Performing
Gender, Losing Agency: Irene Adler’s Feminist Erosion in Sherlock Holmes
Adaptations
Dr. Sabir Ahmed
Independent Researcher
West Bengal, India.
Stories “travel”—when an adapted text
migrates from its context of creation to the adaptation’s context of reception.
- Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (2012: XVI)
Abstract: Recent screen
adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia, published in The
Strand Magazine (1891) reposition the feminist agency of Irene Adler (the
only heroine who outsmarted the legendary Sherlock Holmes) through overt
sexualization, paradoxically reinforcing gender hierarchies. Drawing on Judith
Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this article argues that Adler’s
postfeminist “afterings” (qtd. in Primorac 89) reduce her to a sexualized
body—eroding her intellectual autonomy and reinstating Victorian-era
stereotypes. By contrasting Doyle’s Adler (who subverts gender norms through
performative acts like cross-dressing) with her neo-conservative screen
incarnations in BBC’s Sherlock 2012 (A
Scandal in Belgravia S02E01), this analysis exposes how “sexsation”
(qtd. in Primorac 90) enacts gender discrimination, binarism, and
disempowerment.
Keywords: Gender
performativity, Feminist agency, Adaptation, Discrimination, Sexualization,
Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler.
Introduction
When Irene Adler “travels” from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1891
London to BBC’s postmodern screen, her journey—as Linda Hutcheon might frame
it—becomes less a migration than a mutilation of agency. The moment she sheds
her clothes in Sherlock (2012), declaring nudity her “battle dress,”
(23:16:00) epitomizes how postfeminist adaptations weaponize sexuality within patriarchal constraints, paradoxically eroding
feminist agency. Judith Butler’s assertion that gender is constituted through
“corporeal styles” (Gender Trouble
190)—not biology—finds radical proof in Doyle’s original Adler, whose
cross-dressing and intellectual victory subverted Victorian norms. Yet in these
screen “afterings,” her body becomes a site of neo-conservative regression: overt
sexualization enforces the hierarchies feminism dismantles, exemplifying the “double entanglement” (McRobbie 13)
of illusory freedom and patriarchal recontainment. This article argues such adaptations
enact the adverse outcomes of gender central to this journal’s
focus—discrimination,
binarism, and violence—by replacing subversive performativity with spectacle.
The thematic concerns
of the issue—gender as a
socially conditioned fiction, a “regulated process of repetition” (Butler, Gender Trouble 198) sustained thorough
performative acts—anchor this critique. Where Doyle’s Adler exposes gender as
artifice through deliberate acts (disguise, marriage), BBC’s “sexsation”
reduces her to biological essentialism. Her nudity literalizes this
special issue’s interrogation of roles that relegate women to a secondary
position: when her initial
momentary control ultimately culminates in her hijab-clad humiliation (S02E01 01:27:45-01:28:43). This
devolution—from Doyle’s agentive “woman” to sexualized body—exemplifies
adaptation’s power to reinforce discriminatory norms through market-driven revisionism where
feminism is “taken into account” in popular culture precisely to dismantle its
more radical potential which McRobbie terms as “faux-feminism” (1).
Adler’s reduction exemplifies Butler’s concept of
gender as a regulatory fiction, sustained through constrained
performance. Doyle’s story celebrates performative identity: “male costume
is nothing new to me” (Doyle 130) leverages
fluidity to outwit Holmes. BBC’s Adler performs femininity as surface
sexuality, reinforcing the binarism this analysis challenges. Her transformation—dominatrix to
disempowered victim—mirrors the
critical concern with “gender violence” and the “man-woman divide” underpinning
this inquiry. Contrary to
adaptations that imbue the title with romantic tension, Holmes’s original
epithet—“the woman”—signifies solely professional respect (Doyle 117), a
distinction erased in screen eroticization.
Thus we ask: Can feminist agency survive when “liberation”
is coded as sexual display? Through
Butler’s lens, Adler’s adaptation can be traced as a case study in
media-enabled discrimination. The neo-Victorian fetish for “sexing up” heroines
as neo-conservative “sexsation” emerges
not as progress, but as backlash eroding the intellectual autonomy Doyle
granted. In recentering body over mind, adaptations enact the patriarchal
control her original iteration defied— demonstrating
how cultural “travel” can become gendered dispossession.
Doyle’s Adler: Gender as Performative
Subversion
Doyle offers Adler not as a sexual
object but as an intellectual equal whose agency springs from her mastery of
gender performativity. Her triumph lies in exposing Holmes’s constrained
understanding of identity—a failure rooted in biological determinism. As Butler
contends, gender materializes through the “stylized repetition of acts” (192), and Adler weaponizes this
insight. Her cross-dressing, strategic marriage, and psychological victory
reveal gender as a malleable construct, directly challenging Victorian essentialism. Her performance is not mere imitation but constitutive
action, reworking the very possibilities of identity within patriarchal
constraints and thus “subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified
notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power”
(Butler, Gender Trouble 46)
The Script of Agency: Observation, Disguise, and Narrative
Control
Adler’s agency manifests through
calculated performative acts:
Strategic Observation
Adler’s strategic
counter-surveillance dismantles Holmes’ attempt at disguise. Her
calm, focused observation while he plays the clergyman and gains entry at her
sitting room transforms her from object to subject of the gaze. This act is not mere vigilance; it
is active intelligence gathering, the crucial first step
in her meticulously planned escape (sending her coachman on guard, following
Holmes, verifying his identity). By deliberately observing the
observer, Adler performs a
radical inversion of power dynamics, demonstrating intellectual mastery and a
performative refusal of the passive femininity expected within the Victorian
social framework. Her calm detection of Holmes’ charade as
transpired by her letter to Holmes “I sent John,
the coachman, to watch you, ran upstairs, got into my walking-clothes, as I
call them, and came down just as you departed. Well, I followed you to your
door….” (Doyle 130) demonstrates intellectual vigilance, a
performative refusal of expected feminine passivity.
Disguise
as Utilitarian Performance
Adler’s farewell letter crystallizes her
pragmatic mastery of identity: “Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take
advantage of the freedom which it gives” (Doyle 130). This statement rejects gender essentialism,
framing masculinity not as ontology but as deliberate corporeal
artifice—a set of acquired
“corporeal styles” deployed instrumentally. Her cross-dressing
is pure utility: a calculated performance leveraging
societal male privilege to achieve autonomy and mobility
structurally denied to Victorian women. Crucially, she equates it not with identity, but with functional
attire—merely another set of “walking-clothes” enabling
her escape. This radical detachment of gender signifiers from
biological determinism exemplifies
performativity much before Butler has proposed her theory,
transforming disguise into a tool of feminist agency within a rigidly gendered
society.
Controlling the Narrative
Adler’s farewell letter constitutes a definitive performative act
of discursive control. She orchestrates
the narrative, meticulously disclosing her motives, methods, and
the precise conditions of her triumph. She leaves Holmes the empty safe and a
letter and one of her photograph defining her terms (Doyle 130). This cerebral assertion of power stands in stark contrast to
adaptations that reduce her agency to sexual spectacle. Doyle’s Adler wields
language and strategic intellect—not her corporeal form—as her primary
instruments. By authoring
the final account of events, she seizes epistemic authority,
ensuring her interpretation prevails and irrevocably defines the
terms of her victory and autonomy within Holmes’s own record.
Holmes’s Blind Spot: The Sedimentation of Norms
Holmes’s failure to identify Adler
disguised as “a slim youth in an ulster” (Doyle 129) epitomizes Judith Butler’s
concept of the “sedimentation of gender norms”—a process producing the
compelling social fictions of ‘a “natural sex”’ and ‘a “real woman”’ by
generating corporeal styles that appear as a natural binary (Gender Trouble 191). This sedimentation
blinds him: despite hearing her voice, he dismisses the figure based on male
attire, wondering “who the deuce could have been” (Doyle 129). Younghee Kho
attributes this to his belief in innate gender; he anticipates “feminine” panic
based on precedents yet cannot comprehend Adler’s transgression against the
“hegemonic ideal” of passive femininity (4). Adler’s fluid performance shatters
the fixed binaries upon which Holmes’s deductive logic depends, revealing
gender’s inherent performative instability
Marriage as Strategic Institutional Performance
Adler’s marriage to Godfrey Norton
functions not as surrender but as a calculated performative act within patriarchal institutions. Holmes fundamentally misreads
this act, assuming matrimony neuters her threat by declaring, “The
photograph becomes a double-edged weapon now” (Doyle 126) thereby
projecting Victorian stereotypes of female containment. Adler, however,
strategically subverts the institution from within. She wields marriage
pragmatically as a shield, explaining their joint decision: “We
both thought the best resource was flight” (Doyle 130). Crucially, she retains the
photograph as leverage, demonstrating her continued independent agency, and
signs herself definitively as “Irene Norton, née Adler,” (Ibid.)
performatively asserting identity continuity and refusing erasure. This
maneuver exemplifies Butler’s insight that the critical aim is not to affirm
constraints but to explore how their fixity is established and, most
importantly, “what possibilities
of reworking those constraints arise from within its own terms”–
including the very symbolic position (like “Mrs. Norton”) one is compelled to
assume (Bodies That Matter 96).
The Title “The Woman”: Respect Earned through Performative
Intellect
Contrary to sexualized interpretations,
Holmes’s singular epithet—“the woman”—signifies profound
professional respect earned solely through intellectual parity. Watson
explicitly divorces this title from romantic sentiment, noting Holmes found
“All emotions […] abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably
balanced mind” (Doyle 117).
Adler ascends to this exceptional status not through allure, but by
strategically outperforming Holmes: her mastery of disguise, observation, and
counter-narrative culminates in leaving him an empty safe and a defiant
letter—concrete proof that her mind rivals, as the King of Bohemia
acknowledged, “the most resolute of men” (Doyle
122). Holmes’s subsequent reverence confirms this intellectual triumph. As
Watson observes, whether “He speaks of Irene Adler, or when he
refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman” (Doyle 131). This consistent honorific immortalizes her
unprecedented achievement: transcending gender expectations to claim equality within
Holmes’s own domain of deductive excellence.
The Disempowered
Afterlife: Sexualization as Neo-Conservative Revision
BBC’s Sherlock (2012)
reframes Adler’s legacy through a paradoxical lens: her celebrated intellect
dissolves into sexual spectacle, trading Doyle’s gender subversion for
postfeminist cliché. Where the original Adler wielded performative acts as constitutive strategy, this
adaptation reduces her to biological essentialism. Nudity becomes her primary
weapon—declared literally as her “battle dress” (S02E01 23:16)—signaling not agency but entrapment within
patriarchal scopophilia. Holmes’s inability to “read” her naked body
(visually punctuated by floating question marks, (S02E01 25:12-25:30) positions
femininity as inherently opaque, naturalizing
the compartmentalized idea of gender Doyle’s text dismantled through
performativity.
The Spectacle of “Empowerment”: From
Intellect to Flesh
The corporeal reduction of
BBC Adler manifests starkly in the rewriting of her victory. Doyle’s psychological
duel—culminating in her respectful letter asserting narrative control—becomes a
scene of eroticized physical domination. Adler drugs Holmes, beats him with a
riding crop, and snarls, “This is how I want you to remember me. The woman who
beat you” (S02E01 33:08-33:57). The
shift from intellectual mastery to literal violence regresses to Victorian
stereotypes of the “highly sexed female” as Primorac noted (102), framing her
power as erotic danger rather than cognitive prowess. The
adaptation’s invention of sexual tension—absent in Doyle but amplified through lingering gazes and Holmes’s
elevated pulse reading (S02E01 1:20:36-1:20:53)—romanticizes
gender hierarchy, reducing their dynamic to “The Virgin” versus “The Whore” in
Holmes’s reductive taxonomy.
The Postfeminist “Double Entanglement”:
Illusion and Punishment
McRobbie’s concept of the postfeminist
“double entanglement” (13) structures Adler’s narrative transformation,
revealing how illusory empowerment is violently revoked to restore patriarchal
order. Her initial posturing of sexual dominance—epitomized by declarations of
control over Holmes—exemplifies postfeminism’s reduction of female agency to
individualism and sexual power; a discursive substitution for feminism that
co-opts the language of “choice” (McRobbie 1). Crucially departing from Doyle’s Adler—who outmaneuvered
Holmes through intellectual mastery alone—this modern iteration’s performative
control collapses when Holmes decrypts her self-set passcode “I AM SHERLOCKED”
(S02E01
01:15:30). The revelation of her private desire reframes her
calculated persona as vulnerability, publicly stripping her intellectual
authority and reducing her agency to sensual attachment. Her subsequent reduction to an
Orientalized captive—visually erased beneath a hijab in the final
scence—completes the disempowerment (S02E01 01:27:43-01:28:24). Exotified and anonymized, she embodies
the “damsel in distress” trope while mirroring neo-conservative backlash. This
trajectory, culminating in literal and symbolic violence, exposes
postfeminism’s central contradiction: the instrumentalization of sexual freedom
as a Western signifier, only to be violently retracted. Such punitive
spectacle, McRobbie argues, conjures feminism’s “hideous spectre” deterring
solidarity through the very illusion of choice it propagates (1).
Reinforcing Binaries through Biological
Essentialism
The BBC adaptation systematically
dismantles Doyle’s subversive model of gender performativity, replacing Adler’s
strategic self-fashioning with biologically reductive essentialism. Where
Doyle’s Adler wielded disguise as pragmatic “walking-clothes”—a tool for
intellectual victory secured through cunning and the institutional strategy of
marriage—the modern iteration collapses agency into corporeality: nudity
becomes her “battle dress,” erotic domination with a riding crop substitutes
for genuine victory, and romantic obsession overrides strategic intellect. This
regression culminates in her visual erasure beneath a hijab during captivity,
negating the identity continuity implied by Doyle’s Adler. Such narrative
choices violate Butler’s foundational principle that gender is in no way a
stable identity rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time through
“stylized repetition of acts” (Gender Trouble 1). Doyle’s Adler performed fluid identity to subvert patriarchal structures; BBC’s Adler
is reduced to performing a culturally scripted sexuality anchored
in biological determinism. Her trajectory thus enacts a postfeminist
essentialism, where the illusion of sexual empowerment masks a reactionary
reinstatement of the female body as the primary site of identity—and
vulnerability.
The Hijab as Ultimate Erasure
The burqa sequence (S02E01
01:27:43-01:28:24) crystallizes the adaptation’s regressive gender politics
through Adler’s triple reduction: first to an Orientalist cipher, then to
depersonalized corporeality, and finally to a passive object of patriarchal
rescue. Framed by exoticizing shadows and anonymized beneath a hijab deployed
as crude shorthand for oppression, Adler is stripped of identity and agency—her
intellectual mastery erased alongside her face. This visual depersonification
reduces her entirely to the vulnerable body the narrative has consistently
essentialized, fulfilling the adaptation’s biological determinism. Her
subsequent salvation by Holmes completes this erasure: not only does his
intervention recenter male genius as the sole mechanism for her survival, but
it does so within a neo-conservative fantasy where the sexually autonomous
woman is literally shrouded and silenced. This denouement weaponizes cultural
iconography to enact a postfeminist punishment, remaking Adler as a voiceless,
veiled body—the antithesis of Doyle’s performative strategist and the ultimate
realization of the adaptation’s reactionary logic.
Conclusion
Adler’s journey from Doyle’s cunning strategist to the
BBC’s sensationalized spectacle starkly illustrates a pervasive trend in
adaptation: the sacrifice of complex female agency at the altar of broad commercial
appeal. Where Doyle’s original character triumphed through sharp intellect,
strategic disguise, and narrative control—outmaneuvering Holmes without relying
on her body—the modern remake reduces her to a series of market-tested
binaries. Her initial portrayal as a dominatrix wielding nudity as “battle
dress” and a riding crop offers audiences a superficial, easily digestible
version of “modern” female power—sexually assertive but ultimately hollow. This
faux liberation is deliberately designed to hook viewers craving contemporary
heroines, yet it sets the stage for her inevitable downfall.
Her systematic humiliation, culminating in the
Orientalized captivity in the climax sequence, fulfills the other half of this
commercial equation. Reduced to a veiled, anonymous captive awaiting rescue,
Adler caters to conservative expectations of feminine vulnerability and
containment. Holmes’ predictable intervention is not just patriarchal; it is
a commercially engineered resolution,
providing the emotionally safe spectacle of male genius restoring order. Every
beat—from the exposed body to the erased identity beneath the hijab—serves
sensationalized contrast, maximizing audience engagement through extreme visual
shorthand while avoiding any genuine, challenging subversion that might risk
alienating mainstream sensibilities.
The true cost of this market alchemy extends beyond Adler
herself; it reshapes cultural memory. By trading Doyle’s subversive intellect
for eroticized spectacle and distress signals, this adaptation actively dilutes
her legacy for new generations. It reflects a broader pattern where
historically complex female characters—Elizabeth Bennet’s wit, Jane Eyre’s
moral autonomy—are streamlined into romantic transformation or body-centric
power because these tropes sell more easily than narratives of intellectual
rebellion or social defiance. Yet audiences deserve more than this calculated
regression. Reclaiming Adler’s power means honoring her original, enduring
victory: a mind that challenged patriarchy through observation and cunning,
proving agency stems from intellect and strategy, never merely from biology or
sexual display. That Adler—the
one who outsmarted Holmes and walked away on her own terms—remains the vital
blueprint for stories that empower women without reducing them to marketable,
binary extremes
Works Cited
“A Scandal in Belgravia.” Sherlock, season 2, episode 1, written by Steven Moffat, directed
by Paul McGuigan, BBC, 1 Jan. 2012. BBC iPlayer.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”.
Routledge, 1993.
---.Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in
Bohemia.” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
Wordsworth Classics, 1992.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of
Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013.
Kho, Younghee. “Performative Sherlock Holmes:
Male Direction and Female Digression in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’” ANQ: A
Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 31, no. 4, 2018, pp. 238–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2017.1403301.
McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath
of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. SAGE Publications, 2009.
Primorac, Antonija. “The Naked Truth: The
Postfeminist Afterlives of Irene Adler.” Neo-Victorian
Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, pp. 89–113.