![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gryphonseggIt's not always easy being a non-male Green Lantern fan, and the addition of the rest of the color spectrum to the mythos doesn't necessarily make it easier. These are some of the thoughts that go into planning my Blue Lantern costume:
In all the vast expanse of space, it somehow just so happens that the vast majority of intelligent species are two-sex species. Furthermore, it just so happens that within the species, the even more vast majority of beings found worthy, because of their courage and strength of will, to be Green Lanterns are male. Plus, it just so happens that when a being appears who should not, by any logical train of thought, have a sex or any concept of sex or gender except what may be learned second-hand from those wacky two-sexed aliens, that being gets assigned a gender, and that gender is almost always masculine. Even the sapient planet and the self-aware mathematical progression are called "he." The only exception I can think of right off hand is a fairly recent one, and that one is Mother Mercy, whose defining personality trait is a desire to comfort every suffering being in the universe. Mother Mercy is a brilliant creation whom I absolutely love. The most compassionate and nurturing living being in the universe looks utterly terrifying to humans and has turned an entire planet into a center for collecting dead organic matter to be recycled for healing purposes, creating an environment that was honestly and well-meaningly NOT constructed to give humankind screaming nightmares even though that is the unintentional result! What's not to love? But the character's association with womb and mother-goddess imagery makes "her" the exception that proves the rule when it comes to the default-masculine gendering of sexless beings in the GL mythos.
Getting back to that minority of biologically female Lanterns, it is worth noting that most of them, despite being from different species the emerged independently in widely scattered star systems, are humanoid, thin, conventionally pretty by Euro-centric standards, and often scantily clad while their male colleagues are fully covered. In fact, this pattern seems to have become worse over time: several long-standing female characters have had their character designs altered to make them look less alien and/or to make their costumes skimpier. Ganthet, co-founder of the Blue Lantern Corps, is a very rare exception. Even for the Blue Lanterns, the majority of members are male, the only female character hanging around besides Ganthet is conventionally attractive to humans, and the mostly prominently featured characters are male.
What about the rest of the Lanterns? For red (rage), yellow (fear), and indigo (compassion), the same pattern holds, although the yellow team does have a few female characters who look genuinely scary in addition to the many, many scary-looking guys and the obligatory vampire-themed dominatrix. Orange represents greed in this mythos, so there's only one Orange Lantern, a very non-human-looking male character who wants to own all the things. And then there are the Violet Lanterns/Star Sapphires/Barbie Pink Lanterns, who are powered by love *twitch*. They are the only all-female Lantern Corps *twitch*. Their costumes are . . . well, I've seen some designs that are rumored to be Star Sapphire costumes for the post-reboot comics, and those don't look so bad. The classic costume for the original Star Sapphire (back when there was only one) was good, though an update should do something about that collar. When the Star Sapphire Corps was introduced, however, their costumes *twitch*twitch*twitch* . . . Okay, they were basically wearing hot pink censor dots with matching high-heeled, thigh-high boots. And the philosophy behind their corps was a mess of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend tropes. This is NOT an attack on any of the characters who were put in the Star Sapphire Corps during Blackest Night and Brightest Day. It's a criticism of the writers who made those decisions and who wrote them in stereotypical and sometimes character-derailing ways, and it's a criticism of the artists who made their costumes so damn twitch-inducing. Most of all, it's a criticism of the beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes that led to such a problematic portrayal.
What all of that leads up to is this: On the one hand, I wanted to dress up as a Lantern Corps character who didn't fit into the gender binary, perhaps one whose species had no substrate to generate and sustain a gender binary. On the other hand, I wanted to dress up as a well-covered, non-thin, female character. Of course, I ran into a dilemma: I couldn't do both in the same costume. I tried to think of a way to write an alien species that doesn't do sex and gender the way humans do and still have an individual of that species who would appear/be read as female to most humans. I thought up and discarded a lot of ideas because they turned out upon closer inspection to be just as problematic as the non-Star Sapphire parts of the source material. Today, however, I finally came up with something that works. I'll post about it after I've worked out a few more details.
In all the vast expanse of space, it somehow just so happens that the vast majority of intelligent species are two-sex species. Furthermore, it just so happens that within the species, the even more vast majority of beings found worthy, because of their courage and strength of will, to be Green Lanterns are male. Plus, it just so happens that when a being appears who should not, by any logical train of thought, have a sex or any concept of sex or gender except what may be learned second-hand from those wacky two-sexed aliens, that being gets assigned a gender, and that gender is almost always masculine. Even the sapient planet and the self-aware mathematical progression are called "he." The only exception I can think of right off hand is a fairly recent one, and that one is Mother Mercy, whose defining personality trait is a desire to comfort every suffering being in the universe. Mother Mercy is a brilliant creation whom I absolutely love. The most compassionate and nurturing living being in the universe looks utterly terrifying to humans and has turned an entire planet into a center for collecting dead organic matter to be recycled for healing purposes, creating an environment that was honestly and well-meaningly NOT constructed to give humankind screaming nightmares even though that is the unintentional result! What's not to love? But the character's association with womb and mother-goddess imagery makes "her" the exception that proves the rule when it comes to the default-masculine gendering of sexless beings in the GL mythos.
Getting back to that minority of biologically female Lanterns, it is worth noting that most of them, despite being from different species the emerged independently in widely scattered star systems, are humanoid, thin, conventionally pretty by Euro-centric standards, and often scantily clad while their male colleagues are fully covered. In fact, this pattern seems to have become worse over time: several long-standing female characters have had their character designs altered to make them look less alien and/or to make their costumes skimpier. Ganthet, co-founder of the Blue Lantern Corps, is a very rare exception. Even for the Blue Lanterns, the majority of members are male, the only female character hanging around besides Ganthet is conventionally attractive to humans, and the mostly prominently featured characters are male.
What about the rest of the Lanterns? For red (rage), yellow (fear), and indigo (compassion), the same pattern holds, although the yellow team does have a few female characters who look genuinely scary in addition to the many, many scary-looking guys and the obligatory vampire-themed dominatrix. Orange represents greed in this mythos, so there's only one Orange Lantern, a very non-human-looking male character who wants to own all the things. And then there are the Violet Lanterns/Star Sapphires/Barbie Pink Lanterns, who are powered by love *twitch*. They are the only all-female Lantern Corps *twitch*. Their costumes are . . . well, I've seen some designs that are rumored to be Star Sapphire costumes for the post-reboot comics, and those don't look so bad. The classic costume for the original Star Sapphire (back when there was only one) was good, though an update should do something about that collar. When the Star Sapphire Corps was introduced, however, their costumes *twitch*twitch*twitch* . . . Okay, they were basically wearing hot pink censor dots with matching high-heeled, thigh-high boots. And the philosophy behind their corps was a mess of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend tropes. This is NOT an attack on any of the characters who were put in the Star Sapphire Corps during Blackest Night and Brightest Day. It's a criticism of the writers who made those decisions and who wrote them in stereotypical and sometimes character-derailing ways, and it's a criticism of the artists who made their costumes so damn twitch-inducing. Most of all, it's a criticism of the beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes that led to such a problematic portrayal.
What all of that leads up to is this: On the one hand, I wanted to dress up as a Lantern Corps character who didn't fit into the gender binary, perhaps one whose species had no substrate to generate and sustain a gender binary. On the other hand, I wanted to dress up as a well-covered, non-thin, female character. Of course, I ran into a dilemma: I couldn't do both in the same costume. I tried to think of a way to write an alien species that doesn't do sex and gender the way humans do and still have an individual of that species who would appear/be read as female to most humans. I thought up and discarded a lot of ideas because they turned out upon closer inspection to be just as problematic as the non-Star Sapphire parts of the source material. Today, however, I finally came up with something that works. I'll post about it after I've worked out a few more details.
