The camera is the roving gaze that supposedly belongs to that stereotype of a lascivious young, straight boy, drinking in crotch and butt shots, titillated by the pointless moans that accompany the camera’s irritatingly pornographic caress. The question that remains: is Bayonetta enchained to the pseudogeneric male player?įor a long time I felt she was.
Put another way, it’s her nakedness as nudity, a fluid expression of her character that hides nothing and yet retains the performative aspect of nudity. She performs, and that performance is at once nudity and nakedness.
The performance is the thing, and that is what makes Bayonetta playfully straddle the nude/naked line. But if, in Berger’s phrase, “nudity is a form of dress,” Bayonetta is shown wearing it with pride. When her clothes dissolve into nudity during her most powerful combos, it can seem as if she is at once “a nude” and simply naked-Bayonetta. This is the line Bayonetta walks, for she is at once represented as expressing herself through her performative combat and outlandish costumes, as well as being put on display for the benefit of the player. In art critic John Berger’s pathbreaking book Ways of Seeing, he analyzes the long tradition of the female nude in Western art, distinguishing the majority of nudes from a few paintings in which women are “naked,” explaining the distinction thusly: But to leave it there would be to ignore the emotions the games provoke, particularly in women players, and Bayonetta’s own character as an elegantly presented dominatrix: the performative half of a sexual universe. A case could be made that argues Bayonetta is never shown exercising her agency but that it is, rather, a just-so story to garland her presentation. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.So much is made of Bayonetta’s “agency,” the counterpart cliché to those who opine on her bending to the “male gaze,” to answer that all-important question: is Bayonetta’s unquestionable sexuality hers or simply a performance for men? The answer (or at least a part of it) reveals a good deal about the very nature of sex.Īgency, firstly, must be communicated in the art’s rhetoric rather than presumed or projected onto the subject. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.