Cristina Yang and Female Masculinity

Inspired by Cooper’s look at female masculinity in the case of Boys Don’t Cry, a movie that followed the case of Brandon Teena, a female to male transgender, I seek to explore the implications of female masculinity in one of my favorite television shows, Grey’s Anatomy.  To do this, I will explore one of the female protagonists, Cristina Yang. 

Cristina Yang exhibits many of the typical masculine characteristics.  She is very task-oriented, driven, and seeks to be a world-class surgeon.  She is known by colleagues as having an impersonal bedside manner.  In one episode, a fellow intern, George O’Malley, requests Dr. Yang to be the intern assigned to his father’s case.  When Cristina seems annoyed by this, George explains that he picked her because she is a “machine.”  She seems to show few emotions, a characteristically masculine trait.

In the first season of the series, Cristina experiences an unplanned pregnancy after having sex with one of the attending physicians.  Feeling that she could not obtain her professional goals while pregnant and raising a child, she schedules an abortion.  She needed an emergency contact person, so she confides the pregnancy in fellow intern Meredith Grey.  When Meredith presses Cristina to talk about the pregnancy, Cristina refuses.  These actions go against traditional femininity by challenging the notion that females want to discuss feelings and thoughts, and that females ultimately desire motherhood.  While the abortion never happens—Cristina experiences an ectopic pregnancy before the abortion occurs, she is heavily criticized for not wanting a child and placing her career before her family. 

In season 7, a very similar situation happens with Cristina.  She finds herself pregnant.  This time, however, she is married.  Again, she goes against the traditional feminine response by wishing to abort the pregnancy.  Her husband, trauma surgeon Dr. Owen Hunt, wants Cristina to carry the pregnancy.  Ultimately, Cristina decides to abort the pregnancy, again reaffirming that her career is more important than a family, falling in line with traditional masculine ideas.  The abortion causes conflict in her marriage, as every argument or disagreement shown seems to have roots in the fact that Cristina had an abortion.

Throughout the show, the moments that Cristina shows traditional feminine characteristics, she is portrayed as vulnerable.  One example of this is when Cristina is to marry her attending-boyfriend, Dr. Preston Burke, at the end of the first season.  She is reluctant to engage in any of the traditional bridal activities, and does so only at the insistence of her mother and her soon-to-be mother-in-law.  However, when the wedding day finally arrives, and she is reluctantly about to head down the aisle, the wedding is called off by Preston, and Cristina is hurt and angry for much of the next season of the show because of this.

In conclusion, female masculinity is an interesting construct to explore.  One character that seems to exhibit female masculinity is Cristina Yang in the contemporary prime-time soap opera, Grey’s Anatomy.  One way that this is portrayed is through the unplanned pregnancies that she experiences, and her decision to not carry either of the pregnancies to term.  Another way this is expressed is through the vulnerability and hurt that inevitably seems to occur when she expresses any traditional feminine characteristics.