The Subversion of the Male Gaze

Jennifer is Dimensional 

Though not completely obvious on first glace of the film's marketing, Cody writes Jennifer as a dimensional character. Throughout the film, Jennifer sometimes appears unkept, sickly, hungry, and even vicious. Being portrayed in this way allows Jennifer to transcend shallow archetypes that women so often fall subject to in media and film. Because of this dimensionality, the character of Jennifer proves herself to be written for analysis, not for simply being the subject of gawking. At the time of Jennifer's Body, this deeply complex character would have drawn a stark comparison to other representations of women in film. 

Autonomy Over Her Sexuality 

In other films Jennifer's actress, Megan Fox, has starred in (for example, Transformers), her sex appeal is evident to her audience but serves no purpose to her characterization or to her personality. Fox's Transformers character and similar characters are generally shallowly written and only serve the purpose of giving the male audience something to view, revealing a dark reality of gender dynamics. In instances like Fox in Transformers, a woman's attractiveness is passive to her character, therefore she has no autonomy over how she is perceived. In Jennifer's Body, on the other hand, Fox is portrayed as sexual, but never without her character's involvement in this fact. What makes Cody's work in Jennifer's Body so worthy of analysis is that the basis of the plot proves that Jennifer is fully in control of her sexuality and is not subject to the consumption of men -- quite the opposite, actually. On this, Victoria Pochapska writes for Movieweb, "Megan Fox was the first actress sought for the role of the titular Jennifer, due to her status in audience perception as that bombshell that washed a car as her audition for the Transformers franchise. Kusama [Jennifer's Body director] wanted to play on those sexist constrictions and show how women’s bodies don’t belong to women anymore in a gender-skewed world, of which Hollywood is a hyperbolic mirror."