These Are My Reasons: Why I Like Genderswap, Part Two

[browngirl]

Having written an entire entry disavowing and countering commonly cited reasons attributed to those of us who like genderswap, here's an entry where I try to explain what my reasons actually are.

Soon after I got into the Star Trek Reboot fandom, when everything felt wide open and full of limitless possibilities, I read this post by Liviapenn where she cast STXI with a gender-reversed set of actors. This post, and the discussions I read subsequently both on and off st_genderswap, galvanized my imagination; I haven't yet written a story where I have genderswapped everyone, but I've thought about what changing any one or more of them might do to their trajectory in the fictional universe.

One character I've written a great deal about is Leah McCoy, MD, CMO of one version of the ISS Enterprise. I put Leonard McCoy through two transformations at once, to the Mirrorverse and from [assumed to be -- more on that later] cisgendered male to cisgendered female; I did so at first because an intriguing prompt caught my eye, but I've kept writing about Leah McCoy because I find her a fascinating character, exploring how she is and isn't like Leonard McCoy, the intersections of how being female changes her and how the Mirror Universe changes her.

Generally... one of my reasons for writing and reading genderswap overlaps with one of my reasons for writing and reading about minor, unnamed-in-canon and offscreen female characters. For me, my primary canon for Star Trek Reboot is a two-hour-long movie (I was not particularly a Star Trek TOS fan) and there's one major female character and a handful of secondary characters. I love that major female character, but Nyota Uhura isn't and shouldn't have to be the entirety of womanhood in the Star Trek universe, so I write and read a seemingly disproportionate amount about minor female characters, and I also ask myself what the fictional universe would look like if a larger proportion of characters whatsoever were female. That's my main reason for writing genderswap. The specter of 'Mary Sue' is invoked nearly any time we write about female characters, including against genderswap, but I think female characters are worth considering and that the threat of Mary Sues is greatly overblown (but that's another discussion).

As I put it elsewhen, "I first picked up a genderswap prompt because I thought, "What if Character X, with Y canon role, were female instead of male? And then I ran with it. There's no more complicated reason than that, putting more women into the fictional universe and seeing how being female affects a character's in-universe life and in-story 'jobs'."

Although, I've since found that it is more complicated. For instance, I elided at least two aspects of genderswap in my explanation above.

One: despite liviapenn's brilliant fancasting of Leonard Roberts & Tom Welling, I haven't switched a female character to male. I have seen that presented as a challenge to writers of genderswap, essentially, "Why do you ignore the female characters?" Ignoring them isn't my intent; however, because I want more women in the fictional universe, I'm not as interested in changing the female characters that exist to male. It could make for a very interesting story to write the dynamic of a crew composed of one man and several women and to compare it with the dynamic of one woman and several men, or to mutually swap a het canon couple (Georgina & Winston?) but I haven't written those stories yet, is all.

Two: In my entire discussion above I've conflated 'male' with 'cisgender male' and 'female' with 'cisgender female', and now I want to pull that apart. Another valid and underdone way of writing stories that include more women would be to write about transgender women, as part of writing more about transgender people, who aren't included anywhere near as much as they should be. I've been thinking about this more than my fic output so far likely suggests, since I have only one story so far that could be said to be about a transgender character. As with any other important subject I have not personally lived, I want to do my best. However, as I said in my last post, I don't think stories about transgender characters and stories about cisgender genderswapped characters necessarly occupy the same space, nor do they need to crowd out each other. I'm not done writing yet, and I for one intend to write both genres if I can do so successfully.

I wrote this entry because most of the discussions I've seen of genderswap have been negative portrayals of the practice, so I wanted to start from a positive take on the subject. My friend azephirin asked once: Do you just plunk the traits of the canon/original version onto their alternately-gendered counterpart, or do you consider how the character would relate to hirself and society as a person of another gender, which tends to change things somewhat? Her words have inspired me ever since.

Comments

[mercaque.livejournal.com]

*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.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

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).

*nod* exactly!

Augh, it's getting late and I'm getting terse, but I wanted to thank you for this lovely long, meaty, thoughtful comment. I wrote this with some trepidation and instead I'm getting really wonderful responses. :)