Is WALL-E Male or Female?
How a pair of animated robots reveal our gender biases
Pixar’s 2008 animated sci-fi film WALL-E about a little robot tasked with cleaning up an over-polluted, dystopian earth has several overt messages and themes. Most obviously, it warns against rampant consumerism, ecological devastation, and the complacency of society. Yet, ten years after its release, it carries a different, more obscure message: the way in which we construct gender.
There is still a great amount of debate as to whether or not gender is different from sex. Those who say they are different claim that while sex is dictated by the composition of sexual organs, gender is a social construct built on those differences in sex . In other words, we are born male or female, but we learn to be men and women. Those on the other side of this debate claim that any perceived differences in psychology are the direct result of biology — we are born men or women.
WALL-E is a robot. That’s understood. The real question I have for you is whether WALL-E is a boy or a girl.
Of course, both sides of the debate tend to ignore the fact that as many as one in every 2000 children are born intersex, but that’s a subject for another article.
