By Abby M. Dubisar, Iowa State University

Madeline Gillette’s video project, “4 Reasons Why RoboCop Should Be Considered a Feminist Icon” invites audiences to reconsider where we find feminism in popular culture. As an instructor I have a habit of asking students to look for “productive tensions” that spark and fuel popular culture production and analysis. The productive tension Gillette creates from the moment audiences read her title is the provocative notion that RoboCop, the film and character, are invested in gender equity and destabilizing the patriarchy. Gillette’s video is also effective as critique delivered as a commentary vlog through YouTube and worthy of the widest possible audience since it smartly uses a variety of collage and remix techniques to mobilize the intriguing notion that RoboCop is invested in engaging conversations about gender and power.

Gillette’s video is exact in its precision, inspirational and invitational to audiences, and subtly hilarious while also very serious. She made it in my “Analysis of Popular Culture” course English 275), a class that introduces students to a range of ways to do rhetorical criticism of popular culture. The assigned reading on feminist criticism comes from our textbook, Barry Brummett’s Rhetoric in Popular Culture and the section on feminist rhetorical criticism is brief, but there. Through Brummett’s introductory lens students have no trouble identifying popular culture texts that invite feminist criticism since popular culture is full of narratives that denigrate women and show how the patriarchy shapes relationships on screen.

Other texts we read and watched that modeled feminist criticism include Tamika Carey’s Signs article, “Take Your Place: Rhetorical Healing and Black Womanhood in Tyler Perry’s Films” and an article I published with six students in a previous iteration of this same course. We published our collaboration in Computers and Writing: “Haul, Parody, Remix: Mobilizing Feminist Rhetorical Criticism with Video” (2017). In that article my coauthors and I argue, “video composing can subvert, or critically remix, the power dynamics of mainstream popular culture as well as facilitate students’ desires to write against sexism and enact intersectional feminist identities” (52). A few years after we published our work, students like Gillette continue to buttress our point. Because our university also offers a course on gender and sexuality in American popular culture, I am aware of not overlapping the courses and thus feminist criticism is only a small part of the English 275 course I teach, yet a big part of the projects that students produce.

The video itself uses a variety of techniques to accomplish its goal: collage, using existing memes to establish exigence, editing images to include RoboCop in events motivated by widespread endorsement of sexism, clips that support claims, combination of text and images to firm up the argument, music to evoke emotion, and a clear and direct narration that establishes Gillette’s ethos as a RoboCop expert and feminist critic. Including all those techniques, and more that viewers can locate in the video, shows how Gillette made the most of the remix assignment and illustrates the engaging ways that video mobilizes rhetorical criticism.

As is mentioned in the video, Gillette wrote about RoboCop for the analytic debate assignment that comes before the video assignment in the course so her video shows how ideas can evolve and be scaffolded in multiple assignments. To accomplish the debate, students choose a primary source, a popular culture “text,” and create three personae that are experts from different styles of rhetorical criticism. These experts debate how and why the source text is persuasive and meaningful. Gillette composed hers in the form of a podcast.

For the video project, aspects of the feminist critic’s perspective from the debate were expanded to drive the single-argument focus of the video assignment, scaffolding those two projects to sharpen the claims and make them more specific. The final project notably fulfills my intention that students can create work in my courses that relies on their popular culture literacies as well as the critical tools I teach. Gillette’s project is also an example of a student making meaning through their identity as fan/expert in order to expand audience members’ knowledge on that source text and move the text into a new critical space. I respect how Gillette takes on a debatable argument, supports it with claims, and puts forward a concept that other pop culture critics can use, the idea of stealing icons from misogynists to position them as heroes invested in feminism.