Single-sex adventuring
Nov. 28th, 2011 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gryphonseggOkay, so . . . I'm female-bodied, and for a while now I've been feeling guilty about liking so many things that have few or no female characters. Before that, I thought it was simply a genre preference: the kinds of stories I wanted to read were not the kinds of stories that sexist powers-that-be thought could or should have a lot of girls involved in them. That's certainly part of what's going on, but there's another thing that's a little more complicated. When I do find a story about an all-female team having weird adventures, without obsessive focus on looks and fashion and without the Mean Girlism that so many people so sadly assume to be inherent to all-female groups, and when those adventures are not described/drawn/filmed in a way I find overly fan servicey, I usually end up liking that a lot better than stories about mixed casts that are similar in tone and setting. And when a group of male characters I already like gets AU'ed into a group of female characters for non-fetish purposes, I am all over that. Apparently, it's not just adventure I like, it's the homosocial groupings as well.
[Tangent: This explains a few of my less popular fixations in ATLA, even though it did very well with a mixed cast. My ridiculous delight at the idea of Ty Lee joining the Kyoshi warriors even though fandom at large seems to think that was a terrible choice? My wish to know more about the waterhealers and my fondness for the female Water Tribe characters in general despite the general fandom opinion that they can't possibly be doing anything interesting or important because who needs a healer when there's a war on? My head-canon that Ty Lee's sisters are a wildly varied lot of opinionated and eccentric women with radically different sociopolitical beliefs much like the RL Mitford sisters even though every fic I've seen that mentioned them portrayed them as a group of identically boring and vapid stereotypes of upper class femininity? I think that's a result of wanting more all-female groups to balance out the all-male groups in my fiction-centric life.]
Now I'm trying to figure out why this is. I mean, I have serious problems with attempts to use perceived sex or gender as an organizing principle in real life. People who see me almost always perceive me as a woman, but I hate being treated like a woman. I want to be treated like a person who is not marked as different by sex, gender, or any perceived match or mismatch between them. Having thought about it some more, I suspect that's actually part of the reason I like my homosocial casts in fiction so much-- because there is no Token Girl or Ladies' Auxiliary if either everyone's a girl or no one is. I can temporarily escape into a story where I'm not constantly reminded of the times I've been treated as A Girl rather than a classmate, teammate, colleague, club member, or fellow nerd. Even if the secondary world is as sexist as anything, I can focus on a part of it where the particular issues I'm tired of dealing with IRL simply don't come up. Writers have gotten a lot better in recent years about including girls mixed in with the guys, but it's hard to find stories with mixed casts that don't call a great deal of attention to perceived differences in sex-linked-with gender. That doesn't provide me with the escape I sometimes want.
[Tangent: This explains a few of my less popular fixations in ATLA, even though it did very well with a mixed cast. My ridiculous delight at the idea of Ty Lee joining the Kyoshi warriors even though fandom at large seems to think that was a terrible choice? My wish to know more about the waterhealers and my fondness for the female Water Tribe characters in general despite the general fandom opinion that they can't possibly be doing anything interesting or important because who needs a healer when there's a war on? My head-canon that Ty Lee's sisters are a wildly varied lot of opinionated and eccentric women with radically different sociopolitical beliefs much like the RL Mitford sisters even though every fic I've seen that mentioned them portrayed them as a group of identically boring and vapid stereotypes of upper class femininity? I think that's a result of wanting more all-female groups to balance out the all-male groups in my fiction-centric life.]
Now I'm trying to figure out why this is. I mean, I have serious problems with attempts to use perceived sex or gender as an organizing principle in real life. People who see me almost always perceive me as a woman, but I hate being treated like a woman. I want to be treated like a person who is not marked as different by sex, gender, or any perceived match or mismatch between them. Having thought about it some more, I suspect that's actually part of the reason I like my homosocial casts in fiction so much-- because there is no Token Girl or Ladies' Auxiliary if either everyone's a girl or no one is. I can temporarily escape into a story where I'm not constantly reminded of the times I've been treated as A Girl rather than a classmate, teammate, colleague, club member, or fellow nerd. Even if the secondary world is as sexist as anything, I can focus on a part of it where the particular issues I'm tired of dealing with IRL simply don't come up. Writers have gotten a lot better in recent years about including girls mixed in with the guys, but it's hard to find stories with mixed casts that don't call a great deal of attention to perceived differences in sex-linked-with gender. That doesn't provide me with the escape I sometimes want.