WALL-E & EVE: the Great Gender Debate
Pixar’s 2008 animated film about a little robot tasked with cleaning an over-polluted, dystopian earth has several overt messages and themes. Most obviously, it warns against rampant consumerism, ecological devastation, and the complacency of society. Yet, ten years after its release, it carries a different, more obscure message: the way in which we construct gender.
There is still a great amount of debate as to whether or not gender is different from sex. Those who say they are different claim that while sex is dictated by the composition of sexual organs, gender is a social construct built on those differences in sex — in other words, we are born male or female, but we learn to be men and women. Those on the other side of this debate claim that any perceived differences in psychology are the direct result of biology — we are born men or women.
Of course, both sides of the debate tend to ignore the fact that as many as 1 in 2000 children are born intersex, but that’s a subject for another article.
I, myself, firmly believe that gender and sex are different, but I’ve always found it difficult to verbalize something that is so internal for me. That’s where WALL-E comes in.
WALL-E is a robot. That’s understood. The real question I have for you is whether WALL-E is a boy or a girl.
I’ve asked a couple of people this question already — people on both sides of the aforementioned gender-versus-sex debate. They all had the same reaction: they stopped dead in their tracks and their eyes kind of glazed over. You could see the internal gears turning. Invariably, though, they all had the same answer: “He’s a boy.”
But, why?
Here, I got several different answers: “Because he’s brown,” “Because of his voice,” “Because — I don’t know… Because!” Almost everyone became quite flustered. None of them were really convinced by their own answers.
As far as robots go, WALL-E may be sapient, but WALL-E has no genitals to speak of and cannot reproduce sexually. WALL-E cannot have a sex — yet he can have a gender.
This, to me, is the key to understanding the difference between gender and sex. Sex is biological, and therefore tangible. Gender is neither. Our decision to bifurcate a garment has less to do with any aspect of our biology than it does with the way that our individual ideas and decisions have snowballed into a large and complex society.
So, why do we perceive WALL-E as a boy? Well, while we can’t know for certain what this robot’s gender identity is, the filmmakers did leave us some clues.
The first thing we hear in the film is the opening lines of “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from the 1969 film Hello, Dolly!, parts of which feature extensively throughout WALL-E’s story. As the music becomes diegetic, we find the source to be WALL-E’s own speakers. This is the music that WALL-E plays and “sings” while clearing garbage. Clearly, this song is very important to WALL-E. The titular robot also watches clips from the movie and even imitates Cornelius Hackl, dancing with a hubcap instead of a straw hat. It might be a stretch to assume that WALL-E uses the character of Cornelius Hackl to build a gender identity, but it’s at least clear that WALL-E identifies closely with this character.
Then we have EVE, who comes to earth in search of plant life. When I asked the people from before about EVE, they all ‘knew’ that she was a girl. This is significant because it gives us a binary that we can use for comparison. In a vacuum, WALL-E doesn’t really need to be a boy or a girl. However, when a romantic subplot is involved, we suddenly become gender detectives.
So, then, I ask: What makes EVE a girl? Is it the voice? The sleek, rounded exterior? The white, clean color?
EVE, like WALL-E, has no genitals. EVE cannot reproduce sexually. EVE is a machine that has no biological sex. Yet, she’s a girl and WALL-E is a boy. Not only that — but they’re in love! I could write a whole book about how two inanimate objects in love have to be perceived as heterosexual couples but we’d be here all day.
If you don’t believe in the power of romantic subplots to dictate gender, consider R2-D2, C3PO, and BB-8 from the Star Wars franchise. What gender are they? In the absence of romantic subplots for the droids, you might not have thought about it too much, even though C3PO is more humanoid than either EVE or WALL-E.
So, if gender and sex are the same, how can two machines without sex have genders?
Arguably, we could simply be projecting our human thoughts and emotions onto machines. This wouldn’t be the first time that we did this. Humans have a tendency to see patterns everywhere — like seeing faces on inanimate objects — even where they don’t exist. After all, the filmmakers certainly imply the parallels between WALL-E and Cornelius, but nowhere does the film explicitly state that WALL-E is a boy and EVE a girl. This could just be us as the audience taking things a bit too far.
I disagree. I believe that our ability to so easily transfer concepts like manhood and womanhood to objects and creatures who either have no sex or have different reproductive systems from humans is indicative of the fact that gender is not inherently embedded in biology. It is certainly tied to it, but it is ultimately its own, separate entity.
Think of another abstract concept: monarchy. I don’t think any person would argue that government is biological. Yet, we apply words like “queen”, “colony”, and “drone” to animals that cannot possibly comprehend the concept of divine right.
Obviously, this little article isn’t going to end a debate that’s been raging for decades in courts, classrooms, and laboratories across the globe. I know that I probably won’t change many minds with a paradigm based on a pair of animated robots — no matter how cute they may be.
For those of you who already agree, this might simply be a useful way for you to explain your opinion the next time you’re called to do so. If you’re reading this from across the aisle, then I hope I at least got across that gender might not be as easily defined as sex, even if I haven’t changed your mind.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://selfscroll.com/wall-e-eve-the-great-gender-debate/
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