affably

Is it more sexist to prefer to map onto male leads than female secondary characters,

or

is it more sexist to demand that female-bodied viewers map onto female characters?








This is in a cisnormative vacuum, I think. Oh, fandom.


On another note, I get particularly annoyed when fans argue that as characters, there is no differentiation between Castiel and Anna besides their (vessels/bodies'/etc.) sex, so the reason that fandom prefers one over the other is primarily due to sex. That sort simplification really bothers me, because there are other thematics at work in the story — humanism, faith, redemption, trust — alongside nuances like mistrust of executed romance storylines, gender difference, or Dean reading as queer to a lot of viewers, that all plays into it.

On a more personal note, I may be a minority in this, but one of the reasons I find Castiel so relatable is because he isn't human. So a storyline about a character who enters the narrative as a human and becomes an ally is much less emotionally interesting to me than a character who has to learn how to relate to humans and becomes an ally.

That being said, I would love to see Anna again. I was the most impressed with her when she decided to kill the two characters that make the show happen.

Run, don't walk, and watch this vid: Drove Through Ghosts to Get Here by devilsduplicity. It's Castiel-centric amazing excellent editing and will knock you on your ass. Source up through 5.16 and fair warning it will make you into a crazy person. It is awesome.

No really. I am seriously deranged right now and probably can't even look in the direction of a 5x04 story for the next week.

I've done it again; changed my layout. While I enjoyed Radioactivity, looking at my flist at night with Nocturne running would make my eyes bleed, which is not a pleasant experience for anyone. Particularly not when I need them to enjoy fanfic. (Pamela must've had a very hard life before she bit it.)

That being said, this layout is probably more political than usual; I blame the mastication of my brain cells from sludging through an overabundance of squabbling meta through linkspam*. I swear, if I hear one more self-proclaimed female fan talking about how online fandom is a "female spaaaaaaaace" I will not be held responsible. Stop gendering fannish practices it is not helping anybody.

To chill out, I've prepared my shanks.

But anyway, LiveJournal layout: "Female" robots. Regulating gender signification by mapping heterosexual binaries on nonbiological bodies. How does that even make sense? I love it. It's as theoretically intelligible as real life. Time to queue up some android sex songs.

Oh and porn. I still enjoy porn, though I think the word "spongey" should not ever appear in a sexual context. Puts a damper on the scene. So to speak.

I haven't talked about Supernatural in awhile, but I'm still reading as voraciously. It's still my primary source of fannish thought all the time — everything else I enjoy I manage to intertexualize with it. Though to be fair, the handprint burn in Legend of the Seeker is not a far stretch considering it is exactly the same thing. Good times. Anyway, Show continues to make me smile on a regular basis and keeps producing awesome fannish works. I'm working myself up to doing something creative, though the massive writer's block sitting on my pituitary gland will probably prohibit the kind of stories I want to be reading.

*Summary: female erasure and not enough femmeslash and women appropriating gay romance publishing genres and slash why are we talking about dicks since we all have vaginas and by the way I am queer today oh my god how dare you and you are a female h8r if you don't enjoy het and even if the chicks are secondary characters you have an obligation to fix them and make them awesome I swear no one will tell you you've made those characters into Mary Sues and it's not possible to appropriate anyway everything is free love but omg help help you are oppressing me stop policing my sexuality I can do what I want no you can't and on and on and on. Also if you're straight shut the hell up. Or something.

When I read a genderbender fanfic, it has always made me queasy when I see that the author has chosen to play the pronoun game; that is, change the pronouns to align with whatever the character's current physical sex is, regardless of how they think about themselves internally.(1) It wasn't until I read pandarus's Not Time's Fool that I was able to articulate why. The story is about Dean Winchester being turned into a girl (in the "probably forever" sense) and having to make adjustments, compromises, and re-learn how to navigate social behaviors and cues. While there is a brief element of "Oh no my dick!" which is common to these kinds of stories, more importantly the story was about what he had to do to maintain his sense of identity in a transgendered body.

And that's when I realized that stories that make a character who has for his entire life considered himself to be one gender be mostly comfortable in a new gender, putting on dresses and flirting in a socialized female way, and changing the pronouns, are in fact promoting a cisnormative psychology.(2) Which I found utterly revolting.

Not that I necessarily avoid genderbender fic or AUs, because they are often an interesting commentary on society on the part of the writers. However, I do tend to be more wary of what they are (unconsciously or not) promoting. Also there are often the complications of the phallocentric issues going on with power and penetrative sex, and which party is "losing power" by being penetrated and that crap. Anyway, I am grossed out by forced heteronormativity and anyone insisting that I should act a certain way because of the set of body parts I was born with.(3)

I've been reading up a bit about transgenderism, mostly because I don't really understand gender conviction in the first place.(4) Despite this, I've been mostly getting sidetracked by reading about transphobia and biphobia (especially in LGBTQland) and raging at whoever tends to be online at the time at hypocrisy of people who fight against heteronormatism but propagate sexual binaries. Raaaaage.

Anyway, I guess my point here is that there's a lot of interesting things going on in fandom, but there's a lot of internalized or subtextual phobias that crop up while we explore these ideas. I urge authors to think about carefully: yeah, it's fun, but are you unconsciously promoting an ideology that you don't want to be?

I guess that's what we need betas for? I don't know. In the end, the only one who's going to be responsible for what you've written is the person staring back in the mirror.

(1) I'm not talking about the always-been-a-girl AUs or always-been-a-boy AUs — those come with a different set of complications.
(2) Yeah, welcome to like 1999 or something. Sometimes I am slow okay, especially when I don't have the vocabulary to articulate the problem.
(3) How much do I love it that Castiel (and Lucifer, lol) have (so far) expressed zero preference for the gender of their bodies? Okay this is pre-watching 5x10 so who knows if that'll get Jossed but I love it as it stands now.
(4) I can better intuitively understand gender as a social construction (with some enforced alignment to physical characteristics) rather than the idea of gender as an intrinsic inclination. I'll grant you that some people will likely be more convinced by one or the other, and that neither have been cohesively invalidated (or are likely to be in the foreseeable future).

Okay, this definitely can't just me be hallucinating; my favorite author talking about my brain filter. y/n? Have I finally snapped?

And I definitely agree with her points regarding Show, and one thing I've always been impressed with her is that she's very lovely at delicately disagreeing and letting everyone space to enjoy their own sandbox. I've seen others take up the same issues with Show much more vitrolically — and emotively — which always seems to lead to either cries of "Hear hear!" or bitter defensiveness. Whew, I see intellectual dialogue really happening there!

Yeah, Supernatural is not a good example of shows for promoting the girls, though there is strong narrative grounding for that:

1. the show's inherent genre choice is horror and tragic heroism


2. the two main characters' only female role model was murdered when they were kidlets, on their vengeance quest they were raised essentially homeless, and their caretakers (when they weren't left alone) were strange bachelors like Bob Singer and Pastor Jim while their father was off accidentally making families with other people.

Yes, the treatment of chicks in the series could definitely be better; but the show's textual axis revolves around familial/domestic trauma. Consider the basic premise: two brothers drive around the continental United States (1) fighting violent supernatural entities that are almost always located within normative society. In this show the supernatural is disruptive and traumatic to domesticity.

Therefore, by it's premise there can't really be any longterm love interests, and latent female characters are almost always going to be civilians or sites of domestic disruption (read: sekritly evil). For narrative intrigue, this kind of domestic trauma is often going to be located in unexpected places; so in The Benders, not only are there adults that participate in ritualistic cannibalism that dehumanizes their victims, but the apparently innocent, timid girl assists and participates. These narrative twists in the series maintains suspense.

So anyway, disruption of domestic normality but as located in familial trauma it's unsurprising that then our "normal" expectations are overturned. Therefore apparently innocous characters will actually be evil/possessed/have a secret dating back fifty years of drowning their bff.

Which is a really long way of saying that not only are random male characters, ghosts, and demons often evil, but also women and little girls. Seriously, every time there is a child on the screen they are either going to be evil or be rescued (2) at the last minute by Sam or Dean (3).

So with that in mind, consider:
In Dean Winchester's universe, there are two types of people: people he has to protect (civilians/Sammeh) and things he has to kill (ghosts/demons/girl-demon-ghosts/chupacabras). His adult role models growing up were men who were either priests or widowed (and also involved in sites of domestic trauma), he's got his mom as the virgin martyr figure extraordinaire, and moved around too often to make friends so all of his female interactions are either as possible one-night stands or further sources of supernatural trauma. The only girl we've seen him actively "date" for any amount of time rejected him when he told her the truth about his life. Hell, the first friend he's narratively given on the show as someone for himself in whom he can confide his doubts and shit (4) took the series four years. The episode Sex and Violence articulated the problem excellently.

Sam is much better at interacting with wimmin but then again, due to the premise of familial trauma, they die for either being evil or in evil's way. So within the series I find the character's treatment of chicks to be legit. I mean it's shitty, but seriously, it's not supposed to be about a healthy situation. You barely need to see half an episode to see how fucked up these kids are.

Now I'm not in any way advocating the treatment of women on the show Supernatural to be normative; like episodes about cannibals or childhood murder, it's supposed to be wrong, a site of trauma/disruption, and an incredibly basic one at that.

The question the series poses as a whole is whether it is possible to recover from familial trauma; individual episodes indicate that it's possible — civilians are forced to learn that their nightmares are real (usually through really horrible practical experiences thereof) but at the end of the episode the family is shown to be beginning to recover from that disruption of normality. (5) So um, I'm actually hopeful that this whole thing isn't headed for a terrible wreck (though like a good tragedy that's what we expect), though it's just as likely that we'll get a Bonnie and Clyde/I Am Legend ending.

Basically no, the show is not a good/healthy example of powerful, progressive women (though you can't deny that Meg, Ruby, Ellen, and Jo all have pretty significant agency. Jury's still out on Anna though*). To be honest I'm much more disappointed with fandom's response to female characters/possible love interests for the characters than in the show itself.

The racial problems are of course, another matter entirely. But on a different note, this show is one of the first I've seen to significantly deal with class structure — particularly lower class — though not extremely overtly. (6)


tl;dr version: I <3 Show, but if I want awesome chick power I'm not going to be going to the show about the violent trauma of having your mom burned alive when you were a kid.(7)


(1) LOL they can't fix Europe because Dean can't fly.
(2) Kripke would totally kill kids if he could get away with it.
(3) Or be the angel Castiel.
(4) Since Sam falls under Dean's "people to protect" umbrella, it's very difficult for Dean to confide his doubts and fears to him since he has to keep his "game face" on.
(5) Unless it's the Winchesters.
(6) Ask me later.
(7) Okay, Calisto is a special case.

ETA: As of 5x13 "The Song Remains the Same," it's pretty well-established that Anna has plenty of agency, though ultimately not narratively rewarded with success. Still, what a badass.