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

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

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

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

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. :-)

[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).

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[evangoer.livejournal.com]

The Gilmore Wire!

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

This is the internet.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

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

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Stories about a brilliant, reclusive, orchid-loving rich woman who solves mysteries could be subtly different from the Nero Wolfe books, or very different indeed. If she has Mr. Goodwin doing the legwork for her, it can introduce tension or perception of impropriety*. Or if she were to hire Miss Goodwin instead, the sexism of police/criminals/witnesses would affect almost every investigation. (It wouldn't make them impossible, and might actually make some investigations easier. Consider Miss Climpson. It just changes things.)

*Insofar as a fat woman in her fifties is regarded as a sexual being at all. It might be interesting for her to push past being a figure of fun, and use her intelligence and wealth to claim what power is available to her.