#jamie's messed up gender my beloved 🙌🙌🙌🙌

[the--highlanders]

i'd love to hear your thoughts on jamie's relationship with gender

anon you just activated my unskippable cutscene

in terms of jamie's gender. the first thing we have to look at is where he's coming from, contextually. and where he's coming from is a culture with a language that makes no distinction between the words for man and husband, or woman and wife. you're a boy or a girl, and then you get married and you're a man or a woman. if you look at the dictionary entry for 'balach', the word for boy, you also get 'bachelor of any age'. jamie in the highlanders is 22 years old, but he's still excluded from his cultural definition of manhood by virtue of not having a wife.

I also want to point to gèidh / gàidhealach by mark spencer-turner here. while it's more looking at modern gaelic constructions of gender than historic ones, I think its idea if the gaelic man as a gaelic speaker + who has a wife + who participates in specific social/cultural behaviours and situations is something that can be back-projected. and the modern-day rigidity of excluding men somewhat from full access to manhood if they, say, work an office job rather than a more traditional job also feels relevant. traditional constructions of gender - in any culture, but specifically here in gaelic culture - are built on so many small building blocks of participating in the 'right' social behaviours.

and then we've got jamie. he's a good enough piper to be compared to his father. clearly an apt enough fighter, and not willing to back down from a fight, either. presumably did all the right things and was seen in all the right places for a teenage boy to be, growing up. in that sense, he's not particularly non-conforming. and yet, crucially, he's queer, which throws a big wrench into the whole 'heterosexual marriage is key to access to manhood' thing. I don't think jamie necessarily had a good grasp on his queerness growing up, but I /do/ think the idea of growing up and getting married felt Wrong to him - and from there you end up with a general alienation from the idea of being A Man, too. he doesn't want to be A Husband, so he doesn't want to be A Man, because they're sort of the same thing. he's more comfortable with the idea of being balach, a boy, a bachelor of any age.

now as always the phantom piper does a lotttt of heavy lifting here for me, just by being so Interesting about jamie's family dynamics. on-screen, his father is his only named relative, the man who others compare him to and contextualise him against, the piper who taught and raised him - but it's his mother's pride he remembers, when he's finally fully qualified as a piper himself. his father doesn't get a look in, here. as a child, he idolises his grandfather - his father's father - and wants to be just like him. as the oldest son, he probably bears his grandfather's name. in the highlanders, he's called /wee jamie/, which I tend to think of as a translation of his descriptive name - seumadh beag, little jamie, as opposed to his grandfather. but somewhere along the lines, that idolisation breaks, and as an adult he doesn't describe his grandfather in particularly glowing terms. it's his grandmother he wants to be like, and whose words he turns into a core part of himself. everyone he knows sees him in light of his father and grandfather, sees him as the inheritor of their legacies - but in himself, he's much more comfortable with the women in his family, and wants to be more closely connected to them. his closest icons for masculinity are distant from him, somehow, or actively distasteful.

(he also has a male best friend who dies in his arms, so. negative points for the heterosexuality once again)

I don't think jamie ever really labels his gender, or that it would occur to him that he might want to do so. it probably sits oddly with him if someone calls him a man, but he shrugs it off. travelling in the tardis is incredibly freeing in that sense, because he's free from the weight of social expectations - nobody sees him as the successor to his father and his grandfather, just as himself. and he's ultimately able to explore his queerness, embrace that part of himself, and not live with the expectation that he'll have to follow the same pattern of life as everyone else, no matter how much he dislikes the idea. after a certain point, he probably just stops thinking about his gender entirely, so he winds up a bit apathetic to the whole thing. there's other things about him which are far more important. but I think there's always something of a wound inside him from 22 years of struggling with everyone's expectations that he'll grow into something he's not, thriving in some areas and absolutely failing in others - and I think if he was ever in a situation where he got to introduce himself with a descriptive name, it wouldn't be seumaidh beag. he's not a younger version of his grandfather. he's not seumaidh dòmhnall, either, jamie son of donald, son of his father. if he had the choice, I think he'd probably be seumaidh mairead, jamie son of mairead, son of his mother.