ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 turns to the feminist demand for female sexual pleasure and freedom. This chapter considers how Outlander and Westworld rework conventional erotic coding to push back against aesthetic practices that privilege the male gaze in the depiction of nudity, sexual pleasure, and rape. Westworld does this from an intersectional perspective. The first case study examines how Outlander centers female sexual desire and pleasure, and de-eroticizes rape, as illustrated in two key episodes. One constructs a female gaze that is egalitarian and erotically effective. The other explores the trauma of male-on-male rape from the perspective of the assaulted without eroticizing it. The chapter analyzes how Outlander pushes back against the facile use of rape, but also considers its limitations, including its heteronormativity and whiteness. The second case study explores Westworld, which does a more ambiguous job of centering female pleasure, while it is more ambitious in its construction of female antiheroes and its inclusion of Black leading characters. The chapter analyzes the dynamic tension in Westworld between fetishizing female nudity and de-eroticizing it, between exploiting male violence against women and female violence against those who exploit them, between the show’s blind casting and the intertwining narrative arcs of three featured Black characters who take power in what is essentially a slave uprising. Westworld’s deconstruction of the male gaze establishes the racial nature of that gaze, and how crucial it is to mechanisms of social control and punishment.
