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Clothes Minded: G.I. Jane and the Reappropriation of Male Power
In downtown Chicago there’s a clothing store with largely emblazoned letters on all of its windows that says, “In the professional world, man is judged on the basis of his appearance.” At first I was appalled, on the grounds that the “professional world” is at the exclusion of women and at the superficiality of such a statement. Upon further interpretation however, this slogan became completely consistent with G.I. Jane and my obsession with drag kings. Jordan O’Neil, at once a name that lacks gender definition, is inducted into the “professional world” of the Navy SEALs and must perform the most convincing drag show of her life. The object of the SEALs, and arguably all military branches, is to produce “real men,” emphasizing the notion that gender is a construction, something which can and must be produced in order to perform certain roles and functions within society. Jordan fulfills the role of manifesting masculinity in a female body, much in the ways that drag kings do, both to illustrate the superficial nature of conventional masculinity and to question the purportedly “natural” privileges and power that come from being male. The fact that Jordan succeeds in passing for/becoming a “real man” in the SEALs threatens the entire hegemonic system of masculinity and confirms the body as a site of contestation for both gender construction and institutions of power. As Judith Butler said, “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. Indeed part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary” (Gender Trouble 338).
Jordan’s breasts are her one crux in constructing herself as masculine (can somebody please get this girl a minimizing bra?), as they are continually on display and incapable of concealment, even on the movie’s cover. An example of this vulnerability is when she first enters the mess hall, nipples erect as antennas searching for a signal, and one of the men stands up and yells, “Doesn’t she know it’s not nice to point?” Even later on in the film with shaved head and body muscled and scarred, Jordan’s breasts are her token of femininity, constantly reminding the men she is training with that she is in fact a woman and if a woman can succeed in the military, then their masculinity and the entire foundation of gender hierarchies will be come crumbling down. The only other marginalized soldier, McCool, attempts to stand up for Jordan, perhaps because his masculinity is also called into question, though on the basis of racial and not sexual difference, and how that “difference” is detrimental to the training and to society at large. It also seems significant to note that both Jordan and McCool are the ones who save Urgayle, their commanding officer, from the evil, ethnic Libyans at the end of the film, proving that even those who don’t fit the bill of traditional notions of masculinity can succeed in performing its tasks.
In the context of drag, drag kings are often marginalized in mainstream popular culture and queer communities in comparison to drag queens, their “female” counterparts. This is possibly because drag queens, while parodying gender in similar ways to drag kings, illustrate the utterly fake and superficial aspects of femininity—press-on nails, gratuitous gowns, caked-on make up, etc.—and the lack of power and agency that constitute the female gender in a patriarchal society. Because Jordan (and many a drag king) can and do pass as men, both on stage and off, they are in essence reappropriating the power and privileges associated with masculinity. “All the trappings of authority, hierarchy, order, position make the man, his phallic identity: ‘if the penis was the phallus, men would have no need of feathers or ties or medals’” (qtd. in Heath’s “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade”). The crucial “Suck my dick!” scene is when Jordan asserts her phallic potential and when the other men finally come to accept and applaud her masculinity. Ironically, in this phallic assertion that finally gives her acceptance into the male dominated hegemony, Jordan effectively—like a drag king brandishing a newly polished dildo—disavows the symbolic power of the penis, that sacred fount of masculinity, by recontextualizing it as a farce, as a joke that any woman could tell better with just a little less hair and a good minimizing bra.
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