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Papers:
Still a bit new here. I think I'll screw it up if I try to quote something.
Well, the discussion came up about the narrator being male or female. And there were a lot of compelling arguments for both. And I suppose that the most rational explanation for me seemed not to throw out all the things on the other side but figure out how it could be both. So it came down to changing biological sex at various points in the book or being some sort of mutant alien creature. But then I actually seriously started thinking along those lines and I realized that it wasn't just some weird line of thought that came out of my head (Honestly, I come up with a lot of those) but that it actually made a lot of sense as a template for analysis of the book.
And through the narrator lacking a name or a clear gender, we can see just how artificial and limiting our thoughts on gender roles really are. But if we take that a step further with the character actually changing gender (whether by magic, mutation, postmodern experimentation, mad science or god know what else) we not only do that but we get a larger play against the artifice of a lot of things related to mankind. I mean what is speculative fiction (and, honestly, I draw a pretty liberal boundary around this, more liberal then most people) if not a comment on the way that things are? Just looking over at my bookshelf, we wouldn't have had Starship Troopers if not for Cold War militarism, we wouldn't have had The Plot Against America or The Man in the High Castle if not for World War II, we wouldn't have had Utopia if not for England being a pretty terrible place after the Wars of the Roses and we wuldn't have had J. G. Ballard writing about...well, pick one, he writes about a lot of things.
Forgive me, I have a headache, abstract critical thought in explicit detail about a book I've read several months ago is difficult for me at the moment. I'll post more specific examples of this in a few days.
There is some merit to this but at the same time it is kind of out in left field.
Regarding the second one, I just wanted to point out that I saw a transgendered reading in that book and I was trying to connect it. I didn't want to send the thread going in to a direction of "Transgendered Images in Comics: Social Speculation and Mad Science" or something that sounded like some incredibly arcane lecture that would be attended by 7 university students.
But, at the same time, and this is meant with absolutely no offense intended, I'm not sure that it does either literature or comics a favour to draw a line in the sand in some way. And, it seems that even people who like comics and know their comics fairly well do this (on the other board I post at, I've had people say I overanlyze comics too much because I look at them the way soemone would look at a book). For one, it does tend to ghettoize the comic medium by saying that it can't play with the big boys in the realm of literature. And it also makes the world of "literature" seem like an exclusive clubhouse that somehow only the best works can get in to, and that does smack of the same lines of thiking that made it difficult for a lot of women writers, non-Western writers and ethnic minority writers to really have their work accepted as "literature" because there was the myth of a single canon of great works. Look at how difficult it was for Chinua Achebe to be accepted in to "literature" for Things Fall Apart or Philip K. Dick because not a lot of people saw works from the "Dark Continent" or Science Fiction as something that could warrant the kind of literary quality that "literature" needs. And, honestly, with works like Watchmen, Sandman and Maus accepted, more or less, as 'literature,' I think we are going to see these boundaries lessen and lessen.
While I try not to draw any kind of distinction between "genre fiction" and "literature" simply because of a category someone else may impose on it, I'm not sure that its any different to draw a distinction between "comic books" and "literature," assuming, of course that the work in question is of a high enough standard technically and intellectually to warrant discussion or mention. I apologize for the digression here but I did want to justify my inclusion fo the example without trying to send the conversation off topic.
Back to the topic at hand, however, I believe I cited my Shining Knight example as an example of the assumptions involved in gender roles. Which made it a relevant example for this (as relevant as citing a film or a television episode if it related to the conversation), especially if we think of gender role as more of a continuum (the word I can never spell right) or as some weird kind of graph, essentially, anything to get away from the all of nothing idea of masculine-feminine becaue this is existing less and less in our culture (and, really, things that fall entirely in to one of these categories are seen as nostalgic and quaint at best).
But even outside the paradigm of transformation of gender, if we want to look at the ways in which gender roles are queered, its important to also look at the ways in which they are constructed and the masculine and feminine expectations, even in terms of hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine roles that may seem either like overcompensation or as offensive or politically incorrect. The image of the Desparate Housewife (and whether you want to go down the Baudrillard route and say that the image has now become the reality is another matter or talk about the "normalization of psychopathy" that J. G. Ballard mentions) is every bit as much a deceptive image as Viola in Twelfth Night, its just that one of them is less threatening to people because it challenges their expectations and assumptions less, even though it might actually be the one more dangerous to society in general.
These are not just limited to roles for "females," there are "male" examples as well.
Just a couple from the top of my head:
Rupert Everett not being cast as James Bond because he is gay. He has played straight characters in movies in the past the same way straight actors have played gay characters. But the idea of James Bond
The backlash against "gay cowboys" in Brokeback Mountain from segments of the population who somehow see the use of this image as sacrelige.
The way that images of police officers in the media are changing. Police officers are no longer supposed to rough up suspects or let abusive husbands go or take the law in to their own hands. Traditonally masculine and violence roles.
In L. A. Confidential (mostly talking about the movie though this is fairly true in the book as well), the thuggish Bud White is seen as more of the ideal while Ed Exley is seen as kind of a sketchy character who rises through the ranks by ambition instead of merit. The book was set in the 1950s and written in 1990 (well thats the copyright date).
But fast forward a few years later. Elliot Stabler on law and order SVU is a policeman in the bud white mold. And the show is starting to reach almost silly lengths to avoid him having a meltdown because what he does is so antithetical to the things expected of a police officer. While Gil Grissom on CSI is seen closer to an idealized role. He fights crime with his brain instead of his fists and thats good, the complete opposite of L. A. Confidential.
And to take it back to literature, almosmt any male role in Angels in America (and most of the female roles) could be seen through this paradigm. |
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