The genres of teen film and action film that were our focus in chapter two have not yet done justice to the importance of the romance plot that winds its way through the Hunger Games films. This chapter begins by considering how these films adapt the romantic triangle plotline of Collins’s novels, how they represent Katniss’s scepticism – or at least ambivalence – about romance, and what they draw from the ties between romance, glamour, and developmental narratives about sexuality that are so important to girl culture. From this foundation, we turn to the dominant critical framework that has been applied to the Hunger Games films thus far: feminist cultural and film studies. This brings us back to the conceptual framework of postfeminism and the central question it brings to this franchise – whether Katniss should be considered a feminist hero. Does either the spectacularisation of Katniss in a blockbuster film, which emphasises the beauty of a young film star, or emphasis on her romance plot, compromise the film’s feminist potential?
Katniss’s victory at the end of the Hunger Games is certainly not her achievement of a romantic relationship with Peeta, although this helps motivate her involvement in the larger dramatic political action. But romantic achievement does close her story, in a coda projection of Katniss’s future that functions as an almost off-stage reward (Figure 3.1). And a romance narrative winds its way through the overall story, partly to explain why a family – two children with a young man she loves – seems an appropriate reward for Katniss. Understanding this coda requires, first of all, recognising the kind of cinematic romance that happens in the Hunger Games. Bound up with rites of passage – such as leaving home, and first kiss(es) and sex – romance in the Hunger Games is teen romance. Romance is crucial to the growing-up story in films for and about youth, and growing up is equally crucial to romance in any such film. Learning to contextualise and evaluate forms of love is represented in teen genres as the maturing of sexual instincts, but also social skills, and thus important steps towards adulthood. These are also, in general, steps more important to girl characters than to boys. Even if girl protagonists do not complete what we could call the bridal script, and grow up through love and into a consummated relationship, their development is depicted in relation to this idea.
Sex seems strangely absent from the Hunger Games story.1 The books never directly state that Katniss and Peeta do not have sex until after the main plot closes, but they imply that their many nights spent together are misunderstood by gossip because they are only offering each other comfort. The only clear references to sex are in the false promotional story that Katniss is pregnant, which Peeta clearly hopes will stave off her participation in the 75th Games (Book 2: 309–312), the fact that they have children by the end of the story, and the very loosely described sexual abuse suffered by Finnick (discussed later). Otherwise, the sexual relations of central characters are confined to kisses which are coded more romantically than sexually. Nevertheless, a sexual awakening is suggested for Katniss. In the books, she clearly marks a particular kiss as different than those performed, at least for her, largely for the cameras: ‘There was only one kiss that made me feel something stir deep inside. Only one that made me want more’ (Book 2: 425). What she identifies here as a vague, hungry feeling returns only at the end of Book 3, and sexual consummation is only acknowledged when discussing a conversation held ‘after’ (by implication) her desire has been fulfilled (453). Desire is not usually named as directly as this in YA fiction. However vague and indirect from an ‘adult’ point of view, these are visceral terms for the usually virginal girl heroes of this genre. It nevertheless is striking that the action-oriented Hunger Games films, bound by no such conventions, do little more to represent sexual desire.
One of the most chilling aspects of the Hunger Games story is the media attention paid to the youth of the tributes and the imminent loss of their future lives. But little is made of the sexual development that the franchise’s audience necessarily associates with the age of those reaped for The Games. The Book 2 suggestion that Katniss’s mother might be opposed to her marrying Peeta so young does not appear in the films. More importantly, the likelihood that selecting 12–18-year-olds for The Games would produce sexual or romantic dynamics as well as violent ones is not directly raised even in the books. Book/Film 1 each, differently, suggest an intimate (if not couple) dynamic between District 1 tributes Cato and Clove, and the Book 2 recounting of the 50th Games, which Haymitch won, also indicates an intimate alliance between he and Maysilee Donner from District 12 (238–243). But it seems Katniss and Peeta are the first to attempt refusing to kill an ally in the face of Gamemakers’ provocations and the promise of a victor’s life. The unprecedented strength of their alliance by the end of Film 1 is associated both with strength of character and strength of feeling, but not with sexual desire. When Haymitch declares that Peeta has helped Katniss by making her look ‘desirable’, this is framed as romantic rather than sexual desire, and even Gale and Peeta’s rivalry for Katniss takes this tone. All of this is consistent with a continuing attachment to the conventions of girl-oriented genres.
Teen romance generally presumes that girls want romance and boys want sex, but one of the first scenes in Book/Film 1 indicates we should not look to Katniss for romantic desires. In this conversation with Gale, Katniss rejects the narrative of romantic love, marriage, and family as impossible to believe in under the shadow of The Games. As Woloshyn, Taber, and Lane write, ‘Katniss’ critical assessment of the demands that are put upon her with respect to … the need for heteronormative romance’ – as well as carefully curated ‘appearance’ – ‘demonstrates their unreasonableness and, often, perverseness’ (2013: 189). For an audience familiar with either teen or romance conventions, this scene suggests that romance is exactly what will follow, and very likely with Gale. Script, acting, direction, and editing all indicate a mutual attraction thwarted by fear of The Games, which not only discourage adolescents from anticipating children of their own but encourage pragmatists like Katniss to avoid strong attachments. But Katniss is about to be swept off to The Games, a twist which introduces Peeta as a rival love interest.
The problem of knowing how Katniss feels about Gale and Peeta hinges on what she does not articulate, but also what she does not know herself. The films introduce even more confusion because they include no narration that could match the books’ representation of Katniss’s thoughts. They translate her general unwillingness to confront the question of whether she loves either Gale or Peeta – she does so in the books, but rarely, and never decisively – using the cinematic tendency for emotions to be communicated through facial expressions. But what is communicated by expression is far more cryptic than dialogue. As distinct from the narrative about Panem, and particularly the operations of Snow’s government and The Games, the films introduce little new material to clarify Katniss’s feelings. The only relevant additional scene is one at the end of Film 3. Having been attacked by a psychologically damaged Peeta, Katniss watches through a window as he thrashes in the restraints that bind him to a hospital bed. This insertion offers an emotional climax to the film, additionally necessary because Book 3 focuses its affective drama on whether Peeta, and then Katniss, will recover from torture and trauma. But it does not clarify what Katniss feels.
There are three clear turning points bringing Katniss closer to Peeta than Gale in the films. The first is when she decides that she must die so that Peeta can survive the 75th Games. This choice is made in the wake of the first kiss she shares with Gale, as she is surrounded by the presumption that she does not love Peeta. This claim is reiterated by Snow, Haymitch, and Finnick – all positioned as people who might know Katniss better than she knows herself. Katniss’s only attempt to disagree is when she tells Snow she is not ‘indifferent’ to Peeta, and he immediately brands this a ‘lie’ (Film 2). A second turning point is clear in Katniss’s evident distress over what might be happening to Peeta after they are separated in the 76th arena. Her heightened attachment is marked by Gale volunteering to be part of Peeta’s rescue team on the grounds that he cannot compete with a martyr. The last turning point is when Gale betrays Katniss’s values by devising the trap that kills Prim, a trap Katniss has already rejected as ‘crossing some kind of line’ (Book 3: 216). But none of these involve any spoken statement of Katniss’s feelings. It is consistent with her action-orientation that we have to divine attachment from Katniss’s reactions and expressions. Thus, the changes that require the brief line ‘Peeta and I grow back together’ (Book 4: 452) be translated into a montage of adapted and original scenes that show Katniss looking at and living with Peeta differently.
Until this conclusion, the films maintain the books’ entanglement of the question about whether Katniss loves Peeta with the question of how anyone living in Panem can know what is real (substantial, effective, unavoidable). While Katniss makes no declaration until the final minutes of the final film, Peeta’s televised declarations of love are never quite disentangled from the storytelling premises of reality television. Loving Katniss might make her ‘look desirable’ to sponsors, but it saves his life as well when their ‘star-crossed lovers’ story sells well on television (Book 1: 135). Peeta pays attention to media coverage in a way Katniss does not, even evidently watching the replays of their own Games performance so that he knows how to paint Rue’s grave in Book/Film 2. Peeta knows that audiences, sponsors, and Gamemakers ‘must be manipulated’ (Book 2: 426). The question of why Peeta does not himself need to look desirable seems to be answered by his statement that even his own mother thought only Katniss had a chance of winning. But the question of why Peeta is prepared to seed that image for Katniss is harder to answer without presuming that he is really in love with her. Book 1 gives substantial space to Katniss’s own questions about this, but Film 1 uses the conventions of romance film to take Peeta’s love for granted. After all, they are an attractive girl and boy, thrown together in a dangerous situation. Why would he not love her, even if she finally chose the boy-hunter next door instead?
Such generic cues heighten the narrative twist when Peeta, in the 74th arena, seems to side with ‘the careers’ in hunting for Katniss. They then offer additional satisfaction when he seems to help her escape them, and demand additional investment in her search for him once the Gamemakers have announced that two victors will be allowed if they are from the same district. Even so, the film integrates touching revelations about the history of his love for her with reminders that they are being whispered to a national audience, and Katniss herself is hardly sure where this commodified reality television story starts or stops being a survival strategy. The books allow Katniss to internally debate this, but the film adaptations rely heavily on Jennifer Lawrence’s performance to convey Katniss’s uncertainties. Without her internal rehearsal of arguments about what feelings are real, film-Katniss is confused and disconcerted by Peeta’s apparent motivations, and her own.2 Importantly, she does not know how to untangle her own feelings from tactics of self-preservation when both would be authentic feelings and the two cannot be clearly distinguished in particular experiences of pleasure, relief, comfort and gratitude. To add to this complexity, when Peeta is returned after Katniss has clearly suffered at the idea he is being tortured, that torture has produced a Peeta who hates Katniss, and believes all the worst interpretations of her actions and motivations, especially concerning him. This last twist in the question of whether Peeta and Katniss are in love externalises the larger questions about what kinds of knowledge or feelings are definitely real rather than just crafted expectation.
Finnick and Annie’s love story works as a counterpoint. Finnick’s media story since he won – notably as the youngest winner ever – has been his image as a sensual playboy with a chain of passing lovers. In their first conversation, Finnick seems to be both flirting with Katniss and taunting her for being too obvious when he says that, as tributes, they must grab any passing sweetness in life. His suggestion that he knows Katniss’s secrets seems to be linked to her romance with Peeta, but means something else once he has been revealed as her secret ally in the 76th arena. From this point, Finnick’s story is about gradual revelation. First, he admits that he thought Katniss was only faking love for Peeta, and now knows he was wrong – becoming the first person to say she loves him, including both Katniss and Peeta. Then he reveals that he is in love with Annie, when his pre-show interview farewell to ‘the one’ had seemed like his own media gambit. And finally, he reveals that his playboy history had been his own imprisonment, in which his body/company were traded by Snow to reward or bribe others. This reverses the usual gender roles in action film, where victims of sexual violence are almost always women, and he makes this revelation as a public broadcast when Katniss herself is too traumatised by Snow’s cruelty to speak. Finnick’s increasing openness is both part of dismantling Snow’s power and a guide for Katniss, and his wedding to Annie marks the first wholly positive representation of love in the Hunger Games. Katniss herself is represented as an outsider to the wedding’s celebratory tone, and this scene plays on her relationships with Prim and Peeta in ways that make it more than a happy respite before more grim war scenes, or a reward for Finnick before he, too, sacrifices his life to save Katniss’s quest.
Romance was secondary in promotion of the Hunger Games films, which emphasised action elements and distinguished the film from romance-centred ‘chick flicks’ (Ferris and Young 2008). There is often romance in action films (see Tasker 1993), centrally as a reward for the hero or narrative anchor for questions about why the hero fights and whom they should save. But, consistent with teen film and romance dramas/comedies, the Hunger Games positions romance as a tool for forming a viable self, and a test of that self’s capacities. While romance genres often rely on melodrama for their affective impact, teen film more often emphasises internal psychological drama, often as experienced by the kind of social outsider Katniss clearly is at Finnick’s wedding. The angst of Katniss has three focal points: how to survive, and what parts of herself she would give up for that; what she should sacrifice to ‘save’ the world, and why her; and whether romantic love is real, or can be real for her. While her relationship with Gale becomes absorbed into ethical questions about revenge, her relationship with Peeta becomes increasingly centred on him personally. He comes to represent what she will not give up, what she must save, and what must be real. He is thus an apt reward for a girl action hero – part of what Katniss has ‘earned’, as Boggs puts it in Film 4 when he, too, sacrifices his life to save Katniss. What she has also earned is that dislocated coda scene in which her life is both still and, literally, glowing with love.
Rikke Schubart exemplifies a currently dominant argument about girl heroes when she argues that ‘Today’s active, aggressive and independent female hero is clearly a child of feminism’ (2007: 6), but caught up in a ‘postfeminist’ ‘age of ambivalence’ (6–7) that merits feminist interrogation of its desire for fictional female heroes (12–13). Katniss’s conclusion returns us to earlier points about the changing cultural expectations for girl characters and to ambivalent feminist responses to their success and their happy endings. Central to this ambivalence is the sense that these new stories are, as Elyce Helford puts it, ‘change without change’ (2000: 6). To explore this point, it matters that we could make a case for the similarity between Katniss’s story and fairytale princesses like Cinderella. While Cinderella does not risk her life to save someone she loves, in both stories the central girl’s innate virtue, capacity for self-sacrifice, and refusal to be crushed by injustice are revealed by her response to the cruelty of others. Both are recognised and transformed by powerful people who can give them new and untouchably comfortable lives. The Reaping, the train, and the media extravaganza in which Katniss becomes the Capitol’s darling ‘girl on fire’ follows a similar pattern to Cinderella’s story, and both end with a glowing vision of future romantic domestic bliss that allows no interrogation. Such a proposition that the new girl-centred stories are at heart just like the old ones exemplifies one of the key arguments about the ‘postfeminism’ of contemporary popular culture. But Katniss is not simply a new Cinderella, given that her own actions determine the trajectory of the narrative and that it is her actions and commitment rather than her virtue for which she is finally rewarded. A focus on Katniss’s role as an object for admiration (or manipulation) at the expense of considering her agency seems to us to miss the impact of its action-orientation and dystopian tone on such familiar tropes.
As Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair acknowledge, girl-oriented stories are ‘often criticized for plot resolution that reinforces conventional notions of gender’ despite having also ‘enthusiastically promoted … the necessity for girls to gain control over their own lives by embracing their gifts, to engage in self-definition, and to use their empowerment to challenge oppressive social structures’ (2002: 129). This tension becomes increasingly important as girl heroes become more popular, and critics invested in the critique of postfeminism have increasingly stressed what Angela McRobbie eventually called the ‘neoliberal’ positioning of the girl as ‘an attractive harbinger of social change’ (2009: 58). Along these lines, Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy argue that feminist ideals are subsumed in such girl hero narratives – winked at or implied by the physical ‘empowerment’ of the character, rather than dealt with head-on – meaning that ‘girl power’ rhetoric is ‘shorn of its political context’ (2003: 4). Anita Harris writes:
To be girl-powered is to make good choices and to be empowered as an individual. These uses of Girl Power position young women as creators of their own identities and life chances, and as liberated by their participation in the consumer culture that surrounds them. They both emphasize the positive opportunities for young women to invent themselves.
(2004b: 167)
A girl hero empowered by her own choices is thus suspected of compromising feminist ideals precisely because she manages to succeed in an environment thought definitively hostile to them. For her critics, if not her core audience, the postfeminist girl hero must negotiate a treacherous landscape of suspicion over whether changing ideas about girlhood reflect feminist achievement and walk a tightrope between arguments about how images of girls impact on girls’ desires and expectations.
As we have already suggested, Katniss must embrace ideal images of both femininity and gendered heterosexual coupling to some degree in order to successfully navigate her dangerous relation to the state-media complex. She must engage with the ‘masquerade of womanliness’ (see Riviere 1929), which, although it may still apply to women in general, is today overwhelmingly discussed, under the label ‘postfeminism’, with reference to the way girls and young women attempt to manage their self-image. McRobbie defines the postfeminist ‘masquerade’ as a
mode of feminine inscription, across the whole surface of the female body, and interpellative device, at work and highly visible in the commercial domain as a familiar (even nostalgic or ‘retro’), light-hearted (unserious), refrain of femininity. It has been re-instated into the repertoire of femininity ironically … [so that it] does not in fact mean entrapment … since now it is a matter of choice rather than obligation.
(2009: 66)
This involves, she argues, a superficial empowerment that relies on girls’ and women’s pain and self-doubt. Certainly, this might be a way to understand how Katniss’s ‘excessive performance’ of girlhood is called upon to aid her survival in the arena.
As Jessica Miller writes, ‘Katniss never seems more feminine than when she’s acting as Peeta’s lover’ (2012: 154). This is the product of a ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich 1980) underpinning appropriately gendered performance in the society lived by Katniss’s audiences as much as her own. This gender ‘legibility’, as Judith Butler (1993: 37), and McRobbie after her, might call it, makes Katniss more relatable and adds layers of generic cues to her character. Katniss’s bridal experience is paradigmatically generic. It also summarises her relation to Panem society, which consumes Katniss voraciously, but through a narrative which is oblivious to her lived experience. It is apt, then, that Cinna chooses the state-mandated bridal gown as the costume which transforms Katniss into the revolutionary Mockingjay image for a state-mandated audience. It transforms Katniss from one generic subject position (the bride) to another (the revolutionary icon). While Katniss does not choose this latter role either, and resists it also, she certainly sees more purpose in that façade than in the bride.
While Panem society is not exclusively patriarchal, so that high-status political and military figures may be men or women, patriarchal values still have force in other ways. Many occupations seem stripped of the gendered associations a contemporary audience might expect. There are male and female stylists, beauticians, domestic servants, and technicians and labourers of many kinds. Moreover, femininity is not more indulgent than masculinity in Panem, and its attachment to vulnerability is qualified. A colourful ornamental style characterises the fashion, hair, and makeup of most Capitol citizens, with both women and men seeking personal decoration as a self-validating luxury. Girls are also represented as equally able to fight and survive brutal challenges, not only because equal numbers of girl and boy tributes are chosen for The Games each year but because the winners, too, come from both genders. That Finnick is the sexually victimised character, while Katniss is the strong, silent type, further suggests that some expected gender stereotypes do not apply in Katniss’s world. A dominant dimorphic sexual categorization nevertheless has highly recognisable symbolic meanings, as well as considerable authority over social life in Panem. It is in this respect more than any, perhaps, that the Hunger Games seems ‘postfeminist’. The fact that women can be president, or a military commander, does not alter the symbolic importance of performing femininity through relationships, including the tie between domesticity and maternity. This resembles what McRobbie calls the ‘double entanglement’ of postfeminist discourse (2009: 12, after Butler 2000).
Although one boy and one girl enter the Hunger Games arena from each district, making gender a fundamental social distinction from the first plot premise, The Games may be the least gendered space in Panem. Expected dress, hair, and makeup conventions demarcate girls and boys in the districts, and among the tributes in the pre-Games events – but for those about to die, these seem principally like costumes. Some female tributes have ‘softer’ skills, such as evasion, for Rue and Foxface, or Mags’s fishing, but these are concessions to their ages and physiques. Katniss, Clove, and Johanna are all weapons specialists, for example, and while Johanna wrestles only in the books, on film female as well as male tributes are featured in physical combat – and the most ferocious of the victors brought back for the 76th games is Enobaria, who has filed her teeth into weapons. When the current victors, Katniss and Peeta, formally display their talents to the production team, neither choose skills in fighting but, respectively, skills in strategy and representation: Katniss hangs a dummy and labels it Seneca Crane, and Peeta paints Rue in the grave of flowers Katniss made for her. Agility, stealth, knowledge, and tactics, as well as strength, can be winning assets.
The postfeminism critical framework always seems on more secure grounds with visual texts because it can find allusions to the spectacle of glamour, including the common conjunction of makeover and triumph. The spectacle of Katniss’s action, from her choreographed mastery with a bow and arrow to the digital effects of her apocalyptic scene of action, can also be seen as a glamorous image. Katniss may save Panem from a corrupt government, but she does so in a glamorous outfit and on camera. The Hunger Games franchise has already attracted considerable criticism along these lines, principally focused on the pleasures of Katniss’s makeover and the centrality of her romance plot. As these are both products of the narrative manipulations of reality television, such an argument positions Katniss – and identification with Katniss – as ultimately a media product. As Sarah Kornfield puts this case, the
Hunger Games offers viewers an ‘empowered heroine’ who hunts, fights, and wins without a second thought for her appearance. Yet, the film’s narrative firmly grounds Katniss’s motivation in traditional femininity through her maternal instincts towards Prim, and the production elements (camera work, lighting, etc.) continually emphasize Katniss’s traditionally white-feminine beauty.
(2016: 5)
This reading seems to forget that the Hunger Games is itself engaged in a similar critique. If ‘visual pleasure’ (Mulvey 1975) adds something to Katniss’s various princess and superhero-style costumes in the films, then the same scenes also insist that believing in such an image is a failure to be on Katniss’s side.
Katniss understands the artifice of the Capitol’s beauty/fashion regime – after all, it has been ‘mandatory viewing’ all her life – and her anger at Peeta positioning her as a potential girlfriend suggests that, however many girls win The Games, effectively performing femininity for the cameras connotes a kind of weakness. It takes her whole team’s agreement to convince her that desirable also means power, just as Cinna has to correct her assumption that he is there to make her look ‘pretty’ with the claim that he is there to respect her bravery by making her ‘memorable’. These tensions within Katniss’s makeover signal its ‘postfeminist’ context. Rosalind Gill suggests:
It might be argued that a makeover paradigm constitutes postfeminist media culture. This requires people (predominantly women) to believe first that they or their life is lacking or flawed in some way, and second that it is amenable to reinvention or transformation by following the advice of relationship, design or lifestyle experts, and practising appropriately modified consumption habits.
(2007: 161)
In other words, makeover tropes encourage an image of girl empowerment as an embodied, and centrally visual, image. The transformations at the heart of makeover culture, by this argument, displace the subject and replace lived experience with what Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood term the ‘normative performative’ (2011: 20).
Such an argument nevertheless needs to move beyond ideas about beauty culture. Images of girls on reality television consistently ‘emphasize’, as McRobbie notes, ‘talent, determination, and the desire to win’ (2009: 74). By McRobbie’s reading, this image of the ‘highly motivated young woman’ is nevertheless a distraction, making it more difficult to ‘discern real sociological intersections of structural factors of ethnicity, social class and gender, in regard to young women’ (ibid.). The Hunger Games supports this concern, insofar as the injustice and poverty Katniss has experienced all her life are clearly obscured on television in order to highlight her beauty and character, or what McRobbie would call her ‘colourful self-biography’ (ibid.). It is what Katniss does that matters, and while how she looks is a way of speaking to certain audiences, as the ‘propo’ production scenes elaborate (Figure 3.2), how she looks alone is not enough – she must not only act, she must do so with sincerity for even her most saleable story to work.
The idea that girls can now choose between an array of gender roles and gendered practices, and that this makes any choice valid even if it opposes feminist principles, is one of the key targets of the postfeminism critique.3 But there are other ways to talk about the importance of choice as a relation between gender and agency. Moira Gatens writes:
It is the human subject’s own choice how to read and use the cards she has been dealt in life. In some ways the card game is a good metaphor for the situation of the human subject. She cannot determine the conventions that govern the game, the value of the cards, or the hand she is dealt, but she is nevertheless free to choose how she plays the game. Will she be defeated in advance if she feels she has been dealt a bad hand, or will she interpret it as a challenge? Will she play a ‘safe’ game or a reckless one? It is through the attitudes she forms, and the manner of exercising her freedom, that woman will decide how her body is lived.
(2003: 271)
Applying this metaphor ‘in some ways’ offers some accord between the materialist criticism most feminism requires and popular genres that speculate on other possibilities. Speculative genres represent girls’ capacity to act as independent agents (against the dominant organisation of the world around them) as requiring both will and action. Choice itself is no more important than acting on that choice, and action is often required first, in order to create new options to choose. Katniss is almost always actively choosing a path through available options. This orientation towards action, involving a disinterest in fine political critique and a reliance on instinct rather than deliberation, might get in the way of holding Katniss up as a model of feminist action, but it also impedes reading her as a postfeminist masquerade. Katniss has no time for evaluating degrees of perfection.
The ‘postfeminism’ critiques would agree that girl heroes (of a certain kind) are expected and even demanded today, but also argue that they are burdened, even overshadowed, by an ambivalent relation to the impact of feminism; even that they are superficial satisfactions that make the dissatisfaction of living in a world that lacks gender equality seem tolerable. That this discounts any value in fictional speculation should draw our attention to the problem of fantasy in discourse on postfeminism. Staying close to the psychoanalytic tools, critics like McRobbie have embraced to explain the attractions of postfeminism, we might take up Butler’s account of fantasy as a ‘scene’ rather than an image. Fantasy, Butler writes, demands that ‘identification is distributed among the various elements of the scene’ (2000: 491). The ‘I’ that engages with fantasy is always in the scene; not as a single stable position, but as one able to shift and even multiply points of identification.
At the same time as speculative girl heroes are often thought to fail the test of feminist heroism because of either their success or their happiness, they are also criticised for any signs of weakness (Driscoll and Heatwole 2016). Weaknesses, and limitations, however, are as important as success and happy endings to making the speculative girl hero work. Speculative fiction tightly relies on inference because any aspect of the imagined world which is not represented otherwise will be assumed to work like the world in which its readers are presumed to live. The contemporary wave of speculative girl heroes uses evident real-world limitations on girls’ agency and self determination to add force to the obstacles faced by any hero. The real-world everyday anxieties and obstacles they refer to make girl heroes more compelling, at present, than boy heroes would be in the same story. This, more than anything else, is what constitutes the Hunger Games’ engagement with postfeminism. It is neither incidental nor a failing that Collins includes, among the life-or-death decisions Katniss must make, such apparently trivial dramas as what one should wear, how to be effectively ‘girly’ for an audience, and how to tell if your peers really like you. For Katniss’s audience, correct and effective gender performance is a powerful synthesis of knowledge and practice, the difficulty of which produces much anxiety, as McRobbie rightly elaborates. In Panem, correct and effective gender performance may save your life, and Katniss’s resistance to – and refusal to be changed by – the makeover version of gender conformity is obviously meant to signify her intelligence and strength. The Hunger Games suggests that the most important thing in a world where image has become everything is deconstructing the masquerade, precisely because this is not how things should be.
The prevalence of the postfeminist critique in discussion of speculative girl heroes might be considered a form of utopian longing in Frederic Jameson’s sense. Jameson (1981) argues that ‘formal analysis’ of popular genres – by which he means genres based on the heroic cycle discussed by writers like Northrop Frye – cannot be anything but historically minded. Such analysis must link ‘the history of forms and the evolution of social life’ (1981: 105) so that ‘the study of an object (here the romance texts) … also involves the study of the concepts and categories (themselves historical) that we necessarily bring to the object”’ (109). Postfeminism in just this way is an historically determined conceptual apparatus that brings the girl into view contemporarily with the rise to prominence of speculative girl heroes. It is an appropriate frame for discussing them for just this reason, but we should not ignore the ‘utopian longings’ – the expectations that exceed any possible representation – built into this framework. Speculative fiction is always an experiment with the necessary terms of our present reality. Jameson argues that it is the ‘very distance of the unchangeable system from the turbulent restlessness of the real world that seems to open up a moment of ideational and utopian-creative free play in the mind itself or in the political imagination’ (45). We would press this further to argue that a utopian imagination of worlds in which girls can be heroes must problematize the known-world discourse of postfeminism. By displacing the complex lived experience of girlhood, it renders it subject to further interrogation.
The Hunger Games is just one instance of contemporary dialogue between popular genre, feminism, and ideas about girls and girlhood. No text, or franchise, could fully represent such a set of cultural relations. At this point, then, we want to pause to make a comparison between the Hunger Games and Twilight – the only contemporary franchise that both rivals the success of the Hunger Games and has an equivalent focus on the idea of the girl.4 These franchises both attest that, since the 1990s, girls going through the looking-glass are expected to represent more aspirational political relations to images of femininity, but they take very different positions on this. Twilight has often been condemned as a retrograde and even anti-feminist story (Silver 2010; A. Taylor 2012; J. Taylor 2014), but it certainly has some similarities to the Hunger Games. Both were highly successful publishing ventures in the YA book category, although the Twilight books also had very substantial success among older women (Dorsey-Elson 2013). Both place their typically self-conscious heroine in life-threatening peril that throws her resilient and intrepid character into sharp relief. Both feature a triangle in which the girl must choose between romantic rivals – in the case of Twilight’s Bella Swan, between friend of the family turned werewolf, Jacob Black, and cultured outsider, Edward Cullen. As our subtitle indicates, she chooses Edward fairly quickly, and despite some intensity in her relationship with Jacob she marries Edward relatively early in the final book and fourth film. The Twilight and Hunger Games stories must be distinguished, however, on the centrality of this romance, and the questions about girlhood, sexual desire, and the institution of marriage to which it poses answers. A comparison between them shows the wide range of tastes and orientations populating girl-oriented speculative fiction in the early twenty-first century.
Many of the same audiences may well be engaged with these two series, and there are some clear overlaps in how they were consumed. For fans, choosing Gale in the Hunger Games, like choosing Jacob in Twilight, was to choose a different life for the central girl – in the case of Twilight this means a life in which death and trauma were not the prisms through which she became herself – and it is also to take a stand against some dominant generic queues for romance. An ‘Unpopular Opinions’ column on the website Vulture exemplarily makes a case for ‘Team Gale’ as the choice of passion over practicality (Dobbins 2013), and the 104 comments that follow (at the time of writing) map an array of feelings that took a similar shape in discussions of Twilight. Nevertheless, the most recent fan comment on this thread when we accessed it was: ‘Wow guys. Just let katniss decide on her own! It’s up to her and she’s the only one who can make that choice so back off! THIS ISNT TWILIGHT!!!!!’
Katniss’s choice of boy is an important part of her story but not its principle motivation or goal. Not only is Bella’s romantic choice the motivation, goal, and substance of her story, but she is literally positioned as an ingenue who must learn her place in the world by this romantic orientation. Although Katniss learns important things from both Gale and Peeta, her strength is independent of them, and while Bella is always as brave as her love interests, she must learn to be powerful from and with them. Finally, it is destiny that determines Bella would not have been happy with Jacob. While there is little reason to think she seriously considers Jacob as a partner, the question of why fuels fan investments and adds tension to the middle books, until Bella’s magical daughter erases the question – their attraction, it turns out, only foreshadowed the birth of Renesmee, who will be Jacob’s true partner. By contrast, Katniss has a choice to make, and between people whose differences she learns across the story, including as they change and she does, too. We should not reduce Gale and Peeta to oppositional modes of masculinity. They are not soft and hard, young and old, fun and erudite, as are Jacob and Edward (Guanio-Uluru 2016). Gale and Peeta begin as attractive local bad boy and invisible boy-next-door-cum-supportive-friend, but these recognisable (teen film) types do not delimit them for long. Peeta breaks this mold almost as soon as the train has left the station, and once Katniss has begun to think about what kind of person attracts her, she returns seeing and thinking about Gale in new ways.
Twilight’s transformations of the vampire genre are famously extensive. The carnivorous nature of the vampire, often read as a metaphor for sexual desire, is played down except in the context of controlling it, as when vampires remark on how good Bella smells. While Edward carefully controls his desire for Bella, Bella’s desire for him threatens to (literally) consume her. While critiques of the way feminine desire is constructed in both contemporary media culture and contemporary sex education often stress that girls are held responsible for protecting their sexuality from potential aggressors, Bella is the one who presses the importance of desire and he is the one to exercise caution. While some see this as Bella ceding sexual power to him, Jackie C. Horne argues that this dynamic is in fact ‘a relief’, and ‘speaks to a deeply important fantasy … for girls, exploring their sexuality without self-imposed inhibition’ (2012: 32). While Bella may be a pioneer in terms of representing an assertive girl sexuality for girls – certainly more assertive and explicit than Katniss’s slow-burning ‘hunger’ – this departure from convention is complicated by the ways virginity and its loss are tied to marriage and motherhood in Twilight. Traditional archetypes of morality are embedded in its emphasis on when and how Bella will lose her virginity. The main concern is whether Bella will survive sex with Edward while still in human form: a concession Edward unwillingly makes on the condition she marries him first. That is, Bella insists on risking her life for the sake of not missing out on sex as a key human girl experience; and she equally insists on valuing the man who sees sex as part of a permanent romantic contract.
Critics who doubt the bravery of these choices also often refuse to see heroism in Bella’s active role in fighting evil and preserving good once she is herself a vampire. They do not only cavil because she had to die first, but also because her agency in battle as well as in love is directed to protection. As the song behind the closing credits poses it, Bella has always loved and been waiting for Edward, even before she met him, and this is what gives her life purpose. Her heroism is thus a mode of self-sacrifice. ‘If your life was all you had to give your beloved,’ Bella asks herself in the prologue to Breaking Dawn, ‘how could you not give it?’ (Meyer 2008: 1).
Bella has been particularly criticised as playing into stereotypes of feminine passivity, and it is often claimed that Edward controls her life (Taylor 2014). This is an overstatement. Bella saves Edward’s life as often as he saves hers and her choice to become a vampire – made for the compounding reasons of being with Edward, staying young, and allowing her daughter to be born – orients the story around Bella’s actions and desires. She is not just a fairytale princess waiting for her handsome prince. Recognising Bella’s insistence on her own will is important, despite choices that appear conservative in the lived world of her audience. Bella’s story positions dying for love, and other forms of renunciation for a life of love, as better (purer) choices than others that would keep her alive, and so fits very neatly that model of choice vilified by scholars like McRobbie. However, we should also recognise that Bella knows – indeed, every character in her story knows – that this is a bizarre set of choices, and even those few who know that Bella is in fact choosing to become a vampire rarely attempt to justify it. Her position is not idealised for girls without the vampire option, or presumed to make sense to her audience without this supernatural defence. Recognising this should also help us notice Bella’s difference from most other contemporary stories about speculative girl heroes, including Katniss. But what Bella shares with those peers is a broad insistence that girls can bring about world-making change despite only being a girl. The narrative twist offered by the girl hero relies on acknowledging that the world in which they circulate (still) does not expect heroism from girls – and that ubiquity has not yet made their difference obsolete.
The element of choice becomes synonymous with a kind of feminism. But what the young woman is choosing is more than just participation in consumer culture. No aspect of physical appearance can be left unattended to … Such routine practices [pedicures, shaving, etc.] … are required by all women who want to count themselves as such, and these rituals constitute the postfeminist masquerade as a feminine totality.
(2008: 66)
