The Lambs Gender Roles

Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs exposes the attitude surrounding homosexuality, transgenderism, and gender roles, and provides a glimpse into the fear of castration that clever women instill. Primarily, the film denigrates homosexuality and transgenderism by aligning them with the film’s brutal serial killer antagonist, Buffalo Bill. It opens for discussion the possibility of determining another person’s gender which influences the perspective the detectives take on Buffalo Bill’s crimes. On a different end of the gender spectrum exists Clarice Starling who is training to become an FBI agent and struggling to gain respect as a female in a male dominated field. Clarice thwarts Buffalo Bill using her skill with firearms, a craft commonly

Hannibal Lecter, revered psychiatrist and cannibal. She is sent to interview him by her superior, Jack Crawford, who is attempting to capture “Buffalo Bill” who murders and skins his victims, all female. Lecter gives her information about “Buffalo Bill” in exchange for information about herself. Lecter uses anagrams to provide discreet information leading to the identity of Buffalo Bill. He then escapes entrapment and Starling is able to find the newly identified Jame Gumb who is transgender and is using the skins he collects to make a woman suit. Starling shoots Gumb as he follows her through his dark basement and is able to free the woman that he is holding hostage.

In analyzing “Buffalo Bill”, Hannibal Lecter says that “Billy hates his own identity…and he thinks that makes him a transsexual. But his pathology is a thousand

Starling’s father raised her when her mother died and she now works in a male dominated field, suggesting that she largely identifies with male traits and role models. This might suggest that she desires to become a man, which, according to Monique Wittig in her essay “One Is Not Born a Woman,” “proves that she has escaped her initial programming” (105). However, Wittig goes on to say that, in refusing to be the societally programmed woman, “does not mean that one has to become a man” (105). Starling must then “[refuses]…the economic, ideological, and political power of a man” (Wittig105). Society does not give her the opportunity to refuse the privileges of being a man because they are never offered to her in the first place. While Starling escaped the “programming” that would likely have come along with a traditional upbringing, she has not avoided society’s image of women in general. Miggs, one of Lecter’s fellow inmates, flings semen at her, Chilton, the head of the psychiatric prison remanding Lecter, believes that Agent Crawford only sent her to question Lecter because she could use her gender and sexuality to glean information. In a later scene, the male police officers do not listen to her orders to leave the room, even though her male superior had presently instructed her to do so. Accordingly, the men in positions of power manipulate her to their own purposes. Lecter uses her to acquire his own freedom and Crawford