The animals went in two by two: Heteronormativity in television wildlife documentaries

Heterosexuality

Heterosexuality is an upheld norm within wildlife documentary programming. The centrality to documentary narratives of pairing, mating and raising offspring commonly rests on assumptions of heterosexuality within the animal kingdom. This is despite a wealth of evidence which demonstrates that most non-human species have complex and changeable forms of sexual activity, with heterosexuality only one of many possible options. Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance (1999) collates data which attempts to examine the ways in which animals ‘do’ sex and the social roles that the activity plays within many species, concluding that ‘the animal kingdom is most definitely not just heterosexual’ (1999: 12). Furthermore, Bagemihl finds that ‘homosexuality represents but one of a wide variety of alternative sexualities and genders’ (1999: 36), and demonstrates that ‘Virtually no terminology for animal behavior – particularly sexual behavior – is entirely free of human (cultural, historical, etc.) associations’ (1999: 4). The fact that how humans make sense of animal behaviour inevitably is inflected through the ways in which we make sense of humans, indicates the role that wildlife documentaries can play in both drawing on and upholding contemporary cultural norms concerning sexuality and gender. After all, wildlife documentaries are an interpretation of recorded behaviour in the wild. What such images mean are not likely to be self-evident to an observer, whether this is a scientist in the field or a television viewer at home. Therefore, making sense of what animals do must always ‘shape nature according to specific cultural values’ (Elliot, 2001: 290; emphasis in original) and draw on ‘heterosexualised anthropomorphizing’ (Lee, 2009). Scientists do this in order to classify such behaviour; programme-makers do this in order to offer meaningful narratives; audiences do this in order to make sense of what they are being shown. Perhaps paramount in this process is the notion that behaviour can be interpreted, and that a single, coherent interpretation is the correct one. Within the academic community clearly there is much debate over what precisely particular moments of animal behaviour mean, and the purposes they fulfil. Yet wildlife documentaries commonly offer a single interpretation as unarguable and uncontested; this correlates with contemporary ideas of heterosexuality in which it is repeatedly ‘naturalised’ (Richardson, 1996: 1).

For example, the episode ‘Food for Thought’ in the series The Life of Mammals (BBC1, 2003) follows a group of Chimpanzees in Uganda as they hunt and mate. The programme makes a link between these two activities, and shows how females offer sex to the male hunters in exchange for food. In doing so, the programme makes clear the group’s complex social interactions, with different animals occupying particular functions within the society, and shows how there is a relationship between individual behaviour and the needs of the group. However, in doing so the programme’s voiceover offers interpretations of events which conform to ideas of heterosexuality and sidestep notions of alternative sexual behaviour. We are shown a sequence in which male chimpanzees display dominance over one another via bellowing and restrained violence. The voiceover states: ‘After a quarrel they embrace one another, to re-establish their bonds of friendship’ over a shot of two chimpanzees in close physical contact, the one behind the other. Yet reading such a moment as merely an embrace ignores alternative possible interpretations, despite the ample evidence of primate homosexuality (Bagemihl, 1999). Similarly, a subsequent shot showing a number of chimpanzees in close physical contact with one another is read as ‘grooming’, which is ‘important for health’ and ‘a way of creating and maintaining good social relationships between males and allies in the same peer group’. While this is another moment with a range of possible alternative readings, perhaps the key point here is how a clear distinction is made in the programme between the behaviour of all-male groups (grooming and social maintenance) and that between male and female chimpanzees (food and sex). The shots that we are given in the programme as evidential (Corner, 1996) matter appear strikingly similar for each of these activities, and it is the voiceover which therefore tells the audience how to make sense of what is being seen. Furthermore, that we are invited to see a correlation between such behaviour and that of us as humans is made clear in the voiceover at the end of this sequence: ‘Chimpanzees have much in common with humans. They are, after all, thought to be our closest living relatives. They’re clever, social, political creatures.’

Such readings of animal behaviour also can been seen in the ‘Finding Partners’ episode of The Life of Birds (BBC1, 1998). Here two male buff-breasted sandpipers of the Arctic tundra are shown to be attempting to attract as many females as possible through display of their underwing feathers, with one bird achieving far more success than the other. The less successful male then encroaches on the successful male’s territory in order to ‘steal’ one of the four females he has attracted. The voiceover states that the successful bird ‘won’t allow anyone on his patch for long’, and there follows a slow-motion sequence in which the two males circle one another, with the one bird raising its rear and stalking towards the other. The voiceover notes that ‘competing for mates all too often leads to physical violence’, and the sequence conforms to the heterosexual notion of evolution structured around natural selection via sexual selection (Dixson, 2009). However, Bagemihl describes exactly the same behaviour as ‘a sequence of heterosexual courtship and homosexual mounting’ (1999: 530), and notes that it is extremely common among this species. Now, making definitive sense of a series of television images is rather difficult, and it is impossible to prove what this behaviour means or what purpose(s) it fulfils (either generally among this species or, in this specific case, between these two particular birds). However, it is noticeable that the voiceover fails to acknowledge other possible readings of the behaviour and, perhaps more importantly, assumes that the activities of the two male birds must in some way be connected to, or arise out of, their relationship towards the female birds, and their desire to mate with them. That is, the impetus for the interpretation is one which positions heterosexuality as the only motivator for behaviour, and assumes that such species would engage in such activities only if they in some way increase their chances of producing offspring via heterosexual courting.

Indeed, heterosexuality is repeatedly foregrounded in these programmes because it is equated within a functionalist idea of breeding. Wildlife documentaries commonly present sex as being of value only inasmuch as it produces offspring and therefore furthers the existence of the species. It is for this reason that the term ‘sex’ is rarely used, and the act is instead usually referred to as ‘mating’ or ‘breeding’. Harding sees this kind of language of evidence of the dominance of ‘mechanistic science’ (2009: 34), which defines the sex act as one whose worth is measured by its outcomes, and implies that this is the only reason species engage in it; that sex may be engaged in for pleasure or for a host of other purposes is disavowed. In expressing such a ‘pronatalist sentiment’ (McLaren, 1999: 217) and ‘reproductive imperative’ (Tinknell, 2005: 14), this moment draws on ‘an over-cautious approach to the teaching of sex education [which] often leads to it consisting of little more than an outline of reproductive biology’ (Jackson, 1999: 65). The notion that the sex act is ‘dangerous’ (Foucault, 1986[1984]: 237) if not given a defined social function has been common in human modernity, for it has been assumed that ‘the unruly forces of sexuality … threatened to dissolve crucial social bonds and impede the advance of civilization’ (Waters, 2006: 44). Additionally, if the purpose of sex is breeding, then the only ‘useful’ form of sexuality is heterosexuality, for it is assumed that a male and a female are required in order for offspring to be produced.

While this may be biologically true for some species, the animal kingdom shows that it is not necessarily the case in social terms: a significant number of species show that ‘homosexual parents are generally as good at parenting as heterosexual ones’ (Bagemihl, 1999: 25); indeed, for some birds ‘homosexual pairs sometimes actually exceed heterosexual ones in the number of eggs they lay, the size of their nests, or the skill and extent of the parenting’ (1999: 23). Perhaps the most publicised example of this is two male Chinstrap Penguins, Roy and Silo, at New York’s Central Park Zoo, who remained in a monogamous homosexual pairing for six years. Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s children’s book And Tango Makes Three (2005) recounts the true story of Roy and Silo successfully parenting a heterosexual couple’s abandoned egg. However, Bagemihl also goes on to warn against using such evidence as proof that homosexuality is normal, simply because he rejects the notion that ‘normal’ is a term that can be applied to sexuality. He asserts that:

[I]n all aspects of animal homosexuality, different species exhibit an extraordinary range of rates, quantities, periodicities, and proportions of same-sex behavior – a diversity that is equal to the variation in the behaviors themselves … what we are attempting to quantify is, in many senses, incalculable. (1999: 36)

The implication is that animals engage in a variety of sexual behaviours for a variety of reasons; it is only cultures’ desires to make sense of such behaviour that places categories such as heterosexuality or homosexuality and breeding, mating or having sex as meaningful and, more importantly, significant.

The family

Wildlife documentaries not only present heterosexuality as a norm; they place that heterosexuality within the discourse of the family. During a time in which ‘television families have become more structurally diverse and gender roles less restrictive’ (Douglas, 2003: 2), for humans ‘the monolithic model of an ideal family becomes increasingly difficult to sustain ideologically’ (Tinknell, 2005: 134). This is not to suggest that traditional notions of family, gender and sexuality have dissolved, or that there has not been significant social, political and policy resistance to the development of alternative lifestyles. However, it is to note that discussions about such issues are commonplace in contemporary discourse, if only because there is felt by some a need to reassert such traditional ideologies and social orders. This means there is a debate about what constitutes a ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ family (Hafner, 1993) or sexual behaviour (Johnson, 2003). While equating non-human social structures with those of humans is always problematic, it is unsurprising that humans turn to animal behaviour for reassurance in these matters. Television wildlife documentaries work precisely by taking us into a non-human world, supposedly unfettered by human interference, giving us a glimpse into what we might be if we were more ‘natural’.

The emotional resonance of the Emperor penguin sequence outlined earlier draws squarely on ideas of the family, in which a heterosexual couple do all they can in order to protect their offspring. The welfare of the chicks is predicated on the behaviour of these with biological ties to it; it is not the responsibility of the community, and we are not given a wider view of the range of ways in which young are raised. The ability for the penguins’ plight to be read as an allegory of traditional family values is seen most clearly in the success of the film March of the Penguins/Le Marche de l’Empereur (dir. Luc Jacquet, 2005), which led to ‘Christian interpretations of the film as evidence for intelligent design’ (Wexler, 2008: 273) and was seen as verification of the instinctual nature of parental care.

Similarly, the rhetoric employed in ‘The Big Freeze’ to make sense of the Emperor penguins’ behaviour reiterates a family discourse, while distinguishing that discourse to some extent from that of humans. The use of the word ‘partner’ both connotes the stable family unit while avoiding anthropomorphising the birds by calling them ‘husband and wife’ or ‘couple’. This means that while the socially upheld paraphernalia of human coupledom such as marriage ceremonies are not in evidence here, the idea that the successful family unit is one predicated on two animals of opposite sex working together to raise a child they have biologically spawned together, is one which recurs in this and other sequences. Indeed, the fact that this behaviour does not have the cultural complexities of human interactions suggests that it is more ‘natural’ and ‘instinctive’, for it implies that this behaviour is ‘hardwired’ into the survival techniques of these species.

This notion of hardwired behaviour recurs later in a sequence from the same episode, where we see an abandoned chick attempting to find an adoptive parent. As the voiceover states:

One of them seems interested, but the vital bond between parent and chick simply isn’t there, and eventually the adult walks off. In fact, the adults do have a strong instinct to protect chicks. So much so that birds that have not managed to breed will try to take possession of a stray or abandoned chick. But this fostering never succeeds because the adult has no partner to help in rearing the waif.

Here it is suggested that the family is an essential unit for the success of the offspring, which means that the partnership is more significant than the biological ties of parent and child. Yet at the same time the voiceover highlights the ‘instinct’ which motivates animal behaviour, and that term implies that this activity is therefore ‘natural’. In placing the notion of ‘instinct’ and ‘bond’ in close proximity, the relationships between parent and offspring are presented as dependent on biology, for it is suggested that such a bond does occur between animals with biological ties. That the instinct to protect might be borne out of some other social impulse, which ties the penguins together as a group, is not taken into account. Moreover, the fact that the sequence ends by noting that this fostering never succeeds helps reinforce the notion that the survival of the species rests on traditional family units, with the requisite number of parents and offspring with biological ties.

As noted previously, heterosexuality is the upheld norm in wildlife documentaries, and the idea of the family that is presented here is one which equates the family with heterosexuality and is avowedly ‘hetero-sexist’ (Jackson, 1999: 65). Mitman suggests that the discourse of the heterosexual nuclear family was reiterated in American wildlife documentaries of the 1950s because a rhetoric of protection and unity was needed to overcome the threat of Soviet communism (1999: 143): ‘Animal behavior stories, especially those that focused on themes such as courtship, nest-building, parenting, and development of the young, universalized the family as a natural unit’ (1999: 141) helped justify the links between ‘marriage, family, and social structure’ (Lyons and Lyons, 2004: 10; emphasis in original). Wildlife documentaries’ insistence on foregrounding these aspects of animal behaviour – resulting in what Rothfels calls ‘animals’ unnatural histories’ (2002: 6; emphasis in original) – rejects some animal behaviour as ‘pretty boring and hard to interpret’ (Haraway, 2008: 258), and reiterates the analysis made by Aristotle thousands of years ago which defines non-human species as nothing other than eating, fighting and birthing machines. While this may not be the way in which humans want to think of themselves, the foregrounding of ‘the proper family’ (Chambers, 2001: 30; emphasis in original) within wildlife documentaries gives a ‘natural’ basis to this organisational structure, from which social and national ideas of the family can be seen to be logical extrapolations.

Not only is parenthood defined as the natural state of being, the roles it requires also are seen to be clearly defined. This is most apparent in the language used to describe species whose familial behaviour commonly falls outside of the norm that is reiterated. For example, later in the ‘Finding Partners’ episode of The Life of Birds we are introduced to the Argentinean Blue manakin. The male manakin attracts females through dancing, and often attracts multiple mates. After mating the female leaves and the male continues dancing, hoping for more success. Attenborough’s voiceover states: ‘He will never knowingly see his offspring. But not all polygamous birds are so neglectful of their parental duties.’ Here the voiceover acknowledges the polygamous nature of many species, and I shall explore this in more detail in the next section. Yet in using a phrase such as ‘parental duties’, and seeing the bird’s activities as ‘neglectful’, we are presented with ‘sexual behavior as a moral domain’ (Foucault, 1985[1984]: 252). An argument could be made that in attempting to conceive as many chicks as possible, the manakin is in fact fulfilling its parental duties to the fullest, especially as doing so with many females would mean that any biological problem with any individual bird would be mitigated against. Yet the discourse here is one which links mating and rearing, seeing the duty to the latter as a direct consequence of the former. In conjoining those two ideas, the sequence constructs a notion of parenthood which sees procreating and raising as one and the same thing. While there is a slight tongue-in-cheek tone to this piece of the voiceover, it is telling that the family remains the discourse within which ‘aberrant’ behaviour is necessarily framed. It is impossible to talk of such behaviour outside discourses of the family simply because there are not any other discourses on offer – and because wildlife documentaries foreground mating, giving birth and rearing as their primary narrative interest, they place issues of the family at the core of what constitutes animal behaviour and therefore at the core of what it is to be ‘natural’.

Monogamy

The fact that the Blue Manakin mates with multiple partners queries notions of the family not only because it means the animal cannot fulfil its ‘parental duties’; it also fails to fulfil its partnership duties: the Blue manakin does not form a long-lasting pair-bond with another member of its species, and is instead a highly polygamous bird. Polygamy becomes rather problematic in wildlife documentaries precisely because so many instances of it abound within the animal kingdom (Barash and Lipton, 2001). Indeed, polygamy can be seen as a logical conclusion to sexual selection, which suggests that a creature’s aim is to ensure that its genes are passed on to as many offspring as possible. Wildlife documentaries engage with the idea of polygamy through the criterion of success: it is suggested that polygamy is the outcome when other methods of ensuring genes are passed on are less successful. The family structure outlined above is an example of this, because the programmes often reiterate the idea that this is the best structure for successfully raising offspring. In ‘Finding Partners’, Attenborough notes that pairs of waved albatross in the Galapagos ‘stay together for the rest of their lives’. He adds:

It would be nice to think that such a devoted pair was held together by mutual affection. The evidence, I’m afraid, doesn’t support that. It’s not so much the affection that one bird has for the other, as the concern it has for its own genes which are in the egg which the two produced together. If, without jeopardising those, either bird could find a way of spreading its genes more wildly, the evidence suggests it would take it.

Therefore, polygamy becomes constrained by the needs of the offspring and the desire to continue the bloodline. In these terms, sexual activity has no purpose other than procreation; behaviour is mollified in response to the needs of offspring and, by extension, the species as a whole. Foucault notes that ‘a meticulous economy that would discourage unnecessary indulgence’ was being created in human societies ‘[a]s early as the fourth century’ (1985[1984]: 249–250) in order to position sex as an activity with no purpose other than procreation. So, while this moment in The Life of Birds acknowledges polygamy as a logical outcome for some species, it does so via the assumption that sexual activity is a purely biological act with defined and measurable outcomes. In doing so it adopts a process of ‘dehedonization’ (Foucault, 1986[1984]: 82), which ignores the possibility that animals may engage in sexual activity primarily for purposes of pleasure (Bagemihl, 1999).

‘Finding Partners’ goes on to explore two more cases of polygamy in the bird world, and both examples demonstrate how such sexual activity is marked simultaneously as deviant and rendered natural because it is the logical outcome of animals’ procreation instinct. The first looks at the hedge sparrow or dunnock in what the voiceover refers to as the ‘suburban gardens of England’. Here a female bird, seemingly in a long-term partnership with a male, also mates secretly with another male, who rewards her by bringing food for the chick that he hopes he has fathered. Yet on returning to her original mate, she allows him to ‘peck her genital opening’, which eventually causes her to eject the rival’s sperm. She then mates with her partner, who presumes any offspring will be his. The programme justifies such behaviour because of the benefits that it brings any ensuing chick, who will now receive food from multiple males. Yet the voiceover also suggests that we might see this as an odd way to organise family life: it introduces the sequence by calling it ‘the most bizarre behaviour of all’, and this and the subsequent examples of bird infidelity are cordoned off in a separate sequence towards the end of the episode, where it is made clear that this is aberrant and not common behaviour.

However, the programme also acknowledges the difficulty in spotting such mating activities, for it states that ‘until very recently, nobody even noticed’ that the sparrow was engaging in such activity. The reason for this may be not only that monogamy is assumed within species unless the evidence proves contrary, but also due to confusion over what monogamy actually is. Biologists distinguish between ‘social monogamy’, which ‘refers to a male and female’s living arrangement … without inferring any sexual interaction and reproductive patterns’, and ‘sexual monogamy’, which ‘is defined as an exclusive sexual relationship between a female and a male based on observations of social interactions’ (Reichard, 2003: 4). In the case of the hedge sparrow, it seems that social monogamy is not necessarily equated with sexual monogamy, and Reichard shows how this is rather common in many species. The reading that The Life of Birds offers of the hedge sparrow is one which assumes that the male in the socially monogamous relationship with the female disapproves of her mating with other males: it states that ‘It never lets her out of his sight’. Yet she is out of his sight enough to mate with another male, and offers her genital opening to be pecked so the ‘rival’s’ sperm can be removed. Indeed, there is little in the visual matter in the episode to suggest that the male has the feelings towards his mate’s infidelity that the voiceover suggests. There is a logic in the biological father of a chick encouraging other males to gather extra food for his offspring, especially considering that he is able to ensure his genes are passed on by removing the rival’s sperm. This means that the programme conflates social monogamy and sexual monogamy, which is unsurprising considering that these two categories are commonly understood to be one and the same in human cultural terms.

‘Finding Partners’ moves on to what it calls its ‘most astounding’ example of ‘infidelity’; the superb fairy-wren of Australia. The voiceover outlines the behaviour:

He is an attentive male, courting the female with little gifts of food. But there are other males around, identifiable by the different rings on their legs. One of them dances for her, flaring the blue fans on his cheeks. Yet another male is also flirting with her – and here’s another, and she selects one of them. But her first, established, male is not around to see all this; he is visiting a female neighbour and, what is more, he is carrying a bouquet, a flower petal, something he never does at home – and his flashy courtship behaviour pays off too. Now he’s back beside his own nest and with his first mate, looking after the chicks the nest now contains. So, the female fairy-wren chooses the flashiest males to father her chicks, and allows her partner only just enough matings to ensure that he helps feed the family: and the males – while they may have chicks in as many as six nests – may not have a single one in the nest they actually tend. They say, ‘It’s a wise child that knows its own father’: that’s never more true than in the bird world.

Here, the relationships between social structures and sexual activity appear almost unrelated: within this species there appears to be very little link between who mates with whom, and who raises offspring with whom. In that sense, the superb fairy-wren is unlike the majority of birds, but akin with the vast majority of most other animal species on the planet: ‘Monogamy is a mating system particularly common in birds, but also occurring infrequently in invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. Polygany or promiscuous mating systems appear to be predominant in animals’ (Møller, 2003: 29).

This is seen to be the case in humans too: ‘as a biological phenomenon genetic monogamy, with its attendant constraints on males, is rare in human societies, although socially-imposed monogamous marriage systems are relatively more common’ (Low, 2003: 172). Indeed, the evidence suggests that the success of the human species is hampered by such monogamy, particularly as so many other species employ a range of social mating systems in order to maintain evolutionary success. Human monogamy is commonly justified as the most appropriate way to raise children because it is the most successful, and the wildlife documentaries under examination here make the same claim for other species, marking ‘aberrant’ behaviour as ‘astounding’. Yet such polygamy is seen as morally and evolutionarily logical if it means that offspring have a better chance of survival. This means that representations of polygamy are placed within the heterosexual discourse of the family which was outlined earlier, and made comprehensible through that worldview. In representing a range of sexual behaviours, then, such programming remains wedded to an interpretive discourse which foregrounds heterosexuality as an unarguable norm.

The animals went in two by two

Bagemihl states that ‘The traditional view of the animal kingdom [is] what one might call the Noah’s ark view’ (1999: 36): animal biology is solely focused around animal pairings made up of a male and a female, as depicted in the Biblical story of Noah’s ark. Yet Bagemihl gives evidence of a massive array of alternative sexual behaviours, mating activities and social organisations, to the point that they cease to be alternative and instead demonstrate that it is pointless to talk of ‘normal’ behaviour in the animal kingdom at all. As Bagemihl notes, ‘Noah’s ark was never quite like this!’ (1999: 36). Similarly, Roughgarden draws on the ark story in her analysis of the ways in which animal and human sexuality are commonly constructed, although she suggests that there is rather more flexibility in the tale because God tells Noah to bring ‘every beast according to its kind’ (2004: 937), which she reads as an acknowledgement of a range of sexual identities. Yet the section of the Bible quoted from also says ‘two and two, male and female’, which seems to make quite clear the norms within which animals are being placed here. As the traditional children’s song states: ‘The Animals Went in Two by Two’.

Within that context, wildlife documentaries could be useful in giving evidence for alternative lifestyles and other ways of organising families and social interaction. Via polygamous bondings, decoupling of social monogamy and sexual monogamy, instances of surrogacy and adoption, and the success of offspring raised outside the male-female coupling, a whole range of species show that not only is there no such thing as a ‘norm’, but also that many species are willing to change the ways in which they organise their daily lives in response to factors such as mating competition, food scarcity and offspring availability. That is, social organisation is a response to external factors, rather than an unarguable norm around which external social factors must be organised. However, the television wildlife documentaries explored here remain wedded to representations of animal sexual behaviour which have only procreation as their purpose, and which are understood to exist primarily within monogamous male–female interactions. When behaviour outside of this norm is evident, such programmes remark on its oddity, marginalising it as aberrant while simultaneously justifying it as a logical response to the desire to produce offspring.

Conclusion

As noted at the outset, this analysis has foregrounded the voiceover as the key component of how the wildlife documentary makes sense of the imagery that it offers, precisely because such imagery is relatively meaningless without the guiding activities of the narrator. While this analysis queries how such voiceovers commonly function, this critique necessarily raises questions about how humans talk about the natural world as a whole. Writers such as Harding (2009) and Yoon (2009) query the scientific language which has come to dominate how humans talk about the world around them, for while such language is purportedly objective and rational, instead it presents social ideologies as evidential truths. As Harding and Yoon show, other cultures have not insisted on such language, and this has allowed them to develop quite different relationships to the natural world: relationships which, in an environmental sense, might be more fruitful and sustainable. Therefore, that much of the wildlife programming produced by the BBC remains wedded to particular representational strategies is evidence not only of the centrality of such discourses to western cultures, but also shows how those norms are upheld in practice in such high-profile broadcasting. It is precisely through analysis of the language used by narrators and voiceovers to make sense of the content of wildlife documentaries that these norms become apparent.

As this analysis has shown, the overriding discourse within which such representations exist is that of the family, with heterosexuality and monogamy as social structures resulting from that familial imperative. Yet the family has no meaning within non-human species, and is a purely human construction. To place such a discourse within wildlife documentaries is to insist on reading animal behaviour through a supposedly normal human construct, justifying that construct via the very representation that it defines. Because of this, it seems that in wildlife documentaries, animals will persist to go in two by two.