Girls are meant to wear dresses, be nurturing, shy away from physical exertion, and, obviously, wear pink. And boys? Well, they are meant to be strong, sporty, authoritative, and, rarely, emotional. Some might say that these are harmless stereotypes but most would agree that these views are outdated, archaic, and, frankly, quite f’d up. It may seem incredible, but children experience the process of gender-role socialization as early as 24 hours after birth (Witt, 1997). The major agents of socialization—family, friends, education, religion, and media—teach us the gender ‘norms’ and the potential consequences if these norms are challenged (Trier-Bieniek, 2014). I mean, when have you ever considered buying a mini kitchen set for a boy’s Christmas present? Or a toy truck for a girl? What a story that would make—for future generations—if you were to. In this light, I will delve into the way gender is represented in The Hunger Games (2012–2015), a popular sci-fi adventure film trilogy set in a dystopian future. Millions of teenagers, especially teenage girls, eat this series up because the main character, a girl, starts off as the one in power. I argue that these views are blind to the way gender falls back into the traditional binary.

It is commonly thought that popular culture refutes rigid male-female gender distinctions, sex-role stereotyping, and sexism through movies like The Danish Girl (2015), but I disagree.  I will discuss the apparent gender transgression in The Hunger Games through the lens of two main characters: Katniss and Peeta. They portray a diffused notion of gender identities without a clear idea of what a “woman” and a  “man” should be. But is pop culture really propagating the evolution of gender-roles? I propose that popular culture is simply responding to progressive changes our Western society is leaning towards, by appearing to present gender roles as transgressive. But, it ultimately reinforces the conventional roles we are all too familiar with to attract a wider audience.

First, let’s look at the main character Katniss: ‘The Girl on Fire’. The name ‘Katniss’ comes from the centaur of mythology, Sagittarius the Archer, whose name in Latin means “he that throws arrows”, a fitting description for her highly skilled action with a bow and arrow (“Sagittarius”, 2017). In the beginning, Katniss is strong and fiercely self-sufficient: she takes care of her mother and sister, risksher life in the black market to provide for her family, and displays her physical prowess and archery skills. When citizens are randomly picked to participate in The Game, Katniss bravely volunteers to take the place of her sister. She is bold. In the scene where Katniss bids farewell to her mother, before leaving for The Game, she shows no emotion, warning her mother, “Don’t cry. Don’t.” When a participant is dying in The Game, Katniss is unable to connect with or comfort her; she watches her perish without a trace of emotion, thereby being “non-feminine” by opposing the volatile, emotional stereotype normally attributed to females. Nor does she care for fashion, beauty, or vanity. The movie shows her as being uninterested by the glitz and glam of the Capitol (a metonym for the ruling government). In short, most of Katniss’s explicit and overt traits presented at the beginning of the film line up with the idea of a ‘New Woman’, a term coined by Sarah Grand (1894) in her article “The New Aspect of the Woman Question”. Grand discusses how women are shown to push the boundaries of male-dominated society (Lee, 1988). Pop culture, through media like The Hunger Games, presents women “with a regularly updated and evolving range of subject positions that celebrate assorted female roles and practices and improved and emancipatory versions of womanhood” (Genz, 2010). Although a passive watcher would argue that Katniss takes onthe role of a man, we shall see that Katniss does not remain true to the concept of the gender-transgression. But, we’ll get to that later.

Now, as promised, I will turn to the second gender transgression in The Hunger Games: Peeta: the ‘feminine’ man who appears to challenge the norms of what it means to be masculine. A very pretty man with blond hair and blue eyes, Peeta is Katniss’s counterpart and is (unconventionally) shorter than she. At the beginning, he bakes and paints—traditionally feminine jobs—andchooses to use his strength in ways other than hunting: “He can throw a hundred pound sack of flour straight over his head.” He is emotional, in touch with his feelings, and sensitive towards the pain of others. In a heart-touching scene, when Peeta is comforting the dying participant who Katniss can’t comfort in The Game, he tells the stranger, “Look up. Look at that. It’s incredible isn’t it? All those colours. Don’t look at anything else.” He really cares about people, shies away from violence, and knows how to connect with and help others. Peeta’s portrayal fits that of a traditional woman, and even that of a mother.

From the above, it seems like Katniss and Peeta transgress the usual female-male stereotypes. But scratch the surface and contradictions quickly rear their heads. Katniss might display ‘manly’ traits with her physical strength and impressive bow-action, but we see that it is her emotional attachments and interpersonal bonds, which she learns to develop, that keep her alive. She becomes a feminist archetype who brings all the women in The Game together. She even forms a sister-like bond with another participant who ends up saving her life. Katniss becomes completely reliant on her empathy and intuition—stereotypical female attributes—to form a strong alliance. She joins The Game, unable to connect with people on an emotional level, and quickly learns that she must foster and rely on her feelings to stay alive. She even uses sex(ual contact) as a weapon to coerce others to get what she wants. In Mockingjay Part 2, as Katniss and Peeta are escaping a dangerous trap, Peeta falls and says he can’t run any farther. Instead of encouraging him, or helping him up, Katniss kisses him to do her bidding. Despite Katniss’s reluctance towards material goods and fashion, she eventually succumbs to The Capitol that dictates how she looks. As the “symbol of the rebellion”, she is forced to don tight-fitting outfits, accentuate her boobs and butt, and wear an excessive amount of makeup. In the final film of the series, the rebel fighter group forbids her from fighting because she is the ‘face’ of the rebellion. They describe her as being “very valuable”; not for her masculine traits, but for her physical appearance, her feminine characteristics. Do the gender roles still sound transgressive? One important way that Katniss stays alive is by pretending she is pregnant with Peeta’s child during The Game, in order to gather sympathy from the Capitol’s audience members and manipulate them into pitying her. So here, her ability to pose as pregnant—which only a female could do—is what keeps her alive. It gets worse. Not only has she given up control over how she looks, but she also loses autonomy over how her body is used. At the beginning of the film, she expresses clearly, “I’m never having kids.” To the viewer, this comes in direct conflict with the traditional childbearing role of women. By the end of the film, however, Peeta convinces Katniss to bear his children, and in the penultimate scene, we see Katniss, cooking in the kitchen; a perfect fit for stereotypical gender roles. The movie ends with Katniss holding her youngest baby to her breast, while she watches Peeta and their older child playing in the meadow; thereby giving us a quintessential image of entrenched, traditional femininity. Katniss doesn’t want to be a mother, but society refutes her individual wishes and places her in an undesirable position. Ultimately, I suggest that the representation of Katniss as a ‘new woman’ be “a recurrent sales technique” (Lee, 1988). Katniss’s masculinity portrayed at the beginning is a token; something to keep the feminists happy, and the viewers intrigued.

Peeta, too, does an about-face. What intrigues us is his emotional, sensitive, and ‘feminine’, character. But in the end, his sensitivity becomes his liability. The Capitol tortures and brainwashes him by replacing his positive memories with evil and inaccurate ones of Katniss. We quickly see his feminine side be replaced with a hyper-masculine version, that even tries to strangle Katniss to death with his bare hands. Every emotional and sensitive sentiment he once had is replaced with a ruthlessly unemotional, machine-like man. It’s almost as if he is being punished for stepping outside societal expectations. In society, women are stereotypically thought to be the ‘weaker gender’, and here his femininity,i.e., his ‘weakness’, is not only taken away from him, but also used against him. Makes me wonder if gender roles can really be stretched without collateral damage.

Before I wrap up, I want to take a quick detour and look at the relationship between Katniss and another male character, Gale: the prototypical alpha male. Gale is Katniss’s childhood friend: tall, broad-chested, rugged, and handsome. He is physically strong, stubborn, confident, and very protective of women and children around him. Throughout the movie we see a love triangle between Gale, Katniss, and Peeta—so much so that fans of the movie have even been dichotomised into ‘Team Peeta’ and ‘Team Gale’. Gale, with his macho personality, opposes Peeta’s supposed femininity and competes with Katniss’s apparent masculinity. At the end of the movie, it is Peeta and Katniss who are deemed more compatible for each other. Katniss herself deems Peeta a more suitable partner than Gale, who she thinks is too similar to her. This relationship really follows the clichéd term ‘opposites attract’, and reaffirms the binary of female-male. At the end of the film, Katniss and Peeta fulfill the feminine-masculine pairing which is deemed normal in our society. Gender role stereotypes construct the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways for men and women to behave and are mapped onto what are the ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ sexual practices, beliefs and behaviours (Ikkaracan, 2007). “Gender norms operate by requiring the embodiment of certain ideals of femininity and masculinity, ones that are almost always related to the idealisation of the heterosexual bond”, says gender theorist Judith Butler (1993). So, the heterosexuality which confirms the feminine-masculine pairing is also reinforced here, and conforms to the binary gender roles.

I am left to wonder: Why are the gender transgressions in pop culture not allowed to develop in more meaningful ways? Katniss starts the movie as ‘The Girl on Fire’, a strong independent citizen who provides for herself and transcends norms of femininity, but ends up taking on the role of the doting mother of two. Peeta’s femininity also gets subdued. His emotional susceptibility makes him vulnerable to manipulation, and his caring, sweet self gets transfigured to become a more ‘manly’ tyrant who turns to violence. And Gale? Well, he is far ‘too masculine’ for Katniss. It seems to me that the non-conformist plot and the supposed ‘gender-bender’ characters are there to peak the audience’s interest and, hence, maximize gross sales. It is also possible that the creators (the author, Suzanne Collins, and the director, Garry Ross) are, indeed, experimenting with gender boundaries. But in order to appeal to a wider audience, they have chosen to conclude the story in an acceptable and secure way (read “hum-ho”) to please the crowd. Interestingly, this trend is not unique to The Hunger Games. Over and over again, just like Einar Wegener in The Danish Girl, women and men in pop culture are shown to transgress normative ideas of masculinity or femininity but often conclude by endorsing traditional gender roles. So next time you find a film that claims to transgress gender stereotypes, I ask you to look further than the tokens that merely appear to counter traditional gender roles. Because you might find that they actually confirm them.

 

I have written this paper in the style of John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Earlier version of this paper were edited by Annie Kang and Juna Khang.

Work Cited

Butler, Judith (1993): Bodies that Matter : On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York & London : Routledge.

Ilkkaracan, P. and Jolly, S. (2007). Gender and Sexuality. BRIDGE Overview Report, Institute of Development Studies.

Lee, Janet. “Care to Join Me in an Upwardly Mobile Tango? Postmodernism and the ‘New Woman’” The Female Gaze : Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. Eds. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment. London: The Women’s Press, 1988. 166-72.

“Sagittarius.” cafeastrology.com N.p., n.d. Web. 15 May 2017.

Trier-Bieniek, Adrienne M., and Patricia Leavy. Gender & Pop Culture: A Text-reader. Rotterdam: Sense, 2014. Print

Witt, Susan D. Parental influence on children’s socialization to gender roles. Adolescence; Summer 1997; 32, 126; ProQuest. Pg. 253.