Interesting article I found when looking for articles about Brave. This article brings up the question and explores the topic about Merida being Gay. Now that Merida is not stereotypical, social constructed female, does that make her gay? What foolishness someone brought? Constantly judging and making accusations an empowering female character.
http://theweek.com/article/index/229891/is-braves-heroine-gay
In a Ms Magazine commentary, the author Natalie Wilson addresses this issue of "lesbian baiting" (ie: shaming and critiqing gender-non conformity) as a way of keeping us aligned:
ReplyDelete"the attempt to “out” Merida as a lesbian simply because she doesn’t wish to marry [is bewildering]. For instance, Indiewire claims “Merida goes out of her way to assure middle-American audiences that she is not a lesbian.” (I missed this assurance from Merida, or maybe my more hopeful feminist-viewing self chose not to see it.) More problematically, the reviewer suggests that, despite assurances, “She totally is [a lesbian] and the movie would have been much stronger if it had actually admitted it.” This “she must be a lesbian” read is reductive. Sure, it would be awesome to have a lesbian lead in a family-oriented film, but let’s not force Merida into a sexual-preference label just because she is more interested in horses than in her decidedly unappealing male suitors. To her credit, Merida seems more bent towards a queer take on love than beholden to fitting into any hetero or not-hetero label, as when she asks in a crowd-pleasing speech, “Might our young people decide for themselves who to love?”
What makes the film most brave is not its non-glorification of hetero-romance and it’s poo-pooing of gender norms but that it focuses on female characters relationships with other females. Finally!" http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/06/21/the-bold-and-the-brave/