Marvel’s The Avengers and the Female Gaze

May 7, 2012 Commentary, Geek Girl Life, Movies, Reviews, Watching 11

Marvel’s The Avengers (2012)
Director: Joss Whedon
Writer: Joss Whedon, Zak Penn
Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johanson, Samuel L. Jackson

[Editor's Note: Beware some very minor spoilers for the movie.]

Here’s the thing, the first time I saw Marvel’s The Avengers, I declared to some skeptical friends that it was the greatest super hero movie I’ve ever seen. They, who did not see the film yet, argued for The Dark Knight, which I still maintain is not a super hero movie but a crime movie that happens to star comic book characters. Said friends saw Marvel’s The Avengers and relented, saying it was extremely good.

After a second and careful viewing, I have to say it is a nearly perfect movie: solid storyline, great pacing, awesome and not overbearing action sequences, fantastic chemistry between the many larger-than-life characters, plenty of Joss Whedon humor and a beloved character’s death. Also, everyone in this movie is gorgeous.

Seriously, this may be the best looking cast I have ever seen and if I can be superficial here for a moment: that is awesome.

A lot has been said about this movie and the female gaze, a concept that has been steadily gaining traction in feminist and gender studies. I have written about the male gaze in comics before, and since this is a concept that was founded in cinema studies, it makes sense to apply it to Marvel’s The Avengers. The male gaze, or the gaze in general, is ultimately about power and dominance. Whoever holds the gaze (typically, heterosexual men) exhibits agency and dominance over the sexualized object (women). In cinema, and as I argue, in life, women are viewed merely by their bodies and as sexual objects for their male counterparts. Think of the common advertisements, posters, magazine covers, music videos, etc. and you can see the male gaze in action.

Now, as I said earlier, this film stars a handful of some terribly good-looking people, most of which are men. Black Widow is the one female Avenger and she is incredibly sexy. She is portrayed that way for the audience from her skin-tight cat suit, to her perfect eye make-up and even to her interrogation scene in the beginning of the film in which she is referred to as a “pretty face.” Nonetheless, I found Black Widow a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing character. She manipulated her sexuality and her femininity for her own gains. In a fabulous face-off sequence with Loki, she uses his assumptions of how a woman feels and reacts to endangered loved ones to get information. She is not just a pretty face and never does the audience feel that she is trying to compensate for her womanhood. She is a world-class assassin; that’s it.

Meanwhile, a lot of comments, often bemusedly and very often sexistly, have been made about the hotness of the male Avengers. The latest issue of People Magazine features this photo-shoot:

Also jokes abound about Captain America and Hawkeye’s tight costumes and of course, Loki’s legions of fangirls. In fact, this is one of the first action movies that I can recall that I’ve noticed this profound attention paid to the fact that women (my God, WOMEN!) want to see and enjoy it. Most of the people I have talked to and discussed Marvel’s The Avengers with have been women and they all love it and want to see it again.

So where does that leave us? Is it equality to switch the gaze around so that women possess it? What does it mean to objectify the male body rather than the female in a big budget popular film? Was that even the film’s intention or are we simply protecting onto it as a society?

Ultimately, I wish more than anything that the mere fact that women would want to see a super hero movie were not considered surprising or alarming. There have been plenty of sexist and demeaning responses to Marvel’s The Avengers and its female audience. It’s as if the kneejerk reaction to seeing women line up to see an action comic book movie and being genuinely excited for it is too much to comprehend. Therefore, they MUST be in it for the eye-candy. What else could explain it? Women don’t read or care about comic books but they sure do love muscles.

I am angered by this sentiment and the fact that so many of these responses try to backpedal by claiming to be tongue-in-cheek. No, that is not a free pass to dismiss women. In fact, by focusing so much on how female audience members are objectifying the male characters only, these women are reduced to one-dimensional sexual beings.

The gaze in general, whether male or female, is troublesome. Furthermore, it is difficult to shed because of how it is shoved down our throats in society. We see here with interviews that part of the marketing of the Marvel’s The Avengers seemed to focus on the gaze and sexual objectification, rather than the strengths of the film itself.

Of course, I am happy to see a film in which it is not only the female characters that are wearing those skin-tight, kind of nonsensical outfits. I also like talking about which Avenger I would most like to date (Coulson, in case you were wondering, though technically he isn’t an Avenger) with friends but that is only a portion of why I love Marvel’s The Avengers.

I love it simply because it’s a great film. I love it because I love comic books and this did justice to some of my favorite characters. Like the millions of others who have also seen and enjoyed Marvel’s The Avengers, I love it because it was everything I could want in a super hero movie. The attractiveness of the actors is merely an afterthought.

  • a passing geek girl

    Over 10 years ago the first Lord of the Rings movie came out and the media was astonished at the number of women flocking to see it in part for the sexy men. You’d think by now this wouldn’t be old news?

    I do wonder with superheroes the disconnect between the appeal of chars and plots vs the aesthetic appeal – that women are assumed to be enjoying Avengers entirely for the latter rather than the former, or both – is that this is how it works (or is expected to work) for many male comic book fans? So many comics are geared such that the male chars exist for plot & story, and the female chars are mainly there for sex appeal.  While as many of us straight and bi girls enjoy the sexy boys, but primarily like them  – and the movie – for story reasons.

  • aboynamedart

    I’ve noticed this profound attention paid to the fact that women (my God, WOMEN!) want to see and enjoy it.

    I think it’s also important to remember that each of these characters probably enjoys a sizable amount of LGBT fans – it’s not difficult to imagine that Hiddleston and Evans get some male gazes of their own, in other words. But your overall point is spot-on: to paint this movie as only appealing to one part of the gender spectrum based on aesthetics speaks to the amount of progress marketing forces refuse to make.

  • Alawson

    I love comic book movies! I live in a house with a FanBoy so yes, seeing The Avengers was a no-brainer but not because he wanted to but because WE wanted to. There is something for everyone in this movie. Humor, sadness, conflict, and beautiful men and women. I love the fact Captain America’s outfit is so tight, not just because his ass is amazeballs but because it’s so perfectly Captain America. Same with Thor and the rest. Their costumes fit their personalities and it has less to do with sex than the mythology. Thanks for these great articles. I can’t wait to see it a second time so I don’t miss out on as much from all the laughter.

  • Kerry F

    Thank you so much for all your comments! I just saw Marvel’s The Avengers for the third time last night and thought some more on gender binaries and the heteronormative manner in which the mass media has portrayed the public’s reaction to the film. The concept of anyone other than straight men and straight women wanting to see this film due to the apparent hotness of the actors has frankly not even been considered in mainstream pop culture.
    Furthermore, I find it interesting that everyone I talk to who has seen this film all seem to hate Maria Hill, the only other central female character in the film. While Black Widow is awesome, Maria Hill seems to be understood as a personality-less pretty face (I also noticed that the women of S.H.I.E.L.D. wear wedged boots. How are these helpful?). I am curious to see how you feel about Maria Hill; how she was portrayed and your reactions to her.

    • / TDF Pamela

      In the comics, I’ve always been ambivalent about Maria Hill. I like that she’s very competent, but I dislike both how she’s often written (cast iron bitch who antagonizes the hero) and that she fell on the side I disliked in Civil War (but then again, so did Widow and Iron Man). In the movie, I loved her. She admittedly didn’t have much in the way of characterization, but I think that’s an issue with having so many characters and not enough time to full flesh out the side characters. Sadly, she is the only side character who got that treatment, but then she’s also the only new one; Coulson and Fury have had three/four other movies to show off their characters and grow into them.

    • / TDF Pamela

      (Sorry, disqus and my iPad aren’t cooperating.) I love competent characters, and Maria is beyond competent; she’s the head bitch in charge (bitch used very fondly). She knows her stuff well enough to challenge Fury, and I love that.

      I think that challenging Fury might be part of the reason why people didn’t like her. Fandom has LOTS of internalized misogyny, and often lashes out at female characters for challenging or one-upping male characters, and a lot of the hate for Maria kind of stinks of that to me.

  • http://naeko.tumblr.com/ Naeko

    I said something like this to my husband when I took him to see The Avengers; this movie, I think, pandered to fangirls without talking *down to them, if that makes any sense. It did what it could to entertain women (not just women, but that’s not my point) without assuming that what will entertain us is something stupid or one-dimensional.

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  • Jennifer

    As a gender studies scholar, I am very interested in the concept of the female gaze but I am very doubtful that such a concept actually exists. Here’s why: the male body has been objectified countless times throughout film history (e.g. Marlon Brando, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Brad Pitt, Zac Efron, etc). Men are sold and marketed as sexual products just as much as women, but the excuse that enables them to expose their bodies in movies is usually the necessity to engage in some form of physical activity. Men are usually depicted fighting, nursing their battle wounds, engaged in training, handling guns, having sex – all things that give us viewers acceptable reasons for looking at the exposed male physique or his working muscles. This is precisely how the male gaze works – it does not exclude the possibility to have men showing off their naked bodies or their muscles, it very much includes it and it is necessary to include it in order for the male viewer to indentify with the men on screen (everybody wants to be the strong, handsome hero who gets the girl). So when the male lead is engaged in physical work, it doesn’t disturb the heterosexual, white, male viewing experience of the beholder of the gaze, because the exposure of the body is justified and isn’t coded as sexual. When you say these men are clad in tight costumes that show off their abs, they’re of course objectified, but they’re not fucking each other or looking at each other with sexual interest which would destablize the male gaze. I.e. not the female gaze.

    The problem with the male gaze is that it does appeal to all kinds of female and male audiences, but a female gaze would destablize the viewing experience of heterosexual male audiences because it would depict men in a clearly sexualized manner which heterosexual men would experience as queer (i.e. anxieties about castration and homosexuality are unleashed) and the movie wouldn’t reach the largest possible audience (this is why most mainstream movies employ the male gaze). Heterosexual women look at other women in a similar manner a heterosexual man would look at a woman (i.e. women check out other women’s tits and figures and hair and makeup and clothes), so I am able to get pleasure from looking at Scarlett Johansson, Megan Fox, Amber Heard or Jennifer Lawrence clad in basically nothing because I am interested in the aesthetics and I get turned on, too.

  • http://www.librimania.de/ Dschuleila

    Hey, first I like to say, your review is really great. Altought I am a Gender Studies student, I did not really care for roles in Avengers when I first saw it.  I watched it in the first place because I like comics and superhero movies (and thouse funny dialoges!). I mean a superhero movie is a superhero movie, because some strong men/ sexy women struggle to save the world. Maybe a superhero movie would not be a superhero movie if something like that was missing. Who would have watched avengers if all the heroes were just normal people and the heroines ugly?