Transformer Her I Hardly know Her.

           Surprise, Surprise, I also have a love for Transformers. I think it has strong themes of the cost of war, environmentalism, and what exactly leadership is and how it can be best used. But a friend of mine, when we watched one of the movies, pointed out how the only female robot in the film was so feminized in comparison to the male robots. This made me think heavily about gender in the Transformers universe. For starters, the simple issue of girl transformers is they often fall into the tropes of female characters that are written for boys' media. There are exceptions to this rule, but the expectations are not the rule. This trend of having female cybertronians be in feminized robot bodies, though there have been growing expectations. I think my best example of this is the movie Transformers Rise of the Beasts; in the film, we are given Arcee, whose design is a chest plate that resembles a woman's chest, human-like thighs, an unarmored midriff, and a feminine face. In contrast, Bumble Bee in the film only has a few masculinizing features: a crotch guard and a broad chest. With Arcee, I could easily tell you that she was the girl character, but if you told me that this Bumble Bee was a boy or a girl or non-binary, I would not be surprised. Now, I want to start off by saying I don’t think all feminized robot designs should go, but I think that the designs should be less gendered with more non-gendered features. A great example of this is the Bumble Bee Movie Arcee. Her chest area is more blocky, their lower legs do not resemble those of humans, and their midriff is no longer exposed. This design has an equal amount of robots and girls needed to be understandable. There also just needs to be more female characters with a verity of body types and male characters with more feminized bodies. This could mirror the real-life variety of gender we have on Earth. Another important question is why the cybertronians have a gender that gender similar to ours. For this, you can have an interesting conversation about the performance of gender amongst a race that has no biological incentive for it. I do like to think that perhaps when the Cybertronians came to earth they may have learned about gender and perhaps ingrained it into their own culture and how they thought of themselves as when cultures collided, they often take from how they observe the other and how they are observed and when they are observed as male or female or other they might link to that identity or battle against it. So why is this important. Gender is a complex topic especial in todays environment. It is often tied to sexuality and sexual drive transpeople are tied with sexual deviance when in actuality their gender has nothing to do with their sexuality. I think that Transformers maybe a great place to observe this as these robots have gender but no sexual drive. They may have romantic drive but the species has no equivalent to sex so these relationships are purely romantic. Thus gender to these beings are and can only be performance which reflects humanity in how our gender is truly only performance.

Thank you so much for reading. As my Christmas break nears it’s end I will have to slow my output from two post a week to one. This also means that my story will come out slower. I hope you all enjoyed it and will click on for the next chapter.