Femme identification & Stranger Things

spoilers for most of season 1.

I read, and appreciated a lot of Shannon Keating’s points about femininity and Hollywood horror conventions over at Buzzfeed. Its central point is a critique of the trope in pop culture requiring unfeminine girls to be made over, feminized, and rendered desirable in order to be worthy of regard. It’s true: this sucks. An attention to the way mythical femininity works (and is resisted) in the show helps us think about why the character of Barb has been widely taken up as awesome and stylish (which was not, I think, the intention of the Duffer Brothers, who seem like pretty much dudebros); it helps us think about the tragedy of Nancy snuggling up with Steve in episode 8.

At the same time, I worried about two things in the article; its typification of kids in sixth grade as necessarily not having sexuality and its dismissal of the ways taking up femininity can be good:

1. Thinking strictly in the realm of consensual interaction: It is totally true that children don’t have adult kinds of sexuality; prepubescent kids – as are many of the characters in Stranger Things – in particular. It’s also almost always the case that when kids have sexuality imputed to them it is straight sexuality. So actual babies are rendered as “flirting” if and only if they are interacting with humans of the “opposite” gender, but they are talked about that way all the time. Usually, only queer kids are rendered as always and only non-sexual (and not in the liberatory ways that ace sexuality manifests) until we’re well past the age of majority. (If you want to reflect on this, look at all the sexual things that have different legal ages of consent if they’re done across or within gender lines.) It’s also true that there are forms of desire and interpersonal connection happening with people who are twelve, and it’s not disgusting or weird that Eleven and Mike might like each other and that within the fucked up and predictable gender norms of junior high that liking might express itself in wanting to go to a dance. In the totally TV context also of a kid who’s been raised in a basement as a cold war science experiment, a kid who’s depicted as being forced to assent to the experiments performed on her, a kid who’s depicted as rewarded with care and regard when she kills two of the men guarding her after refusing to kill a cat, I think it’s also worth reflecting on what Eleven’s desire for Mike means. I read both her openness to connection in friendship (“friends don’t lie”) with all of the D&D boys and the specific connection with Mike as a quite beautiful kind of resistance to, well, her entire life to date. It says: the entire US government tried to destroy my capacity to form lateral connections of warmth and trust in service of making me a world-breaking weapon, and I still like people.
2. Okay, so I get that it’s technically not femme identification when Eleven (Elle, ha, it’s such a blunt instrument feminization, I see that…) puts on Nancy’s old dress and wig from the boys’ dress-up stash, having previously identified Nancy in a photo as “pretty.” I agree with folks that the whole show is very, almost queerly, trying-really-hard straight. And when the wig comes out, they’re just trying to disguise her as not a buzz-cut kid to get her into the school undetected. Keating makes awesome points about the many ways that, in the 80’s and now, masculine and tomboy girls are called to reform into girly girls in order to be rendered palatable. Maybe it’s because I agree with this critique so much that I have been dwelling on why it doesn’t completely scan for me in this show. I wonder if there is any way for us to receive the pleasure Eleven has in wearing the dress, wearing the wig, in being told she is pretty – pretty with the wig, pretty without it – as a pleasure that can be real, and not only a capitulation to traditional gender norms. Keating says, “The more we see women and girls embracing nontraditional gender presentations, the less vilified those presentations will become. Characters like Furiosa and Holtzmann represent the possibility that a woman could be masculine, or queer, or unattached, or some combination of the three without being forcibly feminized, given a boyfriend, or branded a monster.” I agree! And I wonder also if there isn’t some way that girl and women characters can embrace feminine gender presentations – can like being pretty – and still be complete ass-kickers.