Hey it's Rowan, and today we're goin to be revisiting last week's video
to talk about queering Agent Carter. So first: what is queering?
Uuuummm...it's difficult, it's a lot of things, it's essentially
the reusing reconstructing refocusing
of narratives in away
which undermines those social conventions that the narratives are based on
blah blah blah it's a lot of words
essentially it's a way of retelling the stories that we're
constantly told
in our society of heterosexuality, of male dominance, of white dominance,
and imagining them in different ways in order to empower people who have
previously been disempowered
by the narratives which exists in our society. So for example we might take
a very traditional fairy tale for example maybe Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella
and then recast the Princess and Prince characters as
two princesses or two princes or even two people who don't fit into that gender
binary.
There's an alternate version of queering narrative which would be to
say that just implanting queer characters into an already
heteronormative narrative is not conducive to
anything particularly radical, and what you need to do is remove
the heteronromative narrative entirely and have queer characters
existing on their own terms with their own unique stories.
Now we've already seen in the first two episodes of Agent Carter
a queering in terms of gender and Agent Carter's gender presentation, and the way
that gender is constructed,
and narratives, and how the TV show's really playing around with those.
I'll put a link to the first video in the description. Now there's an important
distinction between the first two episodes and this third
episode. The first two episodes are essentially showing
all the ways that Peggy can be successful in queering narrative, but episode 3
is full of things that even Peggy can't change. We move away from
focusing on Peggy as a single entity and
into focusing more on the differences between men and women in general.
In episode 3 what we're really seeing is institutionalized sexism.
Now at the beginning of the episode we have the situation where there is a man who's trying to go
up stairs
to see his sweetheart Molly. But the next morning Molly's found out
and she's chucked out. We have a woman who's being directly punished for her
sexual behavior.
Now this is directly parallel to the story of Agent Krzeminski
within the episode. So its casually mentioned that he has a wife
*and* a girlfriend *and* it's also implied that he may be visiting prostitutes on top of that.
Now this is treated as a complete joke in the workplace, it's an
open secret everyone knows about including Peggy who uses it as a comeback.
So on the one hand we have this girl Molly who is thrown out of her house
for engaging in one night of possibly sex, and on the other hand we have this agent
who is cheating on his wife
and his girlfriend and no one really cares.
So this then sets up the idea that
there are certain things that Peggy's going to want to do that society is just not
going to allow.
Or that there will be social attitudes that will be imposed on her
against her will.
Already we see this in the expectation as a female agent, she's going to fail
and I think one of the defining moments of her character this episode is when she
again and again chooses to undermine herself and her own
actions and her own successes, in order to cover up
what she's trying to do for Howard. So when she pretends she's mislaid the stolen car
report she's really throwing herself under the bus.
And again in a different way when she gets Jarvis to call in the fake tip,
meaning she can't take the credit for her own work. So the question rolling around this
series is
do we allow Peggy to do male-coded
things, within a time when women weren't expected to be able to do those things,
in order to show her power and her intelligence,
her strength, and her skills... or do we try to reframe the feminine
in order to show that it has a similar inherent power than anything
masculine. Is it a form of assimilation to make
Peggy become more masculine or male-coded?
Or is it actually subversive to have a woman who is
often presented as quite feminine, engaging in these kind activities?
Now I was really really excited to see the continuation of her fighting style in this
episode.
Her fighting style basically being "just hit
the thing with as many
any other things as you can find" but what I was the most happy about within those
fighting scenes is that there is
a section when the man attacker she's fighting
has her pinned down. So she's on her back and he's on top of her,
and the way it was filmed was one of the
least sexualized fight sequences that I've seen between a man and a woman, or a
woman and a woman
because quite often these get sexualized. Even when you have these
slasher flicks where there isn't actually a fight going on and it's just kinda chase and
kill,
very often, you know, from "texas chainsaw massacre" onwards
it's a very sexualized death for the women, which isn't the case for the men.
But nope there was nothing in the camera angles to suggest that, there was no
snide comment from the man callingher "sweetheart" while she was under him, there was nothing
you might expect from that kind of sequence,
which was so refreshing. Similarly one of the beginning scenes with Peggy in a nightgown
could
also have been sexualized by using the male gaze
but it wasn't. The camera didn't pan up her body anonymously,
and we were also allowed "behind the curtain", as it were, because she had her hair in
rollers.
Now we don't just have a queering of gender, we always have a queering of sexuality.
I'm gonna say that I am still waiting on
any confirmation that there's going to be a canon queer character
with in the show. However I think that the coding
of Angie and Peggy's scenes is queer as hell!
Honestly just rewatch that last scene again with Angie and Peggy and
listen to the song that's playing. *whispers* It's "Someone to Watch over me"
It's super fucking romantic. Now the kind of sad thing that
as we probably all know by now, if one of them had been a man,
I reckon their relationship would have been the big "will they won't they?"
going on... there's romantic music playing, there's a lot of pseudo-flirting,
and peggy has been defending Angie's honour
against these guys who have come into the Diner to harass her. However because
they're both women
I imagine that this is going to turn into a coded-queer but never fully talked
about
possibly queerbaiting scenario. So we have an expose of
sexual double standards, we've got some queer-coded relationship between women,
we have all the things Agent Carter is doing to mess with gender presentation and
performance.
So what do you think? Do you think there's anything I haven't mentioned that the TV show is
doing to queer up the narrative?
Are you still frustrated by the lack of intersectionality in their feminism?
With the lack of canon queer characters or characters of color? Leave a comment below
I really want to hear your thoughts.
and I will see you next video. Bye!
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