Whether it’s a cinema viewer or a video player, the question of identification with the screen character does not provide an easy straightforward answer that satisfies a panicked public who wants no-nonsense, jargon free answers.
While our intent here is not to go through the literature of psychoanalytic film studies to make our point (see jagodzinski 1996, 165–243, for review), the introduction of more and more “tough” women characters in television, film, and video games requires the most comment since such character devel-opment has received the most attention and is the most visibly noticeable, for instance, Xena: the Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain Jayneway of Star Trek: Voyager. In the American society where too often women are raped, assaulted, and murdered by men, the fantasy of a young girl or woman’s empowerment where she is shown defeating the men who attack her is to be admired. At the same time such an act generates horror.
Women who take on these masculine characteristics present a homophobic threat to men. They are women in men’s drag as the biologically held socially assumed binary of male/female is deconstructed, making gender an ambigu-ous and performed discourse. The question of the mannish lesbian continu-ally haunts these figures.
In the sport of serious women bodybuilding this is especially the case. The bodybuilding organization, headed by the Wieder Brothers, goes out of its way to mitigate this threat by preventing “big” women from winning Ms Olympia contests by factoring “femininity” into the judging protocol.
You have to “look” like a woman to win! In muscle magazines such as Flex, big muscular women are shown as centerfolds, their brawny bodies dressed (as well as undressed) in skimpy undergarments, wearing translucent body-suits, dessous, and stiletto shoes (Aoki 1996; Ian 2001; jagodzinski 2003a).
Women’s bodybuilding comes closest to the “tough” women characters in computer games who are similarly defined by their excessive muscular bod-ies. Toughness in women suggests masculinity and hence is a threat to men, whereas if they are portrayed as being strong but not necessarily tough, then the same associations do not hold. Before commenting on these “New Tough Women” as Inness (1999) calls them, from a psychoanalytic view point it is interesting to examine Clover’s (1992) hypothesis of the Final Girl standing in the horror films of the late 1970s and 1980s. Her reading of this fantasy is important for several reasons. It points out how the threat of a strong powerful teenage to twenties-something young woman is mitigated by this Hollywood genre. Second, the Final Girl emerged when families in the United States were going through a profound change as women entered the market, divorce rates went up and feminism gained ground. And, three, it raises a question about the New Tough Woman of the new millennium.
How radical is she? Can she escape the parody of being a woman with a man’s body?
Carol Clover in her study on slasher films claimed that this occult horror genre was a response to the “trouble” going on in the Oedipal household.
“The typical patrons of these films are the sons of marriages contracted in the sixties or even early seventies,” a time characterized by “the women’s move-ment, the entry of women into the workplace, and the rise of divorce and woman-headed families” that “would yield massive gender confusion in the next generation” (62, emphasis added). A new “female victim-hero”
appeared on the scene. Clover raised the question as to why such a large audience of mostly adolescent males identifies with this female victim-hero, or the Final Girl in these slasher horrors? The Final Girl is the last one left standing at the narrative’s end after having defeated, killed, or sent the killer back to “hell,” but only after the killer has left a long trail of bodies, and she has done a long arduous battle with him. As Clover argues, it is doubtful that the male audience identifies with the “good” male characters. They are usu-ally boyfriends or schoolmates of the girls who are marginal, underdeveloped characters that are dispatched with quickly. The would-be rescuers—policemen, fathers, and sheriffs—are usually presented as incompetent or incapable of stopping the killer. Often they are dispatched with as well. The killer himself is often unseen or barely glimpsed in the beginning of the narrative. When he does make an appearance he is ugly, fat, masked, deformed, or dressed as a woman, and sometimes is a woman (as in Friday 13th, pt. 1). The killer is himself eventually killed or dispatched as well from the narrative to live
again in another sequel. It is the Final Girl who lives to tell the tale. All this conclusively suggests that identification rests on the Final Girl and the diegesis that rarely varies.
Clover’s thesis is that slasher films play out a male fantasy despite the appearance that the hero is a young woman. She proceeds to argue that these films specifically engage its forms of “cross dressing” and games of gender identity in order to make possible the disavowal of the fantasy, “a boy is being beaten by his father” (51–52). To recall Freud’s (1919, SE XVII) beat-ing analysis, this is the fantasy that boys suppress and interpret as, “I am loved by my father.” To avoid the homosexual implications of male love, heterosexual boys displace this entire fantasy as, “I am being beaten by my mother.” Sadomasochistic incest fantasies and castration anxieties, the taboo subjects of male adolescence, are explored in the relative safety through the femaleness of the victim. The Final Girl is always “boyish.” She is set apart from her more “feminine” friends. She is sexually reluctant, can look death in the face, is resourceful, intelligent, clever, while her name signals her mas-culine attributes: Marti, Terri, Laurie, Stretch, Will, Joey, Max, just as the surname Ripley in Aliens also suggests. Such gender displacements, claims Clover, are obvious in these films where the Final Girl is really a girl in boys drag, a “congenial double for the adolescent male,” while the killer is really a woman in men’s drag—the phallic mother. On a rare occasion, like Friday the 13th, the killer is the mother. The killers are virginal and sexually inert, and on occasion are dressed in drag as transvestites and transsexuals, Norman Bates in Psycho was an earlier forerunner. Their masculinity is severely quali-fied. Rape, as Clover points out, is not normally part of the stalker genre.
The defeat of the killer for the male audience might now be interpreted as the castration of the phallic mother.
Despite her insightful analysis, Clover has little to say about the way girls in the audience experience these slasher films. If boys cross-gender for empowerment, don’t girls do so as well? We maintain that the crossing over of sex/gender identification with action figures in violent video games for the fantasmatic purposes of empowerment and/or control is what provides the jouissance of play for some youth. The figure becomes the embodiment of objet a for them. As cross-identified figures they fill a lack. How and why?
The threat of the opposite sex, in particular, is mitigated through such cross-identification. Adolescent boys who identify with the skimpy-dressed, big-breasted heroines like Lara Croft or Joanna Dark—figures who are active, powerful, and threatening—feel like they can control and come to terms with the “impossible” power of female sexuality, which, in “real life” (RL), poses a threat to them. They may be shy, unable to approach the opposite sex, embarrassed about their own bodies, and unable to fit in with the more “mature” sexy crowd who date. The fantasy of control is psychically reassuring. Whether the fantasy is one of admiration (boys are in “love” with such self-assured girls), or retribution (boys are angered by the rejection they receive from such girls), it still sublimates their emotions.
Such cross-identification goes for girls as well. There are now a significant number of websites that celebrate Grrrl culture (or gURL) of “first shooter”
video games.2 The following sample of names tell the story: Amazon Sex Kittens, Babes in Boyland, Beautiful Ladies of War—players of Half-Life-where the player is an innocent scientist who has to fight his way through hundreds of invading aliens and soldiers sent by a corrupt government; Evil Quake Goddesses and QGirlZ Quake Clan—players of Quake (2 and 3) where the protagonist battles a legion of zombies; FJK—Female Jedi Knights, which is an all women’s’ Star Wars Role Playing Game; GameGirl, offers information and forums relating to Half Life MUDS like Counter Strike and Day of Defeat. The fantasyful identification with hulky male action figures by girls is empowering. Again it provides a way to cope with the threat of the male mystique; the threat of force, brutal strength, and domi-nation. Hate or love them, the question of sexuality is sublimated through game playing.
For both sex/genders, the fantasy space created by the game’s narrative becomes a “holding place,” a transitional space (Winnicott) to work through the threat of the opposite sex. One might hazard a generalized hypothesis here that these fantasies are heterosexually sexed/gendered: for boyz cross-identification is more for control, for gurlz cross-identification is more for empowerment. Such a claim, however, may be far too simple when both het-erosexual and homosexual positions are taken into account where the picture becomes much more complicated. Gay and lesbian youth who are almost always under homophobic threat in schools, or whose identity is conflicted when peer support is missing, would cross-identify for yet other fantasmatic desires. Suffice to say that the “impossibility” of sex/gender identification is given more possibility for exploration through the fantasy space that is being offered through these games. This, of course, is a positive development for the anxieties surrounding sex/gender that every culture has to provide for an explanation; however, the question remains whether the fantasies that are offered through video game narratives challenge the existing power rela-tionships, or as a cathartic sublimating release, are they merely maintaining the established hegemony? In our view such strategies offer another insight into the post-Oedipal landscape that is especially being opened up by the site/sight/cite of video game culture.