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angela_weber for editing this essay with me, and my friends list for providing stimulating conversation throughout.
I want to talk about women on Lost, highlighting my favorite representations that perceive my points, with the characters in order of (how I perceive?) their prevalence in the story. This essay will examine the archetypes and roles that women on Lost inhabit through the examples of Ana Lucia, Claire, Sun, Juliet, and Kate. Spoilers are throughout 6x05, 'Lighthouse.'
1. Ana Lucia:
Am I the only person who likes her? Quite possibly. But here's why I love (no, really, love) Ana Lucia:
1. Person of color representation! Always wonderful.
2. She's a cop! She's a female cop! Place a woman in a male-dominated field and I'm ready to go.
3. She's sex positive. She thinks Sawyer is hot, and she has sex with Sawyer, and she was the one to be like "Cool, that was fun, see ya" after it was done. She thinks Jack is hot, and she could have had sex with him too, and that would have been totally fine with her.
4. She's a leader. Part of the reason why she and Jack connect so immediately is that they share that connection of leadership, she for the tail section, him, of course, for the main cabin. Her leadership can be harsh, but it makes people survive.
5. She's doesn't play nice with others, she doesn't play nice in general, she's vicious and violent and doesn't want to take your shit.
The number one complaint I always hear about Ana Lucia is that she's a bitch. I've never understood it. So what if she's a bitch? She's a fully developed character and that's a rare story in Lost-land. Is this not really an extension of Strong Powerful Women being hated on by fandom at large? Tell me if I'm wrong here. Tell me that if a hot man acted in the same devil-may-care style, was that same level of damaged and "fuck you" that fandom wouldn't love him.
(Hint: the fandom does love him. His name is James Ford.)
Now, Ana Lucia isn't the best feminist character in the world either, but my main (generally only? I'd have to re-watch in detail to be positive) complaint about her is less an extension of her and an extension of the way this show writes women, and that's the murder of the man who shot her and made her lose her child. Now, obviously, that's a horrible, terrible loss. But this show, as we'll see, places women into categories of Wife and Mother (with, if you're Kate, Sex Object thrown in), and that's an extension of essentialism I am entirely uncomfortable with. After all, what other motivations could a woman have for killing a man in cold blood other than because he made her lose a baby? What do women care about other than babies, after all?
2. Claire Littleton
I will preface this section with this: I am beyond ambivalent about Claire. Always have been, always will be. But, the reason this is the case is because of Lost's general treatment of women and consistent inability to write well-developed female characters. Or, you know, keep them alive. But let's go back to the beginning. We first see Claire screaming about her baby, which is completely logical, because she's super pregnant and in a major plane wreck, but in retrospective analysis that scene pretty much makes Claire's character for the rest of the show. Claire is immediately set up as the Pregnant Woman/Mother archetype, and she stays there. Any character she once had in season one blurs entirely into Claire, the Mother, by season three, and in (?) season two she doesn't really exist as separate either.
Claire, of course, never wanted to keep Aaron. She wanted to give him to a different family -- even though she was told by creepy men with visions of the future that she, as The True Mother, had to raise him. But as soon as Aaron is born, or perhaps earlier, as she begins to somehow come to peace with her pregnancy in a way she couldn't on the mainland, Claire begins to love being a mother. This is no fault of either the character or the show. What is a fault of the show is that everything that happens to Claire surrounds her motherhood. Ethan attacks her because she's pregnant and He Must Save the Child At Any Costs -- including kidnapping her (which has some creepy anti-choice undertones as far as I'm concerned); that same storyline is exploited to get Juliet accepted into the beach camp. I honestly cannot think of a single moment in seasons two or three that aren't about how Claire is a mom. I don't know who she is. Which is why I am apathetic about her. Because Claire isn't a person, she's a flat archetype of young motherhood, of women who thought they didn't want to keep their children but then realized once they were born that they did, in fact, want to keep them, and, as we'll explore later, this sort of anti-choice narrative comes up again with the Others.
But until then, Claire Littleton has come back. And -- who knows, maybe in this last half of the season she will be awesome and evil and crazy and more awesome. If so, I applaud Lost for shaping up. But Claire -- she doesn't have depth. In her flashbacks she has character and pain and joy and it's real and then she just gets swallowed up into motherhood as soon as she gets on that island. Now, her violence that we've seen revolves around Aaron, in some vicious representation of motherly instinct. She has, in her apparent grief and loss, created a fake child made of sticks in a bassinet. One wonders how Lost would paint a male character who was infected and then abandoned for three years on the island.
We don't know at this point what makes Aaron special -- but we do know that Claire had very explicit instruction to raise him herself (which she didn't). There has been a lot of talk that the Littleton crossed out on the wall was Aaron; Kate had that dream where Claire demanded she not take Aaron back to the island, and, to be honest; I'm not entirely sure Ben's ploy to get Aaron was just an attempt at getting Jack to contact Kate and that it wasn't, in fact, an actual attempt to get Aaron back to that island, because for some reason Aaron is important. And what does that make Claire? That makes her the mother of the prodigal son, faded into the backdrop because she has no other purpose other than her motherhood. Maybe Claire will be great in this new, infected incarnation. If so, I look forward to it, though it doesn't change what they did with Claire for three seasons. Nor does it change what has happened with the other women on the show.
3. Sun
I thought Sun started out really well. There was certainly a wonderful narrative there, all about the restrictions of an abusive marriage and how you just scream for women to get out and they just can't. On island, her imposed silence despite her complete understanding of English mirrors exactly the silenced relationship she had with Jin off-island -- understanding everything and yet being unable to speak, under the same constrictions from Jin she was under before the crash.
As a woman of color, Sun lives in the intersection of female and Korean, with all the complications in representation therein. In establishing Sun as the only woman in an abusive relationship on Lost, she perpetuates a stereotype that East Asian women are docile and East Asian men patriarchal and abusive (her mother and father further serve this point). Even early on, Sun does have her rebellious side, and this rebellion grows throughout the series. The strength she carries with her, and her decisions to learn English and have an affair with the goal of getting out of her marriage do serve to a certain extent to subvert the racialized tropes we are originally presented with. However, she does remain in an abusive marriage under the pretext of emotional attachment, and while I wholeheartedly appreciate the way Lost portrays the sheer difficulty of walking away, she does not walk away. While we learn later that Jin did truly still love Sun, this fact only increases the risky narrative. In addition to constructing Sun as a woman struggling to leave a man who emotionally abused her, Jin is constructed as the abusive husband who hurts you because he loves you, and who, in the end, loves you despite his actions. That's a dangerous place to go.
However, Sun's storyline is, for quite a while, a narrative about reclaiming. She gains her power back, she and Jin work through their issues, they love each other, they're having a child, and then she leaves the island. Sun reclaims the power her father once had by buying a majority share in his company; she stands up to Charles Whitmore; she holds guns at Benjamin Linus' head. Even though her actions in this regard still spring from her relationship with Jin, I think it's vital to establish a distinction between acting out of love (and, in this case, grief born of love) and acting out of gendered interpersonal constructions. I would describe Sun's behavior off-island as constituting the former, but a cogent argument could be made for the latter as well.
When Sun agrees to go back to the island, however, her entire storyline completely vanishes. The only important things that have happened with her group on the island have revolved around Ben, Jacob, Flocke, and a brief moment of her attempts to find Jin. Sun's light, once so bright and promising, has almost entirely faded away. In some ways, she has circled back to that original silence from when they got to the island -- this not because she is in an abusive relationship, but because the Lost writers simply decided to forget her.
4. Juliet
Juliet Burke was a tragic figure from the start. Off-island, her every action was controlled by her ex-husband, and her treatments of her sister were done in dark, secret rooms. Juliet was brave from the start, too. On-island, Juliet falls under the control of Ben, but she does what he asks of her because of her last shreds of hope that Ben will let her go home to her sister. Therefore, though her actions are circumscribed by the grip of Ben's power, her ultimate motivation is her own liberation, which is quite different than many of the other women on Lost.
The broader context for Juliet's presence on the island, however, is less progressive. Juliet is brought to the island because mothers keep dying, and while she is unable to save the mothers, no one ever suggests abortions. Given Juliet's status as a (very capable) fertility doctor, I am fairly certain she'd be able to terminate pregnancies as well, though maybe I'm wrong about this. Instead of even presenting the option of abortion, pregnancy for women is a death sentence without alternative. The doomed mothers on the island go through with their pregnancies despite the high likelihood of death. Perhaps this is because they think they might be the exception, the first saved woman in a long line of cold bodies, but I find it categorically impossible that every pregnant woman on that island was more than happy to march down that deadly path despite the overwhelming facts. Sacrificing the life of both mother and child is constructed as a necessary risk for the potential of healthy childbirth, and we are never told of a mother that considers abortion to save her own life. The Others' obsession with children is what leads them to kidnap the children from both sides of the plane, and it is what leads to Juliet's captivity in search for a cure despite its impossibility.
A lot of what happens with Juliet's interaction with Jack takes place off-camera in season three, so we never see, for example, the conversation where she tells Jack that she was sent by Ben, nor do we know precisely why she changed loyalties. It was probably a combination of factors - her affection for Jack, Sun's pregnancy, and a final, decisive personal liberation from the Others. Because we never see it, we don't have the opportunity to understand what created that sense of agency, and it detracts from our full understanding of her character. While we always see the complete motivations of the important men on the show, as soon as Juliet stops existing in the moral grey box of intrigue, we no longer have the ability to fully view her experiences.
Later, when she, Sawyer, and the boaties are left on the island, Juliet has the opportunity to become a true leader. Sawyer somehow takes that position, but Juliet does get a sort of second-in-command, the position of the great woman behind the great man that women have theoretically occupied for centuries. Sawyer goes out to negotiate with Richard; Sawyer concocts lies to protect them in the Dharma camp; Sawyer becomes head of security while Juliet becomes a mechanic, which, given her response to Amy's labor in 'La Fleur,' seems to be almost a sense of self-imposed purgatory for her failure to save pregnant women. Thus, her inability to perform her functional role as protector of women's reproductive capabilities constitutes punishable behavior.
To a large extent, 'La Fleur' is the last time we experience Juliet's power. The rest of the season she largely functions as an emotional support system for Sawyer, and the finale presents her as an irrational woman acting under jealousy rather than a rational actor with agency. She goes along with Jack's plan because she is jealous of Kate and suddenly insecure in her relationship with Sawyer. Juliet Burke doesn't decide to try and blow up an island so she doesn't have to lose her boyfriend. Juliet Burke doesn't act irrationally - everything she does is rational, almost too rational, since getting to that island. But the Juliet we see in the finale, prior to her final act, is an act we are meant to read as both irrational and hyper-emotional. This is not to discount Juliet's strength or sacrifice in detonating that bomb. What it does say, though, is that even in Juliet's arguably bravest moment, the motivations for her actions are a response to Sawyer, not to her own rational decision-making (to be fair, Jack does quite a lot of irrational thinking in this episode as well). Even when the finale attempts to retcon Juliet's actions as not born out of jealousy, she says she wanted it to work to get Sawyer off the island. This particular aspect I can respect. People in love should want the best for the one they love, though generally killing oneself for that goal isn't the best decision. Her name is Juliet, after all. But Sawyer's all-encompassing grief in season six seems to place Juliet's death as a plot point on the path of a somehow more vital male character, rather than the loss of a powerful, strong woman in her own right.
5. Kate
At this point in Lost, it is sometimes easy to forget that Kate Austen, like Juliet and Sun, started out being a fully formed character with complex motivations and history. She has been this ping-pong of romantic interest for so long, so often this object to be attained rather than a person in her own right, that it is easy to forget about the woman with agency that was presented throughout much of season one. Kate doesn't act violently because she is a wife or mother. Kate kills because -- well, I'm still not entirely sure why Kate kills her father, and I'm still not sure if that's a fault of my analysis or the show's fault of representation. However, Kate does not kill because of some essentialist compulsion, and that's something. Other than that, though, Kate in early seasons barely merits discussing. She inhabits the role of love interest so thoroughly that all her other motivations fall away. Maybe the shift that occurred can be related back to JJ Abrams leaving the show, because he does generally write female characters fairly well (see: Alias), or maybe it's just that the Lost writers forgot what to do with her, but primarily I want to focus on the later seasons.
Kate's quest off-island is primarily the protection of Aaron, who she has claimed as her son. To a certain extent, Aaron feels like Kate's salvation. Her attorney in 'Eggtown' (4x04) suggests bringing Aaron into the courtroom to bring sympathy, which is a more literal translation of salvation, but it is very much worth noting that Kate is the only person off-island who has a stable existence, which is rather ironic given her pre-island fugitive status. Somehow, we have gone from on-the-run Kate Austen who doesn't do taco night to loving-mother Kate Austen, who does taco night and mac and cheese afternoons. Her actions off-island are primarily as mother, which goes against every pre-island characterization of Kate but still provides her with stability and a large, brightly lit home, and as girlfriend to Jack and as friend to Cassidy, a role which she only partakes in because Sawyer asked her to.
Whatever the reason, Kate's primary action has been to elicit response from Jack or Sawyer, even when she has motivations separate from them. For example, when Kate leaves Jack's camp to go to Locke's camp at the Others' homes in season four, primarily in 'Eggtown' (4x04) her desire to find out what Miles knows about her gets transformed into a narrative about the triangle. Kate's relationship with Sawyer is contrasted with her relationship with Jack in the flash forward, and Kate's primary motivation isn't revealed until the end of the episode. Much like Juliet's motivational shifts mentioned in the above section, we don't get to see how Kate thinks or why she does what she does until we have spent an entire episode lingering in this triangle space. In 'What Kate Does' (6x03) we have a similar problem, wherein it seems like that Kate is going after Sawyer because of romantic attachment, rather than her actual motivation, which is to get Sawyer to help her find Claire. Similarly, in 'Lighthouse' (6x05), Kate's brief appearance to explain that she is going to find Claire does exist outside the triangle, but we also don't see it.
Kate has become a distant element, a woman on her own quest to find another woman, and as this therefore does not relate to broad island mysteries, they are deemed both unimportant and unworthy of display for the greater mission of the men's mission to discover the answers to questions. Therefore, it could be suggested that men on Lost quest for answers the audience seeks, and women on Lost quest based on emotional responses that do not contribute to overall island issues, but, rather, their own personal and decidedly 'unimportant' missions. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the fandom lamenting that Kate doesn't "do anything" lately. That's both correct and incorrect. Kate is doing a lot, and has been doing a lot, but the show has deemed it unimportant.
Conclusions
What we have here is process of elimination. Every female character who is not Kate has been swept away in one way or another. This isn't to say that the men don't have emotional responses and romantic ties; they do. But they are also fully realized persons with complex motivations that are built in a way that cannot be said of the women on Lost. At the end of the day, Lost is a boys' club. It's the men who pull the strings, it's the men who write the lists, it's the men who get the complicated, in-depth characterization that is fully expanded, it's the men who exist beyond their romantic ties. At this point, the only female character with any semblance of screen time is Kate. I don't know where the hell Sun is, and Claire is back, which, as mentioned, could be a good move, but it also could not be. We'll wait and see on that one. Flocke and Sawyer and then the Hurley, Jack and Jacob plotline have so far commanded the majority of the plot concerning island mysteries, and since Jack, Ben and Locke commanded most of the plot in earlier seasons (with Sawyer as an add-on in s4+5 when he really came into his own), not to mention the fact that the two main powers controlling the island are also men, this is, again, a show about the men. Even a conservative interpretation places women as secondary roles. A more critical version sees women on Lost as established archetypes: mothers, lovers, victims. When they are not this way they either, in the case of Sun, become those archetypes and fade, or, like Juliet or Ana Lucia, they get killed off. And attention, once again, falls back to the boys. I'm not saying that these men don't have an essential place in the plot, but there’s a place for women in these storylines, a place where they have agency and effect and voice, and Lost gave up on giving that to them a long time ago. And that's a damn shame.
angela_weber for editing this essay with me, and my friends list for providing stimulating conversation throughout.I want to talk about women on Lost, highlighting my favorite representations that perceive my points, with the characters in order of (how I perceive?) their prevalence in the story. This essay will examine the archetypes and roles that women on Lost inhabit through the examples of Ana Lucia, Claire, Sun, Juliet, and Kate. Spoilers are throughout 6x05, 'Lighthouse.'
1. Ana Lucia:
Am I the only person who likes her? Quite possibly. But here's why I love (no, really, love) Ana Lucia:
1. Person of color representation! Always wonderful.
2. She's a cop! She's a female cop! Place a woman in a male-dominated field and I'm ready to go.
3. She's sex positive. She thinks Sawyer is hot, and she has sex with Sawyer, and she was the one to be like "Cool, that was fun, see ya" after it was done. She thinks Jack is hot, and she could have had sex with him too, and that would have been totally fine with her.
4. She's a leader. Part of the reason why she and Jack connect so immediately is that they share that connection of leadership, she for the tail section, him, of course, for the main cabin. Her leadership can be harsh, but it makes people survive.
5. She's doesn't play nice with others, she doesn't play nice in general, she's vicious and violent and doesn't want to take your shit.
The number one complaint I always hear about Ana Lucia is that she's a bitch. I've never understood it. So what if she's a bitch? She's a fully developed character and that's a rare story in Lost-land. Is this not really an extension of Strong Powerful Women being hated on by fandom at large? Tell me if I'm wrong here. Tell me that if a hot man acted in the same devil-may-care style, was that same level of damaged and "fuck you" that fandom wouldn't love him.
(Hint: the fandom does love him. His name is James Ford.)
Now, Ana Lucia isn't the best feminist character in the world either, but my main (generally only? I'd have to re-watch in detail to be positive) complaint about her is less an extension of her and an extension of the way this show writes women, and that's the murder of the man who shot her and made her lose her child. Now, obviously, that's a horrible, terrible loss. But this show, as we'll see, places women into categories of Wife and Mother (with, if you're Kate, Sex Object thrown in), and that's an extension of essentialism I am entirely uncomfortable with. After all, what other motivations could a woman have for killing a man in cold blood other than because he made her lose a baby? What do women care about other than babies, after all?
2. Claire Littleton
I will preface this section with this: I am beyond ambivalent about Claire. Always have been, always will be. But, the reason this is the case is because of Lost's general treatment of women and consistent inability to write well-developed female characters. Or, you know, keep them alive. But let's go back to the beginning. We first see Claire screaming about her baby, which is completely logical, because she's super pregnant and in a major plane wreck, but in retrospective analysis that scene pretty much makes Claire's character for the rest of the show. Claire is immediately set up as the Pregnant Woman/Mother archetype, and she stays there. Any character she once had in season one blurs entirely into Claire, the Mother, by season three, and in (?) season two she doesn't really exist as separate either.
Claire, of course, never wanted to keep Aaron. She wanted to give him to a different family -- even though she was told by creepy men with visions of the future that she, as The True Mother, had to raise him. But as soon as Aaron is born, or perhaps earlier, as she begins to somehow come to peace with her pregnancy in a way she couldn't on the mainland, Claire begins to love being a mother. This is no fault of either the character or the show. What is a fault of the show is that everything that happens to Claire surrounds her motherhood. Ethan attacks her because she's pregnant and He Must Save the Child At Any Costs -- including kidnapping her (which has some creepy anti-choice undertones as far as I'm concerned); that same storyline is exploited to get Juliet accepted into the beach camp. I honestly cannot think of a single moment in seasons two or three that aren't about how Claire is a mom. I don't know who she is. Which is why I am apathetic about her. Because Claire isn't a person, she's a flat archetype of young motherhood, of women who thought they didn't want to keep their children but then realized once they were born that they did, in fact, want to keep them, and, as we'll explore later, this sort of anti-choice narrative comes up again with the Others.
But until then, Claire Littleton has come back. And -- who knows, maybe in this last half of the season she will be awesome and evil and crazy and more awesome. If so, I applaud Lost for shaping up. But Claire -- she doesn't have depth. In her flashbacks she has character and pain and joy and it's real and then she just gets swallowed up into motherhood as soon as she gets on that island. Now, her violence that we've seen revolves around Aaron, in some vicious representation of motherly instinct. She has, in her apparent grief and loss, created a fake child made of sticks in a bassinet. One wonders how Lost would paint a male character who was infected and then abandoned for three years on the island.
We don't know at this point what makes Aaron special -- but we do know that Claire had very explicit instruction to raise him herself (which she didn't). There has been a lot of talk that the Littleton crossed out on the wall was Aaron; Kate had that dream where Claire demanded she not take Aaron back to the island, and, to be honest; I'm not entirely sure Ben's ploy to get Aaron was just an attempt at getting Jack to contact Kate and that it wasn't, in fact, an actual attempt to get Aaron back to that island, because for some reason Aaron is important. And what does that make Claire? That makes her the mother of the prodigal son, faded into the backdrop because she has no other purpose other than her motherhood. Maybe Claire will be great in this new, infected incarnation. If so, I look forward to it, though it doesn't change what they did with Claire for three seasons. Nor does it change what has happened with the other women on the show.
3. Sun
I thought Sun started out really well. There was certainly a wonderful narrative there, all about the restrictions of an abusive marriage and how you just scream for women to get out and they just can't. On island, her imposed silence despite her complete understanding of English mirrors exactly the silenced relationship she had with Jin off-island -- understanding everything and yet being unable to speak, under the same constrictions from Jin she was under before the crash.
As a woman of color, Sun lives in the intersection of female and Korean, with all the complications in representation therein. In establishing Sun as the only woman in an abusive relationship on Lost, she perpetuates a stereotype that East Asian women are docile and East Asian men patriarchal and abusive (her mother and father further serve this point). Even early on, Sun does have her rebellious side, and this rebellion grows throughout the series. The strength she carries with her, and her decisions to learn English and have an affair with the goal of getting out of her marriage do serve to a certain extent to subvert the racialized tropes we are originally presented with. However, she does remain in an abusive marriage under the pretext of emotional attachment, and while I wholeheartedly appreciate the way Lost portrays the sheer difficulty of walking away, she does not walk away. While we learn later that Jin did truly still love Sun, this fact only increases the risky narrative. In addition to constructing Sun as a woman struggling to leave a man who emotionally abused her, Jin is constructed as the abusive husband who hurts you because he loves you, and who, in the end, loves you despite his actions. That's a dangerous place to go.
However, Sun's storyline is, for quite a while, a narrative about reclaiming. She gains her power back, she and Jin work through their issues, they love each other, they're having a child, and then she leaves the island. Sun reclaims the power her father once had by buying a majority share in his company; she stands up to Charles Whitmore; she holds guns at Benjamin Linus' head. Even though her actions in this regard still spring from her relationship with Jin, I think it's vital to establish a distinction between acting out of love (and, in this case, grief born of love) and acting out of gendered interpersonal constructions. I would describe Sun's behavior off-island as constituting the former, but a cogent argument could be made for the latter as well.
When Sun agrees to go back to the island, however, her entire storyline completely vanishes. The only important things that have happened with her group on the island have revolved around Ben, Jacob, Flocke, and a brief moment of her attempts to find Jin. Sun's light, once so bright and promising, has almost entirely faded away. In some ways, she has circled back to that original silence from when they got to the island -- this not because she is in an abusive relationship, but because the Lost writers simply decided to forget her.
4. Juliet
Juliet Burke was a tragic figure from the start. Off-island, her every action was controlled by her ex-husband, and her treatments of her sister were done in dark, secret rooms. Juliet was brave from the start, too. On-island, Juliet falls under the control of Ben, but she does what he asks of her because of her last shreds of hope that Ben will let her go home to her sister. Therefore, though her actions are circumscribed by the grip of Ben's power, her ultimate motivation is her own liberation, which is quite different than many of the other women on Lost.
The broader context for Juliet's presence on the island, however, is less progressive. Juliet is brought to the island because mothers keep dying, and while she is unable to save the mothers, no one ever suggests abortions. Given Juliet's status as a (very capable) fertility doctor, I am fairly certain she'd be able to terminate pregnancies as well, though maybe I'm wrong about this. Instead of even presenting the option of abortion, pregnancy for women is a death sentence without alternative. The doomed mothers on the island go through with their pregnancies despite the high likelihood of death. Perhaps this is because they think they might be the exception, the first saved woman in a long line of cold bodies, but I find it categorically impossible that every pregnant woman on that island was more than happy to march down that deadly path despite the overwhelming facts. Sacrificing the life of both mother and child is constructed as a necessary risk for the potential of healthy childbirth, and we are never told of a mother that considers abortion to save her own life. The Others' obsession with children is what leads them to kidnap the children from both sides of the plane, and it is what leads to Juliet's captivity in search for a cure despite its impossibility.
A lot of what happens with Juliet's interaction with Jack takes place off-camera in season three, so we never see, for example, the conversation where she tells Jack that she was sent by Ben, nor do we know precisely why she changed loyalties. It was probably a combination of factors - her affection for Jack, Sun's pregnancy, and a final, decisive personal liberation from the Others. Because we never see it, we don't have the opportunity to understand what created that sense of agency, and it detracts from our full understanding of her character. While we always see the complete motivations of the important men on the show, as soon as Juliet stops existing in the moral grey box of intrigue, we no longer have the ability to fully view her experiences.
Later, when she, Sawyer, and the boaties are left on the island, Juliet has the opportunity to become a true leader. Sawyer somehow takes that position, but Juliet does get a sort of second-in-command, the position of the great woman behind the great man that women have theoretically occupied for centuries. Sawyer goes out to negotiate with Richard; Sawyer concocts lies to protect them in the Dharma camp; Sawyer becomes head of security while Juliet becomes a mechanic, which, given her response to Amy's labor in 'La Fleur,' seems to be almost a sense of self-imposed purgatory for her failure to save pregnant women. Thus, her inability to perform her functional role as protector of women's reproductive capabilities constitutes punishable behavior.
To a large extent, 'La Fleur' is the last time we experience Juliet's power. The rest of the season she largely functions as an emotional support system for Sawyer, and the finale presents her as an irrational woman acting under jealousy rather than a rational actor with agency. She goes along with Jack's plan because she is jealous of Kate and suddenly insecure in her relationship with Sawyer. Juliet Burke doesn't decide to try and blow up an island so she doesn't have to lose her boyfriend. Juliet Burke doesn't act irrationally - everything she does is rational, almost too rational, since getting to that island. But the Juliet we see in the finale, prior to her final act, is an act we are meant to read as both irrational and hyper-emotional. This is not to discount Juliet's strength or sacrifice in detonating that bomb. What it does say, though, is that even in Juliet's arguably bravest moment, the motivations for her actions are a response to Sawyer, not to her own rational decision-making (to be fair, Jack does quite a lot of irrational thinking in this episode as well). Even when the finale attempts to retcon Juliet's actions as not born out of jealousy, she says she wanted it to work to get Sawyer off the island. This particular aspect I can respect. People in love should want the best for the one they love, though generally killing oneself for that goal isn't the best decision. Her name is Juliet, after all. But Sawyer's all-encompassing grief in season six seems to place Juliet's death as a plot point on the path of a somehow more vital male character, rather than the loss of a powerful, strong woman in her own right.
5. Kate
At this point in Lost, it is sometimes easy to forget that Kate Austen, like Juliet and Sun, started out being a fully formed character with complex motivations and history. She has been this ping-pong of romantic interest for so long, so often this object to be attained rather than a person in her own right, that it is easy to forget about the woman with agency that was presented throughout much of season one. Kate doesn't act violently because she is a wife or mother. Kate kills because -- well, I'm still not entirely sure why Kate kills her father, and I'm still not sure if that's a fault of my analysis or the show's fault of representation. However, Kate does not kill because of some essentialist compulsion, and that's something. Other than that, though, Kate in early seasons barely merits discussing. She inhabits the role of love interest so thoroughly that all her other motivations fall away. Maybe the shift that occurred can be related back to JJ Abrams leaving the show, because he does generally write female characters fairly well (see: Alias), or maybe it's just that the Lost writers forgot what to do with her, but primarily I want to focus on the later seasons.
Kate's quest off-island is primarily the protection of Aaron, who she has claimed as her son. To a certain extent, Aaron feels like Kate's salvation. Her attorney in 'Eggtown' (4x04) suggests bringing Aaron into the courtroom to bring sympathy, which is a more literal translation of salvation, but it is very much worth noting that Kate is the only person off-island who has a stable existence, which is rather ironic given her pre-island fugitive status. Somehow, we have gone from on-the-run Kate Austen who doesn't do taco night to loving-mother Kate Austen, who does taco night and mac and cheese afternoons. Her actions off-island are primarily as mother, which goes against every pre-island characterization of Kate but still provides her with stability and a large, brightly lit home, and as girlfriend to Jack and as friend to Cassidy, a role which she only partakes in because Sawyer asked her to.
Whatever the reason, Kate's primary action has been to elicit response from Jack or Sawyer, even when she has motivations separate from them. For example, when Kate leaves Jack's camp to go to Locke's camp at the Others' homes in season four, primarily in 'Eggtown' (4x04) her desire to find out what Miles knows about her gets transformed into a narrative about the triangle. Kate's relationship with Sawyer is contrasted with her relationship with Jack in the flash forward, and Kate's primary motivation isn't revealed until the end of the episode. Much like Juliet's motivational shifts mentioned in the above section, we don't get to see how Kate thinks or why she does what she does until we have spent an entire episode lingering in this triangle space. In 'What Kate Does' (6x03) we have a similar problem, wherein it seems like that Kate is going after Sawyer because of romantic attachment, rather than her actual motivation, which is to get Sawyer to help her find Claire. Similarly, in 'Lighthouse' (6x05), Kate's brief appearance to explain that she is going to find Claire does exist outside the triangle, but we also don't see it.
Kate has become a distant element, a woman on her own quest to find another woman, and as this therefore does not relate to broad island mysteries, they are deemed both unimportant and unworthy of display for the greater mission of the men's mission to discover the answers to questions. Therefore, it could be suggested that men on Lost quest for answers the audience seeks, and women on Lost quest based on emotional responses that do not contribute to overall island issues, but, rather, their own personal and decidedly 'unimportant' missions. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the fandom lamenting that Kate doesn't "do anything" lately. That's both correct and incorrect. Kate is doing a lot, and has been doing a lot, but the show has deemed it unimportant.
Conclusions
What we have here is process of elimination. Every female character who is not Kate has been swept away in one way or another. This isn't to say that the men don't have emotional responses and romantic ties; they do. But they are also fully realized persons with complex motivations that are built in a way that cannot be said of the women on Lost. At the end of the day, Lost is a boys' club. It's the men who pull the strings, it's the men who write the lists, it's the men who get the complicated, in-depth characterization that is fully expanded, it's the men who exist beyond their romantic ties. At this point, the only female character with any semblance of screen time is Kate. I don't know where the hell Sun is, and Claire is back, which, as mentioned, could be a good move, but it also could not be. We'll wait and see on that one. Flocke and Sawyer and then the Hurley, Jack and Jacob plotline have so far commanded the majority of the plot concerning island mysteries, and since Jack, Ben and Locke commanded most of the plot in earlier seasons (with Sawyer as an add-on in s4+5 when he really came into his own), not to mention the fact that the two main powers controlling the island are also men, this is, again, a show about the men. Even a conservative interpretation places women as secondary roles. A more critical version sees women on Lost as established archetypes: mothers, lovers, victims. When they are not this way they either, in the case of Sun, become those archetypes and fade, or, like Juliet or Ana Lucia, they get killed off. And attention, once again, falls back to the boys. I'm not saying that these men don't have an essential place in the plot, but there’s a place for women in these storylines, a place where they have agency and effect and voice, and Lost gave up on giving that to them a long time ago. And that's a damn shame.
