Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

I don't have suggestions, I just wanted to say ILU for the idea of Katee Sackhoff as Javert.

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If you gender-swapped Peter and Olivia in Fringe, it would be a lot more conventional: tough male FBI agent, female caretaker for mentally ill father. Which is part of why their dynamic pleases me so much, because the swap has already happened (and made the show much more interesting as a result). There are two inter-character tensions that would be different if the genders were changed -- to put it in non-spoiler terms, the histories of what Walter did for/to Peter, and what he did for/to Olivia -- but I don't think the show would change substantially.

And I a) like the idea of Katee Sackhoff as Javert, and b) grin at the choice of what to clarify and what to assume your audience knows. :-)

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And since that makes me think of the one other recent TV show I've seen much of -- man, I don't think you could get away with a female House. He's an inexcusable asshole when male, but people will excuse it anyway because he's so brilliant, and that isn't a kind of leeway often given to women.

(Oddly, it would be easier to get away with a female Sherlock Holmes, which is of course what inspired House. I think because detectives aren't expected to be compassionate about people's suffering, the way doctors and women are, and House isn't.)

And then, of course, there's superheroes. The actual Batwoman is not the same as a female Batman. I'd love to see a properly gender-flipped Batman, or Superman, or any of the others -- hah, a female Wolverine would be awesome.

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You're right that privilege is a big part of what makes Batman who he is, since the contrast between the useless playboy Bruce Wayne and the useful vigilante Batman is pretty central to the character in every canon I'm aware of. I think you could still do it with a woman, though -- in some ways moreso, because you could use the high-society expectation that a woman should be decorative to build a similar contrast. But another central bit of Batman's character is the angst over his parents dying (particularly his father, at least in the Nolan films), and the gender-typing of superheroines tends, in my experience, not to be so much about that bond.

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txanne.livejournal.com

The "misleadingly decorative female" spot is already filled by Catwoman.

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redbird

A gender-swap there might involve a society woman who spends a chunk of time on the sort of arts-related good works that it's easy to respect but not take seriously, like raising money for the opera, and is always seen respectably dressed and attractive, but in a low-key way, not Catwoman's style of "look at me" sexiness.

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I was thinking rather the opposite, amusingly enough, because my initial thought was, "Yah, Paris Hilton is not the same thing as some rich dude." And then I imagined Paris Hilton Batman's chihuahua was actually a tiny mutant or alien mastermind named Uncle Enzo because of the Mafia/Revenge/pizza connection from Snow Crash, and she could bring him everywhere as her sidekick or advisor because she was a crazy rich girl with nothing on her mind but frivolities. And for some reason I like this idea, particularly if she walks the superhero/supervillain line rather finely because she gets just so pissed at having to maintain her persona.

Which Bruce Wayne doesn't much seem to. Possibly because it doesn't require pretending active stupidity.

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I was simply looking at whether you can make Batman still feel like Batman when female. There are other superheroines, of course, but I rarely find any of the "female versions" (Batwoman, Superwoman, etc) to be very comparable to the male originals. (Which makes sense, in the respect that you don't really need a twin for the original; you want somebody new. The kind of "new" brought in by the female is generally disappointing to me, but that's a different rant.)

Gender-flipping Catwoman -- now that would be a neat trick.

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Yah, it's very different to have Batgirl with Batman still around than to assume that there never was a Batman and she's the original.

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Hmm, interesting. My first question in gender-flip House was whether you would flip Cuddy or not. I think Cuddy's protecting House's crazy might actually work with two women who had been best friends since forever even though they hurt each other in various ways. I am not at all sure about the dynamic with both of them flipped, because I think guy-Cuddy would read as more patronizing of girl-House even without changing the lines.

On the other hand, I can actually see a woman in a House role: "I am not your damn mommy, I am your diagnostician. If you wanted someone to pat your hand, you should have made friends before you got sick." etc.

Possibly this is because I have known a few pretty damned abrasive female doctors.

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What I mean by "you can't do it" is that I don't think audiences will accept it, at least not to anything like the same degree. Viewers who will gladly come back week after week to watch Gregory House be a brilliant failure as a human being would probably complain a lot faster about how Georgia House is such a bitch, god, I don't care how smart she is, why does anybody put up with her . . . .

I do like your notion of not flipping Cuddy. That would be a great chance to play with female friendship. (But I'm unconvinced by the House/Cuddy relationship anyway, so I wouldn't see de-romancing it as any loss.)

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I run into people saying "women aren't allowed to get by with crap like that" in conversations like this, and I always want to pin down their argument, so I'm glad you've been clear here. Because it is my experience that some women in the real world are, in fact, able to get by with crap sort of like that, and that men generally aren't allowed to be as extreme as Greg House either.

But. When it's a question of where viewer sympathy goes, that's a very different thing. You don't have to be arguing that women never get away with something to argue that viewer sympathy ebbs if a female character tries it.

My main objection to fanfic that romanticizes non-romantic friendships (whether slash or hetero fanfic, I don't care) is that I feel like we have few enough really good filmed representations of friendship that I resent making them into romances. I see why the urge is there, and I don't actually want to stop anybody doing it. But I actually like having characters being able to display love for each other in non-romantic contexts without having everybody jump on it and say that it must be romantic love in disguise.

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To put my meaning quantitatively: if House is a unit of measurement, then men in the real world can maybe get up to .5 House* before people start to decide their good points aren't worth enduring the bad. Women are more likely to run afoul of that reaction at a lower threshold, say .3 House*.

*The actual numbers are randomly chosen, though I kind of like the idea of using House as a unit of measurement: assholeishness per watt of brilliance, or something.

I agree with you on the friendship thing. In fact, although I don't object to slash overall, my main objection to slash is the way it eroticizes our reading of every emotionally significant relationship between men. Friends? Slashy. Enemies? Slashy. Superior and subordinate? Slashy. The only way to avoid those overtones is to have no emotional bond between them at all, and even then it may not work.

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moiread

I am one of the audience members for House who would thrill in it, because I am totally entirely there for the snark. I like it from any character on the show regardless of gender (but especially from House because he piles on more sarcasm than anybody else) and would love it just as much from a female character. Quite possibly moreso because, much like with Starbuck from BSG, certain types of abrasive women really hit home for me. But I suspect I am in the minority on that and am saddened by this suspicion, because I would love to see more of those kinds of women on TV.

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shweta-narayan.livejournal.com

...I would find Les Mis (the musical) so much more interesting with a female Valjean or Javert. That'd pull the gender issues as well as the class issues etc to center stage, and... I think, not allow it to go all the way into melodramatic without nuance.

(I do not find Cosette & Eponine worth anything other than EYEROLLS).

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timprov was actually complaining because Eponine gets good songs, and he (as a baritone-bass) sings them beautifully, but he'll never get to do it. Then we started working through the question of whether Marius could work in anything like that setting with a gender flip (we thought not because of all the university friend guyishness), and we wound up keeping Cosette and Marius the same and having guy-Eponine pining for a Marius who isn't interested in him that way. Which

timprov thought might work beautifully for someone else, but he didn't think he could pull it off himself. Sadly, I had to agree, so he's stuck just singing Eponine songs around the house.

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shweta-narayan.livejournal.com

Agreed about Eponine's songs!
But... yeah, and guy-Eponine just doesn't have the horizontal hostility with Cosette. Which, songs aside, is all the personality either seems to have...

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It would come awfully close to Grantaire's pining for Enjolras. But since most of that didn't make it into the musical, that's all the more reason to cross-cast.

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THANK YOU FOR SAYING THAT I STILL SAW IT THERE NICE TO KNOW IT'S NOT JUST MY SLASH GOGGLES.

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OH MY GOD THAT DEATH SCENE!!! I reread that scene compulsively when I was a teen-- over and above the twice-yearly reread of the whole book-- and I did not know why I found it so compelling, but YES OMG NOT JUST YOU AT ALL.

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*confession* Haven't even read the book. I spotted it -- at age 16, where my slash goggles had only developed to the point of thinking Ponyboy and Johnny needed to kiss during the "Stay gold, Ponyboy" scene and WTF was that all about? -- watching the original West End cast performing it.

Didn't hurt that Enjolras was smokin' hot, of course.

But despite them leaving it out of the musical in an overt fashion -- DAMN it was still there.

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What are Johnny and Ponyboy from?

And, here (http://books.google.com/books?id=5i5AAAAAYAAJ&dq=les%20miserables%20grantaire%20enjolras%20two%20at%20one%20shot&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q&f=false). Two of the slashiest pages you will ever read.

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The Outsiders. Slashiest YA you could ever hope to read, and the movie had Ralph Macchio and C. Thomas Howell in the roles, plus bonus Matt Dillon inna towel. I have missing-scenes slash cooking away in the back of my head (for after I finish a Lucius Malfoy/OFC secretary fic that's a present for a friend) because it's SO DAMN OBVIOUS where it goes.

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*adds to TBR list*

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"The hideous potion, absinthe-stout-alcohol"

THAT'S LIKE DRINKING JAEGER BOMBS, WITH THE ALCOHOL TURNED UP TO ELEVEN

NO WONDER HE WAS SO DRUNK

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...yeah, holy shit, slashy. Obvs. does not happen that way in the musical, either.

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Yeah. It's pretty amazing.

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cyranocyrano.livejournal.com

If Ms. Sackhoff can't sing, you could always do a non-musical version of Les Miserable.

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juliansinger.livejournal.com

I completely want female Javert now. Yes, it would be a different setting, but it would mess with expectations in good ways.

I suppose gender swapped Marius and Cosette would do interesting things, there, too. (Except in the Castle in the Cloud parts, but I ignore those anyway.)

I want someone not-Heinlein to do the Libby change.

And I want to switch the main characters of Jane Eyre.

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Hmmm. See, I think the (spoiler alert :) for Jane Eyre) woman with the crazy husband in the attic reads rather less menacing and more harried.

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What, we assigned Castle on a Cloud to the lonely child self of our (male) romantic heroine, and it fit just fine...

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evangoer.livejournal.com

The Gilmore Wire!

http://www.goer.org/Journal/2009/10/the_gilmore_wire.html

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mercwriter.livejournal.com

Wow. Awhile back, I was talking to a friend, pondering how awesome it would be to have an all-female cast in Les Miz (also, bonus for setting it in SPACE). And now... man, I want to watch that.

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ckd

Ooh. I completely agree about her as Javert. (No, I don't know if she can sing either.)

Of course, the fact that her BSG role was a genderswap from the original 70s series Starbuck doesn't hurt.

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rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com

... the initial conception for the novel I'm writing now involved a genderswap of Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. There's a specific kind of badassery/ambiguous villainy/revenge tragedy there I've never seen a female character allowed to do.

The book has changed shape a lot since then, but that's what I was trying for originally.

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Nifty.

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dancing-crow.livejournal.com

When the high school put on Bye Bye Birdie last year I was Yearning for an all male cast, just because I wanted to change the words in the telephone song (what's the story, morning glory, what's the word, hummingbird, have you heard about Hugo and Tim?) and imagining the rest made me deeply happy.

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papersky.livejournal.com

I agree with Le Guin about Prospero.

You could swap the whole lot of them and make it work, but if you just swap Prospero you undo the balance of the play.

Privilege is real, and characters who have always had privilege behave in ways that assume they have it. I mean to start with, how come Prospera inherits as duchess when she has a younger brother? So it's a different world, OK. And then you have the relationship between Prospero and Miranda, which is a fairly bad relationship between father and daughter and an appallingly abusive one between mother and daughter. And then you have the whole Sycorax/Caliban/Ariel thing. You can reverse everyone and change the world. Or not.

But the arrogance Prospero has is unchallenged privilege that lets him carry on thinking he was right even when he's been cast adrift on a boat for being a neglectful idiot and spent fifteen years on a desert island -- and while you can have a woman scholar wizard duchess, the world you need to get her to have that assumption of privilege is so far from the world that story can happen in that you've lost something essential.

When I do my character workshop with people the thing I ask about gender is "What is the interesting gender to make this character?" "How does it change the story?" I once for about half an hour thought about making Taveth in Lifelode male. It made her a lot more interesting, which completely defeated the point -- men doing traditional women things are subversive and exciting, women doing them are invisible and boring. The way to make them interesting is not to give them to men.

Lear, I think, would reverse quite easily. And I've thought a lot about what Hamlet would need.

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diatryma.livejournal.com

I could not pick Katee Sackhoff out of a lineup but oh, female Javert, it makes so much sense! It would be beautiful. If she can't sing, she can do spoken-word and it'll be Symbolic or something. But no one will care because of the awesome.

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timprov.livejournal.com

We can do everything (http://kateesackhoff.com/wordpress/?p=827).

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Oh for the love of Mike. That it should be that song.

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merriehaskell.livejournal.com

Glad I wasn't the only one eyerolling at that Tempest post.

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the-jackalope.livejournal.com

I'm interested in a genderswaped Frankenstein, but I'm not sure it would work well. Dr. Frankenstein becomes the evil mother who abandones her child and is to blame for bringing a monster in the world; so not all that different really, but societal expectations would be. I'm torn on the monster because seeing yet another female just wanting affection and a mate is not good.

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ashnistrike.livejournal.com

Shakespeare generally lends itself really well to genderswapping. Everyone in the audience is familiar with the story, making the comparisons, and asking the questions. I haven't seen the new Tempest yet, so don't know whether they pull it off in this particular case. I think you could make it work as an exploration of the ways people get privilege from power, even if they don't get it from other places.

I love the idea of a female Javert! Also, your assumptions seem entirely reasonable to me. But then, I consistently impress my friends with my failure to recognize famous actors. There's Patrick Stewart, and there's Catherine Zeta-Jones, and then there are a bunch of others.

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genarti

Oooooooh. I adore the idea of a female Javert. It would bring so many interesting complexities -- not that Javert doesn't have them anyway, but it changes the nuances a lot.

To riff off the Batman question above, how about Superman? Yes, I know there's Supergirl, but still, one of the fundamental things about Superman's character is that he's such the archetypal American As Apple Pie figure, and as such privileged in all sorts of directions. White, male, physically fit, muscular (even though he has super-strength enough that I don't know how those muscles got enough exercise to fill out spandex like they do), worked on a family farm but never in real poverty, now has a white-collar job in the city. If Superman were Lois Lane instead of Clark Kent, or were Clarice Kent, I'd be interested to see how the character's impression might shift.

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