oceans deep

One of my friends, Samuel*, posted a link on facebook to an article about the Linda Holmes post, Dear Pixar, From All The Girls With Band-Aids On Their Knees. It’s about the dearth of female lead characters in Pixar films, especially ones that aren’t princesses. This is the start of the conversation that Samuel started about the link:

Samuel: An interesting article about something I hadn’t actually thought about! Oh and can some explain to me how you can tell the sex of a robot?

Genieve**: I think the usual method for denoting the gender of something that doesn’t usually have one is to slap a bow on it to make it female… Other than that I have no idea.

Samuel: But did either of Wall-e or EVE have a bow?

Which leads to an interesting question: how did Pixar gender Wall-E and EVE? In many ways it’s simple, the names, despite being acronyms (Wall-E = Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, EVE = Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) are versions of traditionally gendered names. EVE’s voice has been ‘feminised’ and is a higher pitch than Wall-E’s. Then there is their appearance. I often get mistaken for male. Just this morning the man who came to read our gas meter called me “Sir”. I went for a meal with a group of friends and in taking our order the waiter almost skipped over me as he was taking the women’s orders before the men’s (which I have issues with but anyway). I occassionally get homophobic abuse thrown at me because folk think I’m a gay man. All this confusion because I have short hair, don’t wear make-up and don’t dress in an overly feminine manner. The point of all this? Appearance is very important. In the case of the robots, EVE was sleek and almost feline in comparison to the square, scruffiness of Wall-E. Who, incidentally, was a glorified refuge collector, a traditionally male job, whose method of producing ‘bricks’ I found to be slightly reminisent of certain bodily functions… Although it could be argued that EVE was a scientist, also a traditionally male job. (Or was she just a flower-picker? Hmmm…) But despite gendering the robots as male and female in a heteronormative fashion, in some ways traditional gender roles were reversed (see this article for a discussion of this). Wall-E can even be reinterpreted as a butch-femme love story: WALL•E: A Butch/Femme Love Story… or Silly Rabbit! Robots Have No Gender.

It’s amazing what children’s films and our reactions to them can tell us about society….

*not his real name but for consistency, the same fake name I’ve used for him before
**not her real name either but in this case I think her alias really suits her