RWBY Analysis: Gender in Remnant

Warning: This is a feminist analysis, which means that it may be provocative to some people. If you already find that you do not support feminist perspectives or gender theory, please refrain from reading. To the rest; this is a critical analysis on how RWBY is a positive discussion on gender in a time when popular culture doesn’t do very well on that front.

Okay so… in the last couple of days I’ve received a great deal of criticism on my gender pieces (from the inquisitive to the downright insulting) that I would like to address.

I must admit that I am a little surprised at the fandom. I’ve said this before but I feel like it’s a good place to start.

Young Adult Literature and pop culture productions still tend very much to reproduce traditional roles of gender. Even if the women today are empowered as fighters or leaders or more intelligent than their male counterparts, they are still placed in an emotionally subservient position to their partners. They are still the sexually passive characters, they still return to the domestic sphere once the battle is won. So I was excited to dive back into RWBY this year because it transgresses all of that, and …honestly? I thought the rest of the fandom would be all over it too, once the topic was broached.

People with a more hostile mentality towards gender studies aside, I can’t help but wonder about the progressive side of the fandom. I mean… people are fairly excited about the queer aspects of the series, right?

But I’m guessing (and do tell me if I’m wrong) that gender studies and critical theory have mostly been used online to emphasize what is wrong with texts rather than what is right. I certainly hear that often enough: “but, louise. Why can’t you just put the theory down and enjoy a story?”

Well, the thing is, theory can be used to emphasize the good things about a story too! If you know what to look for and keep an open mind the world becomes a much more hopeful place! And RWBY is a really good example.

My primary thesis about RWBY is this; RWBY is a gender progressive, gender transgressive and feminist text!

What I’ve mostly seen of critical responses to this can be summed up in the fact that Remnant has no gender separation of labour, and that the ideal skillsets of men and women aren’t separated. A woman can be just as capable a fighter as a man, and a girl might inherit the estate from her father, rather than have it go straight to her little brother.

Clearly, then, women have the same rights as men, which means that gender has lost its meaning.

First of all, this is what’s called White Bourgeois Feminism. It encompasses first and second wave feminism, which only seeks equal rights and equal working opportunities for women. In other words, it only fights against the opportunities that rich, white, able-bodied, straight women are lacking, as they already have every other privilege.

Of course, Remnant, while certainly portraying people of color, and other cultural artifacts than those of white culture, is still an essentialist society. Or they lack the intersectional experiences of people of other cultures than those belonging to the industrialized world.

Just because emphasized discrimination is removed from the narrative, doesn’t automatically make it representative of everyone.

And gender is a really good example of this.

So if Remnant’s society is gender egalitarian, clearly there can’t be a problem, and gender becomes irrelevant, loses its meaning, right?

Well, not exactly.

First, if gender had lost its meaning entirely the society of Remnant should have looked more like the society one meets in Ursula le Guinn’s The Left Hand of Darkness. In this world the people don’t have a fixed sex; they change their genitalia according to preference and only during mating season. In other words the two contrasting genders of our world never existed and they never had a fixed cultural meaning.

That’s not the case for Remnant.

According to Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault institutions play a vital part in shaping humans into the types of people that society needs them to be. And three out of four of the Huntsmen Academies separate their students in gendered uniforms; skirts for girls, pants for men.

The parameters are also drawn and categorised, and transgressing them isn’t entirely acceptable, as indicated by the laughter of the other students upon first seeing Jaune in a dress. They might be accepting of his transgression, and he isn’t physically punished for it, but their surprise and laughter still indicates that this breaks with how boys are presupposed to dress.

So we have categories, and we have boundaries, and we have the social pressure to remain within those boundaries of gender performance. What naturally follows that is the placement of a hierarchy.

In volume 5 during Yang and Nora’s armwrestling match, Ruby’s yell of encouragement is “You can’t lose to a girl in a skirt.”

As a skirt is more feminine, more ideally girly, than pants, and they are performing a generally assumed masculine competition, this shows that “feminine” is still considered “weaker” in comparison, thus placing women in a subordinate cultural position.

This is further emphasized by the lack of women in official roles on Remnant. Take the council of Vale; two men, one woman. The same can be said for what we see on the teaching staff at Beacon. Of the four headmasters, we have met 3 so far. And the gods that created this world were both categorized as male.

The only institutional leader within the society of Remnant that we have met is Caroline Cordovin, and she carried herself in military, nationalist discourse, the former of which automatically negates any femininity, as military ideology and war are always, by default, a discussion on masculinity.

So even if superficially there is equality between the genders, statistically, institutionally, and practically this is not the case.

There is a struggle, even if it is unvoiced. There is a hierarchy, and there are relations of power.

So where are the struggles?

Well, they’re not openly political. But there are enough discussions to go around, and I feel like I’ve mentioned a good few already:

Jaune’s entire character is a discussion on breaking free from traditional masculinity. He idealises it at first, abandons it for the sake of his female friends more than once; the most prominent being his passivity in the fight against Cinder which led to the awakening of his semblance.

There’s the diverse cast of female characters in general. From villains to heroes, from mothers to military personnel, from bandits to revolutionaries. We see children, teenagers, adults, middle-aged women to old women. In fact, they age more realistically than the men. And none of their character development or final goals hinge on a romantic interest. Neither are they confined to a domestic sphere.

There’s a fun little one between Yang and that one of Raven’s followers who had his tooth slammed out of his face by Yang (I can’t find his name anywhere, but I hope you know which one I mean). Raven’s exasperation with his comments, and the fact that he has no trouble stepping into her personal space, is proof that sexual harassment is very much a thing that happens in Remnant, that Some men think they have the right to a woman’s body simply by virtue of existing. That Yang isn’t chastised by praised for her retaliation, however, shows Remnant to be a place where that type of masculinity is considered unacceptable, and that a woman is not considered less feminine for being able to stand up for herself. The production team also uses sexual harassment as a way to vilify a character, and thus encourages a moral standard in their followers, which, quite frankly, needs to naturalized across all societies.

Personally I quite like Raven and Oz’s struggle (even if I don’t like the former as a person or a parent). It’s not a very obvious one, but it is important. The most prominent theory we have on power is Michel Foucault’s definition of power as dependent on knowledge constructions. “Truth” isn’t naturally found in the wild, but produced and structured by humans. These “truths” when structured become knowledge; knowledge of psychiatry, knowledge of government, knowledge of gender. We construct these knowledges in order to justify the shape of society, why certain people are in power, why we should follow the laws of others. That “truth” in Remnant, is primarily constructed by Oz (I say Oz and I mean the collective soul, although it is definitely the King of Vale and Ozpin that have played the largest part in those present day knowledge constructions). “Huntsmen keep humanity safe”, “we can’t cause a panic”, “Grimm are ‘just’ beasts without a leader”, “democracy is important”, “unity through diversity”. Those are the messages that Remnant’s society is built on, that Oz bases his fragile peace on. But Raven questions those, she makes the others question those, and so they clash, and Raven is placed in a position outside law and order, as a “criminal”.

Weiss

The most obvious one, of course, is Weiss’ struggle with her father. Here, we’re really and truly back at the white bourgeois feminism. Not that it being white or it being for the rich makes it automatically evil. Its messages are important, but they cannot be all encompassing. According to Rebecca Solnit, a prominent feminist activist and historian, whose texts are the catalyst for the term “mansplaining” (even if she does not condone the term herself), confinement of women is an important tool in the continued survival of patriarchy. Why? So that men can keep a tight grasp on who their women interact with, so that the male family line stays clean. If you look at most family trees, you will see that the male line is the one preserved, and not the female.

Weiss’ struggle with breaking free of her father’s mental and physical confinement is a powerful part of her character development. As soon as she returns to Atlas he forces her back into a role of emphasized femininity; Sing, look pretty, be passively at my side when you are not confined to your room.

And even before she returns to Atlas, she has trouble accessing her Semblance (the manifestation of her soul), because he’s chopped away at her confidence to keep her in line. The first time she gains access to it is after Velvet’s use of her semblance, which is a collection of other huntsmen and huntresses’ attacks, which become a metaphor for female and overall feminist solidarity, an important part of feminist literature, all the way back to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (which is one of the first actual feminist critical texts). Feminist solidarity therefore inspires her to reach within herself, past her father’s restraints. And only when she determines to break free from his confinement at the end of Volume 4, is she able to fully use her semblance, severing her ties from his family tree emotionally as well as legally.

Her music is also fraught with feminist discourse. Especially This Life is Mine: “I’m shattering the mirror, that kept me split in pieces, that stood between my mind and my heart”; “shame that it took so long to rescue me, from the guilt you used to tie me to your family tree”; “your patriarchal prison won’t hold me”.

It’s worth mentioning, as a last note on Weiss, most white feminist heroes upon having a feminist awakening, are not awoken to a feminist community, thus placing them alone in a world of men, doomed to fail. However, Weiss is returned to her friends, who like herself, deviate from traditional gender ideals, and thus she is returned to a feminist community.

Blake and Adam

“Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist.”

So writes Rebecca Solnit in her book Men Explain Things to Me.

She continues, explaining how one in three women are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses every day in the United States, that there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes. The EU recently did a scientific survey that showed that 100% of Danish women have experienced sexual harassment. Denmark, my country, is thought of as one of the most gender egalitarian and gender progressive nations on earth. We were the first to legalize gay marriage, to obtain universal suffrage, the system pays for trans operations. And we still have a rape law that is 400 years old, that let 90 out of 700 men charged with rape this year (which isn’t even finished) go free. We still refuse to address Zentropa’s extreme cases of work place sexual harassment because it gives our nation a brilliant reputation within the world of Cinema. Violence against women is epidemic, and it is gendered.

Adam is a brilliant example of that.

We never see him perform an act of violence on a male character. It might happen, he might be a tyrant, but it’s never shown on screen.

Instead we get his murder of Sienna Khan.

A knife through the reproductive organs? That’s called femicide. It’s a specific attack on her physical sex, what signifies on her body as her gender.

Then there’s his attack on Yang. His mental games with Ilia.

And his relationship with Blake is a clear representation of what domestic abuse looks like. Destroy her confidence, her sense of self, so that she allows you to own her, to hurt her. And if you can’t do it with just that, cut her off from other people, destroy what she loves until she has nothing left in the world but you.

That’s what makes Sun’s character so important. He’s the positive antithesis to Adam’s destructive masculinity. Whether he loves Blake or not, he has always let her call the shots, always attempted to push her back into the world, to make her reconnect with her team. And when she’s up and running again he looks at her and goes “wow, that is so inspirational. I better go work on myself.” No strings attached.

And Blake’s struggle with Adam is never a solitary thing; it is always with the mindset he produces in others, with the contagiousness of traditional masculinity. In Ilia, in Yang. She fights him by fighting his ideology; she shows solidarity with other women and empowers them.

Ironwood and Ozpin

And that’s the thing about RWBY. It doesn’t just talk about women vs men. It addresses the destructiveness of traditional masculinity all on it’s own, representing men that don’t meet those ideals, but are still a positive force, an important representation of a new type of masculinity that ought to be praised and encouraged.

That’s what I like about Ozpin. He’s confined, he nurtures others, he’s passive, he seeks peace and he dislikes military force. He’s one of the most feminine male characters in the story, and that’s why Ironwood can’t trust him.

One of the most important eras in Hollywood history is the era of the Vietnam War movie. The defeat is a scar on American military history that still hasn’t healed, because it was the first defeat they ever suffered on a military scale. What followed was a series of cinematic representations of politicians and activists as evil, as the cause of the defeat, and the soldier the hero that had been called home too early. But the ways Hollywood categorized the two opposing forces of politics and militarism was that; the politicians and activists were scheming, secretive, passive (feminine), and the scolders were active, honest, and faced the problems head on (masculine).

Wars are a reflection on masculinity, and Ironwood, being both hyper masculine and nationalist, cannot comprehend Ozpin’s methods, which results in at least three masculinity challenges that I can tell; he steals his position as head of security at the Vytal festival, thus stating that Ozpin isn’t a capable defender; he attempts to influence the moralities of his students; and he accuses Oz point blank of being passive in the fight against Salem (the last of which actually has Oz reacting).

Of course, Oz is no saint, and he isn’t outside the network of power struggles that goes on in this series. Far from it. But his character as a gendered discussion is especially emphasized in his interactions with Ruby, and I have a whole other analysis planned for that (because class, race, age, plays into that one as well, as does Oscar, ofc) and I would rather wait with dividing into that.

So the world of Remnant is very much experiencing struggles defined by gender, and RWBY is more than anything, a discussion on gender. It discusses western gender ideals, and transgresses them in progressive ways. It shows a diversity of male and female characters that doesn’t confine them to any one characteristic or goal. And I really do think we need to praise CRWBY more openly for how good a job they’re doing on it.