Introduction

Much of the current landscape of feminist epistemology concerns itself with hermeneutical injustices. While this line of thought has been evolving for decades, after the publication of Miranda Fricker’s 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, particular attention has been directed towards conceptual gaps (hermeneutic injustice) and the undervaluing and underestimating of oppressed groups as sources of knowledge (testimonial injustice).[1]

The resulting discourse focuses on theoretical or conceptual knowledge—what we might call, for simplicity’s sake, knowing that. By contrast, it is harder to philosophize about more embodied, practical, even emotional knowledge—or what we might call knowing how. Specifically, I want to examine the phenomenon of embodied knowledge that has been illuminated by Iris Marion Young in “Throwing Like A Girl” (1980). Here she describes what I like to call a phenomenological inequality, in which women are socialized to experience their bodies differently from men, namely through both physical and psychological inhibitions that, in turn, affect the dynamic between our embodiment and our agency. This results in a dissonance between what we know, i.e. that we have the same rights and entitlements and freedoms as men, and how we feel: we are not treated the same way, nor do we feel safe or confident that we may act as though we should be. Here is a different kind of epistemological problem: we know that we are subjects, but we do not necessarily know how to embody that knowledge.

This kind of practical knowledge, or know-how, is not something that can simply be addressed intellectually. Instead, we need practical interventions. While there is no single point of entry, in this paper I argue that film can offer us one possibility.[2] Counter to prominent lines of thought in feminist film theory, Mad Max: Fury Road offers an example in which not only are women not objectified, but are actually agent-ified across the film’s different dimensions: from character and plot through to the overarching imagery and cinematography.

I take a Cavellian approach to film theory: an approach that understands that any good theorizing about film must answer to the experiences of the actual audience. Any audience member can claim the status of critic, and in claiming what matters to her about a film and her experience of it, she does not only speak for herself, but also for us. Her claim about what matters in a film is also about what matters, full stop. In so doing, the critic invites the reader into a dialogue about how we understand and experience film.[3]

What I offer here is far from exhaustive. Instead, by reflecting on my experience of watching Fury Road, my aim is to begin a philosophical dialogue about this film, and to open a broader conversation about representational possibilities for women.

Phenomenological Inequality:

It is uncontroversial to say that in the past century or two, feminists have achieved significant material gains in opposing systemic oppression. We (in Western countries, anyway) no longer question whether women are entitled to an education. Many women in my home country of Canada have had the right to vote since 1918 (with Quebec finally catching up by the 1940s).[4] Women have been technically entitled to equal pay since 1951.

And yet. Women are still regularly underpaid, often fail to achieve leadership positions, are sidelined into extra administrative work, and the list goes on. As traditional work in feminist epistemology and elsewhere has shown, a huge part of this stems from the myriad of ways women are perceived as less capable. Yet this material disparity between genders perpetuates not merely a material inequality, but also a phenomenological inequality. Women are ostensibly equal, and technically entitled to the same things and the same treatment as men. But it doesn’t follow that we know how to embody that knowledge.

In “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980), Iris Marion Young argues that the ways we are socialized into our bodies has a direct impact on how we experience our subjectivity. Specifically, she argues that women are encouraged from childhood to take up less space than men, which in turn inhibits their very sense of autonomy and agency.

Her paper is a response to anthropologist Erwin Straus’s analysis of why eleven-year-old boys use their full range of motion when throwing a ball as compared to girls of the same age who do not. At a loss for biological facts in which to ground this observation—after all, at that age, both genders are physically similar—his rather underwhelming conclusion is that the cause is a “feminine attitude” that informs girls’ proprioception. In short, Straus, a credited social scientist, is quite happy to gesture vaguely at something as metaphysically flimsy as the ‘feminine essence’ in lieu of any further investigation.

Unsurprisingly, Young finds this explanation rather dissatisfying. Examining such a basic feature of everyday experience, she argues, will also shed light on more general, overlapping daily experiences of those who identify as women. Her focus, in other words, is material social construction, rather than something biological or metaphysical.[5]

Strauss focuses on young girls, but Young proposes that this kind of inhibition carries over into adult feminine comportment: our strides are shorter, we sit with our legs closer together, and unlike men, who spread their chests and arms, women often cross their arms over their bodies in a protective gesture, carrying items like books against their chests while men swing them along their sides. We often do not put full effort or range of motion or force into pushing or lifting weight. In fact, before action even begins, women anticipate that they will be weaker, more fragile, less capable than their male counterparts. We are nervous about our bodies, we sit above or outside them, as though they are a tool we do not feel confident wielding.[6] In short, Young argues that there is a feedback loop, a connection between how we feel about ourselves and our capabilities, and our ability to execute tasks in space. Yet, when women release this inhibition, they are often surprised at their own ability.

To organize her analysis, Young appeals to some basic tenets of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological framework. For Merleau-Ponty, agency is experienced within the body rather than separate from it. The feeling of moving through one’s body rather than upon it is central to his understanding of subjectivity. For him, our bodies always contain possibilities for action. This goes hand in hand with what he calls “intentionality,” a sense of “I can” in relation to our specific surroundings. Even when we are not moving, we have a sense of how we might move, and what we could accomplish in moving. Furthermore, we don’t think of moving in a disjointed way; rather, we reach out and grab something in a unity of movement. My sense of myself is not merely of a body, but that of an actor within a space that surrounds me, an agent in the world, allowing for what Merleau-Ponty describes as “transcendence.” My agency, in other words, isn’t just about my thoughts, or my body, but extends outwards from my body into my very environment.

By contrast, women are taught to be constantly aware of their bodies, to be cautious of them, wary of them, protective of them. This, in turn, creates an obstacle to pre-reflective awareness. Instead of simply experiencing ourselves as actors, we experience ourselves (perhaps more strongly) as things that can be acted upon. We project both a sense of “I can” and a sense of “I cannot” at the same time.

Young’s point is not that women are “naturally” this way as a function of biology or some mysterious “essence”; rather, in her view, our socialization leads to these ways of relating to our bodies and our environment. Women are not as encouraged to do sports, nor are demanding physical tasks expected of us. We learn to sit with legs crossed, learn to comport ourselves, tilt our heads, and gesture in feminine ways. To not do so is to risk harsh criticism, harassment, and even assault.  Three decades before Young, Simone de Beauvoir had expressed the same frustration: “Everything influences her to let herself be hemmed in, dominated by existences foreign to her own […] once again: in order to explain her limitations it is women’s situation that must be invoked and not a mysterious essence” (de Beauvoir 1989 [1949], 713-14). This bodily reality permeates down to our very sense of self, creating a tension between immanence and transcendence. For our safety, we are expected to anticipate how we are seen and thus how we might be treated. In fact, women are often explicitly made to feel responsible for preventing attacks on them, something for which London police were heavily criticized after advising women to “stay inside” after the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 (Goodwin, 2021). We cannot relax into a fuller sense of our agency, lest we be attacked, and then later, blamed for the very attack we were unable to prevent.

Representational Oppression:

It is routine these days to refer to the “male gaze” in critical discussions of cultural production, particularly those surrounding cinema. Originally coined by John Berger in his series Ways of Seeing, and further popularized by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the term refers to the way men are encouraged to be active lookers, while women are relegated to be objects that are looked at. The result is that any audience member, regardless of gender, is positioned within the male gaze. As such, films anticipate the male gaze, catering to it, and normalizing the implicit expectations therein.

Mulvey’s examination revolves around film, but the concept can easily be applied beyond filmic canons. The term offers a lens through which to better understand representations of women, who often find themselves at the mercy of men, even as these representations encourage us to internalize the male gaze, revealing the tension between appearance and reality. In his 1972 book Ways of Seeing, art critic and theorist John Berger echoes de Beauvoir’s observations in order to explain the cultural foundation of the concept:

A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. […] By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what cannot be done to her. […] The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must constantly watch herself. […] And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. (Berger 1972, 46)

The split-consciousness Berger describes was named by W. E. B. DuBois in the context of Critical Race Theory as “double-consciousness,” in which the oppressed internalize the gaze of the oppressor. They are thus rarely, or perhaps never, entirely in their bodies or in their experience without some parallel awareness of how they might be viewed. The “male gaze,” then, is not a purely external force; it forms part of women’s very sense of themselves, forming the core of the phenomenological inequality they experience. This phenomenological inequality results in concrete consequences: women inhibit and censor themselves before anyone else even has the opportunity.

Far from a curation of neutral depictions of what women “are really like,” the traditional and filmic canons naturalize a socially constructed gender reality. Take, for example, Berger’s distinction between nakedness and the dominance of the “nude.” He argues that most women portrayed in Western art are nudes: they are portrayed not for their subjectivity, but for their servility. Often, they are depicted looking outwards, towards the spectator (usually the artist or the owner of the painting) implying her submission to him. These women are valued for the status they bestow on the viewer, and their ability to arouse him, rather than as individuals with any subjectivity to speak of. To be naked is to be “seen without disguise,” whereas “to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself” (Berger 1972, 54). By contrast, when we show women as imperfect beings—that is to say, as human—we subvert a long history of what we might call “representational oppression.”

The relevance of Berger and Mulvey’s analysis has spilled out into countless other kinds of filmic critiques. Women’s objectification is starkly illuminated by the Bechdel-Wallace test, first illustrated by Alison Bechdel in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For in a 1985 strip entitled “The Rule” (Hooton 2015). The test is a basic barometer of the ways in which women are portrayed in mainstream media. For a film or series to “pass” the test, there need to be two named women characters who speak to each other about something other than a man at least once during the story. Despite setting such a low bar, most films fail. The upshot is clear: women’s significance in film is nearly always derivative of and subordinate to the male protagonists.

Mulvey worries that in identifying with the camera’s perspective, we too are inevitably drawn into the objectification of the female characters, taking pleasure in women as bodies as objects. While Mulvey may not be arguing for the impossibility of reversing this seemingly inevitable objectification, the implication underlying her work is somewhat fatalistic.[7] Alison Bechdel’s test further reinforces the ubiquity of this objectification. A pressing question, it seems to me, is: can we extricate ourselves from this pernicious feedback loop and, if so, how?

Mad Max: Fury Road is one such film that resists catering to the male gaze. In so doing, I argue that not only does the film liberate its characters from the status of objects, it provides an intervention into the feedback loop that forms women’s phenomenological inequality.

Representational Liberation:

The following remarks form a discussion not only of what I think matters to the film, but also about what matters to me about my experience of watching it. Fury Road not only shows that women are subjects rather than objects, but also show women how to be empowered subjects. It does so not merely through its content, which includes both its characters and the construction of its plot, but also, significantly, through its narrative form, use of imagery, and cinematographic techniques. The film is purposefully in dialogue with women’s historical representation, while inviting the audience to see those tropes in a new way.

The action begins several years after the fall of civilization. The world has been reduced to desert-like conditions, hostile to life, not least because the tyrannical despot Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) of the fortress Citadel has a monopoly on everything, including their very access to water. Branding it “Aquacola,” he renders it his commodity which he owns and he alone distributes. The plot of the film is satisfying in its apparent simplicity: Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), one of Immortan Joe’s lieutenants, is sent on a mission in her armoured War Rig to extract gasoline and ammunition from the nearby Gas Town and Bullet Farm. Unbeknownst to Joe, Furiosa is trying to rescue five of his (enslaved) wives, stowed away in the rig, and her real mission is to get them to ‘The Green Place,’ Furiosa’s utopic matriarchal ancestral home. Upon discovering this, Joe leads an army in pursuit of her, calling on his fellow despots and their armies of War Boys.

The world-building is elegant, constructed indirectly, illustrating the situation and the stakes through setting and character. There is very little dialogue in this two-hour long adventure. In short, most of the drama amounts to a good old fashioned car chase.

My personal experience of watching this film is relevant, but significant also in its contrast with how I felt beforehand. Heading down to see it, I was, frankly, feeling cranky. Later that summer I would discover that my iron levels had dropped low enough to generate several now-familiar to me symptoms: irritability, low-energy, sensitivity to light, clammy hands, and feeling out of breath. The symptoms parallel anxiety and are easily confused with it. Anticipating that I might be easily over-stimulated, I alerted my friends that I might have to leave the theatre if I felt an anxiety attack coming on, and that they shouldn’t worry. I was there with three men, all of whom were eager for the gritty, fast-paced action film they were about to see. I didn’t want to ruin their fun.

Not only did I remain rooted in my seat for the entire time, but when we emerged, I felt elated. The anxious energy I’d entered the theatre with had dissipated. In its place, I felt energized and strangely powerful. Three hours earlier, I’d been ready to go home. But now, I felt excited to go out, to talk about what I’d just experienced, to spend the rest of the evening fighting through the downtown crowds. By contrast, my formerly eager male companions were overwhelmed, cringing at the bright sunlight, easily startled by the passing sirens. They were ready to go home, but I rallied the group and we headed to a nearby bar. Meanwhile, the reversal intrigued me: what had just happened? What had that film just done to our respective nervous systems, and how? Furthermore, did men get this sense of empowerment currently pulsing through me all the time?  

If someone had told me that on a scale from one to ten, about ninety percent of the action would be pitched at eleven, I would have assumed that would be too intense to watch, and furthermore, narratively flat and uninteresting. It certainly wouldn’t have seemed, from the bare description, to be my “thing.” Certainly, the film was widely heralded as excellent by mainstream (and, incidentally, almost exclusively male) reviewers. Anthony Lane of The New Yorker called it a mashup of “Titus Andronicus” and “The Cannonball Run,” adding: “Enjoy the movie, but for God’s sake don’t drive home” (Lane, 2015). Anthony Oliver Scott of The New York Times said "it’s all great fun, and quite rousing as well—a large-scale genre movie that is at once unpretentious and unafraid to bring home a message." (Scott, 2012). Meanwhile, Mark Kermode of The Guardian liked the film but echoed my friends’ experience when he referred to its pace as “an orgy of loud and louder, leaving us alternately exhilarated, exasperated and exhausted” (Kermode, 2015). Good reviews, but tempered. And yet not simply my own but women’s reactions in the general public were not just positive but also deeply emotional.[8]

To illustrate this, I will share what many women have reported on blogs and social media.[9] A user named Kim commented underneath the Bad Bitches, Trashy Books review:

So, I wasn’t sold on watching this movie. I saw the trailers and most I felt was ‘meh’. Husband was stoked. Then the reviews came out and my friends went. The articles about MRA’s came out. And I went to see it in IMAX.

I f*cking loved it, for all the reasons mentioned above. So now I’m telling everybody to go and see it and I’m contemplating going again.

BTW, I don’t know about any of you, but I had no tangible idea of time while watching the movie. Like, has it been 30 minutes or 90 since the beginning? You tell me.

LovelloftheWolves adds:

I too was hesitant when the first couple of trailers came out but then when all the articles came out singing its praises I knew I had to see it. My BF and I rode our bikes (as in, bicycles and not mot[o]rized vehicles) to the theater and back, and riding back was a THRILL. We wanted to put sound stuff on our tires so we could sound COOL.

Beth not Elizabeth wrote:

I saw this movie opening day. After the sandstorm when there is literally the first quiet moment the entire theater said “WHOA”. I had to remember to breathe.

And I’m taking my neighbor to see it tonight, then I’m taking my mom to see it tomorrow. I will not stop until everyone I know has seen this amazing movie.

You know how much I love this movie? I will pay a babysitter so I can go see it. That is true love. (Carrie S. 2015)

Their words strike me as profoundly relevant. The excitement about the film, wanting to describe it, and share it, is evident. But in the second account, note the description of how she felt on the ride home—this isn’t merely excitement, this is a sense of feeling free and capable in the world, in a way that she describes as no less than ‘a thrill.’ When I originally read Merleau-Ponty’s words about transcendence and unity, there was something about them that eluded me. As someone socialized as a woman, I am so often aware of how I am seen that trying to get a sense of myself and my desires as separate from how I am being seen can seem like navigating a maze. But in the hours after experiencing this film, those words made sense. I had had a new sort of experience of my body, and of myself. Something that seemed no less than transformational.

That the film had a strong impact on me and on others is evident. By why this film? After all, while female-centred action films aren’t the norm, they exist. From Alien to Terminator 2 to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Charlie’s Angels, we are seeing women increasingly in lead action roles. (More recently that list extends to Wonder Woman and Atomic Blonde, neither of which had been released when I viewed Fury Road in 2015.) Pinpointing the reasons this film had the energizing effect on me that it did is more difficult, and admittedly subjective, but worth attempting.

Let me begin with the characters. While Max’s (Tom Hardy) name features in the title of the film and he is along for the ride, he is decidedly not the focus: Furiosa is in the driver’s seat of this story. Theron’s character, whose shaved head and attire recalls Ripley from Aliens, also has a visible disability: she has a prosthetic attached to her left upper arm. The captive wives all have distinct personalities and possess clear strengths, weaknesses, and desires.

Max’s PTSD flashbacks are, in contrast with Furiosa’s visible disability, an invisible one; nevertheless, he is depicted as calm and capable. Even their captive war boy, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), emerges as a three-dimensional person over the course of the story, someone capable of affection and compassion. His sacrifice at the end isn’t the result of the self-serving intention he started with—the glory of Valhalla—but comes from his desire to protect the women he has come to see as people. Within Furiosa’s crew, no one’s value rests, at any time, in any way, on their sexual appeal.

The depth of the characters is crystallized in their development over the course of their trials. The stow-away wives have been imprisoned presumably for their entire lives, but are pointedly not objects in this film. Traditionally beautiful as they are, they are also scrappy, and angry, and resilient. They don’t know how to do much, but they are willing to try. Reload a gun? No idea what they’re doing but they’ll learn as they go.

There’s something very relatable here. I have no idea how to load a gun either. So I get the experience of watching a woman who, having no idea how to perform this task, especially under the novel pressure of a combat situation, persists anyway. She fumbles at first—dropping the ammunition, trying again and again. There is something deeply human about this kind of scene; something so imperfect in a genre where we’re used to witnessing our protagonists seamlessly loading and discharging weapons with an ease and accuracy that is—while admirable—unrealistic. By contrast, the moments of fallibility depicted in Fury Road brought me into the action, and the satisfaction of watching them finally succeed was invigorating—I felt, vicariously, like I had succeeded too. 

Meanwhile, the relationship between Max and Furiosa evolves while remaining grounded in practical collaboration, presenting a man and a woman working together without any hidden romantic or sexual agenda. Instead, they each provide what they can. When he needs water, she offers it. When she is injured, he gives her blood. When Joe is gaining on them, Max takes two shots, missing. Seeing that Furiosa is more likely to succeed, in a stunning move he defers to her, offering his shoulder to stabilize her gun.[10]

The film does a remarkable job depicting how these characters make do with what they have. The pace is non-stop: just as they solve one problem, another one emerges. They do finally find Furiosa’s people, only to learn that the Green Place had long ago succumbed to the desert conditions and is now a wasteland. Furiosa collapses in despair, until Max and the women convince her not to give up, but to turn back and continue to fight.

The film further deploys imagery in self-conscious ways that both acknowledge and subvert the male gaze. First, it is worth remarking on what the film refrains from showing. American author Saladin Ahmed tweeted: “Fury Road is an R-rated movie with a sexual slaver yet Miller & co. didn’t feel the need to include a rape scene. #GameofThrones” (Ahmed, 2015). In other words, the violence against women is strongly implied but rarely depicted. It is clear enough from the set-up that the wives are the targets of egregious sexual violence given their desperation to escape; any rape scenes would have been gratuitous, undermining the effect the film had on the audience.

This is a point I often find myself explaining to those who would argue for depictions of violence as contributing to a work’s “realism.” As de Beauvoir and innumerable other feminist critics have pointed out, women already live with the sense that we are targets for violence. Far from neutral depictions of “reality,” rape scenes can be harrowing, and often triggering, for many audience members, distracting from the storyline and the adventure. Beyond simple affect, in most cases such scenes not only depict women being violated, but in doing so merely to quickly advance the plot or provide some affective motivation to a male hero. In other words: moments of violence which do phenomenological harm to female audience members are inserted merely for structural purposes, then tossed aside. The violence is used rather than addressed in a move that somehow manages the disgusting feat of objectifying a moment of objectification.

This technique is so ubiquitous that it has a name: “the refrigerator woman.” Originally coined by Gail Simone in 1999 within the context of comic books, the term refers to a female character who is brutally harmed (often murdered) in order to advance the journey of the hero (Romano 2018) The trope has existed for thousands of years, but the coining of the phrase allowed the critique to gain traction in the last two decades. In an article on Deadpool 2, Aja Romano and Alex Abad-Santos draw a line between the classics to more recent iterations:

An adjacent device is the hero’s overwrought reaction to the threat of violence — often sexualized violence — against her: Witness the abduction at the center of The Iliad, which leads to a war on behalf of Helen of Troy, or Odysseus’s rage in the climax of The Odyssey when he kills all of Penelope’s potential suitors.

The threat of sexual violence against a female character drives the plot of several Arthurian legends, as well as the plot of the first novel in the English language, the 1740 epistolary novel Pamela, and most classic vampire tales of the 19th century and beyond. It also drives the desolate quest at the center of John Ford’s 1956 Western masterpiece The Searchers; the list could go on and on. (Romano 2018)

One of the most recent and extreme culprits is, as referenced by Ahmed, the series Game of Thrones. In this context, refraining from such depictions is thus a more conscious choice than including them, and the omission is one of the subtler ways that Fury Road subverts mainstream norms.

Of course, there are more obvious ways the film does this. In fact, Fury Road constantly alludes to traditional representations of women while turning these images on their head. The scene where Max first encounters Furiosa and The Wives illustrates an established trope in folklore and mythology: Actaeon witnesses Diana bathing, Orpheus encounters the Maenads, Hercules the river-nymphs. The most famous among these is the scene where Odysseus meets Nausicaa and her handmaidens doing laundry. Max is thrown from one of the convoys in the desert and meets Furiosa and the Wives drinking from their hose. In Nausicaa’s case, she sees Odysseus as a potential suitor, and offers her help. Meanwhile, Furiosa and Max’s relationship goes in a very different direction.[11]

First of all, Max’s lustful gaze isn’t fixed on the wives, but on the water.[12] In contrast to Odysseus, who is initially struck by Nausicaa’s beauty, Max isn’t interested in the women’s bodies: not as objects to be retrieved, not as objects of his desire, not even as things to be saved. He is dying of thirst, and he needs to drink. Furiosa and Max fight, which ends in a stalemate, where Furiosa grudgingly throws him the water hose. The relationship is distinctly not romantic, but they establish themselves peers, and the result is a reluctant partnership. In stark contrast not only to the story of Nausicaa, who sees Odysseus as a suitor, but also with (among others) Ariadne’s cunning aid in the execution of Theseus’s mission, Furiosa is the one leading the rebels, with Max assisting.[13] Fury Road thus announces itself as a very different kind of story: no gallant hero is rushing to rescue damsels in distress. Instead, we have a woman, Furiosa, saving women: Max is just along for the ride.[14]

In another example, as Joe gains on their truck, Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) opens the door of the truck, presenting her pregnant belly as a human shield. She looks at Joe defiantly, daring him to risk his property (his child) in his attempt to reclaim his property (his wives). This image, I submit, is in dialogue with a long history of the nudes of which Berger writes. Splendid’s pose is similar to that typical of an odalisque, the familiar pose of a woman reclining, barely clothed, and submissive. The meaning of Splendid’s pose, is, however, quite the reverse.

In a related move, Cheedo (Courtney Eaton) weaponizes the ways the war boys see her as fragile as she feigns helplessness to solicit help to board their truck. They continually anticipate this male gaze, one in which they appear fragile and helpless, so that the war boys underestimate them, only to prove that assumption wrong again and again.

Another example comes when they reach Furiosa’s people. Our first glimpse is a woman screaming for help from a rig. The scene evokes yet another moment from Odysseus’s journey: the Sirens. Part bird and part human, the Sirens lay in wait to enchant sailors with their hypnotic songs, luring them off course and ultimately to their deaths. While her screams form a jarring contrast to the seductive force of the Sirens’ song, it’s a clear instance of how women in Fury Road harness the male gaze to protect themselves. As one who doesn’t invoke the male gaze, Furiosa sees through it and disarms the trap. She identifies herself, and women previously positioned as snipers race down the dunes on motorbikes to welcome her into the fold.

While the camera subverts the male gaze, it is also worth briefly mentioning some particularities of cinematographer John Seale’s technique. Most action films consist of quick edits of un-structured shots, filmed shakily by a hand-held camera. As an audience member, this generates a feeling of being out of control, both emotionally but also practically, since one doesn’t get a sense of my place in time or space within the action. Seale, however, uses filmic techniques that allow the camera to maintain the centre of the frame as the focal point of each shot (Nedomansky 2015). This allowed me to follow the action without it feeling jarring or disorienting. I felt grounded, and so the thrill of watching the action unfold wasn’t undone by a sense of fear or overstimulation.[15]  

Recall Kim’s comment that she had quite literally lost a sense of time while watching the film. My own experience was similar and suggests this effect of being swept up in the action. I didn’t feel like an observer so much as I felt that I too was a part of the adventure. Furthermore, this sense of being carried along while not losing a sense of place leaves many with a sense of empowerment. LovelloftheWolves’ comment that her ride home from the film on her bicycle was a “thrill” evokes a sense of freedom, play, and excitement that goes beyond addressing Young’s concern about women’s inhibition. It also brings to mind a contrasting passage from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex:

At eighteen T. E. Lawrence took a long bicycle tour through France by himself; no young girl would be allowed to engage in any such escapade […] yet such experiences are of incalculable influence: through them an individual, in the intoxication of liberty and discovery, learns to regard the entire earth as his territory. (de Beauvoir 1989, 712) 

Of course, LovelloftheWolves’ perspective was that of someone riding alongside a man, and doesn’t quite indicate the sense of transcendence de Beauvoir lamented women not achieving, but it does indicate an elation and empowerment in the act of riding a bicycle that is also not the common experience of those of us with female-coded bodies.

Finally, I want to turn to the crux of the film. Halfway through, as the group finds Furiosa’s people, they think they are on the cusp of reaching the Green Place. Instead, they learn that it dried up long ago, and that they had unknowingly travelled through it, as it had become barren and contaminated. Her people are now nomads, refugees of sorts. Despite all she sacrificed to get them here, the escape she sought simply doesn’t exist. Initially Furiosa despairs, then devises a plan to go farther afield, across the salt. Fearing for their resources and the futility of the proposal, Max suggests that the way home is not to keep running, but to go back to the Citadel. At first, the group is incredulous but eventually everyone agrees.

This move strikes me as powerful on at least two levels. First, it is an emotionally courageous shift. They are no longer running from their oppressors but turning to fight them. Their agency is being demonstrated now not simply by their ability to subvert or evade the patriarchy or the male-gaze, but to attack it, head on.

Second, it strikes me as a profound metaphor for a lesson that needs to be learned again and again in the practice of feminism. It is easy, and tempting, to wish for a straightforward way out of systems of oppression—that if we can just somehow get outside patriarchy, we could achieve justice. The reality of fighting against these structures, however, must happen from the inside. This process is messy, rife with setbacks, and often feels futile. Yet as much as it may be tempting to imagine feminist utopias, focusing on such a place will distract from the more productive work of fighting each day through an unjust and imperfect system. The project of deconstructing oppression is a long one, and will not be fulfilled in one lifetime. I know this, intellectually. But it can be difficult to maintain hope, and stamina, and courage, to keep fighting when you also know the goal is so distant.

This scene embodies this lesson, reminding us how this kind of knowledge can only be achieved in moments of exhaustion and despair. In the moments we think we have nothing left to give, realizing that we can rally ourselves alerts us to levels of resolve we wouldn’t otherwise recognize. The resulting bravery of the characters is empowering. If these women can find the strength to continue despite terrible conditions, so can I. I feel that each time I watch this film, and the visceral reminder is welcome.

It is also a lesson that creates the very possibility of films such as this one: contrary to Mulvey’s concerns about the futility of depicting women’s humanity on camera, the film itself manages to find creative ways to achieve this very goal, despite the overwhelming historical dominance of the male gaze within both cinema and visual art.

Conclusion:

In The World Viewed Cavell (1979) laments the shift he noticed in Hollywood over the course of the 1960s, despairing somewhat about the interchangeability of the contemporary actors at the time of his writing. I cannot imagine he would even recognize the current state of cinema with its emphasis on franchises and action films, as the infrastructure of public movie-going is more precarious than ever.

Yet something remarkable has emerged—out of a franchise, no less. Despite de Beauvoir’s anxiety about the material impediments to women’s transcendence, Mulvey’s pessimism about the inevitability of women’s filmic objectification, Fury Road offers a window into a filmic possibility whose significance is not limited to the way it intervenes in thousands of years of representational oppression. It also intervenes in the phenomenological feedback loop observed by Young.

Through character, imagery, plot, and filmic technique, the film demonstrates the possibility of viewing women not only as agents but as empowered, embodied agents. As a viewer, I felt viscerally connected to the characters, so much so that I felt I was part of the journey in ways that felt energizing. I emerged from the film buzzing, feeling energy and a sense of possibility, feeling capable of acting upon and within the world. I was experiencing my body, and myself, in a new way. I suspect that this effect is at least partly explained by the fact that I was welcomed into the world of the film, which allowed me to actively feel a part of the action in a way I had never fully experienced. This paper has been an exercise in trying to begin to explain this experience to myself, but it is only a beginning.

As with all experiences, this sense of myself faded as the evening wore on. But it changed me insofar as I am now someone who experienced my body in a new way, in a way I know had a sense power and capacity and energy that I experienced as a unity. My understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on transcendence did not come from reading them, or thinking about them, but from experiencing how that feels. Knowing that such an experience is possible, that I felt it, that I want to pursue understanding and acquiring it—is invaluable information I can take with me.

I am not claiming the film did this perfectly, or that everyone will react as I did. Nor am I suggesting that films like this are the only way to intervene in this feedback loop. I suspect that engaging in a variety of exercises is of crucial importance here, pushing us women out of our comfort zones and revealing our capacity for risk tolerance and strength—martial arts or rock climbing come to mind, for example. Films, however, are more accessible, and within the context of mass production, will easily reach far and wide. Nevertheless, there is not a single intervention that will help reorient women, or all women, in the same way. My claim is much smaller than that: that for a few hours, Fury Road offers us a window into a possibility of finding ourselves on film, and, with it, a way to begin to figure out how to find ourselves in our bodies.

[1] Work on hermeneutic injustice has been evolving for decades, and much work has been done on the topic especially by Black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins. To be clear, I am not claiming Fricker originated these concepts, merely that she popularized them within academic philosophy.

[2] I suspect, for example, other kinds of interventions would be playing sports, learning martial arts, and other kinds of physical activities that develop physical skill and agility.

[3] Here I am following Nancy Bauer’s Cavellian discussion of film theory in her 2015 book How To Do Things With Pornography.

[4] This was, of course, limited to mainly white, Canadian-born, women. Asian women could not vote until 1948, with the inception of the UN Human Rights Act, and Indigenous women didn’t gain full voting rights until the 1960s. For a lengthier account of this see https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/suffrage

[5] She notes that not every woman will fall within the commonalities she investigates, and it is possible that those from other genders may identify, to varying degrees, with them.

[6] “We feel as though we must have our attention directed upon our body to make sure it is doing what we wish it to do, rather than paying attention to what we want to do through our bodies” (Young 1980, 144).

[7] Of course, Mulvey’s observations no doubt ring true with much of contemporary cultural production. But, as Bauer writes, “But not always, and not everywhere. There are still makers of films and television programs, even those with lots of boob shots, who trust the power of the camera to surprise us when it comes to the question of what it’s possible for something or someone to become on film.” (Bauer 2015, 159). She goes on to argue that Lars and the Real Girl is such an example.

[8] There is a related emotional reaction from many men on the internet, calling for boycotts of the film. Aaron Clarey, for example, rants: “[L]et us be clear. … This is the Trojan Horse feminists and Hollywood leftists will use to (vainly) insist on the trope women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength, and logic. And this is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, further ruining women for men, and men for women.” Cited on: https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/05/12/furious-about-furiosa-misogynists-are-losing-it-over-charlize-therons-starring-role-in-mad-max-fury-road/

[9] I selected a few of the longer ones here but you can read them in full at: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/movie-review-mad-max-fury-road/

[10] Almost every discussion I have had with another woman about this film involves referencing this moment precisely because it is so astonishing in its novelty.

[11] Credit for this observation and the parallels to Classical stories listed above needs to be given to Adam Barker at the University of Toronto (Classics dept).

[12] Rheanna-Marie Hall. “Furiosa and the Five Wives: The female body as battleground in Mad Max: Fury Road.” Girls On Tops. Accessed August 2nd 2022. Available: https://www.girlsontopstees.com/read-me/2019/6/27/furiosa-and-the-five-wives-the-female-body-as-battleground-in-mad-max-fury-road

[13] For elaborations on the nature of the myth, see: Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives : Translated from the Original Greek, with Notes, Critical and Historical, and a Life of Plutarch. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859. For a different interpretation see Apollodorus' "Library", E.1.7-11

[14] In fact, he spends much of the film in the passenger seat. It is unusual to see a woman do most of the driving in an action film. In fact, the main moment where Furiosa lets Max take the wheel, it is because she is climbing back onto the side of the truck as it is moving, with a wrench. This shift subverts a larger paradigm of gendered relations in cinematic history but also daily life.

[15] I lack the space within this paper, but there are fruitful discussions to be had here about the relationship between cinematographic techniques and the disjointed phenomenology of oppressed groups. See, for example: Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 

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