Alexandra Reynolds questions how gender is hardwired to urbanity.

Accelerated urbanisation has inevitably brought with it a rapid growth of urban poverty; a poverty produced not only by poor provision for housing, health services and education, but from socially conditioned constructs of equality, gender identity and criminal activity.  The recently fevered support for David Simon’s acclaimed sociopolitical series The Wire (2002-2008) highlights not only the expected public fascination with sex, drugs and violence, but takes its appeal from a refusal to glamorise such facets of urban poverty.  This programme seeks to create a brutally realistic vision of an urban environment, based upon the private experiences of Simon and his writing partner Ed Burns.  What I ask is this:  where do women stand in Simon’s depiction of the “faces and voices of the real city”?

The words which head this article, spoken by D’Angelo (Larry Gilliard Jr.), are highly illustrative of the exclusion of women from Simon’s urbanity.  Though the cast is not entirely male, all the characters inevitably operate in “masculine” discourses of power, legal control and violence.  D’Angelo’s description of his “people” alludes to a social order founded upon domestic relations, but nonetheless his words demonstrate a complete absence of mothers, aunts and sisters from that family which governs his social urban existence.

This absence of female family members is clearly given an ironic dimension, given Simon’s presentation of D’Angelo’s mother, Brianna Barksdale.  A “real” depiction of motherhood in The Wire depends upon the recreation of gangster matriarchs such as Brianna and De’Londa Brice into images of the tyrannical state system itself.  Any glimpse of maternal love from these women is seen to derive its source as much from a ruthless awareness of economic stability, monetary value and ownership, as from protective love.  Thus domesticity, a dominion commonly declared as a “feminine”, is apparently controlled by “masculine” concepts of transaction, territory and control.

This interplay between female domestic relations and masculine control is evident on both sides of the Baltimore boundary between Drug Empire and the law.  Take, for instance, the three main female characters Shakima “Kima” Greggs (Sonja Sohn), Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy) and “Snoop” (Felicia Pearson).  These three women form examples of what Simon himself identifies as “men with tits”.   Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) suggests that Kima’s capacity as a good police officer relies upon her lesbianism, a statement which denies her capabilities to exist beyond her sexuality and categorisation as a breasted man.  Similarly, gangster Snoop actively operates in the “masculine” dominion of drugs and mass murder, yet in this role she performs not a rejection of gender stereotypes of “femininity”, but rather becomes androgynous; her sexualised body is disguised beneath male costume and her female anatomy is thus removed from the gendering eye.  Whilst Rhonda Pearlman displays competency and a fair, decisive nature, her heterosexuality is shown to be the valuable quality, as her attractiveness to fellow characters and audience alike resorts back to the Hollywood requirement for a sexually eligible woman.  Rhonda’s romantic relations with McNulty and Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) represent the cultural trend which seeks to position leading female characters within a romantic storyline.

We find, therefore, that such an exhibition of strong, astute females, possessing and performing masculine agency, does not negate Simon’s exclusion of women from his focus and his sympathy.  Inevitably we see, as Simon’s own comment highlights, that women are identifiable not as victims of the oppressive state system which creates characters such as Bodie and Namond, but as anatomical objects definable only by their sexual value and eligibility in the male gaze. Provision for services in areas of urban poverty are, in many ways, “gender blind”.  The Wire executes a progressive treatment of racial politics, and lucidly critiques the inherent problems within the very institutions designed to combat crime in poor urban areas.  However, as progressive as David Simon’s creation is, there remains a certain amount of gender blindness in his depiction of the “faces and voices of the real city”.  Whilst a narrow perspective on gender does not necessarily constitute anti-feminist design, such a perspective inevitably limits the effects such a work can have in radically improving some of the very “real” pressures women face in the urban environment.