XKRISTINX'S BLOG
Inara Serra: Agency, Controversy and Sex-Work in Joss Whedon's Firefly, Part 2
Thursday, April 6, 2006 1:00 AM
Even though legality is a recurring theme in the banter between Inara and Mal, legality takes a back seat to issues of morality. This is made evident in their constant bickering over a Companions work being legal, and Mal’s work being illegal (smuggling). In saying this, Inara usually solicits a response indicatively revolving around issues of morality or virtue. Such as:
Inara Serra: ?You have no call to try to make me ashamed of my job. What I do is legal, and how is that smuggling coming?
Malcolm Reynolds: My work's illegal, but it's honest.
A current theme throughout the series is Malcolm’s obvious disdain for Inara’s job, but as he makes a point of clarifying, not for Inara herself. He respects her, but not what she does. He makes this clear in Shindig, an episode revolving around Inara’s work as a Companion. In this scene Inara teaches Mal how to use a sword:
Inara Serra: . . .You don't need strength as much as speed. We're fragile creatures. It takes less than a pound of pressure to cut skin.
Malcolm Reynolds: You know that? They teach you that at whore academy?
Inara Serra: You have a strange sense of nobility, Captain. You'll lay a man out for Implying I'm a whore, but you keep calling me one to my face.
Malcolm Reynolds: I might not show respect to your job, but he didn't respect you. That’s the difference. Inara, he doesn’t even see you.
This is an important power dynamic, since as Robert Taylor points out, “Inara, a prostitute, has to instruct Mal, a respected war veteran, on how to properly wage battle . . .” And in this moment of dependence on Inara’s skills, Mal is quick to usurp that power by criticizing the method (or career) through which she came to hold such knowledge (and power).
Whether Malcolm’s arguments hold any clout depends on whether or not his intentions towards Inara are to be taken into consideration. Throughout the series romantic tensions between Inara and Malcolm were made evident, making it seem that Mal’s attacks on Inara’s profession had less to do with the job itself and more to do with his affections for her.
If Mal’s view were to be taken as objective, his arguments would ring true to a Radical Feminist such as Kathleen Barry. Where Inara says being a Companion is a profession, Mal views her as an oppressed victim unaware of her plight. As Barry would say, “prostitution with or without a woman’s consent is the institutional, economic, and sexual model for women’s oppression.”
Barry’s rebuttal against the notion of choice is that what we perceive as choice is really “the form of forcing distinctions between what are essentially non-choices.” And that “appearing to choose is an element of survival,” and that this use of the word “to choose simply means to act . . .. And so women become engaged in establishing the terms of their own commodification.” Which Mal mirrors by stating, “ . . .you think following rules will buy you a nice life, even if the rules make you a slave.”
Barry concludes that, “although often represented as sexually liberating, prostitution, fitted to male customer expectations, is a reactionary, regressive, and repressive sexual act.” Barry also makes the essentialist assumption that all clients are male. In the context of Whedon’s view of a totalitarian Alliance regime, few occupations seem to fall outside of the definition of “reactionary, regressive and repressive.” This is evident in Jaynestown, where the “mudders” are depicted as slave labor, and in Shindig where in the opening scene Mal pickpockets from an admitted slave-trader. Even workers who are not considered “slaves” are depicted to be live and work in poor conditions, such as the minors in The Train Job (who are all sick with Bowden’s – a lung disease), and the villagers in Safe, who need a Doctor so badly, they resort to kidnapping. Not to mention the numerous towns, villages, and colony’s shown to be surviving on the barest necessities.
In the end Mal responds to Inara’s independence and strength. These two characteristics are most likely what drew
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