I'm coming out of older-school, where you were lucky to see them on-screen for ten seconds before they got to die horribly.
If I never see another gay or trans character die mid-book or mid-movie again in my life, it'd be too soon. (Side-note: I think it was mikkeneko who once posted a full run-down of GLBT characters in american comics, and it was... heart-breaking and infuriating, to see how many got chomped in a combine engine. It doesn't really count for visibility when the visibility amounts to nothing but a messed-up corpse in the end. Grrrr.)
I've read blogs/journals from trans folk either currently in-process or post-process, talking about various things they had to learn as part of the transition. It's really eye-opening to realize the bazillion of little ways that we signal gender, that we don't realize consciously because we were trained in them from birth. (No kid is born knowing that you sit like this or stand like that; we all learn it.) We just don't realize what we're learning, or how deep it goes.
Or even that it can be so incredibly entrenched in culture, too. Like the way we stand: it's apparently considered quite manly in Korea and Japan for men to stand well-night pigeon-toed. Sitting with your feet positively at right-angles outwards, to me, looks just... strange, but a man standing with his toes pointing forward (let alone inward) is sending very different signals. That one detail is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cultural signals for sex/gender, wouldn't it be? (Or even the fact that I just typed, "wouldn't it be?" as the tag on the sentence. In English, clear gender-clue, gah.)
I can't recall now whether gender-clues where something LeGuin ever addressed in her SFF works that revolved around gender-neutral characters. In a society where we defined gender by some other single means -- I don't know, clothing or speech patterns? -- would behaviors be more fluid, because all sexes would know/use all/any behavior patterns? Or would we still eventually use behavior and/or body language as a short cut, so we don't have to change clothes or we can all use a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to ourselves?
Even in thinking of the question, "what would a world look like in which there are no gender-coded behavior patterns", and I realized: to most readers, it'd probably look like the entire cast of characters were male. Hello to that bias about "if you can't identify the sex, gender, or race, it's probably a white male." Hrmph.
no subject
Date: 2 May 2012 08:22 am (UTC)If I never see another gay or trans character die mid-book or mid-movie again in my life, it'd be too soon. (Side-note: I think it was
I've read blogs/journals from trans folk either currently in-process or post-process, talking about various things they had to learn as part of the transition. It's really eye-opening to realize the bazillion of little ways that we signal gender, that we don't realize consciously because we were trained in them from birth. (No kid is born knowing that you sit like this or stand like that; we all learn it.) We just don't realize what we're learning, or how deep it goes.
Or even that it can be so incredibly entrenched in culture, too. Like the way we stand: it's apparently considered quite manly in Korea and Japan for men to stand well-night pigeon-toed. Sitting with your feet positively at right-angles outwards, to me, looks just... strange, but a man standing with his toes pointing forward (let alone inward) is sending very different signals. That one detail is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cultural signals for sex/gender, wouldn't it be? (Or even the fact that I just typed, "wouldn't it be?" as the tag on the sentence. In English, clear gender-clue, gah.)
I can't recall now whether gender-clues where something LeGuin ever addressed in her SFF works that revolved around gender-neutral characters. In a society where we defined gender by some other single means -- I don't know, clothing or speech patterns? -- would behaviors be more fluid, because all sexes would know/use all/any behavior patterns? Or would we still eventually use behavior and/or body language as a short cut, so we don't have to change clothes or we can all use a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to ourselves?
Even in thinking of the question, "what would a world look like in which there are no gender-coded behavior patterns", and I realized: to most readers, it'd probably look like the entire cast of characters were male. Hello to that bias about "if you can't identify the sex, gender, or race, it's probably a white male." Hrmph.