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.