Barbelith Underground > Comic Books > "Grant Morrison, in the Invisibles, can't do race/gender/sexuality to save his life" Discuss

Fanny has a penis, self-identifies as female and uses female pronouns, takes part in drag culture and gay club culture, and primarily has sex with people with penises who self-identify as men. that sounds like about a bazillion drag queens i've known in my life, and, frankly, i think GM nails a lot of aspects of the character.

the only issue i really see here is that young Hilde doesn't seek out the dress, it's presented to hir, and it's framed in such a way that ze chooses to embrace it, and further that that choice seems to then lead to hir being sexually attracted to men. this makes it seem that Hilde chose hir sexuality and gender identity, and runs afoul of the currently predominant essentialist theories of gender identity and sexuality. most queer people do not understand themselves to have chosen their identity, but rather to be expressing something that is part of them on some genetic level. it gets a bit more complicated because GM's approach to magick, causation, identity, and time tend to cause problems with that view as it's conventionally understood, and generally speaking, i'm not terribly sympathetic to essentialist views of complex social behaviors anyway, so this doesn't really bother me.

that said, Jolly Roger suffers from two-dimensionality, but i think that most stems from the fact that she's really just a decoy or scapegoat to deflect the karmic consequences of GM's fictionsuit KM's actions. she's only a lesbian so that KM's relationship with her can be the sexually sterile counterpart to his relationship with Rags. it's an irritating example of GM's tendency to cast white hetero males at the center axis while making others to be plot devices which further their character development, though that is somewhat understandable if you look at The Invisibles as a sort of multilevel initiation which GM himself is participating in.

it bugs me most, however, with the Jim Crow one-shot issue and with Boy in general. the attempt to give the Jim Crow story some kind of urban relevance or something with the weird crack angle and the cabal of sinister white men is just painful, but Boy really takes the cake. not only is she the obvious token black chick, and not only does she leave abruptly before the end, she has virtually no powers of any kind nor does she have any special kind of enlightenment, unlike, essentially, everyone else. she is Earth - uncomplicated simple folk like her don't have no learnin' 'bout no big words or no abstract extradimensional hoo-hah or deep philosophical talkin'. she just a workin' girl tryna git by. it's so fucking condescending and GM clearly has no idea what to do with her.