Boy, oh boy. So this is the one that everyone's been looking forward to, I'm sure.
Time to talk about some feminist theory on YouTube, that always goes over well.
Yeah, this is going to be an interesting topic, because I feel like, you know, most of you kind of have like at least a passing
knowledge of how like feminist film theory works.
And then there's the segment of the audience that thinks it's like the matriarchal tentacle of the globalist new world order to destroy all men.
So that's going to be an interesting tightrope to walk.
Glad I chose Transformers to do it.
So ignoring the part where the internet has lost its mind over the last few years,
feminist theory has been an integral part of critical studies for decades.
And while for the sake of simplicity, I would like to be able to separate feminist academia
from the wide, wide world of feminist hot takes on the internet, the truth is I can't.
Because feminist academia is kind of influenced by the wide, wide world of feminist hot takes on the internet and vice versa
Which leads to a lot of confusion, and I'm not really going to try to untangle that right now,
but I see a lot of buzzwords being thrown around as sort of booegyman,
with little regard to what the terms actually mean.
Terms like feminism, post-modernism, marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Jews, and so on.
But the important thing to remember about any kind of theory is that
while yes, it usually has some kind of an agenda, it's really more about putting some element of culture within a framework.
In this case, a feminist theoretical framework.
So the first thing to remember about feminist theory is that it doesn't really share and unifying single point of view.
Even the even the Mulvean view that like male gaze is a thing, there's even disagreement on that.
A part of the ever-evolving praxis of feminist theory is the exchange of ideas, usually through essays or books.
Or now, video essays! I will make this a legitimate academic form alone if I have to.
An essayist will present an idea, for instance, in this case:
in Michael Bay movies, women are rarely depicted as being in positions of power.
And when they are in positions of power, they're depicted as either depicted as being duplicitous, incompetent, or both.
The writer would then use examples from the media in question, and from other academics, to help support their thesis.
And that's how you apply feminist theory to a work or a body of work.
It's that easy.
Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay Visual Please and Narrative Cinema is basically ground zero for most feminist media studies,
so we'll start there.
The Mulvean view involves a theoretical combination of semiotics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
I hope that clears up any confusion.
Mulvey saw men as subjects, identifying with agents who drive the film's narrative forward.
And women as objects for masculine desire and fetishistic gazing.
We'll come back to Mulvey, but consider Mulvey less a holy text, so much as a jumping off point.
Mulvey's essay's also where the term male gaze comes from and we'll get back to that later
In essence, the whole of feminist theory as it pertains to media studies is not to destroy all men,
though that is certainly a priority,
but to question the role of gender in our society, and in particular the portrayal of women in media.
So the rest of this twenty six part series will be exploring the many nuances of post-modernist, cultural Marxist,
feminist, intersectional film theory.
I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
Only twenty-three of them will be that.
Quick! Define post-modernism.
Yeah, me neither.
I see a lot of antipathy towards the term post-modernism, which is pretty odd to me,
because post-modernism doesn't really stand for anything,
except for a really broad line of thinking that questions universal truths.
A lot of feminist theory does arise from post-modernist thought, but what do even post-modernism?
Modernism arose is a philosophical movement in the late 19th- and early 20th- century as a reaction to the certainty of
Enlightenment thinking, especially the idea that there were universal truths.
From modernism, we saw the rise of art movements like Dada, absurdism, pop art, as well as the wide rejection of religious belief.
Post-modernism is an umbrella term for an incredibly broad line of thinking that I won't go into any depth with right now.
You can expect a full deconstruction of post-modernism and Transformers in my upcoming 12-part series,
Directly Beneath the Enemy Scrotum, coming Christmas 2019.
Post-modernism is really an extension of modernism,
especially as the idea of universalism came back in a big way in America in 1950s,
with the rise of objectivism in writers like Ayn Rand.
The 1950s saw return to almost Victorian ideals of universal truths and strict societal rules, especially as it pertained to gender.
So post-modernism was a reaction to that.
Post-modernism questions more binarist modes of thinking favored by universalism,
objectivism, and the ideas that there are universal truths that apply to everything, equally, always.
It's that easy!
Feminist theory derives from post-modernism
in that early feminist theorists looked at societal ideas that were presented about the idea of gender roles and asked, but why?
Why do we take for granted these ostensibly constructed absolute truths?
Post-modernism rests on a rejection of objectivist thinking, especially in the humanities,
and the idea that there are no universal truths.
And I can kind of see where that would get frustrating for some people.
So really, with all this talk of Mulvey and feminist theory and post-modernism
and rejection of objectivism and binarist modes of thinking, what I'm really, really trying to ask
is what do all the robots gotta be dudes?
When people think of women in Transformers, the first thing that usually comes to mind is male gaze-yness in Megan Fox
And we'll get to that. Oh, we'll get to you Michaela.
But to start I want to delve into a much more existential gender question.
Let's talk about the gender of the robots.
Those of you who are new to Transformers fandom might be surprised to learn that the issue of gender is actually a somewhat contentious one.
Or, maybe you're not. The issue of gender seems to be a fairly contentious one in general,
even when you don't throw robots into the mix.
But here's the thing: there haven't always, always been female robots in Transformers,
but there have nearly always been female robots in Transformers.
We first see them in season 2 of the G1 cartoon.
(In clip:) Hold it, Ironhide, Ladies first.
(In clip:) We're sure is sorry, ma'am. Forgot my manners.
(Turn Down for What plays)
The most famous token girl Autobot, though, was Arcee, who debuted in 1986's The Transformers: The Movie,
and totally isn't visually based on Princess Leia.
There have been a smattering of girl bots throughout the years. The most well-known before the movies being Black Arachnia from Beast Wars.
But flash-forward to the 2007 movie and the question of gender pops up again.
Should they all be coded male or do we have a girl bot?
Originally, we did have a girl bot. In an earlier version of the film, Arcee was going to be one of the core five Autobots.
But late in the game, Arcee was replaced with Ironhide
(Ironhide:) You feeling lucky, punk?
(Lindsay, in VO) According to co-writer Bob Orci,
"I would have liked to see Arcee, but the idea of a female Transformer needs its own explanation,
and there just wasn't going to be enough time. it would have been like, 'Oh, that's convenient.
They're trying to appease women with a pink Transformer.'
So rather than have that happen, let it just be a straight shot and speak for itself right now."
So we don't need to explain this.
Or this
(Jazz:) What's crackin', little bitches
(Optimus Prime: My first lieutenant. Designation: Jazz.
(Jazz:) This looks like a cool place to kick it.
(Lindsay, in VO) But a lady bot would have made audiences go, "Hmm, I don't know."
I mean, Megatron accidentally etching coordinates to the Macguffin inside another Macguffin, I'll buy.
A magical glow cube that's the progenitor for all the alien robots that turn into Camaros, I'll buy.
But that one of them displays female secondary sex characteristics and is pink?
Hmm, I don't know, man.
I'm going to have to absorb more of Optimus' robo-pecs and enjoy his deep manly voice while I smoke on this for a little while.
(Optimus Prime:) My name is Optimus Prime.
(Lindsay, in VO) Wouldn't it be more interesting to explore a robot society that exists outside the confines of gender?
Or that explores the purpose of gender in a species that does not reproduce sexually?
And yes, believe it or not, some Transformers fiction does get into that.
The IDW comics are doing some interesting stuff with the idea of gender in a non-sexual society right now.
But the movies are not here for that.
(Glen:) I ate the whole plate.
(Lindsay, in VO) The most common response you hear is that the Transformers are coded male,
but they don't really have gender.
To which the post-modernist, cultural Marxist, communist feminist might reply:
But these Transformers are obviously, unambiguously coded male.
How can you say that these characters have no gender, when the flesh monkeys what created them,
created them to have such such unambiguous masculine traits?
(Ironhide:) I just wanted to show him my cannons.
(Lindsay, in VO:) And then you remember, this is Michael Bay. And nothing matters.
(Cade Yaeger:) Is this your car? Huh?
(Lindsay, in VO:) The question of do Transformers have gender is purely semiotic.
Like all fiction, the answer is a reflection of the audience.
Transformers are fictional characters, they aren't real.
They do or do not have gender if we say so.
But because this is a franchise primarily catering to little boys,
the robots are unambiguously coded male.
They have robo-pecs, they have masculine voices, they use male pronouns.
They reflect a certain version of masculinity.
And that is a part of male gaze. Male is coded default, any variation from that as an aberration.
And this is not a modern idea.
The very foundations of Western civilization have this undercurrent on the idea of gender.
Eve is an aberrant deviation of Adam, Pandora is a corrupt aberration/variation of man,
manly-manly Optimus Prime is fine, but hot-pink Arcee is an aberration requiring an explanation,
and we better not go there.
Arcee did show up in Revenge of the Fallen, sort of.
She seems to be a combiner of some sort, a gestalt of three motorcycles that combines into one lady bot.
She basically has no lines, and then dies.
Like Jazz in the first movie, blink and you'll miss it.
Then there's Alice, which...
...you know, sometimes I think Michael Bay has issues with women.
And in the fifth movie, there's Quientessa, who's not a Transformer, but is called "The Deceiver."
Which...okay.
But Arcee is the closest we got to an actual female Transformer in the movies.
And this in an era when there are actually a lot more lady-Formers across all areas of Transformers-dom.
It's not just tokenism anymore. Often there are multiple female Transformers in the same series.
But not in the movies.
Boom!
#JusticeforArcee, #feminism. Feminine coding in these movies means you're either utterly impotent like Arcee,
a horrifying abomination like Alice,
or a duplicitous controller of minds, like Quintessa
And we haven't even got to the human womens yet.
(Sam:) Yeah know, I'm cool, with females working on my engine.)
(Lindsay:) One attitude I see a lot especially when we talk about big-budget action movies and Michael Bay,
is an idea that it's odd to question what we are given in our media,
rather than ask what brought us here in the first place.
The fact that the male robots, clearly coded as male, would be accepted by the audience without question
but a female robot is regarded as aberrant and begs an explanation,
makes you wonder why would the filmmakers think that?
And more importantly, is that true?
Critical studies is not here to shame you for what you like, much as it apparently feels that way to some people.
But rather to help give us the tools to question the media we consume,
and what it says about the culture that created it.
Questions like: why do we need to gender code a race of robot aliens in order to humanize and relate with them,
but then really never go into what gender would even mean to a race of robot aliens in the first place.
And we ain't even get into Megan Fox yet.
(singing:) In the arms of Mark Wahlberg, you can crack a beer
With these dark, cold Transformers, and the female bots that you fear
You are pulled into wreckage, by the Bayhem fear...