I seem to keep derailing this conversation into trans* stories and there are a dozen stray thoughts I kind of want to bring to it - Y: The Last Man (so so so transfaily, but all but one character are female), canon genderswap (Red Dwarf) or apparent-sex swap (like in Ranma 1/2) and my fandom experiences of the reaction to them and my feelings for it in the canon, theories and thoughts about genderswap potentiality in other fandoms, my wild distaste of the very idea of Kevin Smith's Ms. Kato in his Green Hornet comics vs. my total joy at the female Starbuck in BSG and how that's probably got to do with the characters' original versions' different archetypal roles, especially since a friend's suggestion of a genderswapped Kato AND Britt didn't squick me nearly as much, and heaven save me, I'd even like to talk about His Girl Friday (1940), which is a genderswap romance filmed fanfic for The Front Page (1931), and how this is a Trope As Old As Time. That would take a lot of writing, though.
There was one commenter here - not the one directly above - who said their initial dislike of genderswap as an idea was related to the suspicion it was slash writers' attempt to garner feminist cred without having to take the focus away from their adored men, which I guess happens, and I have to admit this has been my suspicion in the past too. At the same time I totally get the attraction of riffing on a character by changing their gender and how this is fun and creates new characters, more or less, who are YOURS but at the same time ALSO the character you love, and you can play with them in whole new ways while still having a framework to refer back to. (I always get bored with my entirely original characters because I could make them do/say/be anything and there doesn't seem to be much challenge to writing them.) So there are all those enticing reasons to write genderswap that are NOT "I want feminist cred but I don't find women characters interesting", and so I also KNOW that that suspicion is just prejudice, and not going to be true in all, perhaps not most, cases.
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Date: 2011-03-28 10:31 am (UTC)There was one commenter here - not the one directly above - who said their initial dislike of genderswap as an idea was related to the suspicion it was slash writers' attempt to garner feminist cred without having to take the focus away from their adored men, which I guess happens, and I have to admit this has been my suspicion in the past too. At the same time I totally get the attraction of riffing on a character by changing their gender and how this is fun and creates new characters, more or less, who are YOURS but at the same time ALSO the character you love, and you can play with them in whole new ways while still having a framework to refer back to. (I always get bored with my entirely original characters because I could make them do/say/be anything and there doesn't seem to be much challenge to writing them.) So there are all those enticing reasons to write genderswap that are NOT "I want feminist cred but I don't find women characters interesting", and so I also KNOW that that suspicion is just prejudice, and not going to be true in all, perhaps not most, cases.