Gender-swapping characters

[mrissa]

So 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?

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

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.