Core Post #3 - Erin Cooney

I'd never seen any of the Terminator movies before, but I had a great time watching Terminator 2 in class, largely thanks to my own extremely self-indulgent interpretation of the movie. Obviously this interpretation is nonsense and has no real connection to the source material, but I chose to read Terminator 2 as being about queer families, specifically a cool lesbian finding a trans robot dad role model for her trans son. Again, no real reason for it, other than that Sarah Connor and her fashion sense definitely have a queer energy. The trans part is reaching even more, but I do think there's an argument to be made that all robots are trans on some level; I'm not sure it's a good argument or an argument we should make, but it's an argument! Anyway, it's a fun interpretation, and doing the readings with this in the back of my mind was definitely interesting, particularly when I hit the part in the "Hard Bodies" reading about the Terminator arguably having "given birth to the future of the human race" (160).

The argument about motherhood that Sarah Conner presents in the movie, that this article references again here, wasn't my favorite, mainly because forcing a one-to-one connection between birth and motherhood is definitely transphobic (the article suggests her speech is a feminist critique of masculine/male attitudes around birth, which, it's not quite that!). I also have no interest in taking the article's suggestion that the Terminator is a good mom and being like, "See??? I was right, he's trans!!", because that also is pretty rough re: transness, but I am going to make the argument that the only way that the movie's commentary on masculinity would actually be interesting instead of vaguely terrible would be if the Terminator was actually a cool trans role model/dad to a John who is also trans. Then I don't know that it would be sidelining Sarah's character in the same way, or at least not with the same impact around gender (the article suggests John's response to Sarah's speech about men not understanding motherhood/reproduction is a "putdown of Sarah's feminism," but, not if he's trans!), and white cis dudes wouldn't get to feel essential in the same way that the article argues this movies makes them feel. Anyway, that's not the movie we got, but it (or some version of it--transness sure doesn't clear up the rest of the article's argument around race if the trans people are still white) would be neat to see, in my opinion. It was hard not to think about transness and trans potential when reading this article, when it was explicitly discussing bodies, disconnect with bodies & bodies as failing an individual, along with the article's slightly insufficient reading of gender and reproduction in this movie.

But now that I've briefly rewritten Terminator 2 (sorry I keep blogging about transness and nothing else! oh well), the article was interesting for its actual/more direct argument as well. The specific political argument was interesting and offered a valuable perspective into the context moving from Reagan to Bush within which these 80s to 90s action hero shifts were taking place. Injecting heart and a family focus into these masculine characters may not actually make them better around gender, or politically--instead it just gives them a new way to reproduce masculine authority and masculine value within a shifting context, seems to be the argument. And I am going to hit transness just one more time to mention that even this conversation about the issues around centralizing and putting value into masculinity necessitates a critique that reminds us that not all masculinity has the same power. Queer masculinity, trans masculinity, women's masculinity, different racialized masculinities, it definitely misrepresents the power that people with those experiences have (i.e., not a lot!) to lump that into a general view of masculinity; cis straight white man masculinity is the one with the real hegemonic power, something that this article probably best unpacks around race but doesn't fully consider within other (or multiple) different dynamics of oppression and power. Anyway, it was a cool and valuable article; the critique of Beauty and the Beast was especially interesting to be put into context with these other more traditionally action-hero movies. And I'm excited to finish watching Terminator 2 and discover just how much I can force queerness into this movie!