*nodding along with both posts eagerly* I'm finding all this particularly interesting since one of my coming-of-age fandoms was Ranma 1/2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD). Although both canon and fandom can be guilty of some real problems, the imagination and willingness of the fandom to play with sex and gender in pretty much... every permutation imaginable, was a formative fandom experience.
I personally find it sort of empowering, as a female reader and writer, to suggest that Chekov's adorable geniusness and Sulu's general badassery and Kirk's command are not off-limits to my gender and are not incompatible with "a female personality" (I loathe phrasing it that way, but I can't think of a better way to express it). For that reason I tend to feel positively about genderswap, but I also realize that my positive emotions aren't everybody's.
I actually had not heard the Mary Sue criticism of genderswap before. Maybe there are some individual genderswap stories where that applies (or I'm just out of the loop), but I'm surprised to see it as an across-the-board criticism. I feel like, in popular perception, making a male character unambiguously awesome doesn't trigger the same reactions as when it's a female character. And I actually don't think that reaction is always wrong, because sometimes "making a female character awesome" can come from an author who seems to define "awesome" as "successfully conforming to all of society's misogynistically impossible expectations for women." So while I think the Mary Sue epithet gets thrown around too freely, I think it can have some legitimacy in those situations. Or at least, I'm sympathetic to the place of frustration that can cause people to reach for the "Mary Sue" tag, even if I don't always personally agree with the use of it.
I feel like most of the Trek genderswap I've read averts that pretty strongly, which is one of the reasons I like it so much. But I can understand how a reader might have different experiences within the fandom and/or come at it with different expectations.
I sort of want to tie all of these issues (Mary Sue, genderswap, and even to some degree slash itself) into some insightful theory about female members of fandom finding ways to "own" or at least make peace with a male-slanted canon, but it's not clicking in my brain exactly right. I also don't mean to make this All About Misogyny - while I think that's an important factor, I recognize that it's not the only issue at play here. It's the only one I feel even a little qualified to offer thoughts on, though XD
Thank you so much for these posts, for writing so clearly and elegantly on a potentially divisive topic, and for giving me more to think about in regards to my own attitudes and participation in fandom.
no subject
I personally find it sort of empowering, as a female reader and writer, to suggest that Chekov's adorable geniusness and Sulu's general badassery and Kirk's command are not off-limits to my gender and are not incompatible with "a female personality" (I loathe phrasing it that way, but I can't think of a better way to express it). For that reason I tend to feel positively about genderswap, but I also realize that my positive emotions aren't everybody's.
I actually had not heard the Mary Sue criticism of genderswap before. Maybe there are some individual genderswap stories where that applies (or I'm just out of the loop), but I'm surprised to see it as an across-the-board criticism. I feel like, in popular perception, making a male character unambiguously awesome doesn't trigger the same reactions as when it's a female character. And I actually don't think that reaction is always wrong, because sometimes "making a female character awesome" can come from an author who seems to define "awesome" as "successfully conforming to all of society's misogynistically impossible expectations for women." So while I think the Mary Sue epithet gets thrown around too freely, I think it can have some legitimacy in those situations. Or at least, I'm sympathetic to the place of frustration that can cause people to reach for the "Mary Sue" tag, even if I don't always personally agree with the use of it.
I feel like most of the Trek genderswap I've read averts that pretty strongly, which is one of the reasons I like it so much. But I can understand how a reader might have different experiences within the fandom and/or come at it with different expectations.
I sort of want to tie all of these issues (Mary Sue, genderswap, and even to some degree slash itself) into some insightful theory about female members of fandom finding ways to "own" or at least make peace with a male-slanted canon, but it's not clicking in my brain exactly right. I also don't mean to make this All About Misogyny - while I think that's an important factor, I recognize that it's not the only issue at play here. It's the only one I feel even a little qualified to offer thoughts on, though XD
Thank you so much for these posts, for writing so clearly and elegantly on a potentially divisive topic, and for giving me more to think about in regards to my own attitudes and participation in fandom.