Boys, Girls, and Monsters: Regulation of Normative Gender in Supernatural
Abstract
Supernatural, a cult phenomenon currently in its tenth season on the CW, is about
Sam and Dean Winchester and their heroic journey across a Gothic horror landscape of
things that go bump in the night; as Dean puts it, “Sweetheart, this ain’t gender studies.”
Yet while the creators may not have intended it to be as much, popular media texts
always contribute to the construction of hegemonic norms. A close reading of Seasons 1
through 9 reveals that Supernatural is in fact built upon the bedrock of binary sex-gender
identities. Through both individual characterizations and narrative structure, Supernatural
presents detailed portraits of idealized maleness and femaleness the depend on mutual
exclusion and the subordination of female characters to the male ego ideal embodied in
the Winchesters. Most interestingly, Supernatural also features a host of inhuman
characters, through which emerges a third portrait of monstrosity as that which threatens
the integrity of normative male and female identities.