Pretty Ladybots

In what really smacks of a really cynical attempt to acknowledge that Transformers comics has a *gasp* female readership, there's a sudden influx of female characters in the ongoing Transformers comics series.

I know that makes me sound jaded as hell. Guilty as charged. Because I grew up in the1980s, the Dawn of the Smurfette Principle, founded on the patronizing notion that girls can only relate to female characters (despite mountains of evidence that seems to indicate that it is boys who have a problem relating with differently-gendered protagonists in stories), and the concomitant appearance of those female characters in very narrow portrayals: curvy, made up, gracile, small, and above all, OTHER.

The message was clear, from Smurfette to Arcee: appearance. It didn't matter if you ALSO kicked ass, you had to be pretty. And you had to be a love object to males, of course.  Even if it wasn't your central goal, it was a thing that would be part of your existence.

This was good, in a way, in that it demonstrates what is part of a lived reality for women in American culture: they are perceived as Other and they must also always be highly marked as female, and be aware of their size/shape/look/differences from men.  They are never 'one of the guys' even on a team like GI Joe--they still have to be pretty, with long, impractical hair and body revealing clothing.

Of course, it doesn't cover the other even darker parts of lived reality for women: predation, abuse, stalking and all the petty diminishments of being seen as the 'weaker' sex (mind you, this was preBuffy). It was Objectification 101, and the isolation of the female characters really underscored their alienation, their differentness. It wasn't just a matter of often being a distaff version of a male character (though that was often implied in the pairings), it was the fact that female was solitary (as the Bechdel Test, for all its flaws and limitations, is immensely useful in illustrating). Female friendship was almost invisible.

So that's where I come from. And of course I'm aware of Whedon and Buffy and Firefly and how some things have changed (I'll leave aside for now my sideeye at Whedon's 'fascination with the female = badass who is emotionally crippled and seeks approbation from men' because at least his female characters had agency!)

And now, Transformers is hopping on the bandwagon. And we have females, who appear to be friends.  STOP THE PRESSES. But, no, don't stop them yet, because despite three female characters and two issues, they still haven't managed to pass the Bechdel Test.  This is somehow even sadder than when we just had Arcee, the nonconsenual transgender character, where there was no Bechdel possibility ever (and boy does she do that classic 80s style Isolated Female thing with a side of misogynistic humor about female rage). 

And also, I know you're shocked. All three of the females have hourglass shapes, 'lipstick', and curvy armor and limbs.  In a lineup, they stand out on body type alone.  Looking for represenatation that doesn't look like a swimsuit model? You're not going to find it here.  The message is still women look different, women are different, women are this puzzling question.  Windblade even has heels. 

So I find myself in a real conundrum.  Honestly the imposition of binary gender AT ALL here is something I could have done without, but the impulse to male/female everything is kind of worth a question, isn't it?  Why do we have to have binary gender in robots where it's not about reproduction?  Because that's how our minds work, and conceptualizing anything different would be...hard? Weird? unrelatable? I don't know.

I see people asking 'lol what the hell is a female robot' and I am asking the same question, too, but now I'm also asking...what drives that impulse in us, to force things into gender, and then binary gender?  One person I saw is glad that they glossed over the answer to 'what is a female robot' because there was, in her mind 'more important stuff to talk about'.  Yes, more important than what female is, what gender is. Oooookay.  But honestly, the question is unanswerable, isn't it?  As a Butlerian, I see humans have binary gender to perform or not perform or half perform: you can argue that gender is really a social construct, especially since there exist places that do not fall into binary gender.  (So in a sense the imposition of binary gender is also an imperialist move, an Occidentalizing and attempt at nativizing/essentializing their notion of gender).  Which is all well and good in humans, because we HAVE a culture that has a discourse and a code of gender to inhabit. 

Robots...though....?

But we have female characters and I love the idea of *gasp* competent female characters, and *double gasp* non-isolated female characters (we saw this in G1, though in the movie and the females quickly split up and paired off so...not sure if I should get my hopes up), there's the tetchy never-be-satisfied part that wants them to break that 'pretty' rule.  Where's a female who looks like Strika? 

Then again, it's wrong of me to expect so much of my robot comics, to expect inclusion, complex characters who happen to be female, and to have a range of visual representation, when let's face it, Hollywood in all its movies can't do this, either.