hth | kink and canon

The friendly folks at Marvel have brought us this cover for the new issue of Heroes for Hire. I can't imagine hiring any of these women for anything, unless I should suddenly be in need of backup singers, but what do I know. Anyway, for all of you who loved the Mary Jane statuette but really wished there had been more crying and alien spooge, Marvel has got you covered!

In the comments to the post I linked, though,

nindulgence asked some really interesting questions from the perspective of someone, like me, who knows slash-fandom mores well and the comics universe only tangentially. Here's part of the text of that thread:

"do find it interesting that many of the arguments against common depictions of female characters in comics (e.g., infantilization, excessive victimization, sexual objectification, domestication) have also been made against common depictions of male characters in fanfic--and that some of the same responses have been offered by fanficcers when those depictions have been protested by male readers (e.g., we're not writing for you; don't read the fanfic if you don't like it; isn't it funny that you men are threatened by our sexual desires, etc.).

There are of course, huge differences in the fact that fans are rating their kinkfic and kinkart as adult and posting it in semi-private public spaces, versus the comics companies which are marketing theirs commercially as good clean fun for preteens...but I do see similarities in the kinks themselves.

Which makes me wonder--hypothetically speaking--if objectification of male comics/collectibles characters were offered in equal quantities and rated in the same way as objectification of female characters (e.g., if pleasure-slave Obi-Wan statuettes were just as canonical as and rated no more strictly than and sold side-by-side with slave-girl Leia), would that be a satisfactory outcome for female comics fans?"

First, the correlations

nindulgence notes are very real, both in terms of what our kinks often are and how we defend them, so what she's asking is a 100% relevant and reasonable question; I'm glad she asked it. She's also wisely anticipated the most obvious objection, the truth-in-advertising issue: we call our kinks "kinkfic," "smut," and "porn," where Marvel appears utterly oblivious that that's essentially what they're churning out. Within the thread,

liviapenn also eloquently deals with the second-most-obvious issue, which is that "equal treatment" isn't necessarily equal treatment when there's no such thing as gender equality on this green earth, and that the issue of sexual violence in the real world is not gender-neutral. All of that's true and good and worthy of being said.

But I still found myself thinking about the hypothetical: what's the ideal? Possible or impossible to achieve, what would I like to see being done differently in superhero comics, from the POV of a feminist who likes superheroes and would like to like comics again? I spent a fair amount of time last night pondering the question, and as I usually need a concrete example to hone in on when I tackle something like this, I kept coming back to PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan and PleasureSlave!Leia -- so if I talk about them, please understand that I'm not saying anything specifically about those characters or Star Wars or whatever; it's just a way of thinking-in-things about these ideas.

My conclusion -- and I don't know how much within the fannish mainstream I am on this, but here we go -- is that I wouldn't want to walk into my Local Comic Shop and see *either* of those statues. I would find it skeevy not *only* on gendered grounds, but because both statues violate what I feel is a serious and important boundary between source material and fannish treatment of source material.

I *adore* kinkfic. Some of my very most favorite fics involve such fandom greatest-hits as aliens-made-them-do-it, objectification, humiliation, bondage, slave-fic, and a gorgeous rainbow of semi- and noncon stories. I own my kinks, including the ones that are socially and politically awkward, and I think that being able to read and write kinkfic is good for me.

But what I'm reading is fanfiction -- it is one fan's creative use of a pre-existing and shared canonical vocabulary (setting, characters, narrative) to explore some particular thing that interests the writer, and then putting it out there for me to love, hate, or ignore. By the rules of fandom as I understand the fannish game, there's a sharp divide between what happens in fanfiction and what happens in canon that boils down to: what a fanartist does in her work affects the mini-universe of that work, but not the meta-universe of the show. And that matters to me, a lot.

Part of what I understand to be deeply offensive about the Heroes for Hire cover is that it actually alters the canonical characters: they didn't use to look like that, and they didn't use to be deployed in the service of plots like the one that cover art implies. What Marvel has done by putting out that cover is to write what is essentially kinkfic into the source, which for most people means that the way they view the source now has to shift to accomodate these new elements. The women we see here looking like artfully bloodied Bratz dolls in chains used to be these women. But they aren't anymore, and that's canon. That's a fucking loss to everyone with any stake in that fandom, in a way that no fan use of their images and characters could ever possibly be.

What I'm saying is that part of the pleasure, for me, of PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan is that there is a "real" Obi-Wan (yes, he's not a real person; don't e-mail me. *g* The game of fandom establishes a distinction between what characters are "really" like and what they are "really" not like, and we rely mainly or entirely on canon to do so) who isn't "really" owned and used by any other person in sexy, sexy ways.

To go with our PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan statuette, let's imagine a theoretical tv show: The Padawan Adventures, where an eighteen-year-old Obi-Wan travels the galaxy with his master, and every week he is menaced by villains, who tie him up and rip his clothing and his skin so that we see him (in the show and, of course, on all the commercials and print ads) half-naked and glistening and splayed open and frightened and kinda hot before his mostly-inevitable rescue/escape. For me, personally? No, I wouldn't be pleased. I would think it was gross and exploitative and disrespectful, and I wouldn't accept "But it's on the Oxygen Network, so it's for/about women's pleasures!" as a defense.

Give me the same story, the exact same story, as an ongoing fanfic serial, and I would dig the hell out of it. Maybe that's unfair; I can think of several reasons I might feel that way, but I don't know that any of them are bulletproof against accusations of rampant hypocrisy. But if the question is "What would make you happy?", then there it is. Not canonizing your sexual kinks would make me pretty happy.

I can even think of some actual non-hypothetical examples of female media transgressing those boundaries in ways that skeeve me -- not in comics and television, which are just not diverse enough to give women space to be sufficiently skeevy (the skeevy glass ceiling), but in genre novels. Most of Laurell K. Hamilton's work skeeves me out, because I think what she does is create characters who are essentially blow-up dolls and plot points in order to orchestrate increasingly byzantine and unrealistic sexual situations rife with consent issues and exploitation. They would make perfectly serviceable fanfiction, but that's not what they are, and I find them appalling. On the slash tip, there's Poppy Z. Brite, whose work I think fetishizes pretty young male bodies in situations that conflate pain and homoeroticism; Brite is a better writer than Hamilton is, and some of her stuff I think does more than just that, so in some cases I give it a pass in spite of my intermittent deep discomfort. But my discomfort is real.

What freaks me out about Marvel's actions lately is that I can't read their sexual fantasies about Misty and MJ as merely their own private sexual fantasies; I have to read them just as much as a franchise whose desire to indulge their private sexual fantasies is increasingly taking precedence over any desire to depict the female heroes as genuinely heroic or their female love-interests as genuinely loved. That poisons the well for me in a way that no fannish endeavor of any kind ever could.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I kind of agree that it is different if the companies do it in mainstream continuity, but comics "canon" is, well, very versatile in that they do publish characters differently for different audiences at the same time, and also publish Elseworlds about their characters without that having an impact on the character in the other stories. I mean, that DC publishes images of a nearly naked, whipped, gagged and collared Lex Luthor at the feet of a granny dominatrix character in an Elseworld (that btw wasn't rated mature) doesn't really change Lex the supervillain in the mainstream continuity.

I've read DC Elsweorlds that were way weirder and kinkier than the wackiest fantropes, there's the one in a dystopian future Gotham ruled by a Batman cult, in which we see CultLeader!Batman fight a weird bondage gear Batman to the death, because the cult ruling Gotham has a ritual once a year where others can challenge The Batman (who is thought of as a god) to become the next one, and to win that right to fight, first they have to bring down one of the supervillains who are resurrected and let loose in the city for that ritual. Actually they are not so much resurrected, as that they take normal people, erase their memories, disfigure them and implant them with wrong memories of the supervillain they are to represent. (The Elseworld gets a bit weirder and more complicated further on in that the Joker-villain victim was some kind of underground guerrilla member, who manages to kill the Batman after him, and in the end wins the challenge so we get a merged Joker-Batman bat god cult leader...)

Anyway, comics do all kinds of things to their chracters, from Superman was raised Amish to Batman is a werebat because of a gypsy curse, and pretty much anything inbetween, including bizarre porn tropes, like when villains try to mindcontrol Superman to star in a porn movie.

So I guess what I'm saying is that in comics there could be a slaveboy porn series for a character, and they could just put it outside the main continuity.

But aren't there some Elseworlds that do end up bleeding into the main continuity? Like, hm, "JSA: The Golden Age" (I think the original Starman's nervous breakdown was something that was originally introduced in this supposedly non-canon tale) or "Kingdom Come" or any of Miller's later stuff.

Yeah, also it's not always clear how much in continuity something is, especially when a character is undergoing gradual retcons, like with Superman: Birthright and such. My point was mostly that in comics canon itself characterization is more like in fanfic already. Like some is clearly OOC and intended to be, some is in character but edgier and more adult, some is done for humor (like when you get crossovers between the JLA and Bugs Bunny and such), some may start as a potential interpretation but gets adopted kind of like fanon that works really well... It's just that a comic company doing something to a character doesn't have the same lasting effect than if say the SGA producers decided something for John Sheppard, even if they just decided it for a quantum mirror version of him, in part I think because with comics there is so much accumulative backstory that there is a certain "inertia", which sometimes leads also to retcons being eroded, like the whole superpets thing. They were abandoned and for a while nobody expected to ever see Krypto again but then come editors who really liked certain aspects of the Silver Age and all kinds of stuff gets resurrected.

And contradictory things coexist in comics by explicitly splitting the universe not as some occasional gimmick ike on tv, but as an ongoing thing (like the Marvel Ultimate universe characterizations vs the Marvel Earth-616 mainstream characters) or regularly doing whole storylines in universes that are either not the main universe to begin with or revealed not to have been the main universe, or splitting off universes through timetravel like with 1602, or just doing alternative universes where all superheroes are zombies for the fun of it. SF tv sows like Stargate do that too of course with the quantum mirror plot device, but it is much less common, and there is a somewhat bigger emphasis to make things fit I think.

For me, if we got the male equivalent of the MJ statue, say, Remy washing the car in only a pair of soaking wet, skin tight short shorts, I'd be okay with it. What makes me cringe is when violence gets added to the situation. I enjoy some pretty dicey situations in what I read, because I love the dramatic tension it adds. I don't get any of that is a non narrative media. Cover art, statues, all those, give us the act for the act's sake. The power struggles, the give and take of even unbalanced power dynamics, can't be portrayed.

I can't express how much I agree with you. I've never been able to quite express it in words, but I would not want the solution to the cheesecake problem to be more beefcake. Not because the idea of Captain XY (or Lady XX) in minimal gear posing provocatively doesn't attract me sexually, but because it doesn't attract me as a reader.

To me, there's a clear distinction between porn and not porn, and poses or outfits or scenarios that I would enjoy in fanfic or fanart have no place on my bookshelf. Fan-porn by definition takes deep characters and shallows them up to fit the tropes of the erotic genre -- I enjoy a cetain character as a dominatrix because the idea excites me, not because I think she should canonically be a dominatrix.

In canon, I prefer that the sexualized imagery not extend past couples that have sexual relationships; the closest thing to a turn-on in a comic book should be two characters shown kissing, or in bed. The characters should not be posing at the "camera" (the reader/viewer).

I think part of the problem is that comics have essentially become fanfic, it's just that the companies have "privileged" one particular variety of fanfic (het with stereotypical females) over all other possibilities. Not to say there aren't people with a more professional mindset working for DC or Marvel - of course there are. And not to say comics haven't always had a bit of fanfic vibe - when I first ran across fanfic in the late seventies, it was like 90% of the goodness of comics (fewer pretty pictures, is all). Back then there were even stories starring comic writers and editors who'd slipped between the dimensions and got to have adventures with the heroes (Cary Bates and Elliot Maggin in JLA and... Julie Schwartz? in Flash?). :D

I don't have any problem with slash fandom being "closed" to people who don't appreciate it, because anyone who is kept out of slash fandom has other options. But when it comes to superheroes, DC and Marvel are the main options - not to put down other producers, but I grew up with Superman, Batman, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, etc. They're the ones I want to read, and being told "If you don't like it, go somewhere else" is not much of a solution for me. It is a viable solution for someone who doesn't like slash - while slash has dominated some fandoms at various times (I didn't read any new Starsky and Hutch fic for a good decade :p), the original show was accessable to non-slashers. And people could write non-slash S&H at their leisure, since there were gen zines who'd accept it that whole time (now that there are fewer gen zines there's the internet).

What is so cool about comics is that it is open to fannish-style over the top pure crack when it comes to a lot of stuff I love. But I'm getting seriously pissed off about this "no girls allowed" attitude. I never cared about fans with that attitude, and still don't - but with comics, and contrary to every other male-dominated interest I've ever followed, I get the distinct impression that some of the producers of what I love want me out of there just as badly as the most mysoginist fans.

Your last paragraph sums it up for me. When I first started serioously reading comics in the early 1970's, female characters were rarely well handled - the authors and artists were generally sexist males and it showed. The female characters were female first, and then people second - but at least they were people! There are still comic authors and artists who write that way, but the ones who see the female characters as sexual fantasies seem to be running the show. A sexual fantasy is not a person; you can't allow a sexual fantasy to become a person because people do unexpected things and don't always want to do what you want, and that spoils the fantasy. Whether it's consensual or nonconsensual, a partner who won't "play the role" just isn't much fun when it comes to sexual fantasy, because the role is the thing. (The difference between erotica and porn, IMHO, is that erotica allows people while porn does not. Sex can "go wrong" in erotica in ways porn does not tolerate.)

There were females as sexual fantasies in the seventies, too, but it wasn't all of them, and you could predict where you'd run across them. Now they're the standard, and it's the very few who don't fit that role who stand out - and nearly all of the exceptions are younger (Kitty Pryde, Mary Marvel). I was puzzling over why comic producers on the one hand want to insist that "comics are for adults" but on the other hand try to attact teenaged and younger girls to comics (Minx line, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane), and I think that's why. They no longer know how to write an adult female who isn't a sexual fantasy first and foremost, and they have enough sense to know that that isn't what women want.

Sheryl

Now they're the standard, and it's the very few who don't fit that role who stand out - and nearly all of the exceptions are younger (Kitty Pryde, Mary Marvel).

.... Ah, you haven't seen Mary Marvel lately, have you?

I almost hate to disillusion you. But, uh. Yeah, it's... She's in kind of an unfortunate phase right now. A tight black latex costume complete with mini-mini-skirt phase. Sorry.

Yah, I know, or at least I've seen some clips, but until fairly recently she was an exception. :p I don't read every X-zine out there and Kitty could be wandering around in a teddy for all of me, but they were the only exceptions I could think of. My exceptions list is getting right slim, which I suppose just re-enforces my main point. *sigh*

Sheryl

Sorry, I don't have an lj.

Here's my rather unpopular opinion:

Enjoying evil is wrong. Enjoying the thought of evil is wrong. Yes, even if it's just a fantasy in your head. Getting off on oppression of people, or of yourself, is wrong. And a lot of things that people might not realize are oppression, are.

Practically all societies condition their members to get off on oppression. Sexualization of oppression is instilled in practically everyone, such that it becomes difficult to imagine a sexuality free of oppression. It is a sickness. You and I and pretty much everyone are conditioned to get off on oppression, though what sort of oppression, and whether it is your own oppression or someone else's, and such details, vary widely.

The best course of action is for us to work on healing this conditioning. Escaping from it.

Stephen King has an essay where he talks about the "alligators" in the human psyche (our dark impulses and feelings, etc). He says that some horror stories are a way of "feeding the gators" so they don't get mad and break out of the dungeon in our minds where they are kept.

I totally disagree (though I am not against all horror stories, just the ones that feed our evil impulses). Feeding the gators is bad. Repressing your dark impulses is just as bad though. Of course if you just repress them they will grow down there in the dark and eventually break out. People talk as though the only choices are repressing your feelings or indulging them. What about changing them? Of course it will take a lot of time and work -- all the more reason to start now.

Although I think that feeding the gators is bad, that doesn't mean I think feeding them will cause you to act on them. Most people do have various mechanisms in place that keep them from doing bad things. Fantasizing about torturing people won't make you more likely to actually do it. That's not why it's bad. It's bad because of who it makes you become, inside. It cripples your spirit, mangles it, makes it ugly.

You know, I have heard some people actually claim that pursuing and getting off on the types of trauma they have previously experienced in their lives is good for them. For instance, a person who was verbal abused, demeaned, and humiliated as a child might start to have sexual fantasies about humiliation, etc. They might embrace this, and come to believe that it helps them to "deal with" their trauma.

It's true, adapting to stresses (pain and evil certainly count as stresses) is a natural human survival response. Stockholm syndrome is an extreme example of this. And it works--it can help your DNA to survive. But adapting to evil will cost you your spirit, and often you won't even realize that it has happened/is happening. I mean, it's not like you'll become a totally incapable of compassion or be utterly heartless. The harm to your spirit will likely not outweigh your positive qualities. But I don't believe any amount of damage is acceptable. Adding to the confusion is the way that enjoyment of evil is mixed with (or even tied to) enjoyment of good things and neutral things. For instance, some people enjoy playing a slave role in the bedroom in part because it's the only way they can access feelings of trust, emotional openness, etc. Then there is the physical enjoyment of adrenalin.

Yes, the game is stacked against us. Getting free of societal, psychological, and biological influences that encourage us to enjoy evil and oppression is difficult. Even if you work on it your whole life and you live to be 100 you won't be totally free. But a measure of freedom is possible and it is the right choice. The first step is deciding to do this work for the rest of your life. The second is to stop working against yourself by indulging in harmful kinks.

Getting off on evil is wrong.

Here via metafandom. I'm a TV fan and not a comics fan, so I'm looking at it from the outside--I'd say that a slaveboy!Obi figure would be distinguishable from a slavegirl!Leia figure because, even though it's not impossible for RL men to experience sexual harassment or rape, it is simply far less of a risk than it is for women. And, frankly, I think that women are a lot better than men at separating fantasy from reality (and a lot less delusional about who desires them).

Well said.

What I think I hear you saying is,

Normalization of exploitation is not OK.

I am behind that. Like you, I'm okay with anyone's private enjoyment taking whatever form they like (as long as it doesn't harm any other people without their consent, etc.)... but public, mass-market, normalized stuff both reflects and shapes public mores, so its content should be in line with what public mores are, and what we want them to be. Exploitation is not something I want to see become *more* publicly acceptable.

This is a very interesting and thought-provoking response--thanks for posting! (And thank you also for being so generous in your quotation--I was hesitant to raise this question at all because I didn't want to be misinterpreted as somehow being in favour of misogynistic/demeaning depictions of women. From what I've seen, female comics fans put up with a lot of crap in that department on a daily basis.)

When I look at something like the Heroes for Hire cover, my gut reaction is that (besides being wildly inappropriate for the stated target market), it's creepy and offensive on multiple levels. It's my experience of fandom that's now complicating that reaction for me, by reminding me that I have enjoyed reading and writing stories in which male characters are in jeopardy or sexually threatened--I've even made comments such as, "Oh, character X suffers so beautifully." These are my own words--written not out of any sort of aggression towards the character in particular or men in general; on the contrary, they convey an appreciation of the way the actor in question portrays the character in extremis: nevertheless, I have to admit that I would be creeped out if I came across that sentence written by a male writer about a female character.

Because, as Livia points out, there are historic and current power imbalances that render the comparison anything but symmetrical...but neither does it seem fair for me to claim some sort of special free pass or moral high ground for my kink on that basis.

And as others have pointed out, there are important differences between visual and written portrayals of these kinds of situations...yet I can't claim that everything posted by female writers in fandom is sensitively-written erotica respectful of the canonical characters; some of it is outright OOC porn--and though my own tastes don't run that way, evidence would suggest that many female readers enjoy it. And I have witnessed fandom being squeeful over canonical visuals such as Clark writhing weakly under the influence of Kryptonite on SV, or Daniel Jackson blindfolded, bound, and bare-shouldered on SG-1, or fan-made visuals such as Sam Winchester naked and chained in Hell...and in each of these cases it's actually affection for and identification with the character that has driven the squee.

But again, there's an asymmetry there in that female readers/viewers are more socialized to identify with male characters than vice versa, so I don't know whether the above is at all relevant to the thought processes of a male reader seeing a female hero in extremis on a comic cover or in its storyline (be that threat portrayed for older readers in an adult way or for younger ones in a manner more suitable to them).

Again, on a visceral level, for the most part I have this sense of safety within fanfic/fanart, as if it's a sort of roller-coaster in which we play with danger in the confidence that no one will actually go off the rails and get hurt (I say for the most part, because there are some themes in fanfic that I do find seriously disturbing)...whereas, looking at a cover like the one posted by Livia, I have more of an "off-the-rails" sense of danger and potential harm--less "roller-coaster" and more "street-racing."

But, if the cover had been approached differently in a few of the ways that people have suggested (e.g., more respectful/realistic depictions of the characters both as women and as the skilled heroes they apparently are), I think it could have been a roller-coaster instead...

[break for comment word-limit]

~

To go with our PleasureSlave!Obi-Wan statuette, let's imagine a theoretical tv show: The Padawan Adventures, where an eighteen-year-old Obi-Wan travels the galaxy with his master, and every week he is menaced by villains, who tie him up and rip his clothing and his skin [...] I would think it was gross and exploitative and disrespectful, and I wouldn't accept "But it's on the Oxygen Network, so it's for/about women's pleasures!" as a defense.

And in such a situation, I would totally agree with you. The reason I used slave-girl Leia as a comparison is that her gold bikini is so often affectionately referenced in pop culture (e.g., on "Friends") as having been a key moment in a lot of young boys' sexual awakenings. And I remember there being debate at the time of RotJ about whether it was appropriate to portray the famously turtle-necked Leia in this way--debate that seems almost quaint in retrospect given that by today's standards, Leia's slave-girl outfit offered ample coverage and was actually rather practical and athletic.

Leia-as-slave-girl snuck under the suitable-for-teens bar not just because we have a double standard about the degree to which male and female sexuality is normalized in film and advertising, but also because it was a single sequence in a longer series of movies that depicted her as powerful, smart, competent, funny, etc.; and because the sequence put her temporarily in jeopardy without depriving her of those canonical qualities: against the laws of physics, she succeeded in killing Jabba with her bare hands, and one of the most famous stills of bikini-Leia had her competently firing a huge gun. So, looking back on it now, I think it's kind of cool that such a kick-ass female character made such an impact on so many pubescent boys...and that's the kind of thing I meant when I was arguing for eroding that double standard by introducing a little more normalization of male characters in similar situations (I was thinking along the lines of a pre-prequel trilogy, with eight hours or so of content of fabulous Jedi competence, say half-an-hour of which involves having to infiltrate the central headquarters of Planet Harem-Pants-and-Eyeliner *g*). Because I know that at present Harem-Pant-Obi-Wan would be perceived as more controversial than gold-bikini Leia (in the same way that Brokeback Mountain was perceived as more controversial than much more explicit het love stories, or that male underwear ads are protested against as indecent by people who barely blink an eye at female ones) and I'm irked by that double standard.

I think that there have certainly been inroads, and pondering this the last couple of days, I've realized that a lot of fandom's classic source texts are ones that do provide a PG or PG-ish version of that in extremis roller-coaster experience to potential fans. I mean, classic Trek did it all the time. ;-)

And the recent LotR movies offer a fascinating example of the kinds of anxieties that are raised when we see male characters in classic woman-in-jeopardy situations: the fact that Frodo was small and beautiful and under threat from all directions and in need of protection and that his strength was manifested in endurance rather than fighting was, I think, disconcerting for many male fans because that's not the way male heroes are supposed to behave.

In another example, given the recent controversy over the MJ statuette, I think it's interesting that the most iconic image from the movie versions so far is that of MJ peeling back Spidey's mask to kiss him: she's not only the sexual initiator there, but also a potential threat (to the secrecy of his identity)...resulting in a very subtle roller-coaster moment.

So I do see some slow steady chipping away at that double standard...but even if we got to the point where it was completely eliminated, I suspect there would still be an imbalance in the subjects depicted by the comics and collectibles industries, because of significant differences (in general) in the things that men and women collect and in the ways that they purchase them.

~

I have only just now recalled the episode of "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" in which Sean Patrick Flanery's Indy plays a harem guard in an avant-garde production, and must use his shiny loin-protector as a signalling mirror.

Apparently George Lucas gets more points for gender parity than I thought. ;-)

~

Everything you've both said is very interesting and excellent but my mind got a bit stuck on the image of Obi wan in Leia's slave outfit (http://pics.livejournal.com/naewinter/pic/000cdb5k/).
I have previously put Carrie Fisher in Han Solo's costume (http://naefox.livejournal.com/10730.html), gender switchery is sometimes the best way to explain to those who have never thought about the situation, exactly what the issues are.

Thanks for the links! I think it's the inclusion of the beard that somehow really makes the Obi-Wan pic for me. *g*

Carrie looks fab in her Corellian gear! It reminds me a bit of the early Ralph McQuarrie sketches in which Luke was a girl.

~

Thank you for looking, the art that I've seen popping up in response to the MJ statuette, the HFH cover and the assorted redesign/genderswitchery drawing memes recently is really impressive.

Luke was a girl? I feel like that should explain something, I'm not sure what that is though. =)

the art that I've seen popping up in response to the MJ statuette, the HFH cover and the assorted redesign/genderswitchery drawing memes recently is really impressive.

And the art in response to Frank Miller's "I have a date with Bruce Wayne!" version of Vicki Vale as well--I recall some rather fetching hypothetical superhero covers coming out of that brouhaha. :-)

Luke was a girl?

Yes, apparently George Lucas hewed a little closer to The Hidden Fortress in his early conception of Luke. If I recall correctly, there's a lovely costume drawing of a female Luke in The Art of Star Wars--she had short hair and a very cool bodysuit that looked a bit like a less-regal version of Princess Amidala's white catsuits from the later prequels.

You can get a bit of the idea here (http://www.ralphmcquarrie.com/galleries/SW/sw.html).

~

Second attempt:

They are up on Girl-Wonder here. (http://counterpunch.girl-wonder.org/)

Thanks for the link, looks very cool. I wonder how it would have changed the story, it certainly messes with how the character sits in your head. In a good way though. =)

Yes, those are the ones--thanks for the link! I do enjoy the flurries of genderswapped art that emerge from these sorts of debates, and would like to see more of that kind of stereotype-flipping and assumption-challenging move from the realm of guerrilla art into more mainstream work.

I hadn't seen that full "How to Draw" piece before, though I had seen some of the guerrilla art inspired by it, and man--the assumptions inherent in something as basic as how you make your character stand (because of course superheroines keep their hips cocked all the time rather than standing up straight and strong)!

And I see that the first article on that page makes a much more succinct version of this point: Solution: Parity in sexual emphasis. Either tone down the women, or tart up the men.

Heck, yes. Preferably both.

~

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Profile

Hth

December 2018

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Abstractia by chiming
Theme: Midnight by chiming

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Feb. 4th, 2026 09:47 pm

Hope That Holds.

kink and canon

kink and canon

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Kink, Canon, Fanfic, and Roller-Coasters

Leia, Obi-Wan, and Male/Female Sexuality in Public Space

Canonical Harem Pants on Young Indy

Re: Leia, Obi-Wan, and Male/Female Sexuality in Public Space

Re: Leia, Obi-Wan, and Male/Female Sexuality in Public Space

Re: Leia, Obi-Wan, and Male/Female Sexuality in Public Space

Genderswap Art; Luke as a Girl

Re: Genderswap Art; Luke as a Girl

Re: Genderswap Art; Luke as a Girl

Profile

December 2018

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags