Grey's Anatomy and Critical Theory: Feminisms Edition
Studying feminism, gender, and queer theory was one of my favorite sections of my popular culture and critical theory class last semester. I've been sharing my thoughts on different types of literary theory the past few days, and today I talk the ideas of the Heroine, Super-Male, and Shadow-Male from one of the most intelligent women I've ever had the pleasure of studying, Joanna Russ.
Check it out:
Considered by many a powerful feminist in the television industry, Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes does her best to write strong characters of varying genders and sexualities—but Grey’s Anatomy still falls short according to theorists Joanna Russ and Michael Kimmel. When analyzing “Man on the Moon”—the eleventh episode of the tenth season—one can find Russ’ Heroine, Super-Male, and Shadow-Male, as well as see Kimmel’s ideas of homosociality and homophobia.
Dr. April Kepner exemplifies the Heroine that Russ describes: someone passive and suffering. In “Man on the Moon,” Kepner’s sisters come to help her prepare for her wedding. Throughout the episode, they call Kepner “ducky,” a childhood nickname. When Dr. Jackson Avery picks up the term, she explains why she hates it: “It means ‘ugly duckling,’ because I grew up with braces and pimples, and they still see me that way” (Klaviter). Instead of standing up to her sisters, Kepner endures their ridicule silently. According to Russ, to be a heroine Kepner must also be “shy and inexperienced” (Russ 96). Kepner, nicknamed Virgin Mary and often ridiculed for her virginity by her coworkers, is portrayed as amateur when it comes to relationships. Although Kepner entered the show during the sixth season, she is not romantically involved with anybody until the end of the eighth season—an amount of time abnormal in Grey’s Anatomy.
Then, throughout the ninth and tenth seasons, Kepner has an internal battle trying to decide between Avery and Matthew Taylor. Avery is her long-time friend, first crush, and the person she lost her virginity to. Taylor, an EMT, is her fiancé and Russ’ Shadow-Male: “a man invariably represented as gentle, protective, responsible, quiet, humorous, tender and calm” (Russ 97). All of these characteristics fit Taylor perfectly during the little screen time he has. His proposal to Kepner, for example, included several members of the hospital performing a song and dance to “500 Miles” by The Proclaimers. Despite this, he is also portrayed as mundane in comparison to Avery. Because Kepner has mixed feelings for two men, “her only consolation is to be kind, womanly, and good” (Russ 96). Kepner is not too sexual—despite having had sex, she still feels it is important to wait until marriage. Kepner is not too smart or successful, which is seen when she fails her medical boards. But Kepner is good, kind: she cares for her patients and her friends, and behaves as she is supposed to. And because of that, she is eventually rewarded with the Super-Male’s love. According to Russ, “the Heroine’s destiny is always the same—marriage” (Russ 112). Kepner follows the mold of the heroine in this way too, as she marries Avery two episodes later after he professes his love during her wedding ceremony to Taylor.
Avery is the epitome of a Super-Male. His name alone is one of power. Not only is he a member of The Harper Avery Foundation—an institution his grandfather created worth hundreds of millions of dollars that pushes for advancement and innovation in medicine—but he also acts as the chairman of the hospital’s board. In addition to being powerful, he is also potentially dangerous to Kepner. Unlike the typical Super-Male, Avery never threatens abuse or murder, but rather the impending marriage of Kepner to Taylor: “Even when the Super-Male is not a physical danger, sexuality itself provides enough threat” (Russ 107). Before her engagement to Taylor, Kepner had trouble getting over Avery; they would have sex, agree it was the last time, and then have sex again—repeatedly. In “Man on the Moon,” Kepner and Taylor are having lunch with her sisters when Avery walks into the restaurant. The first sister says, “Speaking of dreamboats, who is that and why is he waving at us?” (Klaviter). After being introduced, another sister whispering in Kepner’s ear says, “Gosh, those eyes. You know, I totally get why you’d name a pig after him” (Klaviter). After Kepner failed her boards, she moved back home to her parent’s farm for some time during the ninth season—but even thousands of miles could not erase Avery’s sexuality from Kepner’s mind.
Another necessary characteristic of the Super-Male is to appear cruel before turning out to be a good man at heart. After Kepner and her sisters leave the restaurant, Avery and Taylor watch a man get run over by a taxi. Taylor performs an emergency tracheotomy on the street with a straw when he sees the man is not breathing. When Avery, Taylor, and the patient get to the ER, Kepner is surprised to hear what happened. Avery angrily says, he “took out his little boy scout knife and sliced a wide and horizontal incision into his throat, way lower than it needed to be—all things I’m gonna need to fix in surgery” (Klaviter). In surgery, Kepner is upset with Avery for yelling at Taylor. In response, Avery tells Kepner that Taylor actually did a good job that that, “You should go spread the word—you are not engaged to a nitwit. You know what, this is actually gonna be a pretty easy fix” and tells her to leave (Kalviter). In this situation, the Super-Male’s cruelty turns to kindness toward the Heroine. The situation also, however, represents Kimmel’s ideas of homosociality and homophobia when Taylor confronts Avery about what he told Kepner.
According to Kimmel, homosociality is the concern of proving your masculinity to other men. Kimmel writes, “Other men watch us, rank us, grant our acceptance into the realm of manhood… It is other men who evaluate the performance” (Kimmel 128). This is shown when Taylor says to Avery, “You owe me an apology. April said you would’ve done exactly what I did” (Klaviter). Although his wife-to-be told him he did a good job, Taylor still needed Avery’s approval. Taylor is also homophobic in Kimmel’s sense of the word: he has a “fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up” (Kimmel 131). Avery explains that even though he told Kepner that Taylor did a good job, “the truth is that you messed up this guy's neck, and I spent eight hours fixing it yesterday. So how 'bout a ‘thank you’? How 'bout you should've waited one second for the surgeon standing right next you? I mean, what was that? You felt like you had to be the big man out there? I mean do you feel threatened by me?” (Klaviter). Avery emasculates Taylor by pointing out his mistakes. And further, Taylor, in not wanting to appear weak next to his fiancé’s ex-boyfriend, led to damage to a patient—in the same way homophobia in the real world might cause damage to women, people of color, or gay men.
In the grand scheme of things, Grey’s Anatomy is regarded as a feminist show. Rhimes writes women in charge, women who do not follow gender constructs of wanting children, and people representing different sexualities. With feminism, gender, and queer theory being as complex as it is, however, there are bound to be places in the show’s fourteen seasons that fall short. The love triangle representing a Heroine, Super-Male, and Shadow-Male who is homophobic is one of those places. And maybe that shows just how ingrained certain structures are in our society.
Works Cited
Kimmel, Michael. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” Theorizing Masculinities, edited by Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman, SAGE Publications, 1994, 119-141.
Klaviter, Elizabeth. “Man on the Moon.” Grey’s Anatomy, season 10, episode 11, ABC, 5 Dec. 2013.
Myers, Robbie. “Shonda Rhimes on Power, Feminism, and Police Brutality.” Elle, 23 Sept. 2015, http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/q-and-a/a30186/shonda-rhimes-elle-interview/
Russ, Joanna. “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic.” To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 94-119.
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