Featured Image: Kurt and Ram’s Funeral from: Bennett, Sarah. “So Very Room 237: A Deeper Analysis of Heathers.” The Airship,
http://airshipdaily.com/blog/so-very-room-237-a-deeper-analysis-of-heathers.

Introduction

My purpose in creating this project is to showcase the ways in which the gender performance of characters is constructed by the production teams of films in order to make audience read characters as having a particular sexuality. I will do this through an analysis of and construction of a visual artistic model of a particular scene in the 1988 film, Heathers. While this film is a dark satire that follows a Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque pair of teens, Veronica and JD, who go on a killing spree of malicious, popular teens at their school in hopes to make the school a better place, I will be focusing on only one murder, that of Kurt and Ram, two heterosexist jocks. My work will show how production teams’ construction parallels JD’s construction of Kurt and Ram’s gender performance in their murder scene in which he uses certain so-called “homosexual artifacts” in order to make the town perceive the two as gay lovers who committed suicide together (Heathers).

Gender Performance

In the foundational theoretical text, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler theorizes that gender is performative, meaning that “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 179). This is an incredibly nuanced and complex concept that is somehow best explained with images of adorable cats made by a PhD student, but it is essential to understanding the way in which JD’s construction of Kurt and Ram’s gender, and how that leads the audience to perceive a certain sexual orientation, mirrors the way film production teams do the same with their characters.

The Social Construction of Gender

The starting point for understanding Butler’s theory of gender performativity is understanding the way in which Butler proposes people construct their gender. Butler proposes gender is constructed through repeated “doing” of gender (33, 179). By way of this, she theorizes that there is no clear origin for gender. As Butler states,

gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis…the construction “compels” our belief in its necessity and naturalness. (178)

People repeatedly act out gender, unknowingly, and construct it as they go through these “public actions” (178). Gender is an “effect” rather than the cause of these actions (178). In other words, we act and that forms our gender, rather than we have an innate gender and we act that out. This is how gender is constructed, apart from any type of inherent relation to sex or desire.

The Assumed Chain of Sex/Gender/Desire

Despite gender not having any inherent relation to sex or desire, it is a frequently assumed notion that sex is equivalent to gender, which is equivalent to desire, i.e., sexual desire. Our society operates from a perspective of assumed cisgendered heteronormativity. This means that, for example, if someone has male-presenting genitalia and XY chromosomes, the person’s sex is assumed to be male, his gender to be masculine, and his sexual desire to be heterosexual. This is a false assumption, as Butler points out and LGBTQ+ folks prove. LGBTQ+ folks disrupt the assumed norm.

Remember earlier when I said that JD constructs Kurt and Ram’s gender in such a way that the entire town assumed they were gay? That’s what I’m talking about here. Not that they are members of the LGBTQ+ community, but they, in the moment of their deaths, when their gender is being constructed by JD, function as one of those disruptions by no longer presenting as heteronormative.

The Public Nature of Gender Performance

Despite not presenting as heteronormative, however, Kurt and Ram’s gender performance is still affected by cisgendered heteronormativity because, as I mentioned, the “doing” of gender is inherently a public act. The public nature of gender performance is essential how it functions. As Butler states,

Although there are individual bodies that enact these significations by becoming stylized into gendered modes, this “action” is a public action. There are temporal and collective dimensions to these actions, and their public character is not inconsequential…(178)

In other words, there is always some sort of audience to receive and interpret gender performance. People watch others act out their gender and make assumptions about their sexuality based on that. Regardless of whether a person fits the cisgendered heteronormative scheme, their gender performance will be affected by it because of the inherent public nature of acts of gender.

Let’s return back to Kurt and Ram for a brief moment. Because Kurt and Ram’s gender is constructed in a particular way through the presence of “homosexual artifacts,” the cops who discover their bodies have no trouble believing the suicide note when it says they were gay lovers. Because their gender as performed in that moment did not match heteronormative masculinity, their sexuality had to also not be heteronormative in the eyes of the cops. It is a binary: straight on one side and queer on the other, without any in between, and the reception and interpretation of that gender performance is essential to that.

The Visual

The Research

Review of Literature

While Butler’s Gender Trouble has been my primary source text for this project, I have pulled research from other sources as well as on other topics to inform my final product. I have looked into gay stereotypes via Rob Cover, Andrea Weiss, and The Celluloid Closet as well as masculinity as performed via Anthony Easthope’s What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture. Overviews of the gay experience of and in film from Alexander Doty and Anneke Smelik were foundational in leading me to the above-mentioned texts. All texts have been essential to producing this final product. Originally, and pretty far into the project, I fully intended to use Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire to examine the homosocial relationship between Kurt and Ram in terms of its importance to cisgendered heteronormative male bonds as well as their constructed “gayness.” However, I found in reading chapters from the text that it was not feasible to tackle that idea on top of what I already have, though it is a nice bridging of gay stereotypes and masculinity as performed. I decided to stick to Butler and the others mentioned.

JD’s Staging

The Kurt/Ram Figure: Suicidal Gay Teen

JD’s staging of Kurt and Ram’s gender performance touches upon three major stereotypes of “gayness” in order to convince the town the two we gay: gay men as sexualized, feminized, and tragic. Because of the way JD makes these stereotypes manifest, the cops that initially discover the bodies of Kurt and Ram, as well as the rest of the townsfolk, are easily able to believe that Kurt and Ram were closeted gay men.

As Sexualized

While the idea of sex follows Kurt and Ram everywhere they go throughout the entire film up until their deaths, they are not sexual objects until JD and Veronica kill them. In “Bodies, Movements and Desires: Lesbian/Gay Subjectivity and the Stereotype,” Cover examines the idea of self-stereotyping, using Butler. In doing this, he emphasizes the sexualization of the gay man’s body as stereotypical (82). The stereotype of gay men as sexually perverse and sex-driven is very prominent outside of the community, and something that cisgendered heteronormativity is repulsed by, unlike when women’s bodies are sexualized.

In Heathers, the bodies of Kurt and Ram experience this stereotype by having their “relationship” be reduced to sex alone. One of the prominent “homosexual artifacts” JD places at the scene is an issue of Stud Puppy, a magazine clearly sexualizing the male body (Heathers). Having it with them forces anyone who discovers them to imagine gay sexual activity between Kurt and Ram. Furthering that, the two were found in their underwear, which makes the cops who found them assume the two were sexually active together. There is no fetishization, however, because gay sexual activity is something by which to be disgusted rather than excited. The cops clearly express distaste as one of them states “the quarterback buggering the linebacker—what a waste.” Here, “gay images are positioned in heterosexual terms,” as Weiss argues (6). The relationship cannot simply be, it has to be a waste of two fine specimens of masculinity who could have been in heterosexual relationships. On top of the distaste, the reaction reduces their supposed relationship to just sex rather than the more romantic relationship depicted in the words of the “suicide note.”

I chose to showcase this through the nakedness of the mannequin in my visual as well as the quote mentioned above.

As Feminized

While Kurt and Ram themselves never express any form of traditionally feminine gender performativity, they are associated with it through JD’s staging. In the documentary The Celluloid Closet, the stereotype of the sissy is brought up as being the first gay stock character in film. The sissy is a “prissy” character that is effeminate, perceived as gay but never stated in films or by audiences to be so (The Celluloid Closet). As Cover writes, common stereotypes such as the “well-groomed” gay man and the “mannish or vampirous” lesbian woman are “dependent on certain re-figurations of gender” (85). These are why JD choses to make Kurt and Ram’s gender performance lean more toward femininity.

The feminization is only briefly addressed in the film through the “homosexual artifacts,” and not in a way that is as overt as the sissy characters were but, also, not as subtly as the well-groomed man. Rather, objects such as mascara and a heart-shaped box of chocolates were more timely clues at their “gayness” through feminization. This is s thread clearly picked up upon by the townsfolk as illustrated by Kurt’s dad’s speech at the funeral. His dad calls him a “pansy,” one of the most inherently feminine derogatory terms for gay men (Heathers).

For my visual, I chose to represent this through mascara, which I painted on, and the quote from Kurt’s father.

As Tragic

Finally, as is discussed at length in The Celluloid Closet, gay characters in film always have to meet a tragic fate. Unfortunately, this is often death, and especially suicide. Films have depicted this s the reality of queer people for decades. Even if there is some truth to the sadness of being queer in a world run by a cisgendered heteronormative paradigm, and there is truth in high rates of suicide for queer teens, seeing queer stories only end in tragedy constantly is damaging.

In the same way that seeing that played out in film effects society’s understanding of what it means to be gay, we can assumed it has effected the way the townsfolk of Sherwood, Ohio understand what it means to be gay. With Kurt and Ram having suffered the ultimate tragedy, suicide, it becomes easy for the townsfolk to make the logical leap and say Of course they were gay! They were sad and met tragic ends. It is amazing how easily the line “Kurt and Ram killed themselves in a repressed homosexual suicide pact” rolls off of a character’s tongue to Heather Duke and McNamara in the school parking lot (Heathers). One could argue this is a result of a well-memorized line; however, I think there is supposed to be a point saying that it is easy to believe people who kill themselves are gay and vice versa.

My visual depicts this with a bullet wound painted on the mannequin’s chest and the quote from above.

The Puppeteer: JD

As has been discussed at length, JD stages a scene in which Kurt and Ram, murdered by JD and Veronica, read as gay to the townsfolk of Sherwood, Ohio. He uses so-called “homosexual artifacts” as well as a faked “suicide note” to do this, depending upon stereotypes regarding gay men and their gender performance. This act of construction is one of the main pieces of my visual, depicted by the puppeteer holding the strings attached to the Kurt/Ram figure. I think the puppeteer is an important metaphor for this type of construction because, given that Kurt and Ram are dead, all their agency has been stripped away. JD is in complete control. With the strings, I wanted to emphasize how explicit the construction is. JD lets Veronica, and the audience due the nature of film as a voyeuristic art form, explicitly know that he plans to construct their gender performance, aligned with stereotypes, so that they read as gay. Because this is so explicit, I decided to make the string with which the puppeteer is directing the Kurt/Ram figure thick and easy to see. Later on, I will discuss how this is in direct contrast with my artistic choices for the other side of the visual.

The Audience: Sherwood, Ohio

The public nature of gender performance is what led me to decide to include a sort of audience in my movie theater style visual. As Butler theorized, gender performance is always public and therefore is received by and interpreted by others outside of oneself to mean something. In the case of Heathers, JD’s construction of Kurt and Ram’s gender performance is received by the townsfolk of Sherwood, Ohio and interpreted to mean “gay.” Since this is an essential part of the process, I had to include it somehow in my visual. I did this in two ways: 1) I included the “Welcome to Sherwood Ohio” sign, and 2) I placed a map of a city that could have similar demographics and layout to Sherwood where the audience would sit in a movie theater (and does on the other side). The two aspects signify the townsfolk, and their placement signifies that they are the public that receives and interprets Kurt and Ram’s gender performance.

Heathers Itself

While all of this going on explicitly within the narrative of the film, the same process happens in the production of films. Production teams construct gender performance for their characters through costuming, dialogue, and other formal aspects of film in order to have audiences perceive characters as being of a certain sexuality just like JD did with Kurt and Ram. One specific example of this is Kurt and Ram’s masculinity.

The Kurt/Ram Figure: Heterosexist Jock

The production team behind Heathers focused on constructing Kurt and Ram’s cisgendered heretrosexist masculinity mainly through the characters’ relation to women and homosexuality. The ways in which the two characters engage with women, through objectification, and homosexuality, through attempting to terminate it, in the homosocial space are essential cues to their normative heterosexuality for audiences.

In Relation to Women

The objectification of women is essential to the cisgendered heteronormative brand of masculinity Kurt and Ram perform, and a large part of this objectification is banter and sexual jokes. According to Easthope, the pleasure of dirty jokes “is related to scopophilia…Pleasure in looking can become the pleasure of talking about sex, and the dirty joke is a convention which allows that” (124). Dirty jokes and banter allow men an outlet for the pleasure they take in sex and women’s bodies. However, as Easthope writes, “[the woman] is the butt of the joke, she and her sexual pleasure are passed between the teller of the joke and [those who are listening] as an object…” (125). It seems that an essential act in the construction of this particular brand of masculinity is the objectification of women.

In the film, Kurt and Ram have a multitude of exchanges that exhibit this behavior. The two are constantly discussing women in terms of sex and sexual favors, but one moment stands out. Kurt and Ram are in the cafeteria eating when the Heathers and Veronica enter. Of course, this triggers a significant amount of discussion about desired sexual escapades with the Heathers and Veronica. During this, Ram says “I want to get a Heather and put her on my Johnson, and just star spinning her around like a goddamn pinwheel” to which the guys all laugh while Kurt and Ram fist bump (Heathers). This objectification of women in a homosocial environment gives Ram the pleasure of discussing sex, while it also robs the Heathers of their agency, making them objects passed between Ram, Kurt, and the others at the table.

As far as my visual goes, I illustrated this by painting a vagina on the Kurt/Ram figure’s hand in order to show the ownership of women’s bodies that is so essential to Kurt and Ram’s cisgendered heterosexist masculinity, pairing it with the quote cited above.

In Relation to Homosexuality

Homosexuality has been painted as the enemy of modern masculinity like Kurt and Ram performed, and many of the reasons scholars look at for this are rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, as Easthope points out. According to Freud, masculinity and femininity exist inside all of us. The cisgendered heteronormative masculinity presented in media, Easthope argues, has no place for the internal femininity, however (104). Therefore, it is the enemy and must defended against somehow. Homophobia then, as he theorizes, “strives manfully to eliminate its opposite, the thing which causes it” (105). It is the externalization of the need to expel the feminine within, which is why it is characteristic of cisgendered heterosexist masculinity.

While Kurt and Ram never encounter anyone who explicitly out as gay, the two after often very homophobic towards other men who they feel threaten their masculinity. The repeatedly insinuate that JD is gay when Veronica seems like she may be interested in him. He posed a threat to their masculinity because he might take away a conquest opportunity from them. Most of all, however, they torment two unnamed students that they consider to be geeks. In the second depicted encounter, one of the students steps on Kurt’s foot. Ram calls him a geek, and the student turns around and says, “sit and spin,” holding his middle finger out (Heathers). The insinuation of homosexuality from this retort drives Kurt and Ram to violence. They chase after the student, hold him down, and force him to say “I like big dicks” rather violently (Heathers). The fear of the feminine within themselves from the insinuated homosexuality triggered Kurt and Ram to retaliate with homophobic-remarks-driven bullying.

I had a difficult time figuring out how to depict something so complex in my visual. However, in the end, I decided upon painting a crossed-out pride flag overtop of the mannequin’s heart to show the rejection and fear of the possibility of homosexuality because of inner femininity as well as the line that prompted what I quoted above: “say you like to suck big dicks” (Heathers).

The Puppeteer: The Production Team

As I said at the beginning of the “Heathers Itself” section, film production teams are purposefully constructing the gender performance of characters just like Kurt and Ram’s as I analyze it above in order to make characters present as being a certain sexuality. The production team used homosocial spaces and relationships as a medium through which to produce public acts of masculine performance that objectified women and were homophobic. Similar to as was on the side depicting JD’s staging, I have a puppeteer holding strings attached to the Kurt/Ram figure on the right side of the visual. This is to illustrate that construction. However, the string is nearly invisible, unlike that on the other side. I purposefully wanted to juxtapose this invisible string next to a thick string in order to show that the construction done by production teams is not so explicit. Because of suture, films do not encourage viewers to critically think all the time. Heathers does because it is satire, but that is not the case with most films. Knowing that gender performance of characters in films is constructed with a certain cisgendered heteronormative ideological goal in mind is important.

The Audience: Movie-Goers

Of course, given that certain goal of having the audience correctly assume the desired sexuality for a character based on constructed gender performance, the audience is the essential group that received and interprets characters’ gender. Given that this side deals with production teams constructing the gender performance of characters in films, the most logical audience choice would be actual movie-goers. They are the public witnesses in this case. I included this in my visual two ways, much like I did for the other side of the visual’s audience: 1) a “now showing” movie poster and 2) movie theatre seats in the audience space. These elements indicate the general movie-going population as the public receivers and interpreters.

The Medium

I mainly chose this shadow box/diorama as my medium because I wanted to challenge myself in creating something outside of just writing, but as I did more research, the medium seemed to click with the topic really well. The structure easily lent itself to the thread of performativity I have throughout my project

If I had had more time and more resources, there are many additions I would have made the visual part of my project.

• Primarily, my two “audience” sections would have been more realistic. While I am happy with my Heathers audience, I am not as happy with my audience for JD’s staging. I think that, given more time, I might create the town in 3D from an aerial view.
• I also feel uneasy about the inconsistency in the symbolic use of nakedness. The Kurt/Ram figure in JD’s staging is clothing-less for a purpose—to show the sexualization of Kurt and Ram by JD so that they fit the gay stereotype as were believable as gay from the cisgendered heterosexist cops and the rest of the town. The Kurt/Ram figure on the Heathers side is just as naked, but there is no meaning behind the nudity there. Rather, I was unsure how to address it and did not give myself enough time to do so.
• Lastly, I was unable to come up with five different poses for the Kurt/Ram figures (three for JD’s staging and two for Heathers) to correspond with each of the points I address like I had initially intended to. This is because of time constraints as well as the lack of mobility and the shape on the mannequins.

Regardless of these additions that I could not make, I am still very pleased with how it turned out, especially given how big of a project it was. I think through my visual and written element, I was able to illustrate how film production teams construct the gender of the characters in their films in order to have the audience perceive a certain sexuality through my analysis of Heathers.

Works Consulted

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York : Routledge, 2006.

The Celluloid Closet. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffery Friedman, HBO, 1995.

Cover, Rob. “Bodies, Movements and Desires: Lesbian/Gay Subjectivity and the Stereotype.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, Mar. 2004, pp. 81–97.

Doty, Alexander. “Queer Theory.” Film Studies, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 146-150.

Easthope, Anthony. What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture, Unwin Hyman, Inc., 1986.

Hannah. “Judith Butler Explained with Cats.” BinaryThis, 23 May 2013,
https://binarythis.com/2013/05/23/judith-butler-explained-with-cats/ .

Heathers. Directed by Michael Lehmann, performances by Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, New World Pictures, 1988.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Wayne Koestenbaum. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Columbia University Press, 2016.

Smelik, Anneke. “Gay and Lesbian Criticism.” Film Studies, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 133-145.

Weiss, Andrea. “From the Margins: New Images of Gays in the Cinema.” Cinéaste, vol. 15, no. 1, 1986, pp. 4-8.