In the Disney Channel Original movie Avalon High directed by Stuart Gillard, the main character, Allie Pennington, infringes upon the boundaries drawn with the realms of gender, space, and time. This occurs textually, with Allie being depicted as a 21st century American teenage girl who is also living as the reincarnated soul of King Arthur Pendragon, legendary ruler of medieval Britain. This kind of boundary violation is accentuated in my reading, which imagines a subtextual understanding of how Allie’s dual personhood can function as an exploration of trans identity, and how transness can utilize an atypical and non-stationary relationship to reality and identity to generate its own existence. 

Avalon High opens with a cluster of flashing scenes of two groups of medieval knights, one light and one dark, riding into battle on a beach. The shot focuses on the group of light knights, and then focuses further still on their leader, a girl with streaming blonde hair, who we see knocked violently off her horse to the ground. Then, Allie wakes up. 

Allie Pennington is the daughter of two medieval literature professors who have recently decided to end their nomadic wandering between prestigious universities in order to settle down in Annapolis, Maryland, where Allie will spend the next three years finishing high school. Allie passes off her strange and vivid dream as a result of her parents’ profession and proceeds downstairs to speak with her parents and help unpack their new home. The proceeding scene clues the audience into the fact that Allie has never been able to feel like she fit in anywhere due to the family's constant moving around. She is the outcast, the “new girl,” and she mourns the loss of normalcy that a typical teenage girl might have experienced in a different life. 

Allie has immediately characterized herself as a queer body in this scene, an atypical teenage girl, and specifically, a girl whose behaviors and environment prevent her from accessing the normalcy that she highlights as critical to girlhood. When discussing her dream with her parents she remarks that she dreams about King Arthur, “not like most girls who dream about knights in shining armor, mine have dirt all over them and BO, and are missing half their teeth '' (2:46). Her dialogue in this scene and its emphasis on contrasting her life, and specifically her gendered experience, learning about Arthurian legends to that of a “typical teenage girl” creates an allegorical comparison between what is normal, and her connection to the medieval. Her gender queerness is therefore immediately tied to her connection to the Arthurian legends; it is what removes her from normal girlhood and it is a symbol of her otherness. 

As the plot progresses Allie becomes embroiled in the social scene at Avalon High, her local high school, and she meets the captain of the football team, Will. Allie is first introduced to Will when they both stop for a drink at a water fountain while out running. She is then confronted with a sudden vision of she and Will dressed in armor drinking from goblets filled from a waterfall (5:13). Throughout the movie, Allie continues to experience these visions, slipping between realities and seeing the world through both the modern high school lens and the ancient Arthurian lens. These visions seamlessly integrate themselves into Allie's perception of reality as both a means of expressing how she relates to and perceives others, as well as a representation of what we later learn are the past lives of Allie and her peers. These glimpses also tend to fixate on Will, who becomes Allie’s eventual love interest. 

If we apply the allegorical lens of the Arthurian reality being symbolic of Allie’s gender queerness, then her fixation on Will, who she believes to be a reincarnated King Arthur for most of the movie, is both an expression of her romantic affection, and also a form of subconscious self-recognition. The qualities Allie is attracted to in Will, his strength as a leader, his kindness, his protectiveness, are also all qualities that lead her to the conclusion that he is King Arthur reincarnated. In other words, the traits that Allie is drawn to, that she admires, describe the ideal of manhood and masculinity in King Arthur's time, particularly Arthur himself. Given what we eventually learn, that it is Allie and not Will that is King Arthur reincarnated, we can reexamine Allie’s attraction to and construction of Will in a different light, reading it instead as a classic queer/trans dynamic, wanting to both be someone, and wanting to fuck them (or, because this is disney, kiss them very chastely after they win the big football game). Furthermore, because Allie’s attraction is clearly based on her admiration for Will’s qualities, qualities that she believes make him King Arthur, that admiration can also be read as an expression of self love, given that Allie herself is King Arthur. Allie’s movements between realities then become not just an exploration of identity, but also a celebration and expression of love for it. 

Allie’s full awareness of her dual identity comes later on in the film as a result of her desire to protect Will. In the final confrontation with Mordred, who also believes that Will is King Arthur, Allie jumps in front of a prone Will, between him and Mordred, brandishing a plastic sword. As Mordred laughs, Allie's sword begins to transform from plastic into steel. Miles, Allies' only close friend, the mythological sorcerer Merlin reincarnated, and more importantly to this queer reading of Allie, gay (but in the Shakespearan way where he's gay the whole time and then in the last 2 minutes he's paired up with a suitable woman), murmurs, “any sword in the hands of Arthur becomes Excalibur. It was you all along, Allie, you're King Arthur!” (1:18:20). With the sword fully transformed, the full case of characters is transported fully into Allie’s medieval reality, complete with the beach and glowing armor from her dream. She sits on her horse and declares “I am, I am King Arthur” (1:18:35) with a look of joy and understanding on her face. 

Again applying the lens of gender queerness to this scene, Allie’s identity being revealed in this manner can be interpreted as Allie embracing the merging of her realities by acting in ways that violate the gendered and temporal scripts. Throughout the movie, we see multiple scenes of Will acting out his masculinity by physically defending weaker students against antagonists. In this scene however, Will takes on the role of the damsel in distress, Mordred mocks him, calling him “weak and in need of defending”, seemingly already picking up on how they have begun to transgress against the gendered script. And while Will’s acts of heroism involved standing up to bullies by the lockers, Allie’s protective nature is instinctually Arthurian, she brings a sword to a 21st century fight. It is a kind of unconscious and inevitable self acceptance, an indication that Allie is not limited to the gender or temporal context she appears to occupy in any particular moment. She exists as both King Arthur and Allie Pennington always simultaneously and without concern for the ways in which this cannot be possible. 

Once Allie and the rest of her peers enter into the more recognizably Arthurian reality, Allie is the only Arthurian character whose reincarnated gender is different from that of their previous life. Mordred remarks that he was unable to even consider her as a potential Arthur (embarrassing considering her name is literally Allie Pennington) because “King Arthur can’t be a girl” to which Allie responds “and yet here we are” (1:20:02). It is crucial to recognize that the intended messaging in this scene was reflective of an era of cis girlpower in Disney movies. Allie being the reincarnation of King Arthur was meant to articulate a liberal idea of feminism that attempts to deconstruct stereotypes and argues that cis women can perform stereotypically masculine behaviors just as well as cis men. However, in this case, the film unintentionally argues that not only can women perform traditionally masculine behaviors, they can also be men. This invites a reading of Allie that is reflective not of the cis feminist perspective, but instead of a gender deconstructive perspective wherein Allie exists as both a man and a woman who embodies characteristics of both and feels no need to justify either her identity as a woman or as King Arthur. Allie doesn’t respond to Mordred's taunting about her womanhood with an exclamation about women's rights or feminism, but rather embraces and confirms the reality of their situation as one that exists outside of time, space, and gender. Allie is a girl, a King, a 21st century teenager, and a reincarnated thousand year old man. She lives in both worlds simultaneously and paradoxically, but ultimately she saves her friends, wears cool medieval armor, and kisses a conventionally attractive popular boy at the end of the movie so she isn’t too worried about the details. 

Allie’s personhood is defined based on multiple contradicting and transgressive dualities that characterize her as an outsider. This sense of “wrongness”, or lack of coherence to larger society does contribute to how we read Allie as trans. However, by the end of the movie, Allie is also able to find a community that shares a connection to the Arthurian reality, the reality symbolic of what made her feel wrong or othered in the first place. The nature of her existence allowed her to not only participate in this community, but also to protect it when it was threatened. In true fairytale fashion, Allie is able to achieve a happy ending, and it is one that she could not have participated in without her own dual identities, her refusal to conform to a linear gender expression, time period, or place. So, what Disney executives imagined as a declawed liberal feminist girl power ideological push, becomes an encouragement to become a genderless (or genderfull depending on how you want to read it), reincarnating, quasi-immortal. Much more interesting that way. 

Works Cited 

Avalon High. Directed by Stuart Gillard, 2016. Disney ABC Domestic Television, 2010. 

Keegan, Cael M. “Revisitation: a Trans Phenomenology of the Media Image.” MedieKultur 32.61 (2016): n. pag. Web.

“Mutilating Gender.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006. 331–348. Web.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. Directed by Marie Losier, 2011. 

“THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.” Feral House. Inc. 2010. 

In Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol, comic no 74, the reader follows two parallel plotlines that center around the creation and sale of Robotman merchandise, specifically, robotic replicas of Robotman’s body and consciousness. For those unfamiliar with Robotman, AKA Cliff Steele, as a character, I highly recommend reading or watching some Doom Patrol media. I find that many iterations often manage to combine a kind of self aware humor, philosophical exploration, and genuine love and appreciation for human stories, that make it enjoyable even to those typically resistant to the superhero genre. In the meantime, for comprehension purposes, I will give a very brief summary of the necessary components of the backstory. Though the details vary slightly between iterations, the most pertinent information to understand is that when Cliff Steele, a daredevil/racecar driver, is hit by a car, his body is destroyed and his mind is salvaged and placed into a robotic body. Though his new body is capable of extraordinary feats of strength, speed, and endurance, as a result of his new form, Steele is regularly forced to contend with the consequences of being a human mind trapped inside a body that does not feel, grow, or decay. Comic no. 74 examines these struggles through a unique lens informed by the author’s own experiences with identity and the social and physical conditions of personhood. 

 In the first of the two plotlines in comic no. 74, the audience follows Steele and Kate (AKA Coagula, another superhero) as they track down the creators of the merchandise, and eventually destroy them. This process allows Steele the opportunity to explore and reaffirm his humanity. The second parallel plot line follows one of Steele’s copied robot counterparts as he has his experience of reality manipulated by a group of children. This version of Steele eventually becomes aware of the truth of his existence, that he is a copy and his reality can be altered by remote control, and must contend with the implications this has for his identity and interpretation of his existence. 

Issue no.74 of Doom Patrol, like many that center on Robotman, deals very heavily with themes of identity, dehumanization, and truth, by forcing the characters and audience to ask questions about who and what Cliff Steel is or is not. In this paper, I analyze the articulation of these themes while also offering a potential criticism of their ultimate resolutions. I will argue that, while this issue does a fantastic job of articulating the meaning and power of self identification, as well as exploring how such a thing is done within the context of extreme external dehumanization, it ultimately fails to unpack the underlying assumption that human-ness, which in superhero media is often allegorically representative of many forms of social normativity, is a prerequisite for being deserving of basic recognition and respect.   

Towards the middle of the first plotline, Steele and Kate confront the man behind the sale of the Robotman merchandise. The man, who is never given a name and is exclusively referred to as “the man”, possibly in reference to the American slang term for authority figures as a means of invoking the notion of a social authority, refuses to stop his production and sale of robot copies. In response to Steele’s anger regarding the issue, the man antagonistically asks Steele to prove that he is the real Cliff Steel and that the copies are not. This comment prompts Cliff to doubt his value, he begins to question what makes him “better than any of those things lying on those tables” (21). This line of dialogue is a clear indication that Steele’s belief in his own worth and personhood is contingent not on who he thinks he is, but on who he is not. In other words, it reveals how he defines himself in relation to others, who and what they are, how they are seen and valued, and how they may see him, determines who he is and how he understands himself. In response to Steele’s doubts, Kate argues that he can constitute his own identity, the same as any other person can, by disregarding other people's views and determining for himself that he is a “human being”. This conversation decenters Steele’s desire to constitute himself in relation to the copies, which metaphorically represent those who seek to dehumanize him, and recenters it around Steele himself. It articulates the idea that the “truth” of someone’s identity is not limited to what they have been labeled as by others, but can also be defined by what they have determined that they are themselves.

The second plot line follows an entirely robotic Cliff Steele, who has been programmed with the original Steele’s memories and experiences. A group of children, who Steele believes, as a result of his programming, to be his superhero friends and colleagues, purchase his software and use a remote control to torment him and manipulate what he sees and thinks. One of the children, Alice, who Steele believes is his friend Jane, feels bad for taking advantage of Steele, and reveals the truth, which prompts Steele to take the remote control for himself. The revelation that he is not who he thought he was, that he is merely a copy of a “real” thing, and that his experience of reality is completely flexible and untethered, leads Steele to choosing to use the remote to torment himself out of a combination of anger, grief, and nihilism . He turns the dial completely in one direction exposing himself to a completely disjointed reality where he experiences “[e]verything. All at once” (22). He is terrified by the experience, and in the end, though he knows now that he has never really met her and that she is not there, he calls out to his friend Jane for help. This is the last the audience sees of this version of Steele. Although we are not given a satisfying or cathartic resolution to his narrative in the way we are with the original Steele’s plotline, robot Steele’s experiences are critical to the audience’s understanding of the character and of how personhood is being imagined in this story. Though we know that this version is a copy, that he in some senses could be considered not “real”, we also observe his personhood, his unique and complex self. Robot Steele has self awareness and consciousness that changes in reaction to his environment, he learns and adapts, he makes independent choices. And he feels. Robot Steele feels grief and love for people that he remembers knowing, he feels fear at his circumstances, he misses his friends. Despite the rejection of personhood robot Steele himself provides, the audience cannot deny the haunting certainty that Pollack sets forth, that he feels real, that his subjective experience disproves the logical conclusion of his unreality. 

In the final scene of the issue, Steele and Kate destroy the robotman copies and the warehouse they are made in, and return to confront the man. The man, enraged by the destruction of his so-called “private property”, yells at Steele and tells him that he is no better than “those broken pieces of junk over there”. Steele replies by saying that he is different, because they’re machines and he is not, therefore implying that he is better because he is not a machine. In my view, this ending entirely misses the point of the rest of the comic and of Steele’s character in general. This ending brings Steele’s identity back to being constituted in relation to others instead of in relation to himself like Kate articulated. Instead of combating the fundamental statement that the man made, that being machine/robotic/non-normative means being worthless, this scene simply articulates that Steele isn’t the thing that the man has deemed worthless in the first place. 

From the second plotline, it is clear that Steele’s copies aren’t empty robotic husks with no independent thought or personhood, but rather fully fledged consciousnesses that are capable of heart-wrenching emotional and cognitive experiences. Therefore, Cliff, even as a human, is in no way better or really even that different than the fully mechanical copies. They all struggle and feel and exist and they are all victims of the same brand of dehumanization and otherization. In fact, the despair that the robot Steele experienced upon discovering the nature of his existence very closely mirrors Steele’s own struggle with his transformed robotic nature. Neither is able to feel like a “real” person because their mode of existence is complicated, and is outside of the norm for what personhood traditionally looks like. To fully combat the man, and the dehumanizing and exploitative social forces that he comes to represent, Steele should have instead disregarded the man’s perspective entirely, and rejected otherization regardless of who it is targeted at. The man should have been wrong not because he had mistaken Steele for a machine when Steele was really a human, but rather because the idea that some people are worthless because they are different is wrong. That is the real message of Steele’s character, that regardless of what others think “proves” you are a person, the only thing that matters is that you decide that you are. 

I: Introduction

In 1975, American novelist Ira Levin’s 1972 bestselling novel, “The Stepford Wives” was adapted by director Bryan Forbes into a satirical thriller film of the same name. The Stepford Wives film, like Levin’s novel, followed Joanna, her husband Walter, and their two children as they moved from New York City to a Connecticut Suburb called Stepford. Joanna and her neighbor Bobbi quickly become skeptical of the outdated gendered attitudes in Stepford and attempt to investigate the local Men's Association as well as the strange housewives of the town. As the film progresses, Joanna and Bobbi begin to suspect the Men's Association of doing something to the women, but before Joanna or Bobbi can convince their husbands to leave, Joanna finds that Bobbi has been completely transformed into another perfect Stepford housewife. The movie culminates with Joanna discovering that the Men's Association is replacing their wives with robotic look-alikes and Joanna is killed by her own robotic double. 

Despite The Stepford Wives commercial success, the critical response was very divided. Many feminists of the era, including feminist scholar and activist Betty Friedan, were not in favor of the film; Friedan herself is quoted as calling it a “rip-off of the women's movement”. However, other feminists and critics of the time appreciated the film for its accurate depictions of patriarchal attitudes and dogma. In spite of the mixed responses, the debut of the first film was followed throughout the 80s and 90s by three additional Stepford films released as made-for-television movies. These films took place in the same universe as the original but received very little of the previous film’s acclaim or success. Then, in 2004, a new Stepford Wives remake was released, directed by Frank Oz and starring a variety of famous actors such as Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, and Glenn Close. Despite the star studded cast, this remake also received very poor reviews, and ended up costing more money to make than it brought in in international sales. 

In the most recent Stepford Wives remake, the audience still follows Joanna, Walter, and children, on their move from NYC to Stepford, but this time, the move is motivated by high powered TV executive Joanna’s loss of job followed by a dramatic nervous breakdown. Once they arrive, Joanna still works to uncover the secrets of Stepford, but in this iteration she and Bobbi are also joined by a gay man named Roger. Bobbi and Roger are both transformed into their partners' perfect ideals through the use of microchips implanted in their brain and Joanna is seemingly transformed as well. After that, this remake takes a much sharper turn from the source material and has Joanna and Walter work together to destroy the microchip technology and free the women of Stepford together. 

In the following paper, I examine these two renditions of The Stepford Wives, the 1975 and 2004 films, using a comparative content analysis. I begin by examining two foundational feminist sources, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, one source from each era/wave of feminism corresponding to the release of each film. I then analyze The Stepford Wives films themselves. Ultimately I argue that The Stepford Wives films are highly emblematic of the popular white feminisms of their respective eras. Further, I emphasize that despite the many differences between the feminist texts and films, the popular white feminisms’ expressed within them are unified by a shared emphasis on white women's victimization and a highly exclusionary understanding of women's liberation . 

II: Definitions

To begin, I must define two of the more nebulous terms through which I will be articulating the central concepts of my argument throughout this paper. Particularly, I want to discuss what I mean by “popular feminism” as I have referred to it in the introduction section above and will continue to utilize it throughout the paper. I draw my definition of popular feminism from Sarah Banet-Weiser’s 2018 book, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, in which Banet-Weiser discusses the relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny in the modern day. Banet-Weiser defines popular feminism in her book by three components: its accessibility - its circulation in popular and commercial media, its popularity - its ability to be liked and admired by like minded groups and individuals, and its profitability - its ability to be sold. 

The other term I will define here, “white feminism”, is predictably very heavily linked to the previous term I defined. Banet-Weiser points out that white feminism is almost always those feminisms that are most visible, and therefore, most popular. Therefore, while white feminism and Popular feminism are not synonyms, interactions between capitalism and white supremacy often make it so that they are extremely likely to overlap. White feminism is defined by Mia McKenzie in Banet-Weiser’s book, as “a description of the way that ‘white women put their own needs and well-being above black women everyday and call it feminism’” (32). Building off of that definition, I understand it in the context of this paper as any feminism that conceptualizes women and women’s issues as a single universal category by only discussing or addressing problems that impact upper class white women.  

III: Methodology 

My method for this research paper is a form of qualitative content analysis that I developed based on the standard format of coding that combines both deductive and inductive frameworks. I began the process by reading through the two secondary sources, The Feminine Mystique and Lean In, and then writing a very brief summary about how I interpreted the overall intentions of the author. After my initial reading, I went back and started to pick out meaning units, sections of the texts that I found to be particularly impactful, highly relevant to the ideology of the author, or clarifying of those general themes/intentions I recognized in my summary. I then abstracted those units into a series of codes. After a few readings and having gathered a variety of codes, I condensed my codes further into six categories, three from each source. These categories are: identity, idealized femininity, and addiction and illness, and  professional ambition, internal barriers to success, and individualism. Once these categories were gathered, I moved into my analysis of The Stepford Wives films. 

I began this process by watching each of the films once, and like with the secondary sources, constructing a brief summary of what I interpreted to be the creators’ intentions with each production. Next I went through and noted any key differences between the films, reasoning that because they were an original and remake of the same movie, that any differences would likely correspond to changes in ideology between eras. I then applied the categories from the secondary sources to my analysis and laid out specific examples of how the differences and similarities in each film related back to their corresponding secondary source and therefore the era of popular white feminism represented. 

IV: Literature Review: Foundational Popular White Feminist Texts 

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan 

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published in 1963 and is held by many feminist historians to be partially responsible for sparking the beginnings of the second wave feminist movement. In 1964, the year after its publication, The Feminine Mystique had become a best seller and had distinguished itself from the work of Friedan’s white academic feminist contemporaries by selling over a million copies in less than two years. This quality of The Feminine Mystique’s reception and subsequent cultural impact make it a perfect example of a foundational popular white feminist text for that era. In this section, I will discuss my categorization of the ideologies present in the first chapter of The Feminine Mystique titled “The Problem That Has No Name” with a focus on articulating those ideologies that are most representative of the temporal context of second wave white feminism.   

The first and largest category that I was able to construct from my reading of “The Problem That Has No Name” was made up of codes relating to the concept of identity. Friedan had gathered a variety of interview responses from American women that discuss similar experiences with dependence on others, feelings of purposelessness, and a lack of any meaningful passion or self knowledge. Friedan quotes one woman who says, “the problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself” (28). This quote implies that because the housewife’s labor is defined by enabling the rest of the family’s functioning, she lacks the capacity to establish an identity independent of that role. In other words, because she can’t clock out at the office or finish with school for the day like her husband and children, she is never not a housewife and is therefore never a person in her own right. 

The next category I identified deals with the concept of idealized post war femininity which Friedan defines specifically by the figure of the archetypal housewife. She says that “[e]xperts told them [women] how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training…how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread…how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting...” (3) Friedan attributes the heightened rates of women seeking to get married, have families, and work as housewives, to the prevalence of this ideal being circulated by doctors, politicians, news agencies etc. The notion being that a critical component of the country's recovery from the devastation of the second world war was a reclamation of traditional femininity, an ideal untainted by the masculinizing responsibilities and freedoms women experienced during the war time years while men were abroad. Women were told that in order to achieve personal happiness, satisfaction, purpose, etc, they could now rely on their rightful way of life that had been taken from them during the war. Friedan however argues that this ideal, like all ideals, was ultimately unattainable because women who achieved the technical requirements of this standard were never emotionally or spiritually satisfied by it, and ultimately neither were the men or the society that pressured them into those behaviors and roles.  

The failure to meet this ideal, or rather the failure to achieve satisfaction through committing oneself to the ideal, is what brings Friedan to her discussion of addiction and illness which is the final category that I identified. Friedan notes numerous times that while psychoanalysts, social scientists, philosophers, etc all claimed that women would be happy if they embraced their traditional and natural roles (11), no matter how high birth rates and marriage rates soared, the problem persisted. In response to the so-called “crisis of the housewife”, men, society, and even the affected women themselves tried desperately to fill their emptiness. This resulted in widespread addiction amongst housewives, anything from pills (31), to alcohol, shopping, sex (29), etc. Furthermore, the rate of women in psychotherapy sky-rocketed (13), with doctors trying their best to diagnose and prescribe the unhappiness and then madness of women with outwardly “perfect lives”. All of these components of the crisis just serve as further evidence of Friedan’s position, that the existence of the ideal itself, as well as the patriarchal standards and restrictions that uphold and enforce it, are the true cause.  

What Friedan does not articulate in this chapter, is how the difficulties she discusses, particularly in relation to societal standards of womanhood and the powers exerted over them by men, are experienced by figures other than the stereotypical housewife. She fails to ask what happens to women who do not share the housewife’s proximity to the ideal. Multiply marginalized women, meaning women who experience oppression on axes beyond their womanhood, for example, experience such a large distance from the standards Friedan articulates that their oppression comes not from the dissatisfaction of achieving an ideal and still suffering, but rather from the direct physical consequences of being societally othered for their failure. Friedan’s lack of discussion surrounding the ways in which non-white non-middle class housewives relate to the concepts she is discussing reveals a flaw in Fridan’s overall arguments. While critically relevant to the effects of patriarchy on the most privileged women in society, Friedan’s arguments ultimately set middle class white women as the norm of womanhood and as a result, 

miss the multitudinous experiences of other women, and what incredibly important aspects of the structure and function of the patriarchy their experiences provide insight into. 

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sanberg

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sanberg was published in 2013, and was listed as a New York Times bestseller for more than a year following its initial publication. In the first two 

Years afterwards, Lean In sold 2.25 million copies worldwide and blew up into a cultural sensation with additional books published, a website launched, and lean in circles organized for professional women.  Lean In also generated a lot of controversy from critical readers, journalists, academics, and facebook commenters. Some identified Lean In as a work of faux-feminist neoliberal propaganda that repacked bootstraps narratives into an updated sleek “feminist” box. In bell hooks’ article “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In”, she contextualizes the impact of Lean In by explaining that “[today][w]e were far more likely to hear that we are living in a post-feminist society than to hear voices clamoring to learn more about feminism. This seems to have changed with Sanberg’s book Lean In, holding steady on Times bestseller list for more than sixteen weeks.” This phenomenon that bell hooks points to, is what characterized Lean In as a foundational popular white feminist text of the third wave. Unlike many other feminist texts, Lean In occupies a well known, commonly accepted, and heavily monetized position in popular culture, and it is the best available equivalent to The Feminine Mystique among third wave texts. In this section, like with the Feminine Mystique, I will examine the first chapter of Lean In titled “The Leadership Ambition Gap: What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?” and use it to characterize the popular white feminisms of the third wave. 

  The predominant category I constructed from this chapter was, predictably, professional ambition. Sanberg discusses defining qualities and consequences of ambition in the workplace, the difficulties she and others have experienced as ambitious women, and the lack of ambition present among many women at higher levels of professional power. Sanberg particularly focuses on the leadership ambition gap which refers to a phenomenon observed by Sanberg of qualified, intelligent, even ambitious women in corporate work environments peeling off just before they reach high level positions. Sanberg notes that despite an increase in things like women's level of education (7) and self proclaimed level of career ambition (13), women are still not pursuing the highest levels of power in business that previous generations of feminists thought that they would if given the tools to do so. The other subcategories that I found through my analysis of this chapter all relate to Sanberg’s subsequent attempts to understand and conceptualize how this gap in achievement occurs and what can be done to address it. 

The next category I isolated was women's internal barriers to success. Though Sanberg briefly acknowledges the impact of “external barriers erected by society” (8) on women's achievement, her focus in this chapter is heavily placed on internal barriers. Sanberg believes that factors like a lack of self confidence, unequal personal partnerships, and unattainable standards, can be major contributors in blocking women's paths to advancement (9). Sanberg argues that when women internalize the messaging of patriarchy they are more likely to be pressured into behavior that is stereotypically feminine, even in professional contexts. As a result, they refuse to be aggressive, powerful, demanding, etc, all qualities that Sanberg points to as critical for professional success. Sanberg says, “[w]e [women] hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.” (8) “Leaning in” as Sanberg puts it, is a call for women to “reignite the revolution by internalizing the revolution” (10). She wants women to work to combat the influences of patriarchy in their own lives and prioritize their personal advancement as a mechanism by which to combat systemic inequality. She phrases it as “[t]he shift to a more equal world will happen person by person” (10). In this case, the underlying meaning is that the world becomes more equal one white woman CEO at a time. 

The ideology underpinning Sanberg’s insistence that women combat their internal issues as opposed to focusing on external forces is indicative of the final category I established: individualism. Sanberg continuously argues in this chapter that revolutionary feminist action will be enacted when women (rich white women) can add their voices to the highest levels of power and advocate for less fortunate women (10). She believes that the best thing a woman who is “fortunate enough to have choices about how much and when and where to work” (10) can do to combat patriarchy is to defeat the barriers in their own lives that force them down the path of the ambition gap. This chapter constructs the problem of gender inequality as a “chicken-and-egg situation” (9), where it is equally functional to dismantle societal systems first or individual internal struggles first. Sanberg’s own analysis prioritizes the individual behaviors and sets up further discussion that takes place throughout the rest of the book for how those behaviors can be enacted. 

The underlying ideology present throughout all of the codes and categories I identified was the avoidance of issues having to do with intersectional oppression in feminist action in the workforce. While Sanberg acknowledges abstractly that poor women (10), and women of color (7), suffer differently under patriarchy than she and her wealthy white peers do, she does not seem to have any intention of discussing those issues in any depth. This is likely because in order to make an argument for the importance of individual success in the context of revolutionary feminist action, one must ignore two critical fallacies. First, the historical precedent of wealthy white women always holding more social power and influence than other women and yet repeatedly failing to utilize it on their behalf. Second, that Sanberg’s notion of “leaning in”, of taking power through self confidence and aggression, has regularly failed for many types of multiply oppressed women, often as a direct result of systemic barriers. Sanberg’s book, much like Friedan’s in the previous section, touches on a tangible and observable issue relating to patriarchal oppression. However, also like Friedan in the previous section, Sanberg’s failure to meaningfully engage in the varied experiences of women, and her desire to normativize the experiences of wealthy white women in particular, seems to have prevented her from examining critical aspects of the problems she attempts to resolve.  

V: Film Review: 

The Stepford Wives (1975) 

The first category drawn from The Feminine Mystique in section IV that I was able to recognize in my analysis of the plot of this film, was the category of identity.  The most obvious example of this theme occurs within the most basic premise of the film, the replacement of the wives with robotic replicas. Unlike other types of robot media, a defining characteristic of the Stepford robots is their lack of sentience, they have no identity. Further, by the end of the film, it is clear that things relating to Joanna’s identity, like Joanna’s passion for photography or her desire for extremely limited forms of gender equality, were obtrusive enough to her husband’s desires that he condemned her to death (28:36) and replaced her with a replica that lacked those signifiers of personhood. This exemplifies how patriarchy dehumanizes women to such a degree that even the smallest indicators of identity make them unappealing. This ideology also aligns with Fridan’s analysis of the problem with no name in which she describes the ultimate horror and violence of the patriarchy as the spiritual death of middle class white women who lack all fulfillment and agency. 

The second category, idealized femininity, is also particularly identifiable in the film's depiction of the robotic wives. The ideal that Friedan discussed, something that is impossible to ever fulfill because of the humanity of women, is imagined in the fictional space of this film. Subtle qualities of the Stepford robots such as their enthusiastically professed passion for household tasks (51:30), their heavily sexualized and feminized appearances (1:50:21, 1:20:28), and their submissive and cheerful dispositions (1:05:25), all fall perfectly into Friedan’s understandings of the ideal. Similarly to Friedan’s housewives, the robots' proximity to the ideal makes them into machines that exist only for the enjoyment of others. Like real housewives, they are perfect and pleasant on the outside but are ultimately just empty husks on the inside. 

The third category, addiction and illness, is also highly present throughout this film. For example, early on in the film, a robot who malfunctions is forced to apologize to Joanna and Bobbi for her “drunkenness and addiction” (42:04). This moment points to how any failings to meet the ideal of womanhood are attributed to womanly weaknesses while the fundamental issues, in this case the woman being a robot, is left unaddressed. This blatantly mirrors Friedan’s own understanding of societal responses to the crisis of housewives who were blamed for their own unhappiness in order to avoid examination of systemic patriarchal violence. Joanna’s own plotline is also full of thematic references to madness. Throughout her attempts to uncover the truth and most often in her interactions with her husband (1:25:41), Joanna is made to feel that her reactions to life in Stepford are ungrateful and indicative of the weakness of women's emotions generally or of her own weakness in particular. Just like with the malfunctioning robot, Joanna’s struggles with her sanity reflect the ways in which patriarchal society utilizes the failings of its own systems as further evidence for its ideologies. 

Beyond the applicability of the categories, the original Stepford Wives film also parallels The Feminine Mystique in its centering of the white middle class white woman to its own detriment. This film is almost entirely devoid of any women that are not at the very pinnacle of privilege under patriarchal society. As a result, the audience must question why the creator chose to tell a story about the systematic dehumanization and enslavement of women from the perspective of fictional wealthy white housewives instead of those women who have experienced similar dehumanization and enslavement in real life. The film attempts to utilize the extreme violence and dehumanization of the plot as a metaphor for the more subtle psychological oppressions of privileged women and in the process, unintentionally touches on themes that have wildly different implications for various marginalized women. Ultimately, much like with The Feminine Mystique, the way the film sets wealthy white women as the unquestioned norm implies some degree of implicit racism and classism as well as an attempt to avoid the complexities required of a more complete and productive analysis. 

The Stepford Wives (2004) 

The category of professional ambition, which I identified in the section IV examination of Lean In by Sheryl Sanberg, is present throughout the entirety of this film. It begins with Joanna’s immediate character shift from being an artistic feminist housewife in the original, to a neurotic workaholic executive in the remake (8:27). Furthermore, the remake changes the plot of the original movie to ensure that all the women characters, who before had been average women, became remarkably successful career women who only became housewives after moving to Stepford (53:49). This change between the films mirrors and exaggerates Sanberg’s theory of the ambition gap. For Sanberg, the professional ambition gap is caused by the influence of societal pressures on women to have families and children. In the remake, the subtle influences of society are represented by direct physical violations of women's bodies by their husbands who force them away from the workplace into societally acceptable roles by controlling them with microchips (1:02:24). 

The second category, internal barriers to success, is also present in my analysis of the remake film. Internal barriers to success seem to be represented by Joanna’s own struggle throughout the film to resist her natural inclinations for professional success in order to preserve her family. Joanna’s husband, who could perhaps represent the patriarchal systems of society, constantly pressures Joanna and argues that if she cannot perform classic feminine behaviors (i.e. be a housewife) then she will not have access to the happiness that their nuclear family offers (29:04). Joanna’s self doubt and acquiescence to outside demands through the performance of stereotypically feminine behaviors eventually lead her to a state in which she is almost completely deprived of her autonomy. This series of events mimics Sanbergs theory in that it implies that allowing the fear and self doubt taught by the patriarchy to limit behavior can prevent women from achieving success. The completion of Joanna’s arc also ultimately proves this theory as well because only when Joanna “leans into” her professional skills, intelligence, and aggression is she able to escape Stepford, save the other women (1:16:21), and profit off of her experiences (1:22:39) to achieve professional success.

The final category, individualism, is featured very heavily in this film as well, particularly in the culmination of Joanna’s character arc in which she becomes the savior of Stepford. Joanna’s personal circumstances and her initiative in the face of those circumstances, are what ultimately end the enslavement of the entire woman population of the town. The film shows the audience a sea of helpless, subservient women who have lived as robot servants for years before Joanna arrived, and then shows how they are saved because one woman had the ability to fight back for them. This kind of highly individual heroism exemplifies Sanberg’s argument that women’s liberation takes place through the actions of the individual, her belief that one person’s actions can make great change. Joanna’s actions, saving the wives from constant oppression and control, blatantly represents the film’s desire to reflect a similar ideological belief, or a similar faith in individual competent white women to transform women's liberation through the mechanism of their own self interest. 

VI: Conclusions 

The correspondences noted in the above section between the ideologies of the sources and their corresponding films indicate the ways in which the Stepford Wives films draw their ideological frameworks from the popular white feminisms of the eras in which they were created. Further, the analysis highlights the differences between the two eras/sources/films in its discussions of housewives versus working women, personal fulfillment versus professional success, etc. In this section I will be detailing the similarities between the eras/sources/films by utilizing my analyses of popular white feminism throughout sections IV and V. I will also expand upon my previous points and argue that throughout time, popular white feminism retains its core reliance on the homogenization of womanhood and rejection of politics that do not center wealthy white women as the pinnacle of simultaneous victimization and strength. 

The qualities of popular white feminism that I touched on in my discussions of second wave feminism, through both the film and secondary source, were centered primarily around the hyper-victimization of the housewife. Friedan and the creators of The Stepford Wives film articulated the figure of the housewife as helplessness, that no matter how hard she worked to achieve functionality within the confines of patriarchy, she would always be oppressed. Although the film and secondary source representing third wave ideologies articulate more outwardly positive perspectives, focusing on women saving the world, there is still that same shared quality of helplessness buried within those narratives as well. In Lean In, Sanberg argues for privileged women to work within corporate America to fix the world on others behalf, and in doing so, she inherently submits her ideology to the indomitability of patriarchy. That argument, while based on the strength and competence of white women, also implies that they are simply not strong enough to fight for a world in which all women could be given opportunities to access power and autonomy. 

Under this framework, the housewife is strong for doing constant unpaid labor and organizing the lives of her husband and children, but she is also helpless to combat the systems that cause the extreme privilege that create her purposelessness. The working woman is also strong because she is smarter and better than men and because she must work harder to succeed, but she is also weak in the face of the patriarchy that prevents her from ever combatting the systems she struggles within. These axes of strength and helplessness are performances that white womanhood bounces between as a mechanism to avoid accountability on multiple levels. Heavily dramatized depictions of white women as victims of violent patriarchy, such as the two Stepford Wives films, are articulations of this performance, ways of imagining a level of victimization that camouflages the power they possess. This is furthered by how films like The Stepford Wives and sources like Lean In and The Feminine Mystique attempt to discuss issues within the framework of universal women's liberation. In this conception, women are all on the same team and therefore, there is no need to question how white women may be benefiting from the victimization of their so-called sisters. Ultimately, these ideologies are equally present in both films, both sources, and both eras, revealing that despite progress narratives that point to increases in diversity, intersectionality, and other buzzwords, popular white feminism will always be characterized by its fundamental prioritization of white women over all else. 

Works Cited 

The Stepford Wives. Directed by Bryan Forbes,  performances by Katherine Ross, Paula Prentiss, and Peter Masterson, Columbia Pictures, Embassy Pictures, 1975. 

The Stepford Wives. Directed by Frank Oz, performances by Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, and Glenn Close, Deline Pictures, 2004. 

Friedan, Betty. “The Feminine Mystique”. New York :Norton, 1963.

Sandberg, Sheryl. Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. First edition. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. 

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered : Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny . Duke University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478002772. 

Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring the Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s . Basic Books, 2010. 

hooks, bell. “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In”.  the feminist wire. October 28, 2013. https://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/. 

Garner, Bianca. “A Stepford Wives Tale: Looking back at the reaction to The Stepford Wives”. filmotomy. July 9, 2018. https://filmotomy.com/a-stepford-wives-tale-looking-back-at-the-reaction-to-the-stepford-wives/. 

Palmer, Gianna. “What impact has Lean In had on women?”. Business Reporter, BBC News, New York. March 5, 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-31727796. 

“50 Top-Grossing Movies, 2004”. History.com. https://web.archive.org/web/20090304010558/. 

“The Stepford Wives.” Box Office Mojo, Imbd Pro. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3782444545/

Williams, Zoe. “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sanberg: Review”. The Guardian. 13 March, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/13/lean-in-sheryl-sandberg-review

Faludi, Sarah. “Facebook Feminism, Like it or Not”. no 23, The Baffler. August 2013. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/facebook-feminism-like-it-or-not

This essay is being edited and will be returned to the site promptly.

This essay is being edited and will be returned to the site promptly.