mrissa | Gender-swapping characters

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Gender-swapping characters

timprov and I were having a bit of a sigh and a bit of an eye-roll about Ursula LeGuin's post on The Tempest, and we got to talking about gender-swapping characters. I firmly believe that any particular character can have that done, but not always without altering the story immensely--sometimes the entire setting has to be redone in order to make it work. And

timprov brought up Jean Valjean as an example of this: you can write a woman Valjean, but Jeanne Valjean needs a different setting completely to be able to do the things Jean did.

This brought him to suggest that Katee Sackhoff would make a truly awesome Javert, and I loved the idea: the girl born to prison life instead of the boy, the tough-as-nails young woman for whom the law is not mocked. (For those of you not keeping score, Katee Sackhoff was Starbuck on the new Battlestar Galactica.) I don't even know if she can sing. I don't even care. I just really like this idea. "Men like you can never change, a man...such as you...."

(I had a conversation that made me aware of some of my conversational assumptions this morning, and I'm now noticing that I feel the need to flag a popular actress but not the characters from Les Miserables. Oh, assumptions.)

Also: Dr. Spencer Reid of Criminal Minds is a very different person if she is Dr. Stephanie Reid, the team's little sister figure and the daughter of a mentally ill medievalist, and yet a lot of the Reid-peril stuff in early seasons plays out exactly the same.

Anyway. Anybody else have some ideas for what stories would shift interestingly if a character's sex was swapped, and which ones would actually look substantially similar?

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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. :-)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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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Gender-swapping characters

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