I’m someone who tends to be a bit behind the times when it comes to movies and television shows. If a show or movie has a lot of hype, I’m even more likely to push it to the back burner and refuse to watch it. (My rebellious spirit tends to manifest itself in the most tedious of ways.) I remember seeing a preview for Brave a few years ago and being extremely excited. The scenery! The music! Billy Connolly! My Scotland-loving heart was all a-flutter for the first Disney movie that featured accents other than American or English ones. Not to mention the bow-wielding heroine at the movie’s center with her jealousy-inducing mass of red hair that required an entirely new illustration program to create and control. I immediately hunted down and downloaded the song featured in the trailer (Julie Fowlis’ “Tha Mo Ghaol Air Aird a’ Chuan,” in case you were curious) and then all but forgot about the movie.
Fast forward to just a few months ago. While everyone else was high on Frozen (or actively trying to get their children to stop watching it every single day), I was finally watching Brave for the first time. It lived up to and surpassed all of my expectations. It’s not difficult to fall in love with Merida, a princess who’s continually trying to shirk the strictly gendered expectations pressed by her mother and is willing to risk her mother’s life in order to avoid being betrothed to one of three suitors. It’s also not difficult to see why people insist that Merida is queer. Roger Ebert even went so far as to call Merida “a sort of honorary boy”-- more on that later.
The speculations of Merida’s queerness prompt me to ask: “Does a lack of conformity to gender expectations signify queerness?” Although the men appear to be the leaders in the society that Merida inhabits, the actions of her mother indicate the importance of the Queen’s role and explain her policing of Merida’s actions. If they were not royalty, it’s more than possible that Merida would have been able to engage in her archery, horse-riding, and marriage-shirking without many complaints, making it unlikely that the question of her queerness would ever be raised. In addition to the fact that her social status caused an increased level of behavior policing, the main factor leading to suspicions of Merida’s queer status is the widespread belief that specific behaviors belong to a single gender. Is Merida’s attachment to her bow (despite the protests of her mother) an indication of her desire to be a boy? I think Susan Pevensie and Katniss Everdeen would object to that.
The clearest signal of there being a chance that Merida is queer comes from her blatant dislike of the idea of being betrothed to any of the three young men presented to her. This also shows a flawed popular belief: if a young woman does not want to get married, there must be something wrong. The easiest explanation for Merida’s willingness to use magic (that was not fully explained to her) on her mother in order to avoid betrothal is that she must have no desire to marry any man, and is therefore queer. It’s not difficult to think of other explanations, the first being that she is somewhere around 13 years old and honestly shouldn’t be expected to want to get married to anyone any time soon. And her options weren’t particularly spectacular: a weedy young man (a modern-day geeky teenager), a large lump of a man who seemed to only speak a Gaelic dialect entirely different from Merida’s, and a physically attractive man prone to throwing fits when he fails at something.
The ambiguity that allows for the possibility of Merida’s queerness is a major asset for Brave because it allows every single viewer to project themselves onto Merida. Maybe she is queer, maybe she’s straight, maybe she’s asexual, maybe begins to identify as a trans man at some point after the movie. We don’t know. And if the gods are on my side, there will never be a sequel that cheapens Merida’s undefined sexuality. At the end of the day, Merida doesn’t need to be considered an “honorary boy” because her hobbies and avoidance of marriage don’t define her gender or sentence her to life as a spinster. Perhaps we should examine our own ideas about gender and sexuality and question why we feel the need to define the sexuality of a 13-year-old animated character, before we project our simplistic ideas on her. What really matters is that I, a queer feminist, can identify with Merida on so many points -- and you can, too.
