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‘This is Sparta!’: Discourse, Gender, and the Orient in Zack Snyder’s 300

‘This is Sparta!’: Discourse, Gender, and the Orient in Zack Snyder’s 300

By Jeroen Lauwers, Marieke Dhont and Xanne Huybrecht

Ancient Worlds in Film and Television: Gender and Politics, edited by Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon (Brill, 2012)

Zack Snyder 300

Introduction: In his controversial movie 300 (2006), based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel (1998), Zack Snyder tells the heroic story of the Spartan king Leonidas and his 300 men. As Leonidas is forbidden by the oracle and its priests to raise his army against the mighty Persian god-king Xerxes, he decides to head north himself with a ‘personal bodyguard’ of 300 of his finest men. This handful of soldiers, joined by the Arcadians, holds the mass of Persians back for no less than three days. Meanwhile, in Sparta, queen Gorgo lobbies for extra troops to be sent over to Thermopylae in rescue of Sparta and her husband, therein hindered by the treason of the politician Theron.

From the movie’s release on, opinions have widely diverged. A rather large number of people saw diverse reasons for considering 300 offensive. Part of this critique revolves around its so-called homophobia, for example in the scene where Leonidas arrogantly calls the Athenians “those philosophers and boy-lovers”. Others vituperate the movie for its supposed fascist ideals, pointing out uncanny parallels between the Spartan society and the ‘Third Reich’: the nationalism, the mutual equality of the Spartiates as a superior race against the inferiority of the helots, the (primitive) genetic selection, and women as breading machines for an ideal fighting elite. Yet another accusation is 300’s so-called easy racism towards modern Iran, the descendant of former Persia. The Persians in 300 are depicted as deformed and monstrous, sometimes even barely recognizable as human beings, or as typical and banal representatives of western orientalism: effeminate, decadent, exotic.



In response to these easy and superficial criticisms, we aim to take the discussion onto a deeper level, tracing down the different forms of social discourse (both ancient and modern) which run throughout the movie. We will try to uncover the naturalizing processes of gender definition, in which the norms of the ancient narrator are self-evidently adopted as constitutive for the conventions of the genre of the modern action movie. By deconstructing this self-evident link between two historical forms of discourse, and by showing the historical discrepancy between both worlds in which they are performed, we aim to demonstrate how 300 can open paths to question the ‘natural’ dominance of masculine discourse in our contemporary society. In doing so, we hope to achieve a refined historical assessment of gender as it is described, for example, by Judith Butler: “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space though a stylized repetition of acts. (…) This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.”

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