Deactivating feminism: Sigourney Weaver, James Cameron, and Avatar.

Nesbitt, Jennifer P.

Thirty years separate Ellen Ripley, the gun-toting feminist icon in the Alien series of films (1979-1997), from Grace Augustine, lead scientist for the Avatar Project in James Cameron's Avatar (2009). In the former, actor Sigourney Weaver is the star; in the latter, she plays a supporting role. The actor's move from the center to the sidelines mirrors the arc of second-wave feminist activism, from the euphoric progress of the 1970s to the routine, but limited, implementation of the present day. As Elisa Narminio and Matthew William Kapell explain, Avatar's apparently "regressive" gender politics reflect "confused societies that have integrated the norms of gender equality while still promoting a patriarchal model" (157). (1) The framing of feminism in Avatar merits more sustained attention because Avatar markets itself as a tool for raising environmental consciousness (2) and presents a worldwide audience with a jumble of linked injustices that should or could be corrected as part of this project. According to Ellen Grabiner, critics have argued that the film is "sexist, anti-imperialist, anti-militaristic, racist, anti-capitalistic, leftist, reactionary, and pro-environment" (1). The film takes a shotgun approach, scattering compliments and complaints in every direction, but feminism remains unrecuperable within this broad frame of competing political ideas. The character Grace Augustine personifies this failure of women's agency and leadership both within the film and, historically, through the connection of Grace Augustine to Ellen Ripley, an iconic figure for second-wave feminism.

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Elements of Avatar correlate with its predecessor Aliens (1986), James Cameron's popular sequel to Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979). There are hulking robotic suits (which offer visual counterpoint to the organic avatars), broad-shouldered fighter jets (which seem to have been cut-and-pasted from Aliens), giant mother figures, and greedy interplanetary corporations. But the most compelling and obvious link is Sigourney Weaver, who played the smart, tough, technically skilled Ellen Ripley in Aliens and returns in Avatar as the smart, tough, technically-skilled Grace Augustine. Critics comparing female characters from Avatar to Cameron's earlier work cite Ripley as a ground-breaking figure who "rewrote the rules of who can and should be the lead in Hollywood action films" (Narminio and Kapell 146). Dean Conrad writes that Cameron's "Ripley embodies all that a woman can be--taking a path she chooses for herself" (130). At the time of Aliens's release, Ellen Ripley represented the potential of second-wave feminism, a revolutionary character unfettered by female stereotypes and embodying the need to reject them. Weaver's iconic performance as Ripley earned Weaver a place on the cover of Time. Weaver-as-Ellen Ripley represented the radical potential of feminism to upstage masculine postures of identity.

However, the second-wave feminism Ripley embodied has also been seen as myopically beneficial to white, upper-class Western women. Following the broad-based feminist coalitions of the 1970s, feminism and feminist theory fractured as critics identified complications within the movement. in books like When and Where I Enter (1984) and All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), black feminists lamented the failure of feminism to account for race, and they demanded change. Barbara Smith, one of the editors of the latter volume, also spoke out about homophobia in the feminist movement, and Adrienne Rich published "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" in 1982, which revealed how feminism is a function of straight culture. Criticism mounted when postcolonial critics reframed feminism in the context of imperialism. For example, Chandra Mohanti, in "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1984), and Gayatri Spivak, in "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985), analyzed how Western women writers advanced the cause of women's rights without simultaneously seeking to advance the cause of women (and men) of other races. Numerous critics--following Edward Said's influential work--have studied how white women exploited their race to achieve greater freedom and latitude while travelling in the colonies. (3) Since the 1980s, and as a result of these critiques, feminist criticism, scholarship, and activism has worked to become a more broad-based, nuanced political movement that accounts for the ways other vectors of identity affect the politics of gender. Older narratives of occlusion and exclusivity persist, however, and it is these narratives that can still prevent solidarity and cooperation among women.

Avatar belongs to this group of older narratives, promoting, in its central heroic spectacle, the opportunism, exploitation, and bigotry by which female characters are systematically shown to fail in working together to save themselves, each other, and their communities. Weaver-as-Grace Augustine represents the long-term achievements of feminism, insofar as women have acquired greater access to political and economic power. In Avatar, she is the highest-ranking, most powerful human woman in the Research Development Association (RDA), reporting directly to corporate head Selfridge and on par with Quaritch, director of RDA's paramilitary arm. But her character also represents the limitations of second-wave feminism, with its reliance on white, heteronormative standards for its gains. She therefore stands tall but alone among the male leadership, an embodiment of the "institutionalized ... bureaucratic ... marginalized" feminism that Narminio and Kapell identify as typical of 2009 (148). Augustine is both inside and outside RDA's largely patriarchal corporate structure--having capitalized on feminism's political gains but having risen to the top in a precarious and ethically untenable manner. In the story of gender progress unfolding in Avatar, she is actually anomalous, a leftover icon of second-wave feminist ambition. The "Ripley" identity in Weaver-as-Augustine cannot survive amidst the likes of recuperating men like Jake Sully, who themselves must rise (again) to lead the cultural progress for which Ellen Ripley had once been seen as an avatar.

Avatars methods of discrediting feminism and female agency are apparent in the background narrative about the school Grace Augustine established among the Na'vi natives and particularly her relationships with students Sylwanin and Neytiri. Through the school plot, which occurs anterior to events in the film, Avatar deflects imperialism from masculine to feminine agency. If once a feminist icon in her role as Ellen Ripley in Aliens (1986), Weaver-as-Augustine rehearses the key ontological mode of racial oppression: teaching natives to imitate their conquerors--in customs, in worldview, in reasoning, in language, in being. Viewers can later infer, based on minimal cues (a curt comment followed by a long drag on a cigarette), that the failure of her school has left Augustine riddled with guilt, blaming herself for the death of Sylwanin, her racially and ethnically othered daughter. In the opening of the film, however, Augustine is positioned as fully accommodating and embracing patriarchal agency: she leads a program that gives the ontological usurpation of the natives a literal form: the imperialists can now inhabit Na'vi bodies, becoming "avatars." As scientific missionary to this colony, Augustine has spawned a new class of Na'vi, this time literally inhabited by the minds of manifestly white Western colonists: the principal Na'vi characters are played and voiced, rather obviously, by persons of color; the principal colonists are played and voiced by persons of generally Caucasian descent. (The well-known comparison of the film to Dances with Wolves is not unfounded, but it misses the gender question at stake here.) Although Grace and her fellow scientists claim to be motivated by empathy and cultural respect, their actions are thoroughly "orientalist" in the classic sense that their research is enabled by and veils a looming military threat to appropriate the native land and people.

As portrayed in Avatar, Grace Augustine has exploited the Na'vi to promote her personal success as a scientist. Moreover, she has naively believed that she is helping the Na'vi by brokering their relationship with RDA. She considers her work insulated from RDA's strip-mining, even as she benefits from it, but Selfridge exposes her hypocrisy. Referring to the mineral ("unobtanium") for which the company is mining, he reminds her that "This is what pays for the whole party... It's what pays for your science." The emphasis on "your" contains an accusation: that Augustine has disguised self-interest as inclusive politics, and he's right. Exploitation is the "whole party." RDA has, in turn, used her willful blindness to her own privilege in order to advance its mining interests. Naivete is a commodity, just like the Na'vi themselves. Grace falsely thinks herself the equal of Selfridge and Quaritch and sincerely believes they will listen to her arguments and cancel the attack on Home Tree, the Na'vi's sacred center. Stuck inside her model of feminist ambition, she thinks gender relationships have sufficiently changed to accommodate her agency, but Selfridge implies that she should have known that her narrative of progress was only a deeper form of complicity. (Ellen Ripley would have figured that out.) However, it is the Na'vi who have continually paid the higher price, and Grace knows it. Her science has operated as colonial instrument all along. She represents an elite professional class of women who, while claiming to advocate and speak for racial and ethnic others, ultimately depend for their success on the quiet, perhaps even scientific, exploitation of disadvantaged groups. Grace Augustine is the feminist who has sacrificed broad inclusivity in return for narrower political and economic gains--gains that, in historical perspective, applied specifically to the middle--and upper-class white heterosexual women in the workplace.

The backstory to Augustine's school, revealed in Avatars deleted scenes, compounds her guilt because Augustine's interactions with Na'vi women sketch precisely this failure in second-wave feminism to account for variations in women's access to power. Augustine's efforts to encourage self-determination among the Na'vi lead to the death of Neytiri's sister, Sylwanin. Although Augustine does not tell the story in the theatrical release of Avatar, ancillary materials for the film reveal that Augustine's students called her "Mother," indicating that she had been trusted by the Na'vi, and that her best students, "amazing girls," were Neytiri and her sister Sylwanin. Cameron here tacitly invokes the identity he developed for Weaver's character in Aliens, which was praised for unlocking Ripley's "formerly unacknowledged maternal instinct" ("Help! They're Back!" 54). Ellen Ripley protects her surrogate child--connected to primitive otherness by her nickname, "Newt"--from the monsters in Aliens, culminating in rescue of Newt from the mother alien, whereupon the child leaps into Ripley's arms and cries "Mommy!" In Avatar, Grace Augustine can't protect her surrogate children because, the film implies, she selfishly promotes her own desires, and Grace blames herself for this failure of agency. Feminism makes bad mothers, particularly to others.

Critical responses to the film largely share this indictment of the character. John James and Tom Ue remark, "although she seems to mean well, Grace is not so different from Selfridge," the RDA corporate head (198): "the school only teaches the Na'vi English so they can trade away their natural resources and become better colonial subjects" (189). John Rieder explains that Grace Augustine parallels Jake Sully in an "apparent assimilation of a native identity" that "symptomatically displaces ... actual expropriation of power and wealth from the natives" for their own benefit (48). Rieder notes that this format is "depressingly familiar to anyone who has dealt with ... imperialist adventure-fiction" and film (48). Tellingly, critical response to the entire science staff, as a group, is more tempered. For example, Julia Good Fox notes that "the university folks seem most empathetic to the Na'vi" and, indeed, are labeled traitors for supporting the Na'vi cause (5). (4) The group earns some leniency, but Grace Augustine takes the lion's share of the blame. She is a failed icon.

Some scenes, fully developed but then "deleted" from the theatrical release, call these assessments of Grace Augustine into question, however, as well as highlighting her guilt as a useful construction that reinvigorates patriarchal structures. In one deleted scene, the camera pans across a copy of Dr. Seuss's The Lorax that lies abandoned on the schoolroom floor. While critics like James and Ue claim that Grace's "classroom setting reinforces ... obedience" (189), the presence of The Lorax suggests that Grace may not have encouraged passivity in the face of RDA's environmental crimes and that Sylwanin learned to resist. The setting for Seuss's 1971 children's book, filled with characteristically fantastic flora and fauna, is a low-tech Pandora, presenting a now-classic story of "ecological ruin brought on by greed" (Marris 148). A businessman destroys an ecosystem by clear-cutting the Truffula trees, immune to the warnings of the Lorax, who "speak[s] for the trees" and the animals in the area. The businessman, intent on his "rights," pursues profits unsustainably and leaves to the next generation the dubious task of environmental clean-up and remediation. As an analogue for Pandora's post-RDA future, The Lorax is dismal. Perhaps Augustine helped Sylwanin and her cohort understand that their generation will be left holding the last Truffula seed, as it were, and that neither logical protest nor Cassandra-like warnings will impede corporate rapacity. Perhaps Augustine's teaching helped her pupils see the Lorax's cryptic parting word, "UNLESS," as a spur to direct action against an unreasonable opponent. But Sylwanin's troupe, lacking the protected racial status accorded Augustine and protagonist Jake Sully (they are merely imprisoned when they resist), appropriately dies--shot in the schoolroom doorway--when she and her fellow rebels damage corporate property. Ostensibly, the feminine agency in the deleted scenes is presented for purposes of narrative background, enriching the audience's sense of character, but the typological effect is that of disposal, enriching the audience's sense of what kind of women cannot survive the progress of the narrative that could rise to the stature of the theatrical release. In that version of Avatar, Sylwanin has simply paid with her life for Augustine's political insensitivity.

A reading that includes additional scenes, however, suggests that the story of Grace Augustine and Sylwanin, her lost surrogate daughter, is also the story of writing over and displacing a history of women's leadership and cooperation for social justice, however fraught it was during the second wave of feminism. Grace Augustine encouraged a talented and intelligent young Na'vi woman to fight for a cause indirectly related to gender. Augustine respected and honored Sylwanin's culture. The deleted scenes present a character teetering on defiance, refusing to criticize the traditional social structure of the Na'vi. Historically and intertextually, viewers see Ellen Ripley at work in that school, working within the system to support the next generation of women leaders in a fight for social justice against an alien invader. Perhaps Sylwanin could have accomplished the Ripley-esque radical breakthrough that Neytiri cannot. Sylwanin is qualified as a hunter and, as an intelligent daughter of the chief, legitimated as a leader. Her strategies of resistance are retroactively endorsed when Jake Sully copies them--like Sylwanin, he begins by donning war paint and attacking mining equipment. If her attempt to resist the RDA is seen as a misguided response to an education offered thoughtlessly by a woman who should know better, the point remains: before Jake Sully, there was an indigenous female leader resisting the RDA, who was, in turn, supported and guided by a strong, intelligent woman of a vastly different background. But the final film instead punishes feminine agency and replaces it with masculine agency, even as it extols the organically feminine world currently being raped by masculine corporate powers. Cameron thus offers audiences a vision of feminist ethics that can be made effective only through men. He also, by manipulating the potential of new distribution formats for the film, pulls back the curtain by including "deleted" scenes to reveal that the seamless narrative of male agency in the theatrical release results from the systematic elimination of alternative agents.

The main plot's narrative of sisterly and motherly betrayal, coupled with internalized guilt, backs up a plot in which women apparently sacrifice or marginalize themselves by choice. It is, in fact, with some irony that Grace Augustine calls Neytiri her "best student." Neytiri replaces both Grace Augustine and Sylwanin, playing out her role-enforced by her mother and despite her vociferous protest-as a futuristic Pocahontas. (5) Avatar concludes with lots of dead or superseded women, and a clear, naturalized chain of command for heterosexual male leadership. Grace and Trudy die, Neytiri and Mo'at step aside. Secondary human male characters like Norm Spellman and Max Patel survive and are allowed to stay on Pandora, (6) so, yes, the film does present "strong" female characters, but the narrative space has been cleared for a renewed patriarchy in the person of Jake Sully, the white man inhabiting the native body. Even the feminine divinity of Pandora ordains this displacement of women, sending all the animals on the planet to assist in Jake's counter-offensive and then transferring his mind permanently to his Na'vi body. (Grace's attempted transfer earlier in the story came too late.) Jake has been morally reformed, certainly, but he leads by virtue of his native command, his essential masculine being. Whatever claims his character has to moral rectitude, his agency has come at the expense of the women around him. Avatar presents an elegy for the failed woman and a bildungsroman for the recuperating man.

The confirmation of a beneficent patriarchy in the form of the newly assimilated Jake Sully requires, collaterally, that the film reject homoerotic agency in favor of the traditional heterosexual couple. Grabiner discusses the homoerotic overtones to Quaritch's hypermasculinity and military culture in general (164-165), but the military sadist implicated as closeted homosexual is a stereotype of homophobia, unsatisfying in its broad reductions. Cameron is authorizing, instead, a naturalized heterosexual portrait of male competition. The conflict between Quaritch and Sully, for instance, takes the form of a battle between two forms of prosthetic hypermasculinity-the amplified, Transformer-like battle suit Quaritch wears and the enlarged form of Jake Sully's avatar body-that each, in its way, compensates for physical vulnerability, which men feel acutely whenever placed among competing males, especially in heterosexual environments. Quaritch's false, mechanical prosthetic then gives way to Jake's true, organic prosthetic, and Neytiri confirms the film's typological choice when she pinions Quaritch with two of her spears. (7) On screen, the Na'vi are "exclusively heterosexual" (Grabiner 155, italics original). Yet the film's website, Pandorapedia, softens this compulsory heterosexuality by explaining that "Na'vi males are typically pair bonded with females, but male-male and female-female permanent bonds are not uncommon." Pandorapedia reassures website visitors that the Na'vi are "just like us": generously tolerant of various sexual orientations. (8) Such tolerance does not, of course, extend to screen time.

As the representative of a hypermasculine/ homosexual extreme is eliminated, so the powerful feminist icon Ellen Ripley/Grace Augustine is transmuted from a material force into an abstract, naturalized notion of feminine power that can be co-opted for male use. Mortally wounded during an escape from prison, Grace Augustine is taken to Eywa, the animate goddess of Pandora. Augustine's abilities are then simultaneously dispersed into a naturalized resource and abstracted from quotidian experience into a locus of personal information. With the film's sacrifice of Weaver-as-failed-Ripley to Eywa, the goddess appears to acquire greater subjectivity and agency, capable of logical decision-making that literalizes and (as organic being) inverts the deus ex machina device. But to whom does Eywa submit? She answers Jake's request to save Pandora from destruction, having apparently consulted Augustine's memories, now resident in her network. In the film's climactic battle, the animals of Pandora join the Na'vi to defeat the RDA because Jake essentially commanded it. "Eywa has heard you, Jake," an astonished Neytiri says with hushed awe into her comlink, reflecting her--and our--surprise that a goddess should answer a prayer so directly. Eywa's provisional agency fits with the established patterns for female characters by consecrating Jake's right to lead.

In Avatar's theatrical release, any female-centered, female-motivated activism that assumes equity and equality of agency regardless of gender is portrayed as chaotic and futile. Avatar's narrative apparatus serves patriarchal myth-making: agential women (who are killed and/or written out of the story) figure as typological Liliths, Eve's rebellious sister, who persists only in the Apocrypha. Sylwanin is invisible in the theatrical release of Avatar, and only a memory in the extended version. Neytiri and her family never mention her onscreen. Yet the inclusion of allegedly deleted material challenges the dominant narrative. Formally, the location of this story in the extra scenes mimics the history of feminist scholarship, which has only slowly eroded histories that center on male achievement and spheres of influence. In order to find Sylwanin's story, viewers must consult the extra scenes in the DVD/Blu-ray set, and this formation is no mere accident of record-keeping, especially for Avatar. The stories are there, developed, edited, pondered, discarded. The costs, labor, and complexity of animation and motion-capture technology are substantial, and the scenes about Sylwanin have been fully worked up prior to categorization as "deleted." Decisions about the version of Avatar to release in theaters mimic the process by which women's activism has been realized and then ideologically deleted, suppressed, and overwritten because it does not conform to the prevailing--which is to say patriarchal--models of commerce and art. Cameron and his production team have built this historical critique into Avatar, which means that scholarship examining only the theatrical release reproduces the limited discussion of female agency offered in that version. Most scholarly responses to Avatar follow the film's lead by constructing gender as incidental, integrated, or abstract: all these configurations minimize gender and sexual equity as a cause that must be conscientiously, politically, addressed. In essays that center on Avatar's evocation of imperialism, for example, gender is considered incidental to other forms of domination. In "Decolonising James Cameron's Pandora: Imperial History and Science Fiction" (2012), Alessio and Meredith explore Avatar's critique of US foreign policy, claiming they will show that the film falters in its anti-imperialist stance when it comes to "Pandora's setting," which, "despite all of the film's cutting-edge technology, largely resembles the conventional 'Lost Eden' utopian fantasy common to much of the literature and art of Europe's nineteenth-century high age of empire." They note that the moon and its people are typically Orientalized: the Na'vi "are long-legged, and the women have tiny waists and big eyes" to signal their sexual availability. Their analysis matches that of many critics who, following Edward Said, have seen feminizing the Oriental/other as a key element of Cameron's colonialism, (9) but Alessio and Meredith falter when they turn to Jake and Neytiri's relationship. While they point out that "the film's conventional representation of Jake and Neytiri's sex scene ... could have been radicalized if the coupling [were] between him as a human being and [her] as a Na'vi," Alessio and Meredith focus on the racial dimensions, not on the gendering in this relationship.

Gender stereotypes are also incidentally endorsed in Steven Norton's article "How the Other Is Not Allowed to Be: Elision and Condensation in Avatar" (2013), which abstracts gender into a notion of the "feminine-primitive" (131). Although Norton announces that "Avatar's narrative of anti-imperial zeal is the manifest content which represses a latent narrative of mastery and possession of the (m)other" (131), the analysis that follows actually reifies that repression by condensing and eliding its gender critique. Norton leaves explication of the relationship between the feminine and the primitive to a footnote: "I refer to the primitive in the film as 'feminine' because Jake's interaction with the primitive in Avatar is a heterosexual affair in which the primitive functions in a European oedipal fantasy as both the feminine object to be possessed, and the infantile state of being to which the protagonist hopes to return" (143n2). The feminization of the primitive remains unquestioned, as does the use of a woman to master an oedipal fantasy. (10) When he discusses what the primitive represents in Avatar, Norton lists "everything about which civilized man has developed so much anxiety: the environment, mineral extraction, imperialism, ethics, racism" (136), but he does not address the consequences of feminizing these primitive elements. Norton effectively dismisses the agentially feminine element in the feminine-primitive by turning it into an abstraction and treating Neytiri as irrelevant except as "the feminine object of desire" in a male conflict.

In contrast to analyses which see sexism as incidental or metaphorical, scholars approaching Avatar from the perspective of indigenous cultures downplay sexism to highlight a communal perspective. Julia Good Fox announces a gendered perspective in her essay's subtitle, "An Indigenous Woman Considers James Cameron's Avatar," but Good Fox so thoroughly integrates her gender analysis within a response from the perspective of native peoples that issues peculiar to women within the community are lost. Good Fox attributes the agency of female characters--they help "on their own accord" (6) in Jake Sully's transformation--to "the ability to appreciate and recognize multidimensional relationships" (2). This emphasis, however, does not account for the fact that Mo'at "has directed [Neytiri] to guide" Jake--an intergenerational transfer of the Pocahontas scenario that Good Fox, from a racial interest, otherwise deplores. Good Fox disdains the Neytiri-Sully romance plot: "Cameron and other non-Tribal people may not quite fathom the steep depth of tiredness from Indigenous film viewers regarding this retreaded plot-device" (6). Given the broad condemnation of this Pocahontas element in Avatar, awareness of the problem has grown beyond Indigenous audiences, yet Good Fox remains--with good reason, given some histories of feminist alliance--wary.

Joni Adamson offers a cross-cultural perspective on the apparent lack of concern about the sexism in Avatar. Adamson notes that "cautiously positive responses from indigenous groups, political figures, community leaders and scholars" to Avatar's messages do not necessarily include an awareness of sexism. In Latin America, the association of nature with femininity ("Mother Earth") is not a matter of course (144). This interpretation of Avatar, Adamson argues, reveals a desire "for something that might be termed citizenship rights for a culture-nature entity that does not correspond to Western conceptions of a gendered Mother Earth" (146). Judging by the US$2.76 billion global box office for Avatar (Brown and Ng 221), many of the eyes that saw Avatar in the theater were probably not male, white, or US/Western. Adamson demonstrates that Avatar, a film directed at a worldwide audience, may not activate gender as a category for social action because gender is not part of the interpretive frame for Pandora. (11) Adamson concludes that Avatar partakes of an "increasingly plural politics, or cosmovisions" (159), but this perspective may unwittingly reduce attention to gender as part of a broader reform program. Thus the marginalization of women's agency and activism narrated in Avatar may endure for a variety of interlocking political and cultural reasons.

When Avatar ends by postulating a new world, that new world embeds the subordination of women in its core social and political structures. Avatar and its apparatus show how cultural artifacts and the discourse surrounding them work to diminish the status of gender as a category for analysis and redress. As a prelude to addressing the short--and long-term psychological and political effects that a film like Avatar could have, I want to suggest that the film also pays homage to feminist film criticism, notably Laura Mulvey's 1975 "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Avatar engages literally and theoretically with Mulvey's argument by placing the question of castration at the center of the film and prioritizing the male gaze in its concluding shot. Briefly, Mulvey argues that Hollywood cinema manages the male gaze so as to assuage castration fear with "its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure" (439): a seamless process of male looking that disavows fears of castration by objectifying women, negating women as subjects, and endorsing violence against women. While Avatar does not openly condone such action--displaying it instead as a deliberate and punitive construct--the film succeeds as narrative fulfillment only because it finally does re-establish the male hierarchy in which women are necessarily objectified and demoted in order to reduce anxieties about castration. Jake's decisive cultural maneuver is to transcend the model taught to him by the Na'vi for bonding with the "ikran" birds of prey and instead to conquer the giant ikran ("Toruk") flying above them all, the Na'vi man, not woman, assuming leadership as "Toruk Makto" in a society that is itself deeply patriarchal and has marked its history in terms of such remarkable "men" who defeat the threat of castration by defeating the agency of women.

Following Avatars release, there was a strain of debate surrounding gender and disability that is particularly relevant here. (12) Critics Michael Peterson, Laurie Beth Clark, and Lisa Nakamura argue that "it is precisely because gender and disability are persistently addressed in the film but not in commentary about it that we know how central it [sic] is." Caleb Crain confirms a suppressed relationship between these two categories in his analysis of Jake's fascination with the phallic multifunction queue that comes with his avatar body: "The organ in question looks sort of like flower pistils wriggling out of the hair end of a tail. But we gradually learn that it isn't his reproductive organ, which for better or worse we never see." The coy "better or worse" raises a question: Does Jake's paraplegia involve lost sexual function? (13)

From the opening moments, Avatar blurs this question of Jake's lost function by melding the psychological and the physical. In the voice-over that opens the film, Jake speaks of "a big hole blown through the center of [his] life" after his injury. Presumably, his remark indicates that Jake has lost faith in ideals that sustained him before, as he complains, "All I ever wanted in my sorry-ass life was a single thing worth fighting for." Yet these remarks can also be taken literally, because Jake has lost physical function as well, and fighting, as a man, is what has been taken from him. We see that his legs are emaciated, but the opening voice-over could mean that he has injuries viewers do not see, injuries at "the center" of his body, echoing the quiet lament of Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises. Balancing out these deliberately cryptic statements are Jake's voice-overs at the end of the film, when he announces, "The time of great suffering was over." Here, Jake speaks as the new leader of the Na'vi, and he has even taken on the mythic scope of Na'vi speech. Jake specifically refers to the suffering of the Na'vi at the hands of the RDA, but this statement also applies to Jake's individual physical and philosophical challenges: the "big hole" has been fixed, and he has found "a single thing worth fighting for" in leading a rebellion against economic and environmental exploitation. But he has also found and consummated a relationship with Neytiri. (14) The ambiguities that dwell in Jake's voice-overs resolve the issue of potential sexual dysfunction without direct confrontation. While it is not my intention to conflate masculinity with a functional penis, Avatar exudes a consistent anxiety about castration that the film never addresses directly but resolves narratively by giving Jake a new body and destroying female contenders for power.

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Simultaneously, Avatar offers the promise of "illusionistic narrative film" (Mulvey 447) to produce male pleasure through an enlarged avatar body that offers Jake not only restored physical function but also a hyper-masculine agency as culturally normative. As the film concludes, the fantasy becomes reality as Jake's avatar body becomes his real, natural body. Concomitantly, the film narrates the end of mediation, dispensing with the screens and communication devices that feature so prominently throughout the film. Avatar encodes its ironic debt to Mulvey's theory of the gaze as Jake, seated next to the machine that has heretofore facilitated Jake's transfer into the avatar body, announces, "I guess this is my last video log." His next statement is, "Today is my birthday." In a weird scripting of castration theories, Jake becomes the child who replaces the lost penis. As the film ends, Jake enters a state of wholeness that negates the need for the play of cinematic looks Mulvey identifies as central to the management of castration fears among heterosexual male viewers.

The final frame of Avatar consolidates and questions this position. Jake's Na'vi visage almost entirely fills the screen, but Neytiri's hand is partially present at the edge of the frame, cupping Jake's face and presenting it, nominally to herself, but really to male-positioned viewers. Male viewers are simultaneously invited to identify with Jake while also being positioned as Neytiri--unfulfilled, feminized, in thrall to a fantasy that blacks out an instant later. "I see you"--indeed. Cameron seems well-aware of the anxieties and desires he manipulates. Speaking of Avatar in a Playboy interview, he gleefully claims that the film's heroine Neytiri "reflects [men's id]" so thoroughly that "they won't be able to control themselves": "They will have actual lust for a character that consists of pixels of ones and zeros. You're never going to meet her, and if you did she's 10 feet tall and would snap your spine" (qtd. in Rebello). Cameron exploits the unstated connection between a spinal injury, which robs a man of agency (use of one's legs) in a world depending on physical action, and the emasculation a man feels from an overpowering feminine force. The contrast between the "ones and zeros" and "10 feet tall and would snap your spine" precariously balances that psychology between minimizing fear of the feminine through abstraction, here in the form of digitalization, and exploiting that fear through embodiment in the "real world." And, in the context of a Playboy interview, such revelations are especially titillating, promising pleasure in the larger context of the magazine, even as this threat from the woman provokes a disavowal of all things feminine (Mulvey 444).

In Neytiri's disembodied hand, Avatar demonstrates the positioning of women within this paradigm as both marginal and guilty--it is, after all, the unseen woman who creates this final picture. Thus, female viewers who are "more than a little smitten with the glowing jungles of Pandora," as reviewer Erin Rickard put it, implicate themselves in a system of pleasurable looking that assumes a male viewer, feminizes nature, and then appropriates her power while disavowing it. This logic replicates the strategies of historical imperialism, so that to take pleasure in Avatar is--again--to acquiesce to female disempowerment and to abandon others to a similar fate. The cinematic heteronormative chauvinism persists whether Neytiri is deemed "feminist" or not, whether the Na'vi are interpreted as Native American, African, or Afghani.

None of this stereotyping is particularly surprising in an action film, but Avatar is a social action film that seems to have generated more intense feelings than other films of the genre. Popular media covered the so-called Avatar Blues, a phenomenon which corresponds to the oscillation between loss and plenitude governing Mulvey's logic of the cinematic gaze. In an article on "Post-Pandoran Depression," Matthew Holtmeier describes "the basic response" from viewers: "after viewing Avatar, their own world seemed lackluster" (416). Some responded to this depressive state by seeking ways "to return to the fictional world of Pandora, rather than seeking change in their lived realities" (415). Others turn their experience into what Holtmeier calls "Na'vi Sympathy," and "take action in the social and material environments of our world" (419). These responses rather neatly adumbrate a basic psychological analysis of response to the "mirror stage," as both Lacan and Kristeva have described it: a melancholy induced by the inadequacy of self and by the prohibition on maternal plenitude, and thus a fall into the masculine language of being that, through objectification and containment of the woman, energizes human achievement as a sublimation of that loss.

Perhaps, twenty years hence, the leader of a successful non-governmental organization (NGO) will cite Avatar as an inspiration. Based on Avatar's presentation of worthy social causes, that NGO would probably not be advancing women's or LGBTQ issues directly--or producing work like Half the Sky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book published in 2009, which documents efforts to improve the condition of women around the world, because "the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women's potential." (15) There is no space for women's or LGBTQ equality as distinct from disability rights (Jake should be treated as an equal), racial rights (so the Na'vi look different), and environmental rights (share natural resources with the animals and indigenous peoples). Narminio and Kapell contend that Jake's "radical transformation echoes the Hope left in Pandora's jar after all evils escaped it" because he augurs radical societal change that will eventually benefit women (162), but arguing that a rising tide lifts all boats contradicts research demonstrating that education and opportunities for women indexes to economic prosperity. As UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet states in her 2012 Women's Day message, "Studies show that higher levels of gender equality correlate positively with higher levels of per capita gross national product. Opening economic opportunities to women would significantly raise economic growth and reduce poverty." Avatar demonstrates how feminism's past is turned into its patriarchal future, not only because some women opportunistically align themselves with patriarchal control but also because these divisive narratives are deployed to discredit women's agency and cooperation as a viable politics for communal progress.

Laura Mulvey suggests that critics do not need to "reject" Hollywood film "moralistically" to make a feminist critique, but they can "highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it" (439). In Avatars main plot, the psychosexual tension surrounding the hero requires the containment of women's power, agency, and activism. As such, the implications of casting Sigourney Weaver as Grace Augustine have been largely overlooked despite--or perhaps because of--Ellen Ripley's importance in the Cameron canon. The links activated by Weaver's presence capture an alternative motion in Avatar: the use of historical divisions among second-wave feminists as a narrative means to forestall the recognition of women's agency and leadership as well as the deliberate recording of the conscriptive process by which those aims are accomplished. To rescript the film so that a feminist intertext becomes available, as I have done here, is to resist the enshrinement of the upper-class white Western woman as the avatar of pure feminism, and yet also to realign relationships among female characters so that their activism and cooperation, and the dispersal of these efforts, become visible as an aesthetic and political choice, particularly in films that position gender as the agent of social justice.

Jennifer P. Nesbitt

Penn State York

Works Cited

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Notes

(1) Other critics have suggested that Avatar's chauvinism is necessary as viewers adjust to an innovative viewing experience. See, for example, Joyce Goggin, who argues that Avatar is the latest iteration of cinematic spectacle, and "simple iconic stories lend themselves particularly well to film adaptations like Avatar, both because they provide the basic narrative glue, and because viewers are so familiar with the story that they will automatically perform the essential hermeneutic activity of filling in the blanks in order to make the figure mentally come alive" (109). Thus, Goggin argues, Cameron deliberately chose a conservative narrative so as not to challenge audiences on two fronts at once. Deborah Levitt makes a similar argument through the notion of phantasm, noting that Avatar's CGI-effects are "differentially distributed" according to conservative racial and gender hierarchies, allowing the "less digital, less animal, less animated, and thus more human Jake" to be "the spectatorial avatar, our conduit to the action, and the hero of the story." Christiane Konig claims Avatar retains the spectatorial privileges identified by Laura Mulvey even as it appears to move into a post-human mode. John G. Russell also follows this line of critique: "the narratives themselves are impelled by the displacement of black bodies by metaphoric and digitally generated alien simulacra that quite literally stand in for them" (204).

(2) See "A Message from Pandora" on disc two of the three-disc Blu-Ray edition (2009).

(3) Edward Said's Orientalism is the classic text here, and scholars who have developed his ideas in the field of travel writing include, among many, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (Routledge, 1992); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference (Routledge, 1991); Susan Morgan, Place Matters (Rutgers UP, 1996); Jane Marcus, "Miss Parry's Glass Eye" (in Hearts of Darkness [Rutgers UP, 2004]); and Evelyn O'Callaghan, Women Writing the West Indies, 1804-1939 (Routledge, 2004).

(4) Dominic Alessio and Kristen Meredith allow that the scientists/academics "[hark] back to the theme of anti-imperial voices from within the imperial core" despite their collusion. Joni Adamson notes that the science component of RDA "highlights the historically problematic relationships between indigenous peoples and other human groups, including today's academics, NGOs, and other, who may have good intentions, but whose activities lead to harmful consequences" (155).

(5) Grace Augustine's internalized blame and guilty complicity creates a frisson in Avatar, a momentary superimposition of another Sigourney Weaver role from the late 1980s: Katherine Parker from Working Girl (1988). Katherine Parker is the bad corporate feminist to Ellen Ripley's feminist icon. Unlike Ripley, who mothers the orphaned Newt in Aliens, Katherine Parker uses her power to suppress the next generation of female office workers while appearing supportive and friendly. Parker steals the ideas of her Irish working-class subordinate Tess McGill (played by Melanie Griffith) when she should encourage and protect her. Both Katherine Parker and Grace Augustine are superseded in favor of younger, more compliant, women who suffer under "more than just" gender oppression and choose to advance by attaching themselves to a successful man.

(6) The names of the two men--Norm and Max--are, like all the names of humans on Pandora, allegorical in nature. "Norm" represents the status quo restored; "Max" alludes to the appropriate level of male power.

(7) This victory for Jake's natural form of embodiment obviates the knowledge that his avatar body cost one million dollars to construct and that sophisticated scientific equipment enables his presence in that body. John Rieder claims this scene "panders to feminism" by "proving [Neytiri] is not merely the passive object-reward of Sully's heroic narrative", but parenthetically he notes that her action confirms her as the "good native who allies herself to the white male explorer hero"--confirming the film's support of heterosexual roles across cultural divides, as one of Quaritch's problems is a "failure to show any hint of ... normal [unexaggerated] heterosexuality" (52).

(8) This practice recurs in the discussions of Na'vi reproductive behavior. Cameron claims that Neytiri has breasts to excite human male audience members "even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals" (qtd. in Rebello). The Pandorapedia website built to accompany the film contradicts Cameron by making Na'vi and human bodies analogous. According to the site, "Na'vi females have two breasts, and nurse their infants for up to four months." Further, Shahaylu, the "intertwining of queues," is not Na'vi sexual intercourse; rather "the mechanics of reproduction are similar to humans and other earth mammals" and intercourse proceeds in a manner "which resembles human intercourse."

(9) The essential comment is from Edward Said: "The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient's part" (Orientalism 7 italics original). In this reading, prevalent among critics, a feminized Pandora replete with markers of the exotic cannot resist the superior power and drive of the colonizing population (Grabiner 157-158).

(10) Norton's position is confirmed later in the essay, when he notes, "By associating his [Jake's] experience of the primitive with a return to a feminine totality, Avatar clearly finds an analogy between the primitive and the infantile" (138). The feminine is the channel; the infantile is the goal. The fantasy of infantile return is subject to analysis, but the use of the feminine to get there is not.

(11) Adamson's work demonstrates that Westerners might misinterpret the title of the 2010 Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth because "Mother Earth" is a translation of Pachamama, which has no gendered implications despite the English homograph embedded in the proper name.

(12) Most of the discussion turned on whether the film was feminist or not. Jessica Burstrem, an early reviewer who did not see the film as sexist, notes that "there is little gender role differentiation in the film" in terms of who does what. Further, "there are no sexist jokes ... the suggestion is that the human world is no longer a sexist place in 2154." Ellen Grabiner, in her 2012 book on the film, claims that the film's female characters are "beautiful ... whole beings" who control their own actions and develop as characters. Julia Good Fox explains that Jake Sully, the hero, "would be unable to make [his] transformation without the assistance and mentoring of four women... Each of these females decides to assist him on their own accord and with their own reasons" (6). Dialogue does not call attention to sex discrimination, and both male and female characters are strong, smart, and resourceful. Therefore changes to gender roles are unnecessary because women have chosen and are happy in their roles.

(13) According to medical literature, paraplegic men often suffer some loss of normed sexual function and, more significantly for the psychodrama of Avatar, there is "a general belief that individuals with spinal cord lesion (SCL) and cauda equine lesion were permanently and completely impotent and sterile" (Biering-Sprensen and Spnksen 455). As Grabiner states of Avatars protagonist, "Jake's disability makes him something less than a man and perhaps something less than heterosexual" (165).

(14) In scenes on earth, Jake enacts his urge to fight for something by taking on a barroom bully who is abusing his girlfriend. The girlfriend does not appreciate his interference, defending her lover from Jake's attack. She is not "worth fighting for," thus indicating that Jake requires both a landscape and a woman worthy of his heroic impulses.

(15) Kristof and WuDunn summarize research supporting this quotation, taken from the book jacket (xix-xxi). Their 2009 books was recreated as a PBS Independent Lens documentary, featuring America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union, and Olivia Wilde, and endorsed by Hilary Clinton, in 2012.