Female Focalizers and Masculine Ideals: Gender as Performance in Twilight and The Hunger Games

Abstract

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2008) and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series (2008–2010) have been hugely successful and influential texts, both as best-selling literary works and as action movie franchises. (To avoid confusion, Twilight and The Hunger Games in this essay refer to the first volume in the respective series, while Twilight and The Hunger Games refer to each series as a whole.) In their literary form, there are numerous parallels between the value structures of the two narratives, suggesting that they are expressions of certain common cultural value-schemata. One striking aspect of both series is that their young female narrator-focalizers spend much of their time negotiating the predator/prey binary. While the narrative trajectory of Twilight’s main protagonist Isabella Swan propels her from the position of prey at the start of the series to that of powerful predator in Breaking Dawn (2012 [2008]), The Hunger Games’ main protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, is forced to straddle both sides of the binary simultaneously as a contestant in the Capitol’s deadly Hunger Games. Both heroines are busy negotiating their status relative to a traditionally masculine ideal. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performance, this essay examines the performance of gender in the two series relative to both feminist theory and to theories of the masculine, discussing how gender scripts in the two texts interact with generic scripts such as those of romance and the boys’ story.