Dawn A. sent us these posters for The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  Notice how, in three out of four posters, the women are not making eye-contact and, in all of them, they are in a passive pose with a passive facial expression.  Dawn adds:

I’m alarmed by the disembodiment of the character.  While she may be a part of the Terminator series, would we ever see Arnold Schwarzenegger (or other male characters) portrayed like this in posters?

Thanks Dawn!

NEW: After a discussion with my friend Jason, I decided to offer some more images and commentary as food for thought.

Here are the Terminator posters I could find featuring Schwartzenegger.  There are a lot of things separating and potentially separating these posters from those above other than gender: about 20 years, maybe the moral of the movies/series or the feeling of the show, and surely producers/directors etc.  Even so, I think it’s worth putting up the images for contrast.

Back to The Sarah Connor Chronicles:  Below are some additional promotional images that do not reproduce the passivity we see in the first set.  Word on the street is (or so I have heard some people say), the women are not as feminized in the series as they are in the promotional material (which, if true, is interesting in itself).

Still, Jason notes that the empowerment of the women in the series as protectors, comes at the cost of disempowering John Connor and that disempowerment is achieved, in part, through his feminization.  His task, then, as the series progresses, is to finally become a “man.”  At that point, supposedly, he would no longer need the protection of women. 

So, femininity is still associated with weakness.  And, insofar as femininity is equated with weakness, and women are more-or-less required to do at least some femininity (lest they be called “dykes” or “bitches”), women are more-or-less required to appear at least a little bit weak in their daily lives.