kink and canon

[hth]

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.

Comments

[shilohmm.livejournal.com]

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

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

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.

[shilohmm.livejournal.com]

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