Gender arguments
Jul. 21st, 2017 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThe thing that makes conversations about gender and media difficult to have
is that, in an ideal world, I'd want gender to be a nonbinary system, a gender spectrum, with no particular weight or pressure to so much as pick a position on it, let alone be stuck there.
... but I am aware that this ideal world is based on what would make the world most comfortable for me, and other people want to do their own thing, so okay, I guess, they can play this two sided thing, if they particularly want.
But gender isn't and can't be just two sides, it's always gender-and-class and gender-and-race and gender-and-dis/ability, just for starters, even without bringing geography in, so you can't say men have this rule women have that rule, it doesn't simplify that way. There's no one way of behaviour or expression that's simply masculine or invariably feminine. It just already isn't binary, and gets really stressed around the edges pretending it is.
But! Again, another but. Even with all this complex intersectionality, there are still some super simplified statements you can make that are a start on being true.
Like, There Are Not Enough Women In This Story.
Like, There Are Not Enough Women In Charge.
Because however you divided people up in the first place, if you have two persistent arbitrary groups, and all the good stuff has been going to only one of them?
That needs fixing.
So I'm a feminist who would quite like to bring down the boundaries that section off feminine in the first place. Feminist who wants to queer gender. Feminist who wants to shake up the value sets until you can't force them apart anyway.
But you've got to be feminist, because that's the fight that's happening.
So, that involves having a lot of conversations with people who start out with some very different assumptions, including that there's such a thing as women in the first place, as something other than a social construct, a habit of language, an arbitrary categorisation.
And it's a lot easier to start from there and just push the parity argument. Because surely, surely, if you get equal numbers, it has to help with the noticing we're all fully human with all the options available. In writing especially, if you have to have half the roles be women, surely eventually that means giving women the good meaty story, as they're there.
... yeah this is a thought with many sighs attached, but since we don't even have parity yet, you never know.
But! Again: I much prefer the Imperial Radch approach. Nuke gender from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
We have to start by engaging with the dominant paradigm, but I get so tired of it when it is being a really intolerable paradigm.
There's no room for anyone in this thing, why even prop it up?
So what this adds up to is, the Doctor has potential to be my ideal character. All Time Lords do now. Because they can demonstrate in one continuous person the utter irrelevance of packaging.
But, because they are on the whole written by binary people in a binary system, it seems annoyingly likely they won't.
And yet it's still progress, because parity is at least twelve more Doctors away, so this is a place to start.
It's just kind of wearying knowing that saying this out loud is... pretty likely to start an argument on the fundamentals. Like, gender. What is even up with that?
is that, in an ideal world, I'd want gender to be a nonbinary system, a gender spectrum, with no particular weight or pressure to so much as pick a position on it, let alone be stuck there.
... but I am aware that this ideal world is based on what would make the world most comfortable for me, and other people want to do their own thing, so okay, I guess, they can play this two sided thing, if they particularly want.
But gender isn't and can't be just two sides, it's always gender-and-class and gender-and-race and gender-and-dis/ability, just for starters, even without bringing geography in, so you can't say men have this rule women have that rule, it doesn't simplify that way. There's no one way of behaviour or expression that's simply masculine or invariably feminine. It just already isn't binary, and gets really stressed around the edges pretending it is.
But! Again, another but. Even with all this complex intersectionality, there are still some super simplified statements you can make that are a start on being true.
Like, There Are Not Enough Women In This Story.
Like, There Are Not Enough Women In Charge.
Because however you divided people up in the first place, if you have two persistent arbitrary groups, and all the good stuff has been going to only one of them?
That needs fixing.
So I'm a feminist who would quite like to bring down the boundaries that section off feminine in the first place. Feminist who wants to queer gender. Feminist who wants to shake up the value sets until you can't force them apart anyway.
But you've got to be feminist, because that's the fight that's happening.
So, that involves having a lot of conversations with people who start out with some very different assumptions, including that there's such a thing as women in the first place, as something other than a social construct, a habit of language, an arbitrary categorisation.
And it's a lot easier to start from there and just push the parity argument. Because surely, surely, if you get equal numbers, it has to help with the noticing we're all fully human with all the options available. In writing especially, if you have to have half the roles be women, surely eventually that means giving women the good meaty story, as they're there.
... yeah this is a thought with many sighs attached, but since we don't even have parity yet, you never know.
But! Again: I much prefer the Imperial Radch approach. Nuke gender from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
We have to start by engaging with the dominant paradigm, but I get so tired of it when it is being a really intolerable paradigm.
There's no room for anyone in this thing, why even prop it up?
So what this adds up to is, the Doctor has potential to be my ideal character. All Time Lords do now. Because they can demonstrate in one continuous person the utter irrelevance of packaging.
But, because they are on the whole written by binary people in a binary system, it seems annoyingly likely they won't.
And yet it's still progress, because parity is at least twelve more Doctors away, so this is a place to start.
It's just kind of wearying knowing that saying this out loud is... pretty likely to start an argument on the fundamentals. Like, gender. What is even up with that?