Andie Goldmacher Prompt #1

She’s The Gaze: Gender Stereotypes in She’s the Man

When most people think of Shakespeare, their mind goes to seventeenth-century England and poems and plays written in beautifully crafted iambic pentameter. However, many American millennials and Generation Z, myself included, think of Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum. The pair star in She’s the Man, a 2006 popular rom-com rendition that turns Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night from high culture into popular culture, a widely consumed commercial culture that fosters passive engagement by mass audiences (Storey, 2009). The film directly opposes high culture, which Storey defines as intellectually challenging and reserved for an exclusive audience, reinforcing class distinctions (Storey, 2009). Amanda Bynes plays Viola Hastings, who learns the Cornwall high school women’s soccer team has been cut, so she assumes her brother Sebastian’s identity to join the Illyria men’s soccer team and beat Cornwall. Viola relies on her roommate Duke Orsino to give her extra soccer training before the Cornwall game in exchange for securing him a date with Olivia, the hottest girl in school. However, Olivia develops feelings for Sebastian. Meanwhile, by spending so much time with Duke, Viola begins to fall in love with him. At the same time, Duke develops feelings for Viola after meeting her in her female form, creating a complicated love triangle that resolves itself at the end of the film by Duke escorting Viola to the debutante ball and subsequently dating (Fickman, 2006; Pittman, 2008). While the film converts the complex narrative of Twelfth Night into a more casual, humorous and accessible style for teenage and young adult audiences, Andi Zeisler’s male and female gaze and Stuart Hall’s binary oppositions demonstrate how it counters the portrayal of gender in the original play (Hall, 1997; Zeisler, 2008).

Twelfth Night challenged societal norms of the time when women were considered in a separate, inferior sphere to men in hierarchical society by mixing the role of love, marriage, and social mobility with work and service. Through cross-dressing as Cesario (named Sebastian in She’s the Man), Viola quickly rises through the ranks, becomes Orsino’s right hand, and woos Olivia through her intellect and verbal capacity rather than her appearance, parentage, or social status (Malcolmson, 1999). At the end of the play, Viola marries Orsino, showing her ambition and verbal and intellectual skills “could turn a servant into a master,” as her stint as Cesario helped her find love, which in turn increased her social standing and fortune and made her a master of Orsino’s estate (Malcolmson, 1999, p. 349).

While She’s the Man intends to portray a liberal, feminist perspective that girls can achieve anything they set their mind to regardless of gender stereotypes, the binary of Bynes’ characters ultimately reinforces traditional gender roles. As Viola puts herself in a heterosexual man’s shoes, she develops and applies her own sexualizing male gaze on other women (Sebastien, 2018). Many of the characters in the film are subject to Andi Zeisler’s concept of the male gaze, which builds on Laura Mulvey’s definition. The male gaze “position[s] women as nothing more than objects to be looked at, sexualized, and made vulnerable” (Zeisler, 2008, p. 8). At the beginning of the film, Viola’s mother enforces the standards of the male gaze by pressuring her to abandon the soccer team and become a debutante to wear pretty ballgowns her boyfriend would find attractive. When Viola transforms into Sebastian, she uses male gaze tactics to portray herself as masculine. For example, she consistently makes comments about women’s bodies, calling a woman a “foxy mama,” and asks her female friends to publicly flirt with her to boost her reputation (Fickman, 2006, 29:09; Sebastien, 2018). Viola eventually starts to internalize her intentional projections of the male gaze, cultivating a corresponding female gaze that affects how she views herself and other women (Zeisler, 2008). At a debutante meeting after finding out Duke is attracted to Olivia, Viola fixates on Olivia out of jealousy, examining her as she eats, laughs, and chats with other women. Viola sees her as delicate, graceful, and feminine, unlike herself, who shows up late, gnaws at a chicken leg with her bare hands and mocks Olivia to herself rather than conversing with the other women at her table (Fickman, 2006).

In addition to Zeisler’s theories of the male and female gaze, the film is centered on Stuart Hall’s concept of binary oppositions, which he describes as a “crude and reductionist way of establishing… difference between opposites” (Hall, 1997, p. 35). In other words, when one concept cannot be defined without the other. In She’s the Man, women and men are diametrically opposed. Women are portrayed as feminine, polite, and made-up, and men are athletic. Though Viola tries to break this binary established by her mother, the Cornwall soccer coach, her ex-boyfriend, and her peers, it is consistently reestablished and reinforced throughout the film through her own portrayal of Sebastian. As Viola enacts this binary opposition, using masculine stereotypes to keep up her disguise as Sebastian, she internalizes the male gaze and cultivates a female gaze that affects how she views herself and others, demonstrated by her portrayal of Olivia. This distracts from Viola’s original purpose to defy gender stereotypes and prove women can play soccer just as well as, if not better, than men. She’s the Man makes a “high culture” play that is intellectual and difficult to understand, more palpable for popular audiences of teenagers and young adults. However, the film counters the revolutionary portrayal of gender roles in Twelfth Night that views women as intellects and strategists rather than objects who operate in a lower social sphere and function primarily to be married and raise children.

  

Works Cited 

Fickman, A. (Director). (2006). She's the Man. DreamWorks.

Hall, S. (1997). The Spectacle of the 'Other'. In Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 225-249). Sage.

Malcolmson, C. (1999). What You Will: Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night. In M. Lee (Ed.), Shakespearean Criticism (Vol. 46). Gale. (Reprinted from The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, pp. 29-57, by V. Wayne, Ed., 1991, Harvester Wheatsheaf) https://link-gale-com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/apps/doc/LMFQEH875880729/LCO?u=upenn_main&sid=bookmark-LCO&xid=d94a5bca

Pittman, M. L. (2008). Dressing the girl/playing the boy: Twelfth night learns soccer on the set of she's the man. Literature/Film Quarterly, 36(2), 122-136.

Sebastien, J. (2018). "She's Gazing like the Man": Parallels between Laura Mulvey's and John Berger's Feminist Film Theory in Andy Flickman's She's the Man. Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, 7(1), 1-8.

Storey, J. (2009). What is Popular Culture? In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (3rd ed., pp. 1-16). Pearson.

Zeisler, A. (2008). Pop and Circumstance: Why Pop Culture Matters. In Feminism and Pop Culture (pp. 1-21). Seal Press.