Introduction
Dune (1965, Frank Herbert), as a media property, is incredibly weird about gender. I’m not saying this as a bad thing — I myself am profoundly weird about gender — but Dune is weird in ways that are dense in their politics and in their meaning.
In discussions of Dune, the context of the psychadelic sixties, of oil grabs in West Asia, of messiahs and white supremacy and white saviour narratives — all of these have become refrains. Paul Atreides is not a hero but instead a victim of fate and delusion. Herbert rejects white saviour narratives in favour of illustrating the nuances of colonised and oppressed cultures, while showing the harm that nominating someone as messiah can bring. Following the Iraq War, the shifting and explosive sands of Arrakis feel prophetic to some readers.
However, I feel as if this is all well-trodden ground. Instead, I’m going to do the desert dance toward the women of the newest adaptation of Dune, to try to bring something new to fifty-nine years of criticism.
What are women, in Dune?
It seems strange to begin a discussion of the women in Dune with a ‘what’ instead of a ‘who’, but already we run into a linguistic issue. In the 10,000 years between our world (and therefore, our women) and the world of the Padishah Emperor, there have been some remarkable shifts in what women are, fundamentally.
When discussing gender in media, it’s important to know that gender can be conceptualised as a code of aesthetics, behaviours, and gestures. Gender is what gets read into you when other people see you — it’s the pitch of your voice, the way you walk, the clothes you wear, and crucially, the social role you inhabit. In contemporary language and most academia, gender is distinguished from sex. In the world of Dune, that distinguishment doesn’t necessarily hold true. The gender of ‘woman’ in Dune is intimately tied to the female sex within its world, so much so that women giving birth constitutes a lot of the basis for the conflict in the narrative itself.
Dune is a story about the nobles of an empire interacting with the citizens of a Native diaspora — as such, we don’t know much about the ordinary women of the Imperium. We do, however, know about the gender that noble women have to inhabit. Women of the Imperium are trained under the Bene Gesserit, a mysterious school of nuns attempting to bring about the coming of the messiah. The way they do this is through years of cross-breeding different noble genetic lines, in order to create the Kwisatz Haderach, or ‘the Shortening of the Way.’ All of the noblewomen we encounter in Dune are trained as Bene Gesserit, and therefore their gender gains the roles of nun, alongside the roles of mother and bargaining chip.
Noblewomen
Bene Gesserit as a Gender That Sucks: Helen Mohiam
Our encounters with the Bene Gesserit come dualistically, the spectrum of Bene Gesserit womanhood spanned by Gaius Helen Mohiam, and Lady Jessica Atreides.
Firstly, Helen Mohiam. Helen is the leader of the Bene Gesserit order, a Reverend Mother heavily implicated in the plot to bring about the Kwisatz Haderach. In the first film, she admonishes Jessica for carrying a son — Paul — instead of the daughter she was told to have, because it’s thrown a spanner in the works of the breeding programme as a whole. She continually talks about prospects, the sons and daughters of Bene Gesserit women transformed into pawns in an elaborate game of galactic politics. As a Reverend Mother, Mohiam has undergone the spice agony, and as such, she holds all of the memories of previous Reverend Mothers within her mind. Helen is a composite of other mothers, the embodiment of the Bene Gesserit order as a whole.
If we take Kim Kardashian to be the model for the contemporary woman in the 2010s, Helen Mohiam is the model for the Bene Gesserit woman in 10191. She’s introduced to us in full Bene Gesserit dress to truly hammer this point home, and we learn about the plan for the Kwisatz Haderach through her — she administers the test of the Gom Jabbar on Paul, ensuring that he can control himself thoroughly enough to wield the power that his mother bestows on him through giving him Bene Gesserit training.
Helen is an ideal, in the first film. She is what Lady Jessica is both terrified of and aspires toward, and she is consulted by every major embodiment of male power — both by Baron Harkonnen as a part of his plot to murder the members of House Atreides, and the Padishah Emperor as his truthsayer — that we are presented with.
Gender in Dune is starkly divided. Men are Mentats or Lords, prized for their ability to maintain utter selfless logic or ideal leadership, and women are Bene Gesserit or sexual tools or both. They control religion; they moderate emotion and bodies and childbirth. Helen is the height of this. She is also where its failures lie. She does not anticipate Paul’s rise to the status of Kwisatz Haderach; she fails to prevent the birth of Alia-of-the-Knife even though she views Alia as an abomination, and all of her plans come to fruition but in ways that contribute to her subjugation.
Some have argued that Mohiam is Herbert’s criticism of authoritarianism. Helen squeezes her fist too tight, and Paul slips through. He escapes and causes the very problems her authoritarianism was preset to prevent.
Villeneuve takes this innate meaning, and enhances it: the Bene Gesserit gender role is oppressive, and Helen’s authoritarianism and enforcement of that role leads to the downfall of her order. She cracks down on Jessica, attempting to control her womb and lying to her about her parentage, but with that force comes resistance, and with that resistance comes change. Mohiam says that Paul’s rise was all part of her plan, but I can’t say that I believe her.
The horror of the Bene Gesserit in Villeneuve’s Dune is that ruthlessly enforcing conformity to the Bene Gesserit gender ideal is what leads to Paul’s rise to messianic tyranny. All Paul knows is imposed gendered control; he himself undergoes the spice agony and in his way becomes a Reverend Mother.
Is it any wonder that he becomes a dictator when the gender role he assumes is so corrupted by eugenicist power grasping and a truly objectifying lack of compassion?
Bene Gesserit as a Gendered Tool of Power: Lady Jessica
Lady Jessica Atreides acts as a foil to Mohiam. Where Mohiam represents the old-guard, traditionalist Bene Gesserit gender role, ruthlessly dedicated to the pursuit of a messiah that’s just one generation away, Lady Jessica forms a new guard, takes that pursuit of the messiah and puts it into action.
Instead of having a daughter as she was told to, she has a son. She provides her child with the opportunity to be exempt from induction into the Bene Gesserit order. Her daughter was supposed to marry Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, forming the Kwisatz Haderach through uniting their feuding bloodlines. Her daughter was going to become a pawn of the Order, and in an act of rebellion against her forcibly assigned gender role, Jessica permits her child an option.
Womanhood, as Jessica conceptualises it, is something she feels the need to liberate Paul from.
She does it because her husband wants a son more than a daughter to inherit the House of Atreides, but she also does it because she believes she can create the Kwisatz Haderach with her bloodline.
When she defies this gender role, she is brutalised back into line. She’s locked outside as her mistake-son is tortured, brought beyond the ordinary threshold of Gom Jabbar pain as a direct result of her hubris. Miraculously, her son survives — instead of taking this as a sign that sometimes the foresight of the Bene Gesserit should be bent to bring about the messiah, Mohiam scolds Jessica for even making the attempt.
Defiance, as a Bene Gesserit, is gender non-conformity.
You submit to the Reverend Mother: you are married off and if you’re lucky, you’re a broodmare for the messiah, and then, you die as a cog in a machine grinding the universe toward a golden path that you never get to experience. Your sacrifice is rewarded with your children being made into objects in a grand game.
However, this isn’t to say that Jessica casts off the Bene Gesserit womanhood assigned to her. Far from it: when she arrives on Arrakis, she presents as hyper-Bene Gesserit, in order to curry favour with the Fremen and the Southern fundamentalists. She uses the aesthetics of Bene Gesserit womanhood to gain and wield power. She goes as far as to get face tattoos, to emulate the planet’s previous Reverend Mother.
Although Jessica can see the holes in the system created by the Bene Gesserit, she eventually submits to them because she disagrees with the symptoms rather than the problem. She doesn’t think ‘creating prophetic all-seeing space Hitler is a bad idea, actually’; she believes that she should be the one controlling prophetic all-seeing space Hitler.
Emphasising this, while on Arrakis she gives birth to the daughter she was supposed to have all along. She still submits to Bene Gesserit gender ideals as embodied by Mohiam, even if it takes longer than expected.
Villeneuve uses Jessica’s assumption of Bene Gesserit aesthetics to illustrate the nuances of the Bene Gesserit gender role: namely, the nuances of colonialism. It turns out its difficult to talk about any version of Dune without talking about the colonialism.
The Bene Gesserit gender role is always imposed. It is an innately authoritarian system of organisation that infiltrates other planetary cultures from the outside to align them to the path toward the Kwisatz Haderach.
Helen Mohiam introduces us to the colonial Bene Gesserit by informing Jessica that the stage has been set on Arrakis for the coming of the messiah. Jessica creates that messiah. She takes the colonial myths presented by the historic Bene Gesserit and uses them to gain power.
As a result, the Bene Gesserit gender role can be considered a locus of and vector for colonial power, brought about through enforced conformity of its members.
Women as Tools of Colonial Power
I’m reminded of the book White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Colour by Lebanese-Syrian journalist Ruby Hamad when discussing the Bene Gesserit. Hamad makes the point that women in power in colonial states — most often white women — often acted as enforcers for colonialism. White women fought for the right to keep slaves in court; they adopted indigenous children to train them for white society.
White women in our world have historically acted as tools of white supremacy. Similarly, Bene Gesserit women in the world of Dune work as colonising actors to bring about what they perceive as the best version of the world. The aesthetics of their womanhood are the aesthetics of power and enforcement. Their veils are not for modesty; they’re for hiding their true intent.
It’s no wonder that all of the Bene Gesserit women we see are white; Denis Villeneuve uses the casting of the film to make a point about the part that women have played in enforcing the standards of colonial societies. Bene Gesserit womanhood and white womanhood within Villeneuve’s Dune are inseperable.
A Womanhood Outside of the Bene Gesserit
Chani
Where the women of the Bene Gesserit are confined to the authoritarian ideals of the pursuit of the Kwisatz Haderach, the women of the Fremen are presented as a stark contrast. The women of the Bene Gesserit are formal, separate from the rest of humanity as a result of their distinctly gendered responsibilities.
Chani, meanwhile, is not a member of the Bene Gesserit. She is a member of the more egalitarian Fremen; she is even Fedaykin, member of her people’s guerrilla fighting order. If Helen Mohiam is our model of Bene Gesserit womanhood, then Chani presents the alternative of Fremen womanhood.
The Bene Gesserit fight through elaborate manipulation and endorsements of the violence of men — Chani’s separation from the Bene Gesserit lets her fight with her hands. If, as previously established, the Bene Gesserit are an expression of colonial femininity (womanhood imposed and formalised from the outside to maintain power), then Chani’s womanhood is anti-colonial. It is organic, generated from within herself and within her culture, and she resists attempts to alter it for the achievement of colonialist aims.
When Lady Jessica extends a proverbial orange branch to Chani after Chani brings Paul back to life, Chani rejects her. She says that Lady Jessica’s plan has come to fruition, and now Paul is not Paul — he is the Kwisatz Haderach. The colonial power imposed onto him superceeds his identity and swallows his personhood. Chani tries to bring attention to this supercession, but is ignored.
We end the film not on Paul, or on Jessica, but on Chani, as she rides a sand-worm into the distance. Despite the colonial rule imposed on her planet and on her people, she retains the traditions of those people, beginning the film as a Fremen woman, and ending it as the only Fremen woman.
If Lady Jessica is the weaponisation of white femininity that Hamad discusses in White Tears: Brown Scars, then Chani is the woman betrayed by Jessica’s Bene Gesserit (white) womanhood.
What is all of this saying about gender?
Villeneuve extends Frank Herbert’s anti-colonialism in the light of modern discussions of how colonial regimes maintain power. Where Herbert talks about brute force, about religious manipulation, about the co-opting of tradition and aesthetics, Villeneuve talks about women with colonial power, and how they act as enforcers of hierarchy.
Antonio Gramsci was a writer and theorist in the interwar period who often discussed power and how power maintains itself. Within his work, he presents the idea of hegemony. Hegemony is the organised intellectual and moral class that rules a society. Because hegemony rules society, it also gets to determine how a society thinks and acts.
Prior to the arrival of Paul and Jessica, the Fremen are ruled by a Fremen hegemony that enforce Fremen ideals — they live in sietches, they survive through their still-suits, and they operate as a widely spread Native diaspora. We see an official organisation of that hegemony when Stilgar takes Paul and Jessica to the central sietch in Dune: Part Two — the Fremen are ruled by a governing council. Their hegemony is formalised and embodied within the text. Chani is what a woman is for the Fremen: a warrior, a member of the community, a worm-rider and a member of a sietch.
Lady Jessica replaces Fremen hegemony with the hegemony of the Bene Gesserit. She also replaces Chani’s Fremen womanhood with her own; she wins the fight for Paul, through transforming him into the messiah of her order. She does this through co-opting the aesthetics of Fremen hegemons like the Fremen Reverend Mother. She learns Chakobsa. She uses their myths and legends against them. She preys on their ignorance and turns her son into an angel of revenge, and looks gleefully to the sky in the knowledge that she’s started the war to end all wars.
And through all of this, her womanhood is the point of emphasis — the blonde-haired, blue-eyed child she grows inside of her encourages her, like some sort of parasitic embodiment of coloniality.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is a powerful narrative about how colonialism functions: what moves it forward, what delays it, why it is committed to. He says that women are ‘the epicentre’ of his adaptation, and I agree. Villeneuve uses the women of Dune to make incredible commentary on the nature of womanhood within authoritarian, supremacist regimes, and on how womanhood can be weaponised as a tool of oppression.
Bibliography
Max Evry (2024), Denis Villeneuve Explains Why Women Are ‘the Epicenter’ of His Dune Universe. Den of Geek: London. Available at: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/dune-2-denis-villeneuve-bene-gesserit/
Ruby Hamad (2020), White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Fails Women of Colour. Catapult Publishing: New York.
