Received this from one of my students yesterday. He knows that I collect images of dead women--in fact I have a whole "slide show" of them which we viewed in class. As a gender scholar, I am interested in the politics of representation; in other words, what does it mean that we consistently connect vulnerability and mortality with the female?

One usual response appeals to nature: well women are weaker than men, so there's nothing odd in picturing women that way. Several issues need to be addressed here. First of all, men are just as likely to die as are women. In fact, men die sooner, if we want to get statistical about it. So it would be "natural" to associate males with mortality rather than females. Secondly, in comparison to other primates and to our ancestors, human women are nearly identical to human males in terms of body size and strength. Obviously there is sexual dimorphism--men and women have different physiologies--but we are not very different. On average men are only 15% bigger than women. That's not much, especially when you consider that the Australopithicus, "Lucy" being our most famous relative from that species, had a whopping 50% difference in body size between males and females.

Now that's statistically significant!

And yet we continue to surround ourselves with images of women in states of desperation and death, denying the obvious evolutionary history in which females have emerged as towers of strength, growing larger over time even as males have ceased to. There's a fundamental disconnect between media representations and reality, which wouldn't bother me if everyone knew this. But yesterday in a class discussion some students were rationalizing the heteronormative narrative of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, in which the lead female goes from independent to happily wed to a brute, by appealing to nature. Their "this is how it is and always has been" argument that displays a lack of historical understanding, an inability to separate fantasy from reality, and--consciously or unconsciously-- a willingness to maintain current ideological structures.

And yet a student from that same class noticed that horrific poster for Quentin Tarantino's new movie and sent it along to me. No longer will he passively view images like this, assuming it's natural to portray the exposed female body, to associate the female with death, to enjoy sadistic images of women being mutilated. His consciousness has expanded. As far as I am concerned, that is the point of education. I am honored to be a part of the process.