#gender blogging

[anghraine]

I feel it's worth mentioning that in the context of the episode itself, Nomad doesn't perceive Kirk or itself in gendered terms at all (it only understands organic beings as "units"). Nomad calls him "Creator" because it's confused him with its literal creator, a man named Jackson Roykirk. Kirk alone is the one who jumps from "male creator" to "yikes/lol I'm a mom now" (depending on the occasion) and Spock just shrugs and runs with it.

(This also pretty directly mirrors "Charlie X," where unlike in "The Changeling," Kirk flatly refuses to take on the paternal role that Charlie and McCoy project onto him until he has no real alternative, and is intensely uncomfortable being boxed into Strong Masculine Role Model. He's ultimately unable to hold onto that authority with Charlie and they're saved by the deus ex machina of the Thasians at the end, while in "The Changeling," Kirk leverages his maternal-according-to-him authority to get Nomad to self-destruct and succeeds without outside help.)

Kirk is not ready for motherhood.

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

[woofgender]

i'm trying to change my name with my car manufacturer's financial services company (so my car payments are under my new legal name). they don't even know about transgender name changes at this call center. they think i got married or perhaps divorced. henry the toyota financial services customer representative and i are both having a very confusing time on this phone call.

at one point he asked me, "what is the reason for the name change today?"

i replied, "uh...i had it changed legally?"

apparently this was all he needed. baffling!!

[prokopetz]

That liminal space where an artist you follow has switched their social media avatar from a trending anime girl to a female OC, the he/him pronouns have quietly vanished from their bio, and their drawings of cartoon ladies with big boobs have taken on a distinctly aspirational cast, but they haven't publicly said anything, so you've gotta keep your damn mouth shut.

[anghraine]

So I just discovered a cool conversation that spun off from one of my tag monologues on a gifset—I'd seen the initial tag peer review, but hadn't realized they'd gone further than that until @ladytharen tagged me. Yet again I didn't want to pester the original gifmaker too much, so I decided to respond separately to the part I found especially interesting.

For context, these were my original tags on the "This little thing? Just something I slipped on :)" Kirk captivity scene from "Tomorrow is Yesterday":

#captain gender strikes again! #i appreciate the read on this scene as 'captain kirk is a queer guy flirting with random 20th cent dudes holding him captive. bicon' #but personally my read is 'captain kirk is a queer guy deliberately leaning into effeminacy to fuck with hypermasc douchebros #from the very era in which the show was made irl. bicon' #it's definitely flirty but it is an aggressively feminine-coded flirtiness that's going to triply bother these kinds of guys #ngl i feel like kirk enjoys fucking with gender norms in all directions just because of who he is as a person (his true gender: diva) #but it's extra fun when it lets him troll ultra-military assholes neurotic about their own masculinity who are trying to intimidate HIM #(these guys aren't his type at all - christopher is much more that - but as usual that's not the point of the flirtation #k/s is nerd4nerd but also troll4troll)

I was really intrigued by this response from @mycroftrh, and thinking about it again on this inauguration of Pride month.

#yeah#in a certain context queerness and effeminacy are power#these are also unfortunately often the same contexts where queerness can get you hate crimed#but if you’re gonna be beat up/killed anyway…#you might as well make the homophobes maximally uncomfortable first

Yep, exactly. You can absolutely see the moment when he decides on exactly which side of his personality he's going to use for maximum effect on these gender policing, homophobic, ultra-military, paranoid bigots from the 60s:

I do think it's interesting that the full scene includes not only Kirk's bisexual chaos gremlin diva genderfuckery (enrichment for him!) but moments of fear and defiance:

He doesn't drop the flamboyance until he wants to, though. And the framing, lighting, angles etc only serve to emphasize their attempts to loom even more over him, aggressively get into his space, gesture right at his face to unsettle him, and his refusal to be intimidated by these fundamentally pathetic responses that are by no means free from real danger, just silly and contemptible nevertheless. It's not that he's too disdainful or amused at his own hijinks to understand how easily this could go very wrong. He simply has no respect for these men and enjoys leveraging their own hang-ups against them.

His eye make-up is also more than usually noticeable in the close-ups in this scene—even compared to other scenes in the same episode—which seems maybe not unrelated!

I think it's also worth pointing out that, TOS make-up aside, Kirk's navigation of gender performance in the original series is ... let's say, idiosyncratic. Most of the 23rd-century male characters are far more inflexible and singular about what gendered roles they're willing or able to inhabit. Kirk specifically is very deliberately fluid and versatile and theatrical about a lot of things, very much including gender performance and sexuality.

[icescrabblerjerky]

#I'm probably trans but god made a cow wall so idrc about that right now

i love the way the way the locked tomb does gender. like gideon is butch, undeniably, but also can you really be gender non conforming when there’s no real image of gender to conform to in the first place? palamedes and pyrrah aren’t NOT trans in nona; their souls are trapped in different bodies, and those bodies ARE the wrong gender but also that’s literally the least of their problems. ianthe is pretty firmly in the box we would label “femme” and she’s simultaneously the princess of ida and a tower prince. but that’s also the least of her problems she’s literally puppetting a dead body around. nona experiences dysphoria about her body (harrow’s body and the barbie body) but that’s because she’s literally the soul of a planet trapped in a meat prison. any shaped meat prison would be bad.

like i wouldn’t call the locked tomb a “post gender” world, but they seem to all basically have the attitude of “i don’t have time for gender right now we’re trapped at the murder mystery dinner party from hell and someone stole god’s sperm we have bigger problems”

[caterjunes]

i loved having my mom visit for the eclipse but it would be just SO great if she would stop accidentally misgendering me. it's infrequent but jesus christ, i've been out for more than four years now. each time it happens it's devastatingly obvious that she has not put in the appropriate amount of mental effort or practice time.

[woofgender]

whoever previously checked out this library book about trans history in China was using this as a bookmark 🥹🥰

[drawerbread]

Happy pride month everyone! Here's some silly gh drawings to celebrate (vague college au?)

[indigoire]

You're doing great work, thank you!

(source is Kanojo ni Naru Hi)

[thestyleofblackneutrality]

Grills will always be gender neutral, my dear.

[emmyrosee]

“Just one more,” you mewl.

“Oh my god.”

Sae has to leave. It’s past the point of him responsibly leaving, to now, where there’s no choice of him having to leave now, if he wants any chance of making it to practice on time.

But you, however, are seemingly far from getting your Itoshi Sae fix, not wanting to be far from him at all: you whimpered and whined when he got up for his run, you snuck into his shower with him, you looped your arms around his waist while he made his lunch, now you’ve got his face gripped in your hands, sponging kisses over him.

At first, sure, he loved the attention.

But Itoshi Sae has to leave. Four minutes ago.

“Hey,” he sighs softly, trying to push your shoulders back to peel you off of him. “You know I have to go. Don’t make this harder for me.”

“You don’t have to go,” you say simply. “You and I can just be hermits forever, hide here for the rest of our lives and cuddle forever.”

Tempting. Not that he’d ever tell you that.

“Don’t you want to stay here forever with me?”

He clicks his tongue, “you know I absolutely would if I could. But,” he makes a move to step away, and you whine and squeeze tighter. “I have to go. Then, when I come home, I’ll be able to tell you all about my day while we lay down. You like that.”

“I know I do, but,” you peer up at him with your lethal pout, “I like you being here more.”

Sae looks at the clock on the stove. Then back at you. Then he sighs and leans down to steal another kiss from you, slotting your lips with his. They move in harmony, eliciting small pants from you, and his hand cradles the back of your head lovingly. You mewl and rest your hands on his hips, letting the few seconds of heaven be savored between you.

When he finally pulls away, you’re smiling dopily, giddily, and Sae knows he hit the nail on the head.

You’d wanted a goodbye kiss. Sae always knows what you want from him, and in the morning, it just so happens to be a firm, loving, assuring goodbye kiss.

“Okay,” you purr, letting your hands roam over his back, compliant and melted in his arms. “You can go now. I’m happy.”

“You’re done with me?” He asks.

“Yeah, until tonight anyways,” you hum, kissing his chin. “Better go before I change my mind.”

He cracks a smirk, “you’re a real piece of work, you know that right?”

“What can I say?” You sigh dramatically. “I know how much you love a challenge.”

You’re right.

He really, really does.

[jonpertwee]

I really wanna be a twunk but I have to work out.

[blood-smiles]

𝐘𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐄! 𝐇𝐘𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐖 🔔🐮

INTRODUCING BRIAR!!!!

He is about 8 feet tall, has huge tits and loves you VERY MUCH!! IDK WHAT HE IS BUT GOES BY HE/HIM PRONOUNS!!

[wired-right]

robot partner, who slowly replaces all of your human body parts and traits with technological ones until you can't recognize yourself

[anghraine]

[Note: this post is grumpy and eventually also about Star Trek, it just takes longer than usual to get there and is generally rambling.]

There's something tickling my brain about how my main fandom—to a large degree, sole fandom—for years was Pride and Prejudice, and one of my most intense and long-lasting, yet niche grievances with Austen fandom fanon was over Lady Anne Darcy. It was specifically around the fandom image of her as this absolutely idealized mother, a sort of Madonna figurine brought to life.

I've talked about this many times, but: we know little about Darcy's mother in the book, and that little doesn't really suggest this ideal modest, easy-going, selfless, soft maternal figure. Multiple people in the novel allude to her teaming up with her sister, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, in arranging the betrothal of Lady Catherine's daughter to Lady Anne's son to consolidate the status and property of the sisters' husbands, as well as their own aristocratic ancestry. Lady Catherine is really the only one who goes out of her way to mention Lady Anne. Late in the novel, Darcy very carefully talks his way around filial respect towards his dead parents while also trying to explain how they affected him, insisting they were good people while adding that they not only allowed, but encouraged ("almost taught" him) his arrogance and narrow preoccupation with his family circle. He also specifically says that his widely beloved father was the more generous and pleasant of the two.

It's a small thing in some ways: Lady Anne is an incredibly minor character who is dead before the novel starts and whom we only hear a little about that's easy to overlook. At first (long ago), I didn't care about individual fics or headcanons or whatnot working to distance her from Lady Catherine (and even Darcy himself), and instead envisioning her as a sort of generic maternal ideal. But it was impossible to avoid noticing what seemed an oddly pervasive fannish investment in this quasi-Madonna image of her, even though a) we hear so little about her and b) it doesn't fit very well with what we do hear.

And honestly, Lady Anne being the more abrasive and haughty parent, whom Darcy resembles more closely, makes perfect sense with her background and with the structural mirroring of Elizabeth-Mr Bennet and Darcy-Lady Catherine (each parental figure embodying extreme versions of each lead character's flaws and in some ways, warped versions of their virtues).

But it's not just that there's no reason to assume she was so utterly dissimilar from and superior to Lady Catherine, and that both Lady Catherine and Wickham are independently manufacturing the Pemberley family's cooperation with the planned marriage between Darcy and Anne, or to think that Darcy's implication that Lady Anne was the more difficult personality is mistaken. The thing that always puzzled me is why so many P&P fans want to idealize her this way in the first place, when she's barely referenced in the novel. Why would so many fans care so much about this dead offstage aristocrat being defined entirely in terms of Being a Good Mother (maybe even a perfect mother) despite the obvious unnecessary complications this creates around the characterizations of her sister and son?

It was never a universal fanon, to be clear, but common enough that I couldn't help noticing it and finding it strange. Like, did this whole weird fanon arise solely because Lady Anne is Darcy's mother, and marginal and ambiguous enough to allow fans to default to the most comfortably gendered image of female parenthood? Is it related to the hyper-gendered interpretations of Elizabeth and Darcy themselves, even though both are most strongly associated with cross-gender parental figures in Mr Bennet and Lady Catherine?

(A tangent, but for the record: I'd also argue, and have before, that Elizabeth is most temperamentally similar to Darcy's male friends, while Darcy himself is far more like Jane and Charlotte than like Bingley or Fitzwilliam. And just about every time that either Elizabeth or Darcy makes an assumption about the other based on generalizations about men/women rather than particulars of each other's personalities, they get proven very wrong. So understanding either of them wholly in terms of masculinity/femininity seems dubious in the first place.)

There are probably other possibilities for why there's this investment in idealizing Lady Anne, but in any case, the reason I'm rambling about this is because a lot of the sense of Amanda Grayson's character post-"Journey to Babel" that I've seen reminds me a lot of Austen fandom's representation of Lady Anne.

It's not as baseless with Amanda, for sure. She is initially somewhat set up that way only for that image to get painfully undercut later, when she tells Spock she'll hate him forever if he doesn't step down from his responsibilities to risk his life for Sarek's (she also hits Spock in this scene, though "I'll hate you forever" feels worse to me! ymmv!). And later official ST productions have moved more and more aggressively towards this "Madonna" image of Amanda (while Spock himself has also been increasingly stripped of the messy, complicated ways that TOS Spock himself interacts with gender, in-story and out of it).

But even versions of Amanda that appear almost exclusively based on TOS Amanda seem to lean heavily into an image of her that reminds me much more strongly of fanon Lady Anne Darcy than the Amanda of "Journey to Babel." And I guess it's one of those things that I not only disagree with but don't really get the appeal of. I like both Lady Anne and Amanda quite a lot, despite all of the above—or rather, because of it. They seem to be difficult, imperfect figures within messy family dynamics—great! Messy family dynamics are a lot of fun, and being good mothers is not the only metric by which to engage with female characters who have children.

I don't think either Lady Anne or Amanda are good parents, but they're no worse at it than their husbands, and I find both of them more interesting to think about than their husbands. One of my first fanfics ever was a trollish little fic about Mr Darcy cheating on his wife, who has returned to her father's house with a premature baby nobody expects to live, only to increasingly hint and then reveal that the betrayed wife is Lady Anne and the supposedly doomed premie baby is Darcy himself. There's a TOS-only concept that regularly plays in my head about the cut "City on the Edge of Forever" scene where Spock invites Kirk to Vulcan to rest and heal for some indefinite length of time, only it happens at the end of the five-year mission when Kirk is even more ground-down than he transparently is becoming in S3, but this becomes interwoven with Amanda as this personable but ambiguous figure, and with the complications around how she relates to Spock, Sarek, and even Kirk.

Anyway. I don't know if there are other fandoms where people have noticed that drive to idealize rather than villainize flawed mothers, but I was very struck by how much the cleaned-up Amanda reminded me of cleaned-up Lady Anne.