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    Firefly and Gender

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    Elizabeth Kauppila
    An analysis of short-lived television series, Firefly by Joss Whedon. This paper speaks on the presence of absence of gender stereotypes.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Firefly and Gender

    Uploaded by

    Elizabeth Kauppila
    126 views3 pages
    An analysis of short-lived television series, Firefly by Joss Whedon. This paper speaks on the presence of absence of gender stereotypes.

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    © © All Rights Reserved

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    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

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    An analysis of short-lived television series, Firefly by Joss Whedon. This paper speaks on the presence of absence of gender stereotypes.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    126 views3 pages

    Firefly and Gender

    Uploaded by

    Elizabeth Kauppila
    An analysis of short-lived television series, Firefly by Joss Whedon. This paper speaks on the presence of absence of gender stereotypes.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 3

    Elizabeth Kauppila

    Pop Culture 1600 Hannah Maulden


    11/6/14

    I will be looking at the unconventional and conventional ways that Joss Whedon
    represents the genders of his characters in the short lived t.v. show, Firefly and its successor,
    Serenity. I will be looking at the idea of traditional gender performance and analyzing the gender
    representation divide within the characters of this series. Firefly represents a plethora of different
    characters who display their gender in many ways, however, none of them cross between being
    physically male/female to being the opposite gender. We do see a range of femininity versus
    masculinity within the female characters of the show. For example, Zoe fought in the war
    alongside Malcolm Reynolds, the captain of the ship Serenity during the war against the
    Alliance; she does not wear very revealing clothes and her mannerisms are much like that of the
    stereotypical male. She does, however, have a husband and dreams of having children so she
    does not represent an entirely masculine ideal and does not desire to be a man. Another example
    is Kayley, the ships mechanic; she is chipper, sweet, but extremely good at repairing ships. She
    is not the stereotypical female, because she has interest and knowledge in machines and engines,
    but she loves the idea of dressing up in fancy dresses and attending balls. Both of these
    characters are female, but they present their genders in entirely different ways. Judith Butler
    says, To be female is...a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a
    woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of woman,to induce the body to
    become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited
    possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project (Performative acts 522).
    This is basically saying that to be female is just that, you are born physically female; however, to
    be a woman is to abide to what society dictates as womanly. It is easy to argue that the females

    of Firefly do not abide by these traditional ideas of what a woman is. If you were tasked to list a
    set of traits that make someone a woman, what would you list? It is a common thing for women
    to be classified as submissive, which Zoe is not, and homely, a trait in which Kayley does not
    represent. There is a long list of gender stereotypes linked to the idea of womanhood, which are
    challenged in Joss Whedons Firefly.

    Bibliography
    Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,
    1999. Print.
    Butler, Judith. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
    Feminist Theory. Histoire damour (Paris: Editions Denoel, 1983).

    Espenson, Jane, and Glenn Yeffeth. Finding Serenity: Anti-heroes, Lost Shepherds, and Space
    Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly. Dallas, TX: BenBella, 2005. Print.

    Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film: Psychology, Society, and
    Ideology. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 803-16. Print.

    Rowley, Christina. "Firefly/Serenity: Gendered Space and Gendered Bodies." British Journal of
    Politics & International Relations 9 (2007): 318-25.

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