With the release of the second trailer for the upcoming Wii U exclusive title Bayonetta 2and the beginning of Drag Race Season 6 on the horizon, it feels like the right moment to comment on the politics of femininity within video games. While plenty of digital ink has been spilled on the topics of how best to represent women in video games, not nearly as much has been said about how to talk about drag queens in video games, mostly because there are so few. But what if Bayonetta, perhaps one of the loudest examples of hyper-femininity to grace our digital landscapes, wasn't female? Or, rather than posing this as hypothetical, let's make it a statement. Bayonetta is a drag queen.
Bayonetta's gestures are not that of a “real” (note the scare quotes) woman but of an uber-woman. Her hips sway too much when she walks, while she shoots she her gun she is still stomping on down like the battlefield is a runway, her movements are over feminized (limp wrists and hair tosses are superfluous). Her eyebrows are super-plucked and her make-up never runs no matter how wet or sweaty she may get. Every special attack ends with a pose in front of an imagined camera; every combo ends in a less-clothed hero, every move accentuates her legs or breasts or butt. Her entire body is hyper-feminine, her legs are too long, her head is too small, her breasts are too big for her tiny waist to carry. (This is not body-shaming, this is simply pointing out anatomically incorrect character design.) Bayonetta's confounding usage of secondary sexual characteristics (hair that covers her body) only adds to this gender-fuckery.
That is not to say that Bayonetta is a biological man posing as a woman, in fact what she carries between her legs has little or nothing to do with the conversation, as any transgender person will tell you. Rather, if we focus on Bayonetta's ostensibly cartoonish depiction of femininity rather than her biological status (already an absurdity, she is a video game character, not a real person), it becomes clear that she is less of a “strong female character” than she is a performer of femininity, a female impersonator rather than a “real” woman (as if the category of “real” woman weren't tenuous enough). This necessarily complicates our responses to her as a female or female-performer, being that her outrageous attire, her overzealous sexuality, and her satanic charms are criticisms and/or homages to womanhood rather than a nefarious depiction of the female sex. Bayonetta is a not a sexy female, she is a critique of sexy females.
If considered as such, Anita Sarkeesian's blasé analysis of the series, which focused largely on the manipulative, and (of course) misogynistic aspects of the advertisement campaigns of the game (which had viewers strip off parts of Bayonetta's clothing to reveal her naked body) feels a bit naïve. Sarkeesian is an insightful enough critic to warn the audiences of the inevitable ambivalence inherent in her critiques: just because a game is misogynistic or racist at some points doesn't mean it isn't fun or insightful at others. Similarly, Sarkeesian warns in another video-essay of a sort of ironic “hipster” awareness that knowingly or winkingly adheres to a misogynistic trope, but does nothing to actually break the stereotype. In Bayonetta, we seem to have a complex text which Sarkeesian is not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to.
If Bayonetta is a drag queen then Sarkeesian's analysis of the game's tired rehashing of ultra-sexualized femininity on display for the male gaze breaks down. Bayonetta's actual body proportions and high-drag styling, along with her impossibly contortionistic movements (oh yeah, and that part where she vogue-battles herself) suggest that this is not a woman solely on display for male titillation but a careful deconstruction or a realness (but never reality) of femininity. Bayonetta should be considered a meta-cultural critique rather than as an example of the ills of misogynistic gamer culture.
Of course, this does not completely exonerate the game from criticism. If we are to take on a kind of bell hooks logic, the game presents a minstrel show of femininity, pointing out the inherent stupidity of the opposite sex. Nor am I, a cis-gender male, necessarily in the position to be able to discuss what is or is not offensive or oppressive to woman-kind. It is similarly difficult, if not impossible, to not be made at least a little uncomfortable by the game's concluding credits, which have our eponymous anti-hero dancing on a stripper pole. Nonetheless, these kinds of second-wave arguments feel a bit simplistic, as if drag performances were simply mean-spirited assaults on a marginalized population. Any avid Drag Race fan knows this isn't how a typical drag show works. Drag queens celebrate the feminine as much as they mock it.
Bayonetta displays a prominent problem in media and culture: is it possible, in mediums made (predominantly) by heterosexual males and (predominantly) for heterosexual males to have a powerful female character? And if that character is too powerful, does she then spill over into a kind of pejorative camp territory? Will video games and comic books always suffer from an inherent misogyny? Have there been or are there any truly strong female leads that do not somehow give in to fetishistic or exploitative representations of women? Does this essay only complicate the question by referring to the powerful female character as a female-impersonator, thus robbing her of some kind of essential womanliness and turning her into a kind of camp joke rather than an example of “authentic” power?
