On Agency: Strong Female Characters, the Myth of Non-Action, and Jupiter Ascending
By now you’ll have heard the “Jupiter Jones doesn’t have agency” criticism of Jupiter Ascending (dirs. the Wachowskis; 2015).[1] The gist of the argument, as far as I can tell, is that Jupiter doesn’t have agency (or enough agency) because she does not become a “strong female character” until the last possible second. Andrew O’Hehir, for example, wrote in his Salon.com review that Jupiter has less female agency than any character ever played by Doris Day. Compared to this movie, the Disneyfied feminism of “Frozen” and “Brave” and “Maleficent” feels like Valerie Solanas’ “SCUM Manifesto.” Peter Debruge wrote in Variety that [although] clearly conceived as an empowered female heroine, poor Jupiter spends most of the movie being kidnapped and shuffled from one unpleasant situation to another, whether that’s being nearly assassinated during an egg-donating operation or pushed into a marriage with a two-faced Abraxas prince. Sam Maggs wrote in The Mary Sue: When I hear “Mila Kunis black leather space princess,” I want to see her bulked the hell up, Emily Blunt style, kicking ass and taking names. We don’t get to see Kunis looking really cool until the very end of the film, at which point I wanted way more of that. Which, I guess, means I would pay for a sequel. The most damning claim about Jupiter’s agency, however, comes from Tim Martain’s review for The Mercury: There’s a little test I like to apply, where you try to describe a character without reference to their physical appearance or occupation. If you can come up with three clear character traits, then you may have a well-crafted character. If not, well, you have a cardboard cutout. Jupiter is a big ol’ flat piece of nothing. She is a name and a device, nothing more. Her character is not developed in any way beyond “special girl who everyone is fighting over”. She is Cinderella with even less motivation or personality. In other words, Jupiter isn’t even a person. She’s a thing. Because she is passive. Because she doesn’t fight (until the very end). Because she is manipulated by others. Because she is a toilet cleaner. Because she is everything other than a “strong female character.” One must ask: why does Jupiter need to take names? Why can’t she just be a space princess? Why can’t she simply get sucked into a world where space princesses are real and people like her (like us) have to learn to navigate the absurd bureaucracy of space royalty? Why can’t she be a confused, naive person like, well, a real person might be? Why isn’t that enough for her to have agency or for her to escape the charge that her agency is nearly absent? Why can’t this also be a story about someone discovering or developing a different kind of agency? Isn’t that enough? Frankly, I’m not sure these individuals understand what “agency” means. At its most basic, “agency” refers to one’s ability to take action to affect their own lives; as such, agency exists on a continuum that is affected by social status, culture, upbringing, economics, and so on and so forth. The degree to which we all have agency, in other words, depends on how well equipped we are to affect our daily lives. Agency can be individual, collective, immersed within or isolated from a specific dominant culture, and so on. In other words: agency is pretty damn complicated, as is clear when you start to look into the sociological, psychological, and feminist struggles to adequately define the concept in a way that incorporates the full range of social interactions. For women, agency has been a key component of the feminist fight for equality. Since the world has historically (and still is to a large degree) favored men in nearly every avenue, women’s access to “choice” in its broadest conception has always been curtailed. Worldbank notes that “across all countries women and men differ in their ability to make effective choices in a range of spheres, with women typically at a disadvantage” in the avenues of control over resources, free movement, decisions about family formation, freedom from violence, and freedom to have a voice in society and politics. Oppression does not necessarily mean that one loses all agency, though. Indeed, how one exerts influence can take myriad forms, including subversive actions within an oppressive situation. Women in violent, patriarchal societies do not lose agency simply by being oppressed; their abilities to affect their own lives, however, do change, limiting the degree of agency they might have, or, in some cases, simply changing how agency is perceived. Lest you think only overt oppression can steal one’s agency, remember that we are all to varying degrees limited by social, economic, and other factors. Some of us, such as myself, just have more advantages — in my case because I am white, male, American, and educated.[2] But in a world where pop criticism often stands in for professional criticism, the buzzword definitions are replicated ad naseum. Women who punch bad guys or take direct action against oppression or in some way “act” in a manner that makes them visibly opposed to a system or individual or in a position to “make things happen” are women who have “agency.” Every other woman? Well, she might have “agency,” but not enough that her agency is worth talking about, except to note that she doesn’t have any (or very little). If she subverts the system, her agency is only valued if her subversion is aggressive. Passive subversion won’t make her “strong.” If anything, “passive” is just another word for “worthless” or “oppressed.” These limitations on “agency” are so pervasive that they affect how we even talk about female characters, particularly when the term “strong female character” crops up. Sophia McDougall’s essay in the New Statesman (“I Hate Strong Female Characters”) points out that the phenomenon of the “strong female character” seems particular to women: No one ever asks if a male character is “strong”. Nor if he’s