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selenakPreamble: I'll be referencing both the novels and the movies, all three and all four respectively, so if you don't want to be spoiled for either, skip this entry. Just to be on the safe side, I shall of course employ a spoiler cut.
As far as dystopias go, Panem doesn't appear to have gender discrimination going on. By which I don't just mean that nobody says to Katniss re: her prowess with bow and arrow "but you're a girl"; the tributes - and later the victors, i.e. the survivors from previous games - don't favour either gender in numbers, and attributes like ruthlessness, gentleness, smarts or thug-like obedience are to be found among male and female characters alike. The Capitol is ruled by a man, Cornelius Snow, but his political rival, who rules District 13, is a woman, Alma Coin, and the person who eventually will get both their jobs is another woman. For what it's worth: District 13 has female commanders in its military we get to see in action, whereas the Peacekeepers Katniss knows from 12 (and the ones shown in the movies with their helmets off) are all male, but the Peacekeeper uniform makes it impossible to tell whether a man or woman is inside. Game Makers are another issue; the ones readers and audience get to know as characters, Seneca Crane and Plutarch Heavensbee, are male, but the movie scenes showing the game makers at work (something Katniss can't see, so these are movie-only scenes since the books are told exclusively in Katniss' pov) include an even number of women. The prep teams who style the tributes and victors are a mixture of women and men, and here the readers get to "meet" them far more closely than the movie audience does, not least because the narrative role of Katniss' prep team in the later books has been incorporated into Effie's character. Speaking of Effie: it's been a while, but I don't recall the books aquainting us with another escort, be they male or female, so it's hard to say whether there is a gender preference there. Mentors like Haymitch, of course, being all victors, are present in even numbers, see above.
All of which makes me cautiously certain to say that Panem is meant to be a dystopia in which gender based discrimination isn't an issue anymore; which isn't to say it's gender neutral. On the contrary. From the moment they are presented to their Capitol audience, the tributes are styled in a way that emphasizes their gender, male and female tributes alike. Not just in terms of costume and sexuality, though that's part of it; in terms of the narrative they have to sell. Katniss becoming the "Girl on Fire" and Peeta hitting on the "star-crossed lovers" narrative as a way to heighten their survival chances is the most prominent example. ("He made you look desirable," says Haymitch to Katniss re: that.) Being desirable is important in terms of survival chances; it's equally there with Finnick, whose narrative as sold to the Capitol depends on him being presented as a male sex object, the omnisexual Don Juan. The reveal in Mockingjay that Finnick was also literally sold as a sex object , i.e. that his affairs weren't by choice but because of Snow ordering them , and that Finnick wasn't the only victor thus prostituted, is also the narrative's most overt engaging with the question of and lack of sexual consent in this particular fascist society.
Incidentally: because it's such a stalwart for any grim story by now, it's woth noting that there isn't a single rape scene in all three novels or movie, nor does a villain sexually threaten our heroine. But not only is what happened to Finnick (and by implication other victors) rape (long term, repeatedly, over and over again, and the scene where Finnick reveals this is gutwrenching in the novel; slightly less so in the movie, but that's imo and you may feel differently), but Katniss loses her bodily autonomy, so to speak, the moment she volunteers as tribute to save her sister and starts being remade for public consumption so she can die (or not) for the entertainment of strangers, and it doesn't stop when she leaves the Capitol's authority, because District 13 needs her for propaganda reasons as well. Through the three novels, Katniss keeps negotiating terms for this (and she also gets physically more and more scarred, something the movies avoid; in the novels, Katniss by the end has severe burns and lost much of her hearing), for various reasons (survival, saving other people, revenge), but she rarely downright refuses, and when she does, it usually is leverage until she can get better conditions.
How much of this is tied to Katniss being a woman? Hard to say. District 13 (read: Coin) isn't interested in Katniss-as-part-of-a-romance, it wants Katniss-as-St.Joan instead, the inspiring warrior maiden destined to end up as a martyr, but this persona, too, is of course female. Snow in Catching Fire threatens Katniss into playing up the star crossed romance story in order to devalue her political impact, using the people she loves as leverage, but then that's what he does with everyone (see also: Finnick).
On a less Watsonian and more Doylist level, Suzanne Collins gives Katniss a mixture of tropes both traditionally male and traditionally female. The stoicism and dislike of talking about emotions, the increasing shellshock tied to hallucinations with simultanous inability to function in her original society though she forms intense relationships with battle comrades, eventually culminating in Katniss' complete breakdown after she killed Coin: all associate nothing so much as a WWI era soldier. At the same time, Katniss actually is the hero in a star crossed lovers story, though not in the way it is sold to the Capitol at first, while also being in an "arranged relationship becomes real" trope. Meanwhile, Peeta gets most of the tropes traditionally given to female characters - he's the damsel in distress in all three novels, his survival tactics (camouflage, an instinct for storytelling and pretending) are those usually given to physically weak characters (which Peeta isn't; working in a bakery also means some heavy lifting on a regular basis, but pre-Games, he has no fighter training), and his big moments in the story are usually those where he shows practical empathy (as in donating some of the victor income to Rue's family, for example), rather than accomplishing some heroic rescue. Gale is are more traditionally masculine young hero; he's a hunter and fighter, he doesn't break down when beaten - whereas, Peeta gets both physically broken and brainwashed under torture - and he's channeling his hate at the Capitol in becoming more and more ruthless; all of which in the end becomes part of the reason why he and Katniss part ways in the end.
Among the adults, Haymitch as the gruff cynical and self destructive mentor who comes to care for his charges is an instantly recognizable masculine trope (in another age, he'd have been played by John Wayne, even - hey, Katniss has braids!), but very atypically, he doesn't die to inspire Katniss, but makes it out of the story alive and even within the community of three (and the geese) that ends up in the ruins of District 12. Also atypically for crusty mentors and alcoholic loners, Haymitch is actually good at communicating, if you think about it. Not only because he pulls off being part of a dangerous conspiracy consisting mainly of a bunch of very paranoid (for reasons) proven killers (victors and a game maker, no less), but because winning sponsors as a mentor in the Capitol and later working with the very tightly organized and just as paranoid District 13 people involves just the kind of ego swallowing talk which his type usually gets to avoid in favour of pissing-people-off gestures (like the one from Haymitch's introduction in the novel, though not the movie, i.e. falling off drunk in the middle of Effie's speech).
Conversely, Effie Trinket is also instantly recognizable as a feminine trope: fashion obsessed shallow dame getting upset at messy eating habits while ignoring the horrors she's part of. Here I have to differentiate between movies and novels in how much this is subverted. The novels don't, really; Katniss comes to be a bit fond of Effie and is distantly glad Effie survived when she sees her again in Effie's single scene in Mockingjay the novel, but that's it, and there's no sense that Effie ever does have any deeper emotions. Meanwhile, the movies, partly due to Elizabeth Banks' performance in Catching Fire where you get the sense that Effie, having become attached to Katniss and Peeta, really is starting to wake up to the horror of the Games, and partly due to Mockingjay the movie giving her the role the book gives to Katniss' prep team, do subvert this; by the time Effie in Mockingjay I. uses a turban to make the dearly District 13 uniform at least a bit fashionable, the gesture makes you root for her instead of regarding it as inappropriate.
By comparison, the two politicians on top of the hierarchies, despite being a man and a woman, are downright trope free (other than "authoritarian ruler", of course). Snow's a traditional evil tyrant very untraditionally associated almost exclusively with the colour white, which is a firm negative in this 'verse, whereas black usually signifies good. (When Peeta shows up dressed in white in Mockingjay I, you know this is a v.v. bad thing, whereas Cinna in Catching Fire subverting the showcasing of Katniss in a white wedding dress by revealing the black Mockingjay underneath is the big resistance gesture which costs him his life.) His weapon of choice on his way to power, poison and blackmail, is something referenced in his backstory, but because of the Katniss pov narration, we don't see him employ it (we do in the movies); whereas we do see him use words, usually to devastating effect. (It's worth pointing out that he's also not immune to being manipulated by words, though Plutarch is the only one who pulls that off in-story.) Snow dying in the end not in a duel with our heroine or in a convenient fall from a rooftop but choking on his own blood while laughing (and/or being beaten to death by his enraged former subjects; in the novels, it's more likely the former, the movies make it more look like the later) is also an atypical main villain demise, though by this time, he shares the main villain function with his female counterpart.
Here again I have to slightly differentiate between books and movies. Alma Coin being a bad egg is obvious in the novels from the start. Katniss never trusts her and has no reason to respect her. She's a Stalin or Mao in the making, or a Robespierre-as-seen-by-British-writers-not-Hilary-Mantel, revolutionary leader who will become a tyrant if left unchecked. I can't think of another fictional female example; this is a role usually given to male characters, if at all. The movies present a somewhat different picture in that Coin in Mockingjay I is a stern leader but one who has some unfaked (according to audio commentary) moments of sympathy for Katniss after Katniss has won her respect, and who actually gets to show grace and steel under pressure in the movie only scenes of the Capitol attack on District 13. Mockingjay II, otoh, gives Coin no more such scenes and a book-only characterisation, and the transition is a bit jarring. (I suspect that if Philip Seymour Hofmann had lived, we might have gotten some more scenes between Coin and Plutarch to flesh that transition out.) But it just about works given Coin in Mockingjay II is more powerful than before and very near her final goal, and the corruption of power is in itself a given to most of the audience. At any rate, the movies, having already associated Coin with Snow visually in the first part of Mockingjay with her white hair, in the second part double the two of them whenever they can, and Coin's final speech is of course exactly in the same mode as Snow's public speeches earlier in the movies were, with the characters positioned in a way that Katniss can seemingly aim at Snow wile really shooting Coin: they've become interchangable, including in their gender, like humans and pigs at the end of Animal Farm.
In one regard, the Hunger Games universe, both on a Watsonian and Doylist level, is playing traditional gender politics; Finnick's tales of prostitution aside, there is no mention that I recall of same sex pairings (though I may have forgotten some, feel free to correct me), neither among the Districts or in the Capitol. (Since there isn't anything definite said about anyone's orientation, either, you can easily headcanon any and all characters as bisexual or gay, of course, but I'm talking about main text representation.) Katniss having children in the epilogue, something she didn't want to in the world of Panem where children were inevitably in danger of becoming tributes, makes for a strong statement of change, but it's also critisized for falling back on the image of the traditional nuclear family as symbolizing healing and a new world. I understand the criticism while admitting it works for me. It has also occurred to me that motherhood otherwise in the novels has ambigous to negative connotations; Katniss' mother failed her and Prim due to her depression after the death of Katniss' father, and while she later rallies (more in the books than in the movies; in Catching Fire the book, Katniss' mother is showcased as a healer for Gale, whereas in the movie, that's Prim's role), she deserts Katniss again at the end of the story, not coming with her to 12. Peeta's mother is perhaps the most negatively written character in the Districts who isn't a Peacekeeper or Coin (and writes off her son from the get go). Gale's mother seems to be okay, but she also isn't an active on-page character. Non biological mothers are another issue; Katniss has a quasi parental role with Prim, for starters, and later to some degree with Rue, Effie in the movies behaves somewhat maternally with Katniss and Peeta, and the bond between Mags and Finnick is very much of a mother and son type, though they aren't biologically related. In the end, Katniss risking biological motherhood is perhaps even riskier in such a narrative than it is already given both Katniss and Peeta are survivors of horrible traumas with barely regained stability when we leave them.
In conclusion: I see gender politics in The Hunger Games is neither traditionalist nor feminist, but as a mixture, with the narrative intention being that of presenting a story free of stereotypes; as with all authorial intention, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't.
The other days
As far as dystopias go, Panem doesn't appear to have gender discrimination going on. By which I don't just mean that nobody says to Katniss re: her prowess with bow and arrow "but you're a girl"; the tributes - and later the victors, i.e. the survivors from previous games - don't favour either gender in numbers, and attributes like ruthlessness, gentleness, smarts or thug-like obedience are to be found among male and female characters alike. The Capitol is ruled by a man, Cornelius Snow, but his political rival, who rules District 13, is a woman, Alma Coin, and the person who eventually will get both their jobs is another woman. For what it's worth: District 13 has female commanders in its military we get to see in action, whereas the Peacekeepers Katniss knows from 12 (and the ones shown in the movies with their helmets off) are all male, but the Peacekeeper uniform makes it impossible to tell whether a man or woman is inside. Game Makers are another issue; the ones readers and audience get to know as characters, Seneca Crane and Plutarch Heavensbee, are male, but the movie scenes showing the game makers at work (something Katniss can't see, so these are movie-only scenes since the books are told exclusively in Katniss' pov) include an even number of women. The prep teams who style the tributes and victors are a mixture of women and men, and here the readers get to "meet" them far more closely than the movie audience does, not least because the narrative role of Katniss' prep team in the later books has been incorporated into Effie's character. Speaking of Effie: it's been a while, but I don't recall the books aquainting us with another escort, be they male or female, so it's hard to say whether there is a gender preference there. Mentors like Haymitch, of course, being all victors, are present in even numbers, see above.
All of which makes me cautiously certain to say that Panem is meant to be a dystopia in which gender based discrimination isn't an issue anymore; which isn't to say it's gender neutral. On the contrary. From the moment they are presented to their Capitol audience, the tributes are styled in a way that emphasizes their gender, male and female tributes alike. Not just in terms of costume and sexuality, though that's part of it; in terms of the narrative they have to sell. Katniss becoming the "Girl on Fire" and Peeta hitting on the "star-crossed lovers" narrative as a way to heighten their survival chances is the most prominent example. ("He made you look desirable," says Haymitch to Katniss re: that.) Being desirable is important in terms of survival chances; it's equally there with Finnick, whose narrative as sold to the Capitol depends on him being presented as a male sex object, the omnisexual Don Juan. The reveal in Mockingjay that Finnick was also literally sold as a sex object , i.e. that his affairs weren't by choice but because of Snow ordering them , and that Finnick wasn't the only victor thus prostituted, is also the narrative's most overt engaging with the question of and lack of sexual consent in this particular fascist society.
Incidentally: because it's such a stalwart for any grim story by now, it's woth noting that there isn't a single rape scene in all three novels or movie, nor does a villain sexually threaten our heroine. But not only is what happened to Finnick (and by implication other victors) rape (long term, repeatedly, over and over again, and the scene where Finnick reveals this is gutwrenching in the novel; slightly less so in the movie, but that's imo and you may feel differently), but Katniss loses her bodily autonomy, so to speak, the moment she volunteers as tribute to save her sister and starts being remade for public consumption so she can die (or not) for the entertainment of strangers, and it doesn't stop when she leaves the Capitol's authority, because District 13 needs her for propaganda reasons as well. Through the three novels, Katniss keeps negotiating terms for this (and she also gets physically more and more scarred, something the movies avoid; in the novels, Katniss by the end has severe burns and lost much of her hearing), for various reasons (survival, saving other people, revenge), but she rarely downright refuses, and when she does, it usually is leverage until she can get better conditions.
How much of this is tied to Katniss being a woman? Hard to say. District 13 (read: Coin) isn't interested in Katniss-as-part-of-a-romance, it wants Katniss-as-St.Joan instead, the inspiring warrior maiden destined to end up as a martyr, but this persona, too, is of course female. Snow in Catching Fire threatens Katniss into playing up the star crossed romance story in order to devalue her political impact, using the people she loves as leverage, but then that's what he does with everyone (see also: Finnick).
On a less Watsonian and more Doylist level, Suzanne Collins gives Katniss a mixture of tropes both traditionally male and traditionally female. The stoicism and dislike of talking about emotions, the increasing shellshock tied to hallucinations with simultanous inability to function in her original society though she forms intense relationships with battle comrades, eventually culminating in Katniss' complete breakdown after she killed Coin: all associate nothing so much as a WWI era soldier. At the same time, Katniss actually is the hero in a star crossed lovers story, though not in the way it is sold to the Capitol at first, while also being in an "arranged relationship becomes real" trope. Meanwhile, Peeta gets most of the tropes traditionally given to female characters - he's the damsel in distress in all three novels, his survival tactics (camouflage, an instinct for storytelling and pretending) are those usually given to physically weak characters (which Peeta isn't; working in a bakery also means some heavy lifting on a regular basis, but pre-Games, he has no fighter training), and his big moments in the story are usually those where he shows practical empathy (as in donating some of the victor income to Rue's family, for example), rather than accomplishing some heroic rescue. Gale is are more traditionally masculine young hero; he's a hunter and fighter, he doesn't break down when beaten - whereas, Peeta gets both physically broken and brainwashed under torture - and he's channeling his hate at the Capitol in becoming more and more ruthless; all of which in the end becomes part of the reason why he and Katniss part ways in the end.
Among the adults, Haymitch as the gruff cynical and self destructive mentor who comes to care for his charges is an instantly recognizable masculine trope (in another age, he'd have been played by John Wayne, even - hey, Katniss has braids!), but very atypically, he doesn't die to inspire Katniss, but makes it out of the story alive and even within the community of three (and the geese) that ends up in the ruins of District 12. Also atypically for crusty mentors and alcoholic loners, Haymitch is actually good at communicating, if you think about it. Not only because he pulls off being part of a dangerous conspiracy consisting mainly of a bunch of very paranoid (for reasons) proven killers (victors and a game maker, no less), but because winning sponsors as a mentor in the Capitol and later working with the very tightly organized and just as paranoid District 13 people involves just the kind of ego swallowing talk which his type usually gets to avoid in favour of pissing-people-off gestures (like the one from Haymitch's introduction in the novel, though not the movie, i.e. falling off drunk in the middle of Effie's speech).
Conversely, Effie Trinket is also instantly recognizable as a feminine trope: fashion obsessed shallow dame getting upset at messy eating habits while ignoring the horrors she's part of. Here I have to differentiate between movies and novels in how much this is subverted. The novels don't, really; Katniss comes to be a bit fond of Effie and is distantly glad Effie survived when she sees her again in Effie's single scene in Mockingjay the novel, but that's it, and there's no sense that Effie ever does have any deeper emotions. Meanwhile, the movies, partly due to Elizabeth Banks' performance in Catching Fire where you get the sense that Effie, having become attached to Katniss and Peeta, really is starting to wake up to the horror of the Games, and partly due to Mockingjay the movie giving her the role the book gives to Katniss' prep team, do subvert this; by the time Effie in Mockingjay I. uses a turban to make the dearly District 13 uniform at least a bit fashionable, the gesture makes you root for her instead of regarding it as inappropriate.
By comparison, the two politicians on top of the hierarchies, despite being a man and a woman, are downright trope free (other than "authoritarian ruler", of course). Snow's a traditional evil tyrant very untraditionally associated almost exclusively with the colour white, which is a firm negative in this 'verse, whereas black usually signifies good. (When Peeta shows up dressed in white in Mockingjay I, you know this is a v.v. bad thing, whereas Cinna in Catching Fire subverting the showcasing of Katniss in a white wedding dress by revealing the black Mockingjay underneath is the big resistance gesture which costs him his life.) His weapon of choice on his way to power, poison and blackmail, is something referenced in his backstory, but because of the Katniss pov narration, we don't see him employ it (we do in the movies); whereas we do see him use words, usually to devastating effect. (It's worth pointing out that he's also not immune to being manipulated by words, though Plutarch is the only one who pulls that off in-story.) Snow dying in the end not in a duel with our heroine or in a convenient fall from a rooftop but choking on his own blood while laughing (and/or being beaten to death by his enraged former subjects; in the novels, it's more likely the former, the movies make it more look like the later) is also an atypical main villain demise, though by this time, he shares the main villain function with his female counterpart.
Here again I have to slightly differentiate between books and movies. Alma Coin being a bad egg is obvious in the novels from the start. Katniss never trusts her and has no reason to respect her. She's a Stalin or Mao in the making, or a Robespierre-as-seen-by-British-writers-not-Hilary-Mantel, revolutionary leader who will become a tyrant if left unchecked. I can't think of another fictional female example; this is a role usually given to male characters, if at all. The movies present a somewhat different picture in that Coin in Mockingjay I is a stern leader but one who has some unfaked (according to audio commentary) moments of sympathy for Katniss after Katniss has won her respect, and who actually gets to show grace and steel under pressure in the movie only scenes of the Capitol attack on District 13. Mockingjay II, otoh, gives Coin no more such scenes and a book-only characterisation, and the transition is a bit jarring. (I suspect that if Philip Seymour Hofmann had lived, we might have gotten some more scenes between Coin and Plutarch to flesh that transition out.) But it just about works given Coin in Mockingjay II is more powerful than before and very near her final goal, and the corruption of power is in itself a given to most of the audience. At any rate, the movies, having already associated Coin with Snow visually in the first part of Mockingjay with her white hair, in the second part double the two of them whenever they can, and Coin's final speech is of course exactly in the same mode as Snow's public speeches earlier in the movies were, with the characters positioned in a way that Katniss can seemingly aim at Snow wile really shooting Coin: they've become interchangable, including in their gender, like humans and pigs at the end of Animal Farm.
In one regard, the Hunger Games universe, both on a Watsonian and Doylist level, is playing traditional gender politics; Finnick's tales of prostitution aside, there is no mention that I recall of same sex pairings (though I may have forgotten some, feel free to correct me), neither among the Districts or in the Capitol. (Since there isn't anything definite said about anyone's orientation, either, you can easily headcanon any and all characters as bisexual or gay, of course, but I'm talking about main text representation.) Katniss having children in the epilogue, something she didn't want to in the world of Panem where children were inevitably in danger of becoming tributes, makes for a strong statement of change, but it's also critisized for falling back on the image of the traditional nuclear family as symbolizing healing and a new world. I understand the criticism while admitting it works for me. It has also occurred to me that motherhood otherwise in the novels has ambigous to negative connotations; Katniss' mother failed her and Prim due to her depression after the death of Katniss' father, and while she later rallies (more in the books than in the movies; in Catching Fire the book, Katniss' mother is showcased as a healer for Gale, whereas in the movie, that's Prim's role), she deserts Katniss again at the end of the story, not coming with her to 12. Peeta's mother is perhaps the most negatively written character in the Districts who isn't a Peacekeeper or Coin (and writes off her son from the get go). Gale's mother seems to be okay, but she also isn't an active on-page character. Non biological mothers are another issue; Katniss has a quasi parental role with Prim, for starters, and later to some degree with Rue, Effie in the movies behaves somewhat maternally with Katniss and Peeta, and the bond between Mags and Finnick is very much of a mother and son type, though they aren't biologically related. In the end, Katniss risking biological motherhood is perhaps even riskier in such a narrative than it is already given both Katniss and Peeta are survivors of horrible traumas with barely regained stability when we leave them.
In conclusion: I see gender politics in The Hunger Games is neither traditionalist nor feminist, but as a mixture, with the narrative intention being that of presenting a story free of stereotypes; as with all authorial intention, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't.
The other days
no subject
Date: 2016-01-05 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-05 05:47 am (UTC)