So, did someone say Portal and feminism?
I’m neither intellectual enough to write this academically nor creative enough to relate this in a fic, so here is some semi-organized brainspawn.
For the purposes of this post, if I refer to men as group disparagingly I’m talking about them as extensions and symbolic representations of the patriarchy, not as individuals. I don’t hate men.
Also, I do not agree with the tenets of second wave feminism. While my history of feminism 101 course was a formative part of my youth, I’ve since learned much about feminism that I try to apply to my own politics and opinions. So, connecting Portal to second wave feminism is not a wholesale endorsement of it.
Caroline. She’s a white, probably middle-class woman who is in her youth in the 50’s and 60’s. She has a career that is typically gendered (secretary), and the little canon information we have about her seems to show us that she is accommodating and hardworking (“Yes, sir, Mr. Johnson!), as a woman in her position would be expected to be. But as people much more analytically inclined than I am have pointed out here, Caroline actually uses her situation to her advantage, and occupies one of Aperture Science’s most influential roles.
So she is the perfect person with which to begin this allegory for second wave feminism.
She is not a doting housewife, but she is doing “women’s work”, and she is using her “””submissive””” position to influence the world in significant ways.
But then, suddenly, she is given power  when she is used to create GLaDOS.
In order to keep the historically oppressed women GLaDOS from starting a riot dispensing neurotoxin, the scientists (mostly represented by men in Lab Ratt and Doug’s art) hook her up to some cores.
The cores are supposed to suppress her personality by forcing her to adopt traits that are not native to her.
They ingrain these traits that are not hers into her in order to make her behave and submit. They try to shape and mold her personality into something it is not.
Let’s take a look at these cores.
There is morality core, because (white) women are supposed to be good and kind.
There is curiosity core, who is childlike because women are supposed to be childish (which feeds into paternal patriarchal feelings).
There is cake core, which literally just reads off recipes, because do I even have to explain?
And there is anger core, because women are irrational and overemotional.
The men in Caroline’s life perceive that she has power and have to stop her from using it by making her believe that she has to be these things she is not and forcing the traits on her.
Note that this power she has is now explicit overt power, rather than the power she managed to get by being close to Cave. That is the power that threatens men.
So Caroline goes from “knowing her place” as a woman to having power and threatening men, to being silenced by having a formulaic femininity thrust upon her with the cores.
And sexism cuts both ways! The cores that destroy Wheatley, that corrupt him, are traditionally “masculine” traits: macho bravado, factual rationale, and intrepid pioneerism. The expectations of masculinity destroy the “male” core. Â
It isn’t a perfect metaphor. It isn’t a perfect feminist narrative. But there are definitely traces of feminism in the story and characters that are important because media matters.
This is not a definitive essay post, it is the beginning of a conversation. I haven’t even mentioned the power of having a (possibly disabled) woman of color as the hero of a game, or what it could mean that she strips GLaDOS of the expectations that the men have put on her. I haven’t matched up the dates to feminist movements. I haven’t talked about how the narrative surrounding two fully fleshed out women is feminist. But Portal is undoubtedly a feminist game.
