but willowy. The rest of the female cast is also little - Dawn and Cordelia top the list (literally) at around 5'7".I do love me some strong and/or funny women characters (until Whedon kills 'em, which is another whole can 'o worms), but they conform to beauty standards pretty closely.
Breaking from the Sunnydale/LA crew: River Tam is small, and despite being a crazy-good fighter, not even particularly well-muscled. Zoe in Firefly is as big as Whedon women get - muscley, for sure. I thought she was short-ish until I looked up Gina Torres' height: 5'10". (My mental image of Nathan Fillion is that he's short, which is apparently wrong. I think he projects a Napoleon complex...) There's no bones about Zoe being the physically powerful half of her partnership with Wash, which is cool. But I'm not sure that Whedon really thinks of Zoe as a woman, in some ways - to wit, Wash's fate, which is kind of something Whedon usually reserves for women. Also, I think the race/ethnicity thing I mention below might be playing into Zoe's representation. I haven't seen all of Firefly, so I'm hypothesizing WAAY in advance of my data here.
Breaking out into other fandoms - trying to concentrate on characters we see hand-to-hand fighting . Some of these women are bigger, but most still conform more or less to mainstream standards of female beauty in body shape.
- Stargate/SGA: Sam Carter? Tiny. Teyla? Muscley, but also, let's face it, very small. Vala/Aeryn in Farscape (both same actress) - again, realistic muscles, but small.
- Praise be to Peter Jackson for having women who fight in his versions of Lord of the Rings, but Eowyn is noticeably small - depending on the effects shot, barely bigger than a hobbit. And Arwen, though tall, is of the willowy variety.
- Mulan: notably smaller than most of her fellow fighters. And even the one who is shorter is much broader and more massive than her.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Elizabeth - smallish, height-wise, and quite small, weight-wise.
-
Terminator: Sarah Connor - in the first film, she can't fight at all. But in T2, she's incredibly buff and badass. Nevertheless, pretty small. - Matrix (I've only seen the first one) - Trinity. Carrie-Anne Moss is tall_er_ (5'8"ish), but very curvy.
Battlestar Galactica: Starbuck. I confess I stopped watching about halfway through the second season, partly because Baltar was squicking me out too much and partly because the theo-political subplots were too much for me. I like my TV uncomplicated. But there's a reason I still have a Starbuck icon, and there's a reason it says "kickass". Katee Sackhoff makes a "big" impression in my head, but is apparently shorter than me (5'6"ish).-
Andromeda (I know, getting pretty damn obscure, but...): Beka Valentine. Borderline tall, fights a lot, and (at least in the first season) wears black leather that (gasp!) covers her skin! Lisa Ryder (the actor for the part) is much shorter than I thought - only 5'8". Notably not very curvy. - Crime procedural drama: Olivia Benson (L&O: SVU) and Sara Sidle (CSI: Vegas). Both not stereotypically feminine. Not often seen really fighting, though. NCIS: Ziva David. Kickass character, small(ish) actor (5'7").
ETA - rubmiene points out that I'm mixing categories. I've edited my discussion of the Whedonverse crew to be a little more focused on the fighters. I think Sam Carter will stay where she is, because although she's a scientist, she's canonically career military, so at least in some ways a fighter.
Pontificating
Why do I think so many female fighters are smallish and shapely and so forth? Bits of all of the below.
- The positive view: having tiny, stereotypically-female-bodied characters kick ass is just awesome. It shows that little people can be strong, and can be fighters, and can even (totally realistically) win against people who are bigger than them. And also realistically, a lot of women are small, so in small heroines, they get people they can identify with.
- The less-positive-but-not-negative view: the default image of women in our culture is within a certain size range. If your mental image of literary characters is in this size range, that's a product of your cultural socialization (although yes, there is generally an unspoken assumption that most of these women are smaller than most of the men in their stories.)
- Women characters in visual media get cast out of a pool of actors who fit the standard body models. It is totally cool to have women of any size on screen who have muscles, and prevail in fights.
- The negative view: Fighting women characters are deeply disturbing to the tropes of femininity and masculinity. Because they break so many other stereotypes, the forces of the dominant cultures enforce bodily femininity on fighting female characters. One example of this phenomenon is the female-fighter-in-utterly-unrealistic-clothing trope, which is undoubtedly on some level about making sure the character is subject to the sexualized male gaze, if we're going to go ahead and let her be all feisty and stuff.
- The race/ethnicity corollary to the negative view: women of color, when they do show up as fighters, highlight some of the problems in this whole system. Women of East Asian descent are exoticized in Western culture as hyper-feminine: when portrayed as fighters they often use cunning (another East Asian stereotype) or particularly feminized forms of martial arts, and definitely tend to be small. Women of African descent tend to be exoticized in Western culture as animalistic (shudder): hence Grace Jones in the Conan the Barbarian movies.
On the up-side, by not matching feminine beauty standards in one way (race/ethnicity) women of color sometimes have more freedom to not match beauty standards in other ways, and so may be more amenable to realistic portrayals as fighters, when they get the chance to be onscreen - Michelle Rodriguez in "Girlfight" comes to mind. Pam Grier's action movies may ride right around and across a whole lot of gender and race lines...
- The race/ethnicity corollary to the negative view: women of color, when they do show up as fighters, highlight some of the problems in this whole system. Women of East Asian descent are exoticized in Western culture as hyper-feminine: when portrayed as fighters they often use cunning (another East Asian stereotype) or particularly feminized forms of martial arts, and definitely tend to be small. Women of African descent tend to be exoticized in Western culture as animalistic (shudder): hence Grace Jones in the Conan the Barbarian movies.
In conclusion
Finally, let me celebrate a couple of big women fighters:
- Alien/s/III/etc: Ripley. W00t. She's big and muscley and it's not even really remarked upon. The moment in Alien: Resurrection when AlienHybrid!Ripley (note - clearly the same size as Ron Perlman) straight-arm-palms a basketball (yes, yes, special effects, but she's so COOL!) made something inside me sing the first time I saw it. Maybe even more so because Sigourney Weaver was already almost fifty when that movie came out. Age, again, a whole other gender issue.
- Xena, Warrior Princess: Xena. Again, w00t! I always felt vaguely odd about liking that show, because on the plot/acting/jokes level, I didn't like it much. Looking back, I recognize that my identification with the show might have been because Lucy Lawless is someone I could, conceivably, in my lifetime, look like. Even my parents, who are a little uncomfortable with my self-identification as a fighter, recognized aspects of me in that character.
Just for comparison's sake. Brandi Chastain, footballer, and Wilma Rudolph, runner - note their squarer, angular builds.
And oh my god, can you imagine seeing some kind of brawling fighter character played by anyone who looked anything like as powerful as weightlifter Cheryl Haworth?
So, yeah. I'm out of steam. But I'd be really interested in other people's reactions on this. Who've I left out? What characters break these molds? What experiences do you have that relate to this?