“Women need not apply”: Sylvia Earle, binary oscillations, and the ecofeminist rhetoric of Mission Blue

ABSTRACT

Despite its relative compatibility with contemporary approaches to criticism and flexibility in application, few media studies scholars have “taken up” ecofeminism as an analytical framework. This study marshals insights from ecofeminist theory and critical rhetoric to analyze the Netflix documentary Mission Blue. Through its depictions of renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle, the film points ecofeminists and media scholars toward an alternative theoretical position capable of deconstructing power binaries. More specifically, we contend Mission Blue makes use of “binary oscillations.” These oscillations invite viewers to experience shifts between the extremes of a binary when depicting Earle in the film, thereby resisting the urge to see her as fitting into one side of a dualism. Implications of this critical ecofeminist approach and the notion of a binary oscillation are discussed, in addition to the limitations of the film itself in supporting intersectional feminist commitments.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecofeminism
• binary oscillation
• critical rhetoric
• Sylvia Earle
• Mission Blue

Introduction

“Sylvia sails away with 70 men (but she expects no problems),” read the front page of the Kenyan Mombasa Times on November 20 1964. Sylvia Earle, world-renowned oceanographer and conservationist, was starting her life of exploration on a scientific discovery trip in the Indian Ocean. The tale unfolds, along with many others detailing Earle’s life events, in the Netflix documentary Mission Blue. Exhibiting footage of gross overfishing and rampant industrialization, the documentary ultimately functions as a call to action with its explicit invitation to join Earle’s mission creating marine sanctuaries across the globe. Given Earle’s charismatic personality, the importance of ocean conservation efforts, and the stunning underwater visuals, it is not surprising that Mission Blue was generally well received by critics. Justin Lowe (2014), writing for the Hollywood Reporter, called Mission Blue a “documentary that goes beyond inspirational messaging to offer practical solutions.” In another movie review, Kurt Halfyard (2014) notes that whether or not you agree with the film’s message, “it is all clearly and compellingly presented.”

The release of Mission Blue is situated amongst a recent turn by Netflix and others towards the production of environmental documentaries (Helen Hughes 2014; Julia P.G. Jones, Laura Thomas-Walters, Niki A. Rust, Diogo Veríssimo and S. Januchowski‐Hartley, 2019). While some scholars have shown the potential for such films to invoke behavior change amongst viewers with previous environmental commitments (Florian Arendt and Jörg Matthes 2016) and enhance viewers’ perceived connections with nature (Karen Hofman and Karen Hughes 2018), there also exists criticism of the messaging within environmental documentaries (Jason Sperb 2016). For example, Jason Sperb (2016) concluded many nature documentaries carry contradictions, or tensions, within them. As we display throughout the text, Mission Blue also carries with it such tensions, specifically gendered tensions which call forth this ecofeminist criticism into conversations concerning nature documentaries.

While there is a great deal to celebrate about Mission Blue, much of what is presented in the documentary, like Mombasa’s media coverage of Earle’s early excursion, is backgrounded by Earle’s identity as a woman. For example, Jeremy Jackson of the Smithsonian Institute spoke to her divergence from the then-accepted gender norms: “She really broke through the barriers. And for that, every woman scientist […] should be very grateful.” However, some critics responded negatively and argued the biopic contained a performative contradiction. A review published in Variety captures this sentiment: “Mission Blue has fun sending up the dated, wink-wink sexism of such coverage; conversely, however, one doubts the filmmakers here would ask a male quite so many wide-eyed questions about his marriages, or the difficulty of juggling child raising with a busy career” (Dennis Harvey 2014). This contradiction was not initially recognized by all critics, with some praising her for being a “sexy” marine biologist (Daphne Howland 2014).

Given the film’s explicit conservation message and mission, combined with its sometimes-vexing coverage of Earle’s identity as a woman, we turn to ecofeminism as a theoretical framework to inform our analysis. We do this for several reasons. First, we agree with environmental rhetoric scholar Kathleen P. Hunt (2014) that although researchers in communication studies are familiar with ecofeminism, few have “taken it up” (p. 238) despite its relative compatibility with contemporary reading methods and approaches. Second, because “ecofeminism is not a singular ideology, theory, or method” (Richard A. Rogers and Julie Kalil Schutten 2004, 264), it has much in common with “critical perspectives” concerned with understanding and critiquing power relations (Hunt 2014, 237–8). With these observations in mind, we do not simply wish to use ecofeminism to advance a critical reading of this text, but we also wish to use our critical reading of this text to advance scholarly understandings of ecofeminism.

We argue Mission Blue constructs Sylvia Earle as a complex person who is not only a breaker of barriers for women in the environmental sciences but also as someone who does not fit neatly into the gendered stereotypes often saturating the modern media landscape, explored through emergent tropes like the exceptional heroine and the supermom. Thus, Mission Blue points ecofeminists and media scholars toward an alternative theoretical position capable of deconstructing power binaries, a position similar to Val Plumwood (1993) understanding of “critical affirmation.” More specifically, we contend Mission Blue makes use of what we call “binary oscillations.” By binary oscillations, we refer to the way a single mediated text depicts humans constantly shifting between the extremes of a binary, thereby resisting the urge to see humans as fitting into one side of a dualism. To support these claims, we first provide an overview of ecofeminism, its methods, and how these considerations will guide our analysis. We then provide a summary of the film, detailing its context and structure. Next, we present our analysis and findings, exploring Earle’s portrayal in the film as a breaker of barriers and then as a mother and scientist. To conclude, we discuss the significance of the findings for media studies and ecofeminism at large, including a discussion of the artifact’s limitations.

Ecofeminism as a critical perspective

Although ecofeminism is an ever-changing analytical framework containing a variety of methodological assumptions, analytical tools, and theoretical concepts, many ecofeminist approaches share at least one common thread: the general assumption that there are experiential, historical, political, and theoretical connections between the oppression and domination of women and the oppression and domination of nonhuman nature (Julia B. Corbett 2006, 46; Rogers and Kalil Schutten 2004, 263; Karen J. Warren 1990). Ecofeminism is a critical framework. That ecofeminism provides scholars with a critical orientation to power and relationships is a topic of recent concern in communication studies. For Hunt (2014), ecofeminism’s potential to “uncover and dismantle discourses of oppression” (p. 236) is similar to critical rhetoric’s “demystifying function” (Raymie E. McKerrow 1989). Thus, Hunt (2014) argues, “ecofeminism and critical rhetoric share core epistemological commitments, providing opportunity … for fruitful cross-pollination” (p. 237).

With such alignment, we employ methodology from critical rhetoric to perform our analysis: rhetorical critique. At its foundation, rhetoric is focused on the modes of persuasion within a communicative artifact. Thus, with Mission Blue as the artifact, we performed a close reading in which we identified modes of persuasion and how they appeared throughout the documentary, focusing on elements from the overall organization of the documentary to the style of particular phrases selected to appear in the film. The persuasive modes appeared in different forms, from words to visuals to sounds, all forms of rhetoric (Tomás Albaladejo 2014). Specifically, we conducted an ecofeminist rhetorical critique, in which we read the text for key ecofeminist themes and binaries that emerged.

While our method is grounded in ecofeminist themes and commitments, we also believe it is necessary to distinguish our approach from earlier versions of ecofeminism. Ecofeminist tools and ideas today hold much promise for critical analyses; however, early ecofeminism was not without its limitations. As ecofeminist thought developed in the 1980s and 90s, so too did a common pattern where women and nature were assumed to be essentially and innately connected. However, some scholars now caution against ecofeminist practices of “homogenizing women’s experiences” (Greta Gaard 2011). The approach we adopt builds on strands of ecofeminism without assuming there is an essential connection between women and nature. We agree with Gaard that “the history of ecofeminism merits recuperation, both for the intellectual lineage it provides and for the feminist force it gives to contemporary theory” (Gaard 2011, 42–43).

For many ecofeminist thinkers, power is maintained and used to dominate others through the use of symbolic binaries or dualisms (Corbett 2006; Gaard 2011; Plumwood 1993). Because symbols may be used to construct hierarchies where one side of the binary or dualism is constructed as superior to another, particularly in Western-colonial thought, ecofeminism is concerned with revealing how these constructions work and identifying alternative worldviews capable of challenging these constructions. Prominent ecofeminist scholar Plumwood (1993) defines a dualism as “the construction of a devalued and sharply demarcated sphere of otherness” (p. 41). This “logic of domination” (Warren 1990) is thus animated by the pairing of opposites where one side is “us” and “superior,” while the opposite is “them” and “inferior.” Some of the key means of oppression identified within the ecofeminist literature focus on male/female, rational/irrational, or culture/nature binaries, where male, rational, and culture are perceived as superior to female, irrational, and nature. Dualisms are also mutually defining, where one side creates its opposing side through its implied negation. For example, once “rational” is defined with designated and desirable features, what is “irrational” is defined as containing whatever “rational” does not. Or, once the concept of culture is constructed as being “outside” of the natural world, it creates nature as something lesser in a culture/nature dualism:

Dualism then imposes a conceptual framework which capitalizes and splits apart into two orders of being what can be conceptualized and treated in more integrated and unified ways. But dualism should not be seen as creating difference where none exists. Rather it tends to capitalize on existing patterns of difference, rendering these in ways which ground hierarchy (Plumwood 1993, 55).

Because one side of the dualism is privileged, the other becomes “backgrounded.” The backgrounded side of the dualism encompasses everything negated, or not included, within the foregrounded and privileged side (Plumwood 1993, 20). Irrational then contains whatever rational does not, women embody everything men do not, and nature contains whatever human culture does not.

According to Plumwood’s (1993) early typology found in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, one may imagine three strands of ecofeminism. The first is an approach of “uncritical equality” (Plumwood 1993, 27). Scholars of this perspective contend binaries should be dismantled and all things should have equal value, including different genders and different species (Corbett 2006, 47). Plumwood (1993) calls the second perspective “uncritical reversal,” in which followers believe in reclaiming women’s essential connections to nature (p. 31). Both of these approaches have their problems. The former potentially ignores difference (i.e., one may argue men and women have the exact same kinds of connections to nature when that is not necessarily the case) and the latter potentially falls into the trap of essentialism feminists have been combating for years (i.e., women, not men, are connected to the environment and are, thus, the only ones who can solve environmental problems). Plumwood argues instead for a third perspective of “critical affirmation.” This perspective is one concerned with deconstructing and dismantling oppressive dualisms, but in a way that still recognizes differences and avoids essentializing others. Instead, we are asked to recognize and affirm a range of possibilities and identity positions. While theorized in 1993, this typology remains relevant, illustrating unresolved debates in ecofeminism. In this paper, we return to this typology, demonstrating a new “way of doing” critical affirmation in media and ecofeminist critique: binary oscillations.

Although much has been written about ecofeminism from philosophical or sociological perspectives, media scholars have been slower to engage in what may be called ecofeminist criticism. Of course, there are some exceptions. In an article analysing the animated children’s television show, Steven Universe, André Vasques Vital (2020) uses ecofeminism to illuminate how a female character symbolizing water is essentialized, connecting femininity and nature throughout the show. Turning from television to film, in his book Green Screen, David Ingram critiques The River Wild and FernGully: The Last Rainforest, finding two distinct portrayals of women in environmental films: “action heroine” or “spiritual being” (Ingram 2000, 39). The action heroine portrayal appears in The River Wild, depicting the lead woman as the film’s main protagonist. This film arguably falls into Plumwood’s uncritical equality perspective in the sense a woman may occupy the role of the film’s lead as easily as a man, but equality is never truly achieved (Plumwood 1993, 27). Ingram argues the film actually counteracts this powerful, feminist image by placing the woman in a traditional, mother role and by giving the husband credit for the wife’s heroic actions. Further, Ingram highlights where the blame falls for a failing marriage: on the woman (2000, 40). Diametrically, Ingram’s analysis of FernGully shows an “uncritical reversal” (Plumwood 1993, 31) in the ecofeminist trope of a goddess ruler whose responsibility is to be a nurturer, or protector, of nature (Ingram 2000, 41). While Ingram’s work is useful for understanding environmental films, we argue Mission Blue illustrates a more nuanced ecofeminist message, a message closer to Plumwood’s concept of “critical affirmation.”

Mission Blue at a glance

Netflix’s 2014 film Mission Blue was directed and produced by Oscar-winner Fisher Stevens, known for The Cove, and Oscar-nominee Robert Nixon. Prominent in the environmental documentary industry, their partnership for Mission Blue arguably contributed to its popularity. While its primary focus is Earle, the film also stars an ensemble of male scientists, actors, and curators beside her. Interviewing Earle as viewers follow her life story is Fisher Stevens, who met her on a National Geographic diving expedition to the Galapagos Islands. Upon his introduction to the person the New Yorker and New York Times called “Her Deepness,” Stevens became entranced and inspired by her story and personality, which, in short, called the film into existence. After all, having won over 100 honors and awards in her lifetime, who else could be a more qualified and interesting advocate for ocean protection (“Explorers Bio: Sylvia Earle,” n.d.)?

The documentary’s plot moves chronologically: we first see Earle as an outdoorsy child in New Jersey, then as a “geeky” high-school girl in Florida who harbored a love for oceanographers and explorers like Jacques Cousteau and William Beebe. In these early years, circa 1950, the earth and ocean are described and visually depicted as undeveloped and pure, paralleling the depiction of young, female Earle. Like other marine documentaries (i.e. Blackfish) the pristine nature scenes are then contradicted with violence or extinction (Sperb 2016), as the narrative and imagery change, following Earle to Florida State University. Florida becomes a tourist hub, and we see the first signs of negative human impacts on marine life. At this point, the film expectedly turns to ocean conservation. It discusses exploration alongside protection and describes Earle’s short stint as the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The film reaches present-day where, now in her mid-70s, Earle dives a reef in Australia that she once explored as a young adult. After time had passed, the once-vibrant reef was bleached and barren due to overfishing and ocean acidification. This shocking, visual revelation leads us to the film’s conclusion in which Earle invites us to join her mission: to have 20% of the ocean designated marine protected areas (MPAs)—new places of purity, promoted by a woman. This overt appeal also appears in the final credits, where various statistics flash across the screen. After an hour and a half of viewing, the documentary leaves audience members with the following: “You can help protect the blue heart of the planet. Join Sylvia and Mission Blue at www.missionblue.org.”

To analyze this film, we focus on the presence of several key binaries: rational/irrational, male/female, safe/dangerous, strong/weak, nature/culture, and home/work. We do not posit that these are the only binaries one may see in the text, but merely use these as key pairings for explication. In addition, we concur with Ross Singer (2020) that the power dynamics functioning throughout the documentary should be understood from an intersectional perspective. As we shall observe, the text often oscillates between extremes of several binaries and intersectional categories. For our purposes, we examine Earle’s depiction as a “breaker of barriers” and as a mother.

Findings: binaries and oscillations in Mission Blue

A breaker of barriers

Mission Blue depicts Earle, in part, as a breaker of barriers in the workplace–a woman working tirelessly to advance her career. However, as we discuss throughout this section, the film’s depiction of Earle as a breaker of barriers is not inherently feminist; rather, the narrative is sometimes contradictory, oscillating between upholding stereotypes and “breaking through” them. The breaker of barriers narrative begins and is made most apparent, early in the film, when Mission Blue stories Earle’s participation in the Tektite mission to the British Virgin Islands. The mission was an underwater research project led by a group of American universities, and Earle reflected on the unexpected, antecedent barrier to her participating: “I had already been diving a lot, more than a thousand hours, and published a number of things, and it didn’t occur to me women need not apply.” In a Facebook post for International Women’s Day she reasoned, “the form did not make that clear. Most scientists and divers at the time were men but some of us applied anyway. And it caused consternation” (Sylvia Earle 2017). In the film, it is made apparent Earle was already a published, intelligent scientist, yet the research mission accepted her attendance reluctantly. For example, the leader of the mission said, “well, half the fish are female, half the dolphins, half the whales. I guess we can put up with a few women.” This quotation not only reflects the blatant gender inequality at the time of the Tektite mission, but, by applying an ecofeminist lens, we see it also makes visible assumptions about the relative value of women and “natural” animals in relation to their dominant, powerful male and human counterparts. The comparison with other non-human, dominated groups allowed some women to participate in the mission, taking a step towards equality. However, it also equated women with sea creatures, beings often negated and backgrounded by what it means to be human. By associating women with non-human entities, it attempts to devalue the entire gender; they are the ones who must be “put up with.” Further, women in this scenario were not even given the equality bestowed to the sea creatures. Given that half of the creatures are female, if there was true (perhaps uncritical) equality, one would expect half of the researchers on the mission would be women as well. By sharing this information, Mission Blue establishes just how strong a barrier gender stereotypes proved to be. While she was well qualified on paper as an outstanding, rational scientist, societal systems of power restrained her. The depiction of this barrier as being nearly impossible to cross allowed the film to frame Earle as the woman who broke it.

Depicting the moment when the Tektite mission’s inclusion of women is announced, Mission Blue displays the following newspaper headline: “Five gals take the plunge with one hair drier.” In doing this, the film simultaneously criticizes and romanticizes the blatant sexism of the day, implying its inherent comedy in a “good ol” days’ manner. However, in framing the headline as mere humor, the filmmakers neglect to fully analyze and resist its sexism. By associating a hair drier with the women scientists, the headline symbolically establishes a connection between women and vanity, or self-consciousness. This ultimately functions to undermine the argument that qualified women should be present on the trip. More specifically, as a hair drier is associated with electricity, it should not be immersed in water. The image evoked by a hair drier in water is one of danger–electrocution. It is, factually, dangerous and irrational to place a hair drier in water; conversely, it would be rational to keep them separate. These “gals” are framed to represent the bodily world of outer appearances, not the inner world of deep scientific thinking. This headline, and Mission Blue’s failure to fully dismantle its assumptions, perpetuates an ideology in which women are associated with the irrational and are seen as dangerous to “rational” science itself.

Biographical narration of Earle’s professional career shifts to the testimonials and memories of others (notably men), attempting to depict her as a breaker of barriers. In an interview with James Cameron, filmmaker and deep-sea explorer, he described Earle as “a pioneer invading the flannel shirt, bearded oceanographer image. There was a real sense that women couldn’t do this–well they simply couldn’t pick up the tanks … ‘Here, let me help you with that gear, little lady.’” As Cameron describes Earle as a pioneer, her inclusion becomes dependent upon and entangled with the colonial, extractive, pioneering histories of oceanography itself. The stories of such entangled histories appear in the writings of Epeli Hauʹofa (2008) and other indigenous and post-colonial scholars (i.e. Albert Wendt 1982). These histories, however, are left unaddressed throughout the film. Additionally, Cameron refers to the physiological differences between men and women. These differences, as Plumwood (1993) writes, are often underscored to perpetuate a value hierarchy (p. 55) within the scientific realm, where men were (or are) perceived as greater or better than women due to differences in physical strength. Whether or not some women were strong enough to carry tanks, their side of the male/female dualism is, again, defined by what they are not. Therefore, if men are defined as strong, women are essentially not so. Mission Blue, in offering snippets from men like James Cameron, reveals the difficulties faced by women scientists, while also attempting to portray Earle as the clear counterexample, oscillating between sides of the binary. Perhaps, she could not lift the tanks with the same level of ease as her male counterparts, but this had little to do with her abilities as a scientist.

The scene continues, showing more images from Earle’s early career, superficially attempting to flip the implied hierarchy presented by Cameron. Mission Blue plays Lenny Kravitz’s song, “American Woman,” in the background: “American woman, stay away from me. American woman, listen what I say.” This scene seeks to show Earle as unstoppable, even Rockstar-like, as she redefines the stereotype of the American woman with her strength, intelligence, and bravado. Yet, if one listens carefully to the lyrics, this song does not depict a strong, American woman. Rather, the song was originally written by the Canadian band, The Guess Who, to say that American women are “dangerous” (“American Woman by The Guess Who,” n.d.). While Mission Blue overtly used this song as a tribute to Earle and her strength, there was an ironic oversight regarding the song’s actual meaning. Underlying the images of Earle breaking the barriers is a song that implies she did so dangerously, irrationally. She needs to “stay away” from the man and “listen” to what he has to say.

While contradictions and mixed messages are found throughout the film, it resolutely backs the argument that Earle broke through societal barriers in the metaphorical form of a glass ceiling. Cameron characterized her as “invading” the popular scientist stereotype; she invaded the space past the professional condescension, “never understanding the glass ceiling until she was better than everyone.” However, was this the lived experience of Earle or simply a white male (Cameron’s) interpretation from his own positionality? The film here misses an opportunity to include Earle’s perspective on this, instead characterizing her as someone who ignored the ideological gender barriers set against her. This, then, puts forth the argument that in order to break gender barriers, in the 50s and today, one must ignore the barriers themselves. Further, we must consider the position one must be in to have the privilege of ignorance. Notably, Earle’s identity is that of a middle-class, white woman. Would it also not occur to women of different identities and situations that “women need not apply?” Additionally, the depiction of Earle as the individual, exceptional woman in this space may make invisible others on oceanographic teams who facilitated such exceptionalism. Such promotion of ignorance of intersectional oppression and promotion of sole exception within the documentary calls into question the film’s position and potential impacts.

Still, Mission Blue continues to depict Earle as positively shattering the glass ceiling when she was the first woman appointed chief scientist of NOAA, the U.S. government agency overseeing certain conditions of the ocean and the atmosphere. This gave her incredible administrative and political power during her two years in leadership, from 1990 to 1992. We see this depicted textually in the movie when Earle says, “I learned things there that I couldn’t know from being a private citizen.” This quotation differentiates the stages in her career: pre versus post glass ceiling, private citizen versus government official. Her power at NOAA is visually displayed through imagery depicting her in the Persian Gulf during the Gulf War, flying high above the earth in an army helicopter. She is literally shown as someone far above any ceiling. However, she is the only woman in the helicopter, flying over burning oil fields, gunshots, and an oil spill. Showing footage of the physical, environmental damages sustained during the Gulf War, Mission Blue presents the detrimental effects this largely male-versus-male, capitalist-driven conflict has on the ocean. Further, the footage associates Earle with tools often used in patriarchal and violent ways, such as the military helicopter itself, involving her in a conflict where men are fighting with other men over the rights to oil. The film asserts she was there “fighting” vehemently for the protection of the ocean and, by extension, all living things. The sand of the desert and the water of the ocean could not make the contrast in the binaries any more obvious.

A mother and scientist

While Earle’s status as a rational scientist is certainly mediated by her identity as a woman, her identity as a mother is—unsurprisingly—also featured prominently in the documentary. According to communication scholar Lynn M. Stearney (1994), a mother archetype is often prominently featured in ecofeminist work when making claims about women’s ability to care for the earth (p. 145). Societally-produced “phrases such as ‘Mother Nature’ and ‘Mother Earth’ construct a clear connection between women” and the natural world (Richard Besel 2011, 541). However, this motherhood metaphor is not always empowering, but rather, may be exclusionary and prescriptive, only allowing mothers (not all women or men) a place in ecofeminist movements (Stearney 1994, 155). It is created and reinforced by patriarchy, essentializing women as reproductive bodies, always striving for motherhood (Stearney 1994, 146). In Earthcare, Carolyn Merchant (1981) further explains the double-edged sword of this symbolic, linguistic connection. Merchant (1981) traces how women and nature were sometimes connected through the language and symbols of “mother goddesses and the Earth Mother” as beings of worship; therefore, women sometimes had higher status in certain segments of society. However, this mothering language causes problems when phrases arise like, “man’s war on Mother Nature” (pp. 7–8). This kind of symbolic action induces material effects, shaping society and affecting the attitudes and ideologies of those who hear it repeated consistently. To examine a modern relationship between mothering and environmentalism and the dramatic effects it may have, some scholars have observed the presence of what is called “the Supermom” trope.

According to Elizabeth R. Paré and Heather E. Dillaway (2005), the Supermom stereotype characterizes a woman as able to switch effortlessly from high-powered career woman to attentive mother/homemaker without sacrificing job or child. This role embodies Sharon(1996) description of intensive mothering: “a child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, financially expensive endeavor, in which the mother is responsible for the nurturing and development of the child, and the child’s needs take precedent over the individual needs of the mother” (p. 9–10). While the mother is working full time, she is still expected to prioritize her motherhood, as suggested in the name itself (Katherine Mayer 2012, 10). As the child is the center of the Supermom’s life, there will be times where the child is challenged; thus, the mother is also challenged. Emily Chivers Yochim and Vesta T. Silva (2013) assert “the mother who can fight the establishment then, is one who must give herself over to her child’s every need” (p. 20). This embodied dedication to her children, and a use of “narratives reifying women’s roles as mothers,” is what often gives the “good mother” a voice in public discourses (Yochim and Silva 2013, 6).

The Supermom archetype is not limited to a generic “career woman.” It also exists within the elite fields of science and technology when the subject is a mother and a professional scientist simultaneously. In Jocelyn Steinke’s (2010) article, “Gender Representations of Scientists,” she explores mixed messages in mass media portrayals of women scientists: “some portrayals focus on women scientists as exemplary wives and mothers whose extraordinary energy and organizational skills also allow them to succeed professionally; other portrayals more realistically focus on the challenges women scientists face in juggling work and family responsibilities.” With women working in science constantly associated with Supermoms, there is yet another double standard for them. If a woman chooses the work side of the home/work binary, she is a bad mother. If a woman chooses the home side of the binary, she cannot be an accomplished scientist. The trope provides an idealized image of women who attempt to resist the notion of choosing one side of the binary. Mission Blue is more akin to media texts that “more realistically focus on the challenges women scientists face” as they grapple with the constraints of everyday life.

An alternate portrayal to the Supermom is present in Mission Blue, one depicting Earle’s difficulties of balancing work and family. There are moments in the film where Earle describes the complications of being a mother and a world-renowned, traveling scientist. In one instance, she chooses to go on a scientific exploration mission, leaving her children at home when they were four and two years old. This scene included cutaways to an interview with Earle, and the director asked, “what about your kids?” in a skeptical tone, implicitly framing Earle in a negative light. However, despite this judgmental tenor, there are other scenes in the film that suggest Earle was a capable parent, even if not a good one. For example, in one of the few scenes featuring Earle’s daughter, it is suggested Earle’s status as a scientist brought something new and different to their relationship. Her daughter mentions the uniqueness of seeing her mother’s work. What is often seen as evidence of bad mothering—maintaining one’s career—is instead viewed as a potentially positive development for the children. In another scene, the camera frame tracks Earle’s fingers leafing through pages of pressed seaweeds; the filmmakers encourage the viewers to feel as if they are watching a mother reviewing old photographs of her children, reminiscent. “Oh, this goes back to 1955,” she exclaims as her and Stevens’ hands lightly touch the page. It is as if she was showing old photographs of her children to her friend, explaining their stories. For the viewers, the film gives a clear view of the “photographs,” too, as if Earle were letting us peruse her family’s history. While sections of the film suggest Earle did not live up to the Supermom ideal, the oscillation between career woman and mother in the work/home dualism allows the viewer to appreciate Earle in a more nuanced fashion.

We wish to conclude our analysis with a consideration of one particularly emotional scene near the end of the documentary. When visiting the Tokyo Fish Market, the camera follows Earle as she explores, peering into fish tanks and buckets filled with dying, or soon to be dying, sea creatures. In her face, a viewer can make out the devastation she feels. When a fish struggles in a bucket she’s inspecting, one can see her eyes well up with tears as she shakes her head, defeated. Many of the scenes throughout this documentary depict the ocean as devastated—through oil spills or dying creatures—building an argument for ocean protection. In many ways, the film illustrates Silvia Federici (2019) concerns related to the overlapping of capitalist and patriarchal logics designed to extract economic value from the “ocean commons.” Earle, then, depicted as a mother, is also framed as the mother-protector of the ocean and its creatures, the one who stands alone in a sea of men focused on their entrepreneurial tasks. By featuring Earle’s emotions in this fish market scene, Mission Blue alludes to the perceived connection between irrationality, in the form of emotion, and women–two undervalued sides of dualisms. Emotion and irrationality are thought of as weak in a patriarchal ideology, negated by a stronger, unemotional rationality. In contrast with her emotion, the footage of men at the market shows them as unemotional, performing their day-to-day, capitalist industry-based jobs (no other women are obviously present, and the men have no problems with the buckets). The creators of Mission Blue selected this footage: Earle is emotional and the surrounding men are not. In doing so, the film shows more than the rational side of Earle–a side full of logical arguments and statistical inferences. This scene demonstrates that Earle does not have to choose between rational/irrational or strong/weak. Instead, the text shows Earle as someone who is capable of both. She is neither completely rational nor irrational. She oscillates between extremes becoming, in many ways, extra-rational.

Discussion

In this article, we examined the Netflix documentary Mission Blue using an ecofeminist framework. More specifically, our approach contributes to the larger scholarly conversation about ecofeminism’s potential use as a critical approach in media studies. For Hunt (2014), we have illustrated one way this framework may be “taken up” by media studies scholars. We contend Mission Blue points ecofeminists and media scholars toward an alternative theoretical position capable of deconstructing power binaries, a position similar to Plumwood’s (1993) understanding of “critical affirmation.” Of course, we do not argue this is the only way to engage in critical ecofeminist readings of texts; we do, however, agree with other scholars that there is much in ecofeminist approaches yet to be explored (e.g., Singer 2020).

In our analysis of Mission Blue, we offer a limited accounting of how the film makers shift between poles of various dualisms, the notion of “binary oscillations.” For our purposes here, a binary oscillation referred to these shifts, the way a text depicts humans constantly fluctuating between the extremes of a dualism, thereby resisting the urge to essentialize humans in an association with only one side or perspective. It should also be underscored that this observation is simultaneously similar to and different from the few other scholarly treatments of mediated oscillations. For example, Kelly Wilz (2010) has observed in her analysis of the film Jarhead the filmmakers’ use of a “reflective oscillation” (p. 581). Following Linda Hutcheons (1994), Wilz notes how particular scenes oscillate between the perspectives of the soldier protagonist and enemy Other. By doing so, the text invites audiences to “push beyond a dualistic framework of good and evil, and instead to see the shared humanity of both soldiers and enemies” (p. 594). In a similar sense, Mission Blue invites audiences to see beyond dualistic constructions of male/female, rational/irrational, and logical/emotional, to name only a few. Audiences are asked to adopt a more intersectional and nuanced understanding of Earle, one that focuses on “multiple axes of identity reflecting structural categories, such as race, class, and gender” (Singer 2020, 269). Audience members are invited to see Earle from a variety of vantage points: she is sometimes rational and sometimes irrational; she is sometimes strong and sometimes vulnerable; she is sometimes logical and sometimes emotional. Where our analysis adds to the conversation is in the way the text oscillates between poles of multiple binaries when referencing a single individual rather than the perspectives of different people, as was the case in Hutcheons’ (1994) analysis. However, while we believe there is some promise in the way the film depicts these gender-related oscillations, the film is not without its limitations.

While Mission Blue is a text filled with rich examples of Earle as a breaker of gender barriers, our approach is not limited to what is present in the film; we also wish to comment on what is noticeably absent from the text. By doing so, our observations can better address the kind of intersectional power concerns noted by scholars such as Hunt (2014). From a critical rhetoric perspective, McKerrow (1989) has argued “[a]bsence is as important as presence in understanding and evaluating symbolic action” (p. 107). It is thus worth noting that the systemic drivers of many environmental consequences are treated implicitly or are completely omitted. For example, in our discussion of the final and emotional scene featuring Earle in the fish market, there is no discussion of market demands or the general logic of capitalism as a cause for overfishing. In the scenes where Earle is flying over the Gulf, the underlying causes of the military conflict are ignored. In many ways, Mission Blue glosses over the antecedents of what Federici (2019) might term a crisis of the “ocean commons.” To be fair, it may not be possible for a film to fully explore these causes of disenchantment, but complete omission clearly limits the film’s ability to discuss systemic solutions to complex problems. This naturally leads us to ask what the film could have looked like had it more explicitly tackled these issues, or what Federici (2019) might call a “re-enchanting of the world.” If the film’s primary use of binary oscillations is limited to gender-related symbols, what might such oscillations look like concerning dualisms related to class or international conflict? Of course, we do not pretend to offer the final word on binary oscillations. Instead, we believe there are other mediated texts in circulation, including other popularized nature documentaries, also making use of this technique and should be explored further by scholars to deepen our theoretical understanding of this concept. How other texts engage class, race, or other oscillations is beyond the scope of this article, but we believe we have provided a theoretical springboard for further theoretical and practical reflection.

We wish to conclude our writing with a brief observation about the importance of Earle’s ocean conservation efforts and how they are positioned in this film. Mission Blue is celebrated for providing practical solutions for ocean protection through the story of an unarguably exceptional woman scientist. Unfortunately, through our reading of the text, we realize that while the film provides a firm call to action on ocean conservation, it falls short in promoting all women—not just individual, middle-class, white women who may still feel that they “need not apply”—to be in this field. Still, we contend the documentary’s message around ocean conservation, as told through Earle, is important. Let us learn from this text’s binary oscillations which highlight (some) humans’ identities and positions in this world: “Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us Mission Blue (2014).”

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Notes on contributors

E.A. Welden

E.A. Welden is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. Her areas of expertise include environmental geography and environmental communication. E.A. holds a MPhil in Nature Society and Environmental Governance from Oxford and a B.A. in Communication Studies and Science and Technology Studies from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. E-mail: [email protected]

Richard D. Besel

Dr. Richard D. Besel is Professor of Communication Studies and Director of the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University. His areas of expertise include rhetorical theory, history, and criticism; environmental communication; science communication; media studies; and political communication. He is co-editor of Performance on Behalf of the Environment and Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse. E-mail: [email protected]