Bob Fires Tina Belcher Analysis

Gene Belcher is the only boy of the family, interested in music and bodily functions. While most of the time he refers to himself a boy and uses he/him pronouns, this paragraph will make an argument about how Gene’s gender is actually much more fluid and he could be read as a genderfluid or a nonbinary person. To start of with the way Gene is animated, there’s nothing to Gene that could be considered extremely gendered – his hair is mid length with bangs, he wears a t-shirt and shorts that are respectively yellow and blue. Nothing about Gene anchors him to a specific gender, not even his voice because of Bob’s Burgers tendency to not hire voice actors based on gender. Now, while not being on the list of episodes mentioned earlier, in “Bob Fires

This piece of information is quite significant when it comes to the characterisation of Tina, whose portrayal is in some ways more akin to that what is expected of a teenage boy than a teenage girl. Tina wears a blue t-shirt, a black skirt and a pair of thickly framed glasses; none of this is particularly gendered, in likeness to the other Belchers’ outfits. However, her interests follow the audiences’ conception of a girl in her teens: horses, boys, boys and horses. Tina’s fascination with boys is given a lot of room in the show, as is her appreciation of butts. In the episode “Boyz 4 Now” Tina goes to a boy band’s concert and unlike Louise, she wholly enjoys her time there. Tina has no problem expressing her enthusiasm for the artists and she connects with the fellow fan girls, understanding where they come from with their frantic enthusiasm. Tina’s budding sexuality is surprisingly explicit, given the way she writes “erotic friend fiction” (stories about her kissing Jimmy Jr., her crush throughout the show). Teenage girls do not usually take on the active role of a pursuer in media texts, as the awkward sexual awakening is left for fumbling teenage boys, Tina being an exception to this. Tina and Jimmy Jr.’s roles are almost reverse when it comes to their relationship, or the start of it; Tina is the one going after Jimmy Jr., while he is more interested in dancing and hanging out with his friends. In her book “Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality” Deborah L. Tolman discusses her findings regarding teenage girls and sexuality and Tina seems to deviate from this; she writes that teenage girls do not talk about their own desires nor do they recognise the dominant sexual patterns of behaviour from their peers, teenage boys (2002, p. 26). Tina comes across as a confident teen, but with puberty there’s