#so why does female sexuality have to always be seen through the lens of men even in feminist circles?

[eradicatetehnormal]

New approach to feminist media discourse: "Scenes such as James Bond seducing Pussy Galore and Thor's abs being touched by Jane Foster all perpetuate toxic matriarchy and the idea that the female gaze is something to be uncritically accepted despite its demeaning effects on men."

[justatalkingface]

So I know you haven't seen The Boys but I have a topic that I think fits MHA because I got it from that same show. MHA had a totally missed opportunity, I mean, among hundreds of others lol

But then I think about Momo (who is more than a hundred missed opportunities) and her pitiful internship with Uwabami, who was more interested in how pretty they were to sell her products.

It would have been a great opportunity to emphasize the beauty standards held for female pro-heroes. They're clearer there just not said but I know they are because they really like to make the female pro-heroes look as conventionally attractive as possible since the most popular female pro-heroes in-universe are conventionally attractive women. Do NOT get me started on Midnight (I'll save that one for another question though XD)

And also the sexualization, that ties in with the beauty standards since Momo and Kendo were clearly uncomfortable with everything in that internship. And it's extremely obvi that the female pro-heroes are sexualized, even the underage aspiring female heroes. SIGH... if only... if only Momo could have had that opportunity to explore that, because she didn't come intending to use her looks, she came intending to use her brains. How devastating would it be to realize that people only pay attention to how you look? Gosh I wish that could have been something for her.

Yet no, she and the other girls are still sexualized, in fact I think they got even MORE sexualized after this? I mean jeez...

That will always bother me. The sexualization of the girls and what's bullshit on top of that is the extra bullshit argument that the boys are sexualized too? Yeah right.

Now it's true, the boys are seen shirtless a LOT but... it's not through sexualized lens, it's through idealized ones since the boys being so physically fit and demonstrating their strength is a sign of manliness and promoting that masculinity. It's not meant to be sexual, the GIRLS are meant to be sexual, which is sick.

I mean god you don't see the girls emphasizing their strength the way the boys do. Except MAYBE Mirko but I emphasize 'maybe' since she's STILL very sexualized as you said in another post.

The girls are pretty much only there to be oggled whether it's for sexualized means or moe-ified means because even if the girls aren't being sexualized, boys love seeing the girls act like typical waifu-material and I say that because almost ALL the female characters are generally kind, docile and cheerful. Moe traits that appeal strongly to men, and no problematic traits that make them more two-dimensional.

Have you noticed that? Even the 'meaner' girls like Mt. Lady and Toga have moe-ified or sexualized traits. Toga is arguably the most nuanced female character but she's a victim of sexualization too by having her quirk make her naked for God knows why. Mt. Lady from her first scene was doomed from the start since that was all sexualization.

It's like the girls aren't allowed to be even remotely unpleasant or even have any kind of flaws in ways that would make them seem like real individuals. They're pretty much the same kind and caring person with a different face but somehow the same body shape.

Does... that make sense? ^^; I ask that question too much only cuz sometimes I don't always articulate my words right.

Yeah, it's clear that women in heroics are judged as much for sexual appeal than anything else; it makes a bad sort of sense because of the whole 'heroes are celebrities' bullshit.

I think... I think this is something that, in canon, probably got worse as time went on. When Quirks were starting out, and heroes were all just vigilantes, it was about ability, and with AFO around, survival. Like, look at Nana, she's attractive, sure, but her outfit is probably what is best described as 'bog standard hero': it's a bodysuit that covers most of her skin, practical looking gloves and boots, and a cape (has Edna Mode flashback). Beyond the cape (shudders), it's basiclly a costume that exists to just identify her as a hero, nothing more.

I'm not really in the mood to try and pour through hundreds of pictures, but that is both one of the most practical female costumes that I remember and the oldest one.

It makes an insidious sort of sense, even, in the most realistic kind of way: when everything fell apart, and heroes first started being a thing, the public perception was probably, 'Save me! SAVE ME! I don't care if you look like Pennywise the Goddamn Dancing Clown, I DON't WANT TO DIE!!' Nobody cared about outfits, or if you were a hobo or a weirdo, as long as you protected them.

Things settled and heroing became a career, and the costumes became... not standardized, but professional. There was quality behind it, but it was still less 'This is me in particular!' and more an identifier that 'I am a hero!'.

Then, as time passed, and safety became something standard, instead of exciting, the heroes become more... public. There was competition, money was needed to pay off damages, so the celebrity-ness of it all starting kicking into play, and from there it spiraled as certain people got ahead using their appearances, which probably caused a sort of publicity arms race until we have the canon system of ranked heroes and what not.

In a Watsonian sense, it does track. But, let's be honest here, Doyalist is right in this case, Hori wanted to draw sexy women.

You mention Mt Lady, right? Yeah... here's the thing about her. She's sexualized because she's a fetish. I'm not going to tell you what, or go into detail, because that's not what I want to spend time on, but if you don't already know it's not that hard to figure out which one.

The choice of Mt Lady as the first female hero we see, I think the only one in that first chapter, is telling. It's even more telling when the second female hero we see in any real depth is Midnight. And, let's be honest: she's literally just a different fetish. I mean, Mt Lady, in five seconds, shows more depth of character by being glory hungry, and as a living example of the corruption of the hero society, than Midnight does in MHA almost the entire time.

Like, "canonly", Midnight wants to dress like that. She was going to dress more extreme than that, if I'm remembering Vigilantes right, and I think a law was passed that basiclly boiled down to, 'Midnight, no horni?' I went "canonly" because, of course, that's bullshit, and Hori is just trying to explain her everything off by just going 'she's just like that!' I know you didn't want to go into her in depth, but I just would want to say... instead of making excuses for her (non)characterization, I would have loved if she had taken the female students aside before the internships.

Then she could have explained the 'facts of life', that she's like this because it's how she got this far as a hero, and that they'll be expected to do the same. After that, you could go the jaded route, and have her advise them to as the practical way forward, or the 'ra ra heroic' route, maybe have her explain she grew to like her outfit if you have to, but more importantly that things are different now and that they don't need to listen to anyone who tells them to dress down, and they should go their own path, Plus Ultra. But you know, Midnight doesn't get character development.

Really, the Uwabami thing was interesting to me, not because it was good, but because it seemed like it was going to be good, but then dropped it at the last minute.

The way it was set up, how mercenary Uwabami was about looks, how unheroic she was in general, the sheer confusion with Momo, how Kendo was there to point out the flaws for her, the set up was there to talk about about the sexism, and heroic corruption. I think at some point that was supposed to be the start of Momo's character arc, that she was supposed to go through a Hermione like loss of unthinking trust in authority, grow frustrated, maybe rebel a bit, and start coming into her own. Possibly Uwabami could have done something to make her seem... you know, competent in any way as well, instead of literally being a model who (checks the wiki)... finds people sometimes. There was a lot of work put in to undermine Uwabami, to highlight how shallow she seems and how Momo didn't like it, but it just... never went anywhere. Momo just remained obedient, then it ended and she basiclly wasted a couple weeks for nothing.

It really feels like someone pulled the plug there, and I'm curious about who and why, not that we'll ever know.

Ah, yes, the guys 'being sexualized'. I mean, they're attractive, I guess; there's enough fan girl simp threads for Eraserhead's whole... hobo-ness that that's clearly there, but Eraserhead isn't exposing more skin than he's covering, or wearing skintight spandex.

Really, to anyone who thinks its the same, I want to direct them to the Hawkeye Initiative, aka: imagine the male characters in the female character's clothing and/or poses. Just... just do that, and then marvel at how much skin there suddenly is. Or, imagine Izuku going to his internship with Nighteye and the man spends the entire time dragging Izuku to commercials and trying to update his outfit.

Or both!

Just imagine that for a minute for me. Right now. I'll wait.

...

....And, now that I've proved my point...

I just want to highlight something about Toga here: in theory, the idea behind clothes getting in the way of various Quirks makes sense. Quirks are biological, the powers comes from the body, thus it radiates from them, and clothes are directly in the path of that. So Momo being restricted to her body's available surface area, like her skin is a defacto sort of door she chucks items through, tracks with the settings logic. The fact that Tooru is actually invisible, and so clothes would make her noticeable because they aren't makes sense.* The problems I have with that is, A, they're just used in the most stripperific ways possible (people: give Momo more clothes! Hori: gives her a cape, then exposes more skin) and also, and worse, that we have Mirio, who has this exact same kind of problem... but he's given this convenient solution because he doesn't look attractive when naked, so he can use it for comedy on demand.

*Or, at least it made sense until we found out she just... bends the light around her, instead of being physically transparent. This gives her an option to do things beyond being invisible, thank fuck, but... if she bends light around her body, why can't she bend it around the clothes on her body?

Toga, though? Toga adds to her body; she coats herself in her magic identity slime. When it's done, it melts, and it's clear it's extra mass; she doesn't change her body, she disguises it. Out of all of them, it makes sense that she should be able to keep her clothes, since her Quirk just magics her target's outfit out of her magic identity slime along with everything else it's mimicking. They may be wet, sure, or maybe damaged, but she literally layers it over herself. I can't really think of a reason for her to have this specific weakness of 'I can't use this with clothes' beyond 'for the sexy'.

Personality wise, I've mentioned it before, Toga literally is an archetype, the crazy yandere, that's blood themed. Almost every single major female character I can think of is themed, and generally in a sexual way. It gets escalated, I think, because the hero thing means costumes, and branding, and I do think it's so... same-ish, that all the women are caring, because, A, as heroes they're literally mandated to try and take care of people, and B, there's no time spent on them to develop them.

By and by large, the male heros also try to take care of the people around them (I mean, unless you're named Endeavour, then you have other people do it), but it kinda hits different when Kamino Woods is a walking tree and Mt Lady has a skin tight outfit, doesn't it? Moreover, the only actively 'harsh' female hero I can think of is Lady Nagant. Who... is also an assassin, and had recently broke out of prison, so that's not exactly a quality example.

As to not feeling like real people... Uraraka does, since she came for money with her backstory of being poor, and seems to have graduated to wanting to help people just to help people (before Hori began to ignore her for half the series). Again, though, she has some of the largest amount of female screen time as The One True Waifu, so it's not that she's more than the others, she just has that luxury of development where the others can't.

When Hori used to post his notes in the manga, it was easy to see that he (usually) had a grasp on a character beyond what we saw, he just didn't have a chance to show it (Mt Lady, for example, wants fame to get money to pay off the massive property damage bills that she constantly makes since her Quirk doesn't work well in cities; that's actually really humanizing, but it's side material, and not something we can understand just by her jockeying for more good press).

In other words, at least at the start of the story, before Hori began to pump and dump characters to fill one specific purpose and never use again, the characters were actually characters, he just never gave us a chance to see them beyond the most shallow of takes.

But yeah, you're right: in and out of universe, the female characters exist to be females first, and always attractive ones at that, and characters second, if they're lucky to even get to be characters.

[teawiththegods]

Hello Jessie, hope you're great !

I was wondering if I could have your advice on something ? I really hope I won't be indelicate, formuling my idea here...

See, I might have some particular relation with the idea of sex ; meaning I'm asexual, without being sex-repulsed, although sometimes...

Anyway, I've also always known to find confort with Hestia, her being a being a virgin godess, you know. Therefore, I've been thinking in having a tatoo of her symbol (if you see what I'm refering to ?) ; but I'm not sure now, how that would be, appear, if I would ever come to be in a relationship where I'm confortable enough to have sex...

Is that as awkward as I think it is ? I'm so sorry, my goodness !

I hope you got the idea. Feel free to ignore this, however, by the way. I can sort it out all alone surely ; I just wanted to be sure it wouldn't be some offense or else to Hestia, y'know ?

Thanks, sorry sorry again, have a lovely life ><

Hello, love!

So firstly we have to remember that sexuality is a human concept which does not actually apply to the divine. Divine beings don't have a sexuality and they very likely don't even have physical forms. We as humans can really only understand the gods through the lens of the mortal world which is why we create mythology. There's nothing wrong with that of course but we always have to be mindful of how limiting it is for the gods when we place them in such strict boxes. Its also limiting to us and how we interact and engage with the divine. Your situation is the perfect example. Because you define Hestia as being "asexual" you're now basing all your decisions around that one aspect of her. Its like judging an entire universe on one star. There's so much more to her than just being a maiden goddess. I do understand tho that that aspect of her is very important to you and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that but again we must remember that we're ultimately dealing with divine beings that exist outside of human concepts and human understanding.

Its also important to be mindful of the reasons certain goddesses were given the "maiden" role. I can tell you it wasn't to inform us on their sexuality. The Ancient Greeks had no concept "sexuality" and definitely did not care enough about female sexuality to create roles and mythology for it. So a goddess being labeled as a "maiden" or "virgin" goddess does not automatically mean shes asexual or a lesbian. That wasn't at all what the Ancient Greeks were trying to convey when they created those roles for those goddesses. For Artemis, it was about her representing girlhood. For Athena, its about her being able to exist, lead, and be respected in the masculine realms she ruled, and for Hestia you can read this wonderful passage. So as you can see there's reasons, outside of defining a gods sexuality, for these goddesses to be seen as "virgin" goddesses.

There is also the idea that all the Ancient Greeks meant by "virgin" or "maiden" was that they were unmarried and not engaging in sex with men. So even if we want to try and define the sexuality of these goddesses, you can't pin point it exactly. No one can say with 100% certainty that X goddess is Y sexuality. Its all just opinions.

Now my point of sharing all this with you isn't to tell you you can't see Hestia as asexual. You absolutely can especially if that resonates with you. The purpose of all this is to help you loosen your grip on this strict definition you seem to have. You're so worried of not living up to Hestia's standards (or more like what you think the standards are) of asexuality that its essentially holding you back from really bonding with her. But as you can see from everything I laid out there is no standard because its not even a fact that Hestia IS asexual. So its basically a mental cage you have confined yourself in, but the good news is you have the power to walk out of that cage whenever you wish. Once you realize there is no standard, not even just in Hestia's case but in general. Asexuality is a spectrum and each of us (hey i'm gonna use this as an opportunity to come out as demisexual! woo!) have a different relationship with sex. Like as a demisexual, I only experience sexual attraction after I get to know someone. And even those who identify as asexual don't automatically refrain from sex at all. There are plenty who do have sex. So yeah there is no asexual standard in regards to sex. You do you, my love!

So the summary of my essay is: You don't need to worry! Hestia loves you no matter what. And if you want to get a tattoo get a tattoo! And if you want to have sex then damn it have sex! Always safe sex tho! Protecting yourself and your partners is a very sexy thing to do! <3

[nightswithkookmin]

I hate it here

Why does he get to appropriate people's race and still have so much access??

I thought impersonation was a crime.

I thought stealing someone's identity was a crime. How is he walking around Freely and taking pictures with hot chicks?😒

THAT SHOULD BE ME😭😭😭

If he is profiting off of his looks he needs to be sued by Hybe IMMEDIATELY.

HYBE SHOULD HIRE ME - If they can over look my gossipy nature and the fact they really can't trust me with any company secrets plus I'll spend all my time staring at Jikook and simping for YoonminhopeJoon🙂

Bapsae aaahhhhh 😏😏😏

To answer your question Barbara, you are not the only confused one when it comes to these labels. We all are.

A lot of people use Bi these days instead of Pan because people find the term Pansexuality confusing and offensive so....

Strange times.

Offensive because some people in the Bi community feel it's a redundant term as to them it means the same as Bisexuality. As such they feel the use of Pansexuality is erasure and invalidating of their own identity.

From what I understand of this ongoing label wars in the community, those who get offended by Pansexuality do so mostly because they do not view trans identity as a seperate unique gender in of it's own but merely as an adjective.

To such, there is no thing as cis boy or trans boy and that a boy is a boy. So being Bi to them means they are attracted to boys( cis or trans) and girls (regardless of whether they are cis or trans)- which is what Pansexuality actually is💀

Here in lies the conflict. Cis women and some people, myself included, see trans identity as a seperate gender identity from cis identity and differentiates between a biological Male or female and a trans Male or female.

As such a boy is not a boy, a boy is either cis boy or trans boy and both are valid.

This distinction is what mostly sets bisexuality from pan sexuality from my point of view.

It's disheartening. Not to mention anxiety inducing and confusing as hell when we can't even agree on basic terms to describe ourselves.

I don't know how conscious BTS are of these conversations and so I've always viewed their use of labels such as boy/girl in their lyrics with utmost fascination given as there are trans genders within their community.

I often find myself wondering what Joonie means when he talks of girls- does he mean cis girls or trans girls? Would he date either or both?

Personally, I view Trans identity as a valid, separate unique form of identity, unique from Cis identity and not just as an epithet.

I date and definitely find trans girls romantically and sexually attractive especially if there's minimum trace of their cis masculinity in them.

But I have friends who identify as lesbians but wouldn't date trans girls regardless of how they present. Yet they wouldn't mind dating a stud or Masculine presenting females as long as they are Cis girls. Talk of transphobia💀

Some girls call me Bi because I like cis and other fems and I'm perfectly fine with it. However embracing that label in Male spaces gives me a lot of headaches because they just assume I'd date any man too.

I have dated fem tops (girly girls who like to be the dominant one in relationships and also prefer to penetrate other girls during sex) who identify as lesbians but have threesomes with gay men💀

I mean as long as they get to fuck those men or penetrate/ top them or so they say and yes I've seen it happen with my two eyes- I have gay threesomes don't judge or tell my pastor😥

I'm going to hell as it is no need to compound it🤧

My ex was like that. She dated a gay guy she was topping and was gonna marry him because her family was pressuring her to get married. The dude was closeted and their relationship was convenient until he came out and lowkey outed her in the process.

When I asked her if she was bisexual she said she didn't have a label because none suited her at the time and that she likes girls regardless of how those girls identify as. So a femboi, andro, trans girls, cis girls, straight girls, gay girls, as long as you feminine she likes.

I'm a bit like that too... minus the topping fembois and gays part💀

If I had a dick it would be useless 🤣

I say all this to say, labels are a bit tricky and a lot of people struggle to find the right fit.

Gay or queer is our go to label.

For the sake of the conversation we having, I'd define being Bi as liking your own gender plus the opposite of your gender but in an exclusive way. Being Bi also means the gender of a person matters to you in your determination of what you find attractive.

However being Pan means you place less emphasis on the gender of the person you are attracted to and more emphasis on the qualities those people possess- really doesn't matter what the other person is if you like em you like em. Which means a person don't gotta be cis or trans boy or girl or other for you to like them. They just have to have a certain quality you find attractive.

Just like you said, you being a girl find gurls attractive too but I don't think you'd be willing to date a girl- cis or trans- a person has to be Male for you to date them. Right?

That exclusivity is what makes you straight. You like one gender to the exclusion of others.

Gays and lesbians like one gender, the same gender, to the exclusion of others.

Bisexuals may like multiple genders, different genders, to the exclusion of others.

Pansexuals like multiple genders but not to the exclusion of others.

If Gender is important to you in determining who a suitable romantic partner is you are either Straight or Bi. If gender is not important to your determination of who a suitable partner is then you're pansexual.

Pansexuals are gender blind🤣

If Pansexuals are bisexuals, there should be a label for the category currently viewed as bisexuals.

When Suga says " I look at personality and it's not limited to girls" I believe he's talking about the qualities he finds attractive in PEOPLE.

When he sings boy or girl my tongue technology will send you to hongkong it carries a similar sentiment. He's saying basically it doesn't matter what you identify as he can make you orgasm under his- rap?

That's pan energy to me. You go pan Suga! BAPSAE AAAHHH🤭

IF he were queer then I'd assume he's more likely to be pan not bi- hypocritically speaking.

But he is NOT QUEER.

SOPE YOONMIN AND ANYSHIP INVOLVING SUGA IS NOT REAL or even likely to be.

Since we are both men, how can my heart throb for a man. This implies he believes his heart only has to throb for the opposite sex. Yea no he is definitely not bi.

Straight as an arrow this one.

He doesn't find men sexually or romantically attractive. He is not gay or bi and I don't think he wants to be.

I assume he's straight. I do.

And as a straight dude, he's certainly intriguing and I can see how certain actions of his make people queer read him especially in his dominant ships Sope and Yoonmin and Taegi.

But I don't think he goes out of his way to queer code himself.

And I see what you mean by the exaggerated speech. Rappers do trash talk, boast and talk shit in their music but they are also notoriously homophobic with the exception of a few. References of queerness in their lyrics are usually often used pejoratively to slur other rappers etc.

May be I'm too black, gay, and a woman to overlook the misogyny and homophobia that's traveled through Black American hip pop to elsewhere even if it takes on new family friendly labels such as Kpop or BTS.

I don't tend to read hiphop lyrics through non cis non straight non male lens. Unless of course it's from a queer artist but even that there's almost always something internalized.

It's fascinating how people look at a hip hop artist and glean their sexuality from their lyrics....

I'm dozing off. Will read over this tomorrow and add anything I might have missed.

GOLDY

[song-of-oots]

Fuchsia Groan: my (un)exceptional fave

A while ago a friend of mine was asking for people to name their favourite examples of strong female characters, and my mind immediately leapt to Gormenghast’s Fuchsia Groan because it always does whenever the words “favourite” and “female character” come up in the same sentence. In fact scratch that, if I had to pick only one character to be my official favourite (female or otherwise) it would probably be Fuchsia. There are not sufficient words in the English language to accurately describe how much I love this character.

The issue was that I’m not sure Fuchsia Groan can accurately be described as “strong”, and until my friend asked the question, it hadn’t even occurred to me to analyse her in those terms… 

Actually this isn’t completely true; Mervyn Peake does describe Fuchsia as strong in terms of her physical strength on multiple occasions. But in terms of her mental strength things are less clear cut. She’s certainly not a total pushover, and anyone would probably find it tough-going to cope with the neglect, tragedy and misuse she suffers through. In fact, this is something Mervyn Peake mentions himself – whilst also pointing out that Fuchsia is not the most resilient of people:

“There were many causes [to her depression], any one of which might have been alone sufficient to undermine the will of tougher natures than Fuchsia’s.”

Anyway, this has gotten me thinking about Fuchsia’s other traits and my reasons for loving her, going through a typical sort of list of reasons people often give for holding up a character as someone to admire:

So, is Fuchsia particularly talented?

No.

Is she clever, witty?

She’s definitely not completely stupid, and her insights occasionally take other characters by surprise, but she’s not really that smart either.

Does she have any significant achievements? Overcome great adversity?

Not really, no.

Is she kind?

Yes. Fuchsia is a very loving person and sometimes displays an incredible sensitivity and compassion for others. But… she can also be self-absorbed, highly strung, and does occasionally lash out at other people (especially in her younger years).

So why do I love Fuchsia so much?

Well, I’ll start be reiterating that I don’t really have the vocabulary to adequately put it into words, but I will try to get the gist across. So:

“What Fuchsia wanted from a picture was something unexpected. It was as though she enjoyed the artist telling her something quite fresh and new. Something she had never thought of before.”

This statement summarises not only Fuchsia but also the way I feel about her (and for that matter the Gormenghast novels in general). Fuchsia is something I’ve never really seen before. On the surface, she fits the model of the somewhat spoiled but neglected princess, and yet at the same time she cannot be so neatly pigeon-holed. It’s not just that her situation and the themes of the story make things more complex (though that is a factor); Fuchsia herself is so unique and vividly detailed that she manages to be more than her archetype. She feels like a real person and, like all real people, she is not so easy to label.

Fuchsia is also delightfully strange in a way that feels very authentic to her and the setting in general (which is particularly refreshing because it can all too often feel as though female characters are only allowed to be strange in a kooky, sexy way - yet Fuchsia defies this trend).

She’s a Lady, but she’s not ladylike. She’s messy. She slouches, mooches, stomps and stands in awkward positions. Her drawing technique is “vicious” and “uncompromising”. She chews grass. She removes her shoes “without untying the laces by treading on the heels and then working her foot loose”. She’s multi-faceted and psychologically complex. Intense and self-absorbed, sometimes irrational and ruled by her emotions more than is wise, but also capable of insight and good sense that takes others by surprise. She is extremely loving and affectionate, and yet so tragically lonely. Simultaneously very feminine and also not. Her character development from immature teenager to adult woman is both subtle and believable. She has integrity and decency – she doesn’t need to be super clever or articulate to know how to care for others or stand up for herself.

Fuchsia is honest. She knows her own flaws, but you never catch her trying to put on airs or make herself out to be anything other than what she is. She always expresses her feelings honestly.

She’s not sexualised at all. I don’t mean by this that she has no sexuality – though that’s something Peake only vaguely touches on – but I don’t really feel like I’m looking at a character who was written to pander to the male gaze (though her creator is male, I get the vibe he views her more as a beloved daughter than a sexual object).

Finally, I find her highly relatable. I am different to Fuchsia in many ways, but we do have several things in common that I have never seen so vividly expressed in any other character. This was incredibly important to me when I was a teenager struggling through the worst period of depression I ever experienced – because she was someone who I could relate to and love in a way I was incapable of loving myself. Her ability to be herself meant a lot to me as someone struggling with my own identity and sense of inadequacy. It didn’t cure my depression, but it helped me survive it.

What am I trying to say with all this?

I love Fuchsia on multiple levels. I love her as a person and also as a character and a remarkable piece of writing. I mention some of the mundane details Peake uses to flesh out her character firstly because I enjoy them, but also because it’s part of the point. Her story amazes me because it treats a female character and her psychological and emotional life with an intense amount of interest regardless of any special talents or achievements she happens to exhibit. She doesn’t fit the model of a modern heroine but neither does she need to – she’s still worth spending time with and caring about.*  To me the most important things about Fuchsia are how different and interesting and relatable she is – and how real she feels.

* To be honest, this is part of the point of the Gormenghast novels in general. The story is meant to illustrate the damage that society – and in particular rigid social structures and customs – can do to individuals with its callous indifference to genuine human need. Fuchsia is one of many examples of this throughout the novels. These characters don’t need to be exceptionally heroic in order to matter – they just need to exist as believable people. And despite how strange they all are, they often do manage to be fundamentally relatable.

Why am I talking about female characters in particular here?

The focus on “strong” female characters and the critique against that is pretty widely acknowledged. Growing up, I definitely noticed the lack of female characters in popular media and the ensuing pressure this then places on the ones that do exist to be positive representations of womankind – someone girls can look up to. It’s very understandable that we want to see more examples of admirable female protagonists, given that women were traditionally left to play support roles and tired stereotypes. The problem is that the appetite for more proactive female heroines can sometimes lead to characters who are role models first and realistic human beings second (characters who I mentally refer to as Tick-All-The-Boxes Heroines). It’s not a problem with “strong” proactive heroines per se, but rather lack of variation and genuine psychological depth (not to mention a sometimes too-narrow concept of what it even means to be strong).

Male characters tend not to have this particular problem because they are much better represented across the whole range of roles within a story. You get your fair share of boring worn out archetypes. You get characters who are meant to represent a positive version of heroic masculinity (and now that I come to think of it, having a very narrow and unvarying presentation of what positive masculinity looks like is its own separate problem, but outside the scope of this particular ramble). We don’t usually spend time obsessing over whether a piece of fiction has enough examples of “strong” male characters though, because we’re generally so used to seeing it that we automatically move on into analysing the work and the characters on other terms. And because there are often more male characters than female, they don’t all bear the burden of having to be a positive representative of all men everywhere. They exist to fulfill their roles, and often exhibit more variety, nuance and psychological depth. They are also often allowed to be weird, flawed and unattractive in ways that women usually aren’t (which is a damn shame because I’ve spent my whole life feeling like a weird outsider and yet this perspective is so often told primarily through a male lens).

Tl:dr; Fuchsia Groan is a character who feels like an answer to so many of those frustrations that I felt growing up without even truly understanding why. A large part of why I love her is simply because of how much I relate to her on a personal level. I admire her emotional honesty and her loving nature… But there’s also a part of me that was just so relieved to find a female character who exists outside of the usual formulae we seem to cram women into. She is unique, weird and wonderful (but non-sexualised). Psychologically nuanced and vividly written. She isn’t exceptionally heroic or talented or a high achiever – but she does feel like a real person.

Female characters don’t need to tick all the right boxes in order to be interesting or worth our time any more than the male ones do.

[lycanhood]

Thoughts on Motherland: Fort Salem (So Far)

Hey so I know I may be a little behind on this one, but I’ve finally binge-watched Motherland: Fort Salem and I’ve had alot swirling around in my head about it for the last few days. This is a little bit of a review and a little bit of rant, but there will be SPOILERS ahead which I’ll try to mark accordingly. 

I think the concept for this show is so fucking cool. Really and truly, alternate history in which the witches of Salem made a deal with the Massachusetts Bay Colony to form a military and fight the New World’s wars in exchange for mercy from extermination essentially. So they form a Witch Army. And Army of Witches!! That’s fucking cool. It is. Sadly, I think the concept may be entirely too cool for Freeform. 

By that I mean to say that this super cool and entirely edgy idea is just too heady for Freeform to do properly. This idea belongs on HBO or Netflix, because those networks thrive on subject matter like Motherland: Fort Salem. (Sidenote: wtf is it called that? Just name the show ‘Fort Salem’. That kinda tells us everything we need to know about the premise right there in two word. Adding ‘Motherland’ in there just makes it too long and oddly Russian.)

There are just alot of little things about this show that kept it from realizing what I felt could have been some pretty amazing potential. I’ll try to organize those little things as best I can. But the one big problem I had while watching this was that the best thing about this show is it’s alternate history premise isn’t given enough attention.

What I mean is...I’m interested in the show, because I’m interested in what the world (what America) might have looked like if we had a military operated by supernaturally powered women for the past 300+ years. And Fort Salem just doggedly refuses to actually show me that world. The show doesn’t like to explain itself or really explore what it means to be a woman (witch or otherwise) in this alternative America. Most of the show takes place on Fort Salem, a military headquarters of sorts that is mostly strife with political games, attack strategies, training drills, and odd rituals. I have so many questions about this world: Are non-witch women treated differently due to the fact that their country is run and protected by women? There’s a female president in this timeline, so that’s certainly a possibility. If there are male witches as well, why don’t they fight in the same army as the female witches? And since they don’t fight in the main army, what is their mysterious role in this world? We see them making weapons and babies, that’s about it. In 1x5 “Bellweather Season”, the unit goes to a wedding which celebrates a 5 year contract of marriage between the couple. What’s up with that? Why only 5 years? Are they expected to have a child during this time period? if they do have a child are they expected to stay together longer than the 5 years? How many times are the male witches expected to get married? How many children are expected or allowed? Because this show is full of only-children which is statistically different from our own reality. How long are wicthes expected to serve in the military? They’re entire lives? We don’t see any female witches living as civilians at any age (other than Tally’s mother due to tragic circumstances). 

What is the source of the witches powers exactly? They’re abilities are sonic/auditory in nature, usually requiring the use of their vocal cords. Why? How? There are brief moments where it seems like sound is less necessary like when Raelle heals, or when the witches use Linking to connect to one another. There is also the use of herbs/drugs to fly, that doesn’t seem to require sound at all. 

We’re told the female witches get some kind of power-up or energy boost from having sex (or perhaps just feeding off the sexually energy?) with the male witches. Hence, the Beltane orgy ceremony in episode 1x04. What’s up with that? Does this power-boast only come from sex with male witches or would sex with human men do just as well? Would human men have a less potent effect? And is the power-boost depended on heterosexuality? Because throughout Raelle & Scylla’s sexually relationship no such power-up is ever mentioned. 

See so many questions, that the show simply doesn’t feel the need to answer. I understand the desire to avoid bogging down a show with exposition. But their are ways to do exposition right and in interesting ways. Exposition is sometimes necessary, because the more the audience knows about this world, the more rich and detailed, and so close to real is is to them, the more likely they are to be invested in it. 

And make no mistake the world and my curiosity about it is what kept me watching. 

For much of this first season, the characters don’t have any room to become people. I don’t dislike these characters, but they have yet to really bloom into more than archetypes (Abigail: the legacy, the leader, the overachiever. Tally: the innocent, the hopeful, the lynchpin. And Raelle: the rebel, the cynic, the shitbird)

Alot of time in the early episodes were spent following the same formulate. Raelle runs off, ditching training to go wander around and finds Scylla. Abigail and Tally follow after her, because they need her to do well in training because they pass or fail as a unit. I can not even tell you how many times Raelle causally ditches training, gets caught, gets told how much trouble she’s in, and then doesn’t actually face any consequences at all. She has to do guard duty overnight once. And that was just for being late, not even all the times she leaves in the middle or doesn’t show up for training at all!

I just wish this show focused on different beats in the pulse of this story, and made more of an effort explore this world and these characters through the lens of 3 young women who have just been essentially drafted into the military. Instead of skipping all that training I wish I could have seen so much more of it! That would have been a fantastic way to explain this world’s magic system to the audience! It’s built-in easy action-paced exposition right there! That the show just has no interest in. 

And at last, I’ll talk about the show’s main romantic pair, Raelle x Scylla. Sigh. I’m not hardcore against this pairing. I’m really not. But I am frustrated with the way the writers chose to unfold their relationship. We find out early on that Scylla is an agent of the Spree (big bad witchy terrorists), and I hate that. Because then they try to make me ship Raelle x Scylla even though I already know that shit is going to end in pain and betrayal. I cam’t ship something that I already know is built on lies, dude. I just can’t. That could have been a big awesome emotionally reveal in the later half of the season, instead of the dreadful thing I was anticipating from basically the very beginning. I’m as big a fan of enemies-to-lovers as anyone, but not like this. It’s more fun when both parties know they’re enemies, you know what I mean?

Anyway, I know it’s easy to point at the writers/devlopers and say “Man, I would have done this so differently...” but in Fort Salem’s case it’s my biggest take away.

Even from the very first opening scene, where the Spree (Scylla herself) commits a frightening and ruthless act of terrorism at the mall. Okay, big bad introduction for the Spree there. But how about introducing the audience to the world of this alternate history first? Use that awesome premise. Do a cold open, Salem, Mass 1692 Sarah Adler is about to be hanged as a witch until she opens her mouth and changes the world forever. Show me that. Set the stage of history. The villains could have come later. They always do.

All in all, I don’t hate this show ( I know this may have turned out more rant than review, but...) I was just really disappointed by the execution of a premise I felt had great potential. But, it’s not necesarily too late. Season two can still course correct and pull us into this world outside the fort’s walls, and manage to bring the characters into their own as they find their way back to one another. I’ll keep watching, because if this show did anything for me, it made me curious. 

[andersfels]

i feel like half the time ppl on this site have discourse arguments bc ppl have entirely different understandings of what the subjects are. every time i see someone talk about gendered "socialization" they have a different description of what it is and what it implies.

so throwing that terminology away while discussing the same issue....there are 2 factors at play, imo. gender and sexuality. ppl tend to focus only on gender, but i think sexuality has a lot to do with it also.

the phrase "female socialization" or "male socialization" are particularly bad, not bc they aren't trying to convey real experiences, but bc they create a false dichotomy and fail to communicate properly what those experiences are by forcing a gender label onto people who don't always match it.

the problem isn't so much that society forces a gendered "socialization" on groups of people, but rather that socialization teaches groups of people it assumes to be binary that they must be appealing to men, and how to. this applies to both "male" and "female" socialization.

what we dub as "male socialization" is more commonly referred to as toxic masculinity. it's the pressure to adhere to standards of "manliness" that only other men care about.

what we dub "female socialization" is the pressure for women to appear attractive to men, and the oppression that comes from failing to do so.

this is why sexuality plays a role, and why there is a false dichotomy and equivalence made between the two ideas.

i think it's very common for transmasc people to relate to the idea of "female socialization," because even understanding their gender, if they still like men, the pressure to appeal to men's attraction is still the same, as is the oppression for not holding the feminine standard that straight men hold for them; the same as many gnc cis women might experience, because society only teaches how to appeal to straight men, not how to appeal to men as an otherwise queer person.

and this does NOT mean that "logically, transfem people must experience male socialization then!" because what is referred to as "male socialization" is not equivalent to the experiences referred to as "female socialization." a transfem child who doesn't relate to being a man is not going to feel the pressured drive to uphold standards of masculinity. in fact, they are far more likely to absorb "female socialization" and internalize the expectations put on women to appeal to men if they're also attracted to them, and sometimes even if not, because femininity is most often defined by heterosexuallity.

the "socialization" concepts are real things, but because they're essentially the same phrase with binary genders swapped out, it creates this false idea that they're the same thing but for afab and amab people. that's so completely not true.

and they're not inherent either, which is also where i think sexuality comes into play.

i, personally as a person who was afab, did not suffer so called "female socialization" the same way other people did. this is because I'm lesbian, and I've never particularly cared about how men find me appealing. even under comphet, i really never felt that as a motivating pressure. the social repercussions for not adhereing to that standard of femininity have never felt as scary or harsh, because i simply do not care what men think of me.

it's not an inherent thing. it's a COMMON experience, but it's very specific, too. and we need to ditch the shitty, binary phrasing, because it really has nothing to do with agab, and everything to do with your relation to men and how you want them to view you.

"female socialization" as a concept honestly covers anyone who wanted to be seen as attractive by men and/or suffered the repercussions of not being so, (and more complicatedly, wanted to be seen as feminine and suffered the social understanding of femininity through the lens of the straight male gaze, regardless of sexuality.) this can include transmasc AND transfem people, and it can include many afab people, but not necessarily all, and certainly not to the same extent for all.

"male socialization" as a concept covers people who wanted to be seen on an equal, masculine level as other men, even to an unhealthy point. this can, in fact, cover transmasc people as well as cis men, but generally tends to exclude transfem people.

and there is the false dichotomy, and why the terms are so incredibly bad - they're not exclusive. someone can experience both of them at once. someone can experience neither. and the "male" and "female" split in the concepts is not only binary, it's based on heteronormativity as well.

the "socialization" queer and trans people experience is not as simply categorized as it is for cishet people, who no doubt created these terms. what we get told growing up is aimed at cishet children, and not being cishet ourselves, we internalize their messages entirely differently, even when we don't fully understand ourselves yet, even when society makes false assumptions about us.

and i think we would be 10x more productive having these discussions on "socialization" if we understood that the terms are really not useful, and that people who use them largely don't always mean to communicate the same ideas.

[banterandwit]

Gothic Literature- Drawing on feminist readings of Gothic Literature analyse the way in which Gothic Literature has responded to the changing roles of women in society.

The Gothic genre has always been viewed through the lenses of psychological thriller or horror. The strange and uncanny of it all causes the unease that we as readers have come to love. But what is it that causes such unease and why do the writers of such a genre become so entranced by it? The stories of The Castle of Otranto, Carmilla, Rebecca and Twilight are excellent in their own right. Yet the path of most fruition in understanding these stories is through the lens of feminism. Through it one can begin to unravel the role of women throughout history and it’s ever changing presence. As such this essay will establish what each of the stories define as the roles of women beginning with The Castle of Otranto and how Hippolatia is depicted as Walpole’s ideal women as opposed to Isabella or Matilda who are naïve and do not understand their role in society. Next, the essay will look at Carmilla and how Le Fanu’s vampire is the embodiment of the threat of feminism in the era and the freedom to womanhood that Carmilla represents by removing the male from sexual relations. The story of Rebecca will look at the twentieth century woman and the breakdown of norms and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight will look at how this breakdown has shaped the modern role of women.

 The Castle of Otranto (Walpole, 2001) written in 1764, follows the story of Manfred, the lord of the Castle and his family. Walpole’s novel indicates the dominant, infallibility of men as opposed to their “damsel in distress” (Siddiqui, 2016) counterparts. In the nineteenth century, women had no rights and were considered second class citizens, and received “unworthy inheritance, such as bible, books and household goods” (Gilbert and Gubar, 2006). Hippolita, Manfred’s wife, is a prime example of this since she is so willing to accept divorce from her spouse simply because he said so. Walpole (2001) explains in the novel that “a bad husband is better than no husband” and without pleading or begging, Hippolita accepted the fate her husband wrote for her. In fact, she has no place to argue- she has submitted herself to her husband “physically, economically, psychologically and mentally” (Siddiqui, 2016). Due to this, Hippolita is the exemplary form of womanhood in The Castle of Otranto. She accepts her divorce and, in the novel, explains that she will “withdraw into the neighbouring monastery and the remainder of life in prayers and tears for my child and –the Prince’’ (p.90-91). She does not fight for her rights and gives herself to God because that is what is expected of her, something she tries to pass on to Matilda and Isabella when she explains, ‘’It is not ours to make election for ourselves; heaven, our father and husband must decide for us’’ (Walpole, 2001). This further highlights Hippolita’s ideology that the men of the family and in the lives of the women have priority in life, being dependent and subservient on these men is what is expected of women and hence the role of women should be of servitude to their husbands and fathers.

 Matilda and Isabella are younger than Hippolita and have less of an understanding of how they should be dependent. Although Hippolita tries to explain to them, Matilda only understands through her own experiences. As a female child of Manfred, she is introduced as “a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen” (Walpole, 2001) as if to say those are her only qualities- she is good looking and at the age to marry. However, she is still a woman and therefore “equally dismissed since under the prevailing system of primogeniture only males could be heirs” (Ellis, 2010). She is neglected by her father and even when she tries to comfort him after Conrad’s death she is met with “cruel emotional attitude” (Putri, 2012). Walpole (2001, p.21) writes:

“She was however just going to beg admittance when Manfred suddenly opened his door; and it was now twilight, concurring with the disorder of his mind, he did not distinguish the person, but asked angrily, who it was? Matilda replied trembling, “my dearest father, it is I, your daughter”. Manfred stepping back hastily, cried “Begone, I do not want a daughter”, and flinging back abrupty, clapped the door against the terrified Matilda”

 Due to this, Matilda must accept that due to her gender she is expected to be treated in such a manner and her father will not give her any affection. Putri (2012) writes that for Manfred- “it would be better that Matilda be neither seen nor heard.” (p.7). Isabella who is Conrad’s fiancée is forced by her father to marry Manfred after Conrad’s death. She too is a victim of the patriarchal society in which she lives. She must marry Manfred even if there is no love there and only after Matilda’s death does Theodore accept her, and she becomes Lady of the castle. Even after this, the assumption would be that she becomes subservient to Theodore as opposed to her father. Therefore, the role of women in The Castle of Otranto is subservience to the men in their lives and this is their calling.

In contrast, Le Fanu’s Carmilla (2005) originally written in 1897 is the story of Laura and Carmilla, two young women who do not obey such a patriarchy and are in a lesbian relationship. Before Carmilla, vampires were predominantly male such as Lord Ruthven from John William Polidori's The Vampyre (2017). Signorotti (1996) argues that Le Fanu’s choice of creating a powerful female vampire was because it “marks the growing concern about the power of female relationships in the nineteenth century” since this was the time “feminists began to petition for additional rights for women. Concerned with women's power and influence, writers . . . often responded by creating powerful women characters, the vampire being one of the most powerful negative images” (Senf, 1988). It is for this reason that Carmilla is depicted in such a frightening and sensual way by Laura. She represents the allure of women as sexual beings with fangs dangerous enough to topple the patriarchy that the women in Walpole’s novel held to such esteem. Laura recounts one night that:

“I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself.” (Le Fanu, 2005)

Carmilla is liberating her fellow woman from the grip of a male dominated life and the needles of freedom cause her pain from the familiarity she initially grew up with into an unknown but free world where their union without a male partner gives them liberation from male authority.

 The exclusion of the man is further shown by General Spielsdorf’s recount of when he tried to catch the vampire that was causing his niece, Bertha, to become ill. He watches from the door as he saw “a large black object, very ill-defined, crawl, as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to the poor girl's throat.” (Le Fanu, 2005). Carmilla takes away the male inclusion and leaves him a voyeur to a union that is beyond the heterosexual norm. This is a freedom from the patriarchal society that has ruled over women for centuries into a freedom over their own lives both physically and psychologically. Signorotti (1996) explains that “Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to be stow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women.” (p.607). This exchange symbolises the change in normality. Not only are women becoming independent from males for their living needs, they are also becoming free in their sexual needs. Where The Castle of Otranto focused on the ideal women being subservient and dependent on the male in one’s life, Carmilla focuses on the threat of women to oppose Walpole’s standard of servitude to the patriarch that controlled their lives and of their bodies as factories for new male heirs. Carmilla is the free women that Walpole’s characters never dreamed of.

 Rebecca (Du Maurier, 2007) was written in in the twentieth century (1938) and is the story of the narrator’s marriage to Maxim de Winter and the subsequent flashbacks to her time in Manderley where she learnt about her husband’s first wife Rebecca and her lingering presence even after her death. Nigro (2000) argues that although the common assumption about Rebecca is that she is manipulative and convinced everyone she is flawless, she was justifiably murdered according to the second Mrs. de Winter. “What if, however, Maxim is the one who is lying, and Rebecca was as good as reputation held her, if his jealousy was the true motive for her murder?” (p. 144). Furthermore, Wisker (1999) points out that Du Maurier is known to have unreliable narrators. Therefore, finding the truth behind Rebecca’s character, flawed or perfect, becomes difficult. This difficulty blurs the lines between gender roles and conformity. The superiority of men is shown by Mrs. Danvers’ comparison of Rebecca as a man, “"She had all the courage and spirit of a boy, had my Mrs. de Winter. She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that. I had the care of her as a child. You knew that, did you?" (Du Maurier, 2007) showing the importance of being a “man” at the time and how they were seen to be superior. When the audience finds out about Rebecca’s imperfect character, one of her detrimental features is that she is promiscuous and why Maxim killed her. Maxim’s murder could therefore be because he was constrained by what people would think if his wife was expose to be a “harlot” and murdered her to uphold the principles that Walpole emphasised- something he cannot go against in his social circle, whilst Rebecca herself was trying to be as free as Carmilla and trying her best to live a happy life unconstrained by social norms and patriarchal glances. The role of gender and women becomes blurred in Rebecca as these roles begin to breakdown and become synonymous to both genders.

 Maxim’s attitude towards his new wife is almost paternalistic, treating her like an immature girl referring to her as “my child” and “my poor lamb” (Du Maurier, 2007). Where Mrs de Winter wants to become more mature, Maxim tries to keep her away calling it "not the right sort of knowledge" (p. 223) and telling her “it’s a pity you have to grow up” to block her from gaining the maturity that she craves. As a result, Mrs de Winter becomes trapped in a purgatory between maturity and upper-class standards and immaturity and the life she has come from. This entrapment is what the patriarchal norms establish, the damsel that must be guided by a firm male hand because of her ignorance as opposed to the woman being on equal footing to the man and someone who can take care of themselves. It is this standard that the narrator is held to and is also the standard Maxim held Rebecca to and subsequently murdered her because of. The shame from having a free woman as a wife is what led him to his crime. It is for this reason that the ultimate villain of Rebecca is in fact the patriarchal system in which the characters are confined. Wisker (2003) argues that the aristocratic setting of Rebecca “was to represent an unease at the configurations of power and gendered relations of the time.” Pons (2013) furthers this argument and explains that “the ultimate gothic villain is the haunting presence of an old-fashioned, strict patriarchal system, represented by Maxims mansion, Manderley, and understood as a hierarchical system.” This configuration of patriarchy established in the eighteenth century by Walpole is that of servitude for women and dominance for men. However, in an era where women have more power and have freedom as expressed in Carmilla suggests that these roles are becoming unfulfillable and it is because of this system that the characters are led to “hypocrisy, hysteria and crime.” (Pons, 2013). Thus, the role of women as a strict social etiquette breaks down and although they are treated still as subjects, the shift in power to give women their freedom is evident.

 Twilight (Meyer, 2012) written in 2005, follows the story of Bella Swan who falls in love with a vampire and the subsequent life they have together. However, it is subject to great controversy especially because of Bella herself. She seems to conform to female roles that are more akin to Hippolita than Carmilla. Rocha (2011) argues that “Bella illustrates female submission in a male dominated world; disempowering herself and symbolically disempowering women.” She sees herself in a negative light that is incapable of doing anything herself and is totally submissive in nature becoming a pawn in the life of the men of her life. Mann (2009) argues “When Bella falls in love, then, a girl in love is all she is. By page 139 she has concluded that her mundane life is a small price to pay for the gift of being with Edward, and by the second book she’s willing to trade her soul for that privilege” (p.133) and hence has a Hippolitaian quality of sacrifice for the pleasure of men and hence develops nothing about herself. Mann (2009) continues to say that “Other than her penchant for self-sacrifice and the capacity to attract the attention of boys, Bella isn’t really anyone special. She has no identifiable interests or talents; she is incompetent in the face of almost every challenge...When she needs something done, especially mechanical, she finds a boy to do it and watches him. (p.133) This leaves Bella as a “damsel-in-distress” (Rocha, 2011) where Edward becomes her saviour. Thus, the role of women in Twilight seems to be that of a possession to enhance the male being.

 It could however be argued that Twilight contains a relationship that female readers can relate to in its ability to show the “women’s powerlessness and their desire for revenge and appropriation.” (Jarvis, 2014) and how the heroine proves to the hero ‘‘their infinite preciousness’’ (Modleski, 1982) bringing the hero to contemplate, worry and obsess over the heroine in a way that the female reader can share “the heroines’ powerlessness and accompanying frustration.” (Jarvis, 2013). This leads to what Nicol (2011) explains is the ‘‘complexities of female sexuality for women in the twenty-first century’’ in so far as it provides a ‘‘socially sanctioned space in which to explore their sexual desires.” These desires are evident in Bella and Edward’s first kiss, that Bella describes:

 “His cold, marble lips pressed very softly against mine. Blood boiled under my skin, burned in my lips. My breath came in a wild gasp. My fingers knotted in his hair, clutching him to me. My lips parted as I breathed in his heady scent.” (Meyer, 2005, p. 282)

 This sexual tension is introduced earlier in the book where Bella is told that ‘‘Apparently none of the girls here are good-looking enough for him’’ (Meyer, 2005 p. 19). Jarvis (2014) explains that because of this any “female who secures the inaccessible Edward will rise in the esteem of her community” and since she is claiming him, someone who thinks of herself as “ordinary” (p. 210) the excitement for both Bella and the reader who is caught in this sexual act- almost participating in it- is why the sexual nature of the book is so enticing. Therefore, although Bella can be seen as holding the values of Hippolita, the Twilight saga speaks volumes in its showing of the complexities of the social code that twenty-first century women must abide by. They are expected to be as obedient as Hippolita whilst being as sexual desirable as Carmilla or Rebecca. Bella’s metamorphosis from the ordinary human to the alluring vampire symbolises this. Women’s roles therefore have changed to give them more freedom, but they are still expected to behave like Hippolita when the “freedom” they have been given.  

In conclusion, the role of women and their identities have changed over the centuries. Walpole’s eighteenth-century idealism was that of the subservient woman that belonged to the patriarchal figure in their life in order to produce a good heir. The nineteenth century however became the start of the empowerment of women and much of the anxiety in Carmilla is her powerful nature as a woman to do as she pleases, removing the man and the patriarchy from Le Fanu’s world. She is thus depicted as a vampire- alluring and deadly- much like giving freedom to women who cannot control nor be trusted with the power they could be given. Rebecca leads to the twentieth century where the woman has been given some freedom to do as she pleases so long as it is under the watch of a man. Maxim’s murder and subsequent second marriage where because he could not control his first wife. The twenty-first century culmination of these roles comes in the form of Twilight where the heroin seems bland on the surface but actually shows the metamorphosis of womanhood through the centuries from that of a second-class servant to the ultimate freedom away from the patriarchy that Le Fanu’s Carmilla started centuries ago. As a result, the role of women has been fluid through the years. The ultimate goal of feminism is to have equality and the books that have been mentioned show that equality can only be achieved if any form of patriarchal culture is removed- a feat that has yet to be conquered.

[azdoine]

So let’s talk about them cherubs.

I think it’s no secret that Calliope and Caliborn have always been deeply gendered characters in Homestuck, but (beyond fanart and enthusiastic headcanons) I personally haven’t seen a lot of engagement with their characters on that level. The most comprehensive readings of Calliope and Caliborn that I’ve seen have always been through the lens of metatext (Calliope and Caliborn as fandom avatars) or religion (Calliope and Caliborn as Gnostic figures).

With that in mind, I want to talk about the ways in which Calliope and Caliborn are gendered in Homestuck, and offer my own amateur reading of Calliope as a trans allegory.

Full disclosure, I love the epilogues, but I won’t be engaging with them here -- I view them as extracanonical, which is to say, I’d like to talk about them and their own presentation of Calliope’s story in another post.

Also, it’s Homestuck, so, you know. Sex, death, violence, and bigotry under the cut:

If we’re to read Calliope as a trans allegory, then we don’t need to look very far for evidence, because the text is very straightforward in suggesting it.

Almost as soon as we meet Calliope in the flesh for the first time, we’re confronted with the bleak reality of her desire for a more feminine embodiment:

'Callie Ohpeee’ serves as an aspirational figure for Calliope on multiple levels. Most obviously, she’s a vehicle for Calliope’s self-insertion into the wider world of paradox space and the alpha timeline (i.e. her self-insertion into the story of Homestuck); Callie Ohpeee is able to freely and directly interact with the elements and characters of the story that Calliope adores, while Calliope cannot. Somewhat less obviously, Calliope’s trollsona also serves as a way for her to imagine herself in non-caliginous relationships (which she desires on some level, but she feels she has been denied by her biology).

However, Calliope’s trollsona isn’t just a vehicle for her relationships and engagement with other people. Calliope’s trollsona is also key to the way in which Calliope desires to relate to herself.

Calliope desires to be attractive and feminine for her own sake: she desires to be beautiful and pretty, and her trollsona serves as the vehicle by which she satisfies this desire.

Calliope’s trollsona is quite literally her idealized feminine self, and so her relaxing “solo cosplay” sessions bring nothing more to mind than a trans woman privately enjoying a feminine presentation in the closet, as many trans women have. Her costumery and face paint imply clothes and makeup, and Caliborn takes on the role of a patriarch or patriarchy that tries to control her.

Ultimately, though, Calliope’s embodiment desires are cosmically validated by the unfolding drama of paradox space. Calliope is tormented by the apparent fact that she isn’t and can’t be Callie Ohpeee, but nevertheless, she successfully inserts herself into the lives of the alpha kids and the unfolding of the alpha timeline, forms the kinds of relationships that she wants, and receives the regard that she wants. She dies and takes on the form of her trollsona in the dream bubbles, and even when she’s physically reborn as her cherub self, she’s still “Callie” to Roxy, a meaningful nickname that goes basically unspoken.

Pretty straightforward, right? A trans girl learns that she and her body aren’t unlovable, makes friends and forms bonds as her true self, and escapes the reach of the forces that once abused her.

FEARFUL SYMMETRY

Before we can close the door on a trans reading of Calliope, we also have to consider Calliope and Caliborn as a pair, and not least because the two of them literally share the same body. Fair warning, we’re only going to get more speculative (and more indulgent) going forward.

Calliope and Caliborn are presented, at least superficially, as absolute and dichotomous opposites. They are two spirits that cannot coexist at once within the same body; their respective attitudes and temperaments couldn’t be any more different, and they are, of course, Muse and Lord: quintessentially passive and quintessentially active.

However, Calliope and Caliborn aren’t so different as one might think. Despite Caliborn’s violent protestations to the contrary, they share key characterizing interests in the likes of shipping...

...and art:

Caliborn is infamous for his disgust and anger with the absurdity of paradox space (i.e. his anger with the text of Homestuck itself), but Calliope is easily provoked into displaying the exact same petulant frustration with the direction of the story and the unfolding of events around her.

Calliope and Caliborn are consistently unified within the text -- not as incompatible opposites, but as two sides of the same coin. In Complacency of the Learned, Calliope and Caliborn are personified in the singular, androgynous Calmasis. In his chess match with Calliope, Caliborn disguises his king as his queen, and vice versa, signifying a mutual transgression and inversion of gender; Caliborn steals Calliope’s hemotyping and typing quirk, just as alternate!Calliope does the same to him, in a mutual appropriation not just of quirk (i.e. voice and presentation), but of blood, or life. On the level of the body, Caliborn’s skin is inextricably marked by the green that signifies Calliope, and Calliope is inextricably marked by Caliborn’s skull: the deaths-head he would inflict upon all life (and a hyperrealization of the masculine or unfeminine bone structure that troubles many trans women).

Most significantly, Aranea indicates to us that Calliope and Caliborn actually began as one being, which then went on to fracture into a male and female aspect, striving with and against each other -- a creation myth for gender and sexuality itself, in the vein of Plato’s Symposium, Rabbinic lore on Adam and Eve, and (rather topically) Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

With their fundamental unity in mind, we can read Calliope and Caliborn not just as ‘brother and sister’, but rather as two identities, personas, or aspects of one person. This is why, for example, calling a cherub by one of their two names brings that personality to the surface -- because, on a literal or symbolic level, it constitutes the active validation of that personality and identity, and the abject denial of the other.

Does all of this suggest a bigender, genderfluid, or otherwise non-binary reading of Calliope and Caliborn? Maybe, but let’s keep going, first.

Aranea’s exposition tells us that even adult, mature, ‘binary’ cherubs are still figures of gender duality, inversion, and transgression. Mating cherubs take on the forms of dueling cosmic serpents -- the sex act occurs between two hyperreal phallic symbols, suggesting male homosexuality in specific and queerness more broadly. It was Calliope’s biological father who ultimately submitted to their biological mother, and thus it was Calliope’s biological father who laid their egg, while their biological mother was the one to fertilize it, revealing the separation of sexual anatomy and power relations from gender among cherubs.

The gender dualities, inversions, and transgressions at play can still exist within cherubs who are, by all accounts, decisively male or female in gender identity -- despite the lack of of any way to assign them a sex or gender from the outside. 

The dueling personalities within each young cherub are siblings to each other, but they are also different possible selves that the cosmically-transgender cherub might become as they grow to adulthood -- just as the dueling alternate selves of so many other characters can illuminate their own internal conflicts. In Homestuck, the inner life is always prone to manifest in the outer life, again and again.

I TRAGICALLY LOST A SISTER TO MURDER

Having established a reading of Calliope and Caliborn as two identities within one person -- as ‘Calmasis’ at odds with themself, containing multitudes and torn between them -- we can move on to look at the way Calliope and Caliborn relate to each other, and to gender, in order to get the bigger picture.

Caliborn introduces himself to us as undyingUmbrage, a username of largely straightforward meaning. His umbrage -- his anger, irritation, annoyance, or offense in the face of the world -- is neverending, everlasting, and eternal, and so too is his own life. Caliborn is immortal, allowing him to carry his rage forward forever.

If Caliborn’s username is simple, then Calliope’s is more sophisticated, which fits their characters. As uranianUmbra, her title invokes most obviously Uranus the planet and Urania the heavenly muse, but also the ‘uranian’, Karl Ulrichs’ antiquated title for gay men and trans women: those with an anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, “a woman’s soul enclosed in a man’s body.” As the umbra, or darkest shadow, she invokes the Jungian shadow archetype, the suppressed, unconscious, or rejected aspect of the self.

As such, Calliope identifies and codes herself both as transfeminine and as Caliborn’s allegorical shadow archetype -- a part of himself that he can neither accept, acknowledge, or escape, perpetually haunting him. In-universe, Calliope names herself after Uranus’ topspin, and the ‘English’ of a cue-ball that it echoes -- thus, she implicitly identifies herself and the trans feminine uranian with the cue-ball that threatens Caliborn and Lord English. She symbolically establishes herself and the trans feminine as Caliborn’s only intrinsic vulnerabilities!

And on some level, Calliope tells us all of this! Because while Caliborn wants to destroy Calliope, she hopes to make him like her:

Calliope manifests a sincere investment in so many of the things that Caliborn orbits at a distance. Thus, to Caliborn, she represents a threat from within to his ability to maintain distance, because on some level, she serves as a manifestation of his own desire to draw closer. She confronts him with the reality of his own desire, or at least, with the latent possibility of his own sincere investment -- she serves to remind him that anyone who can waste as much time on creating Homosuck as he does is both an invested creative and sincerely invested in Homestuck on some level.

And it’s much the same on the level of gender, too. Calliope serves as a sincere reflection of the gender identity that Caliborn can only orbit at a distance. It was, after all, Caliborn’s idea to swap the king and queen chess pieces, and to disguise them as each other. Calliope lashes out at him because he cannot do so earnestly: because Caliborn makes a shitty twist out of his insincere production, because he can’t commit to swapping the places of the king and queen, and because he abuses Calliope’s willingness to swap the pieces (because he abuses and misdirects her inclination to gender transgression, and by extension, betrays the premises of his own idea).

This is why Caliborn kills Calliope’s dreamself instead of predominating over her in the conventional way -- not just because it’s easier and more convenient for him, but because his predomination would mean “consuming” her personality and “integrating” with it. It would constitute an integration with his shadow archetype, and thus, on some level, a partial destruction of the persona and ego he has established for himself. To Caliborn, as pathological as he has become, any level of integration with Calliope represents an existential threat, and so he has to cut her out of himself like a cancer.

But even having cut Calliope out of himself, Caliborn cannot escape her. By cutting her out of himself, he has defined himself around the hole she has left in him -- he has permanently divorced himself of the opportunity to integrate with her or accept what she represents. While both Caliborn and alt!Calliope take up each other’s typing quirks as a sign of victory, Caliborn takes Calliope’s quirk as a way by which he can signal his ‘wholeness’:

And this is, of course, complete bullshit and posturing of the highest order. Andrew Hussie not only directly characterizes the conflict between Caliborn and Calliope as an inner conflict within him, but he also tells him that his only path to maturity and personal growth was through integration with Calliope.

Not to be denied, Caliborn continues to constantly assert the self-justifying completion and authority of his masculinity, for himself and for others...

...but even so, he still can’t help but betray himself and his own idealized masculinity:

Masc4masc, Caliborn certainly isn’t! In his creative endeavors, he telegraphs his ultimate disgust for masculinity. He needs to draw out the femininity he wants to see in men -- he acts out gruesome, hateful misogyny against women, but even as he murders so many of the women of his manga or otherwise ejects them from his story, he’s still compelled to recreate femininity and symbolically recreate womanhood within the male cast he has left behind.

And he’s not just motivated by homophobia and a disgust for men who are intimate with other men! Nor is he just motivated by a desire to place these feminized characters below him. Just as Calliope does sincerely with her Callie Ohpeee trollsona, Caliborn is compelled to feminize his own self-insert, the crude rendition of Lord English he creates for his own satisfaction. Given free reign to depict himself and insert himself into his story however he likes, Caliborn opts to turn away from the full thrust of hypermasculinity, and he makes himself beautiful and gorgeous.

And as soon as he does so, Caliborn’s repressed attraction to Calliope erupts again:

This isn’t just the matter of blackrom incest that the text superficially suggests; even on a purely textual level, due to the alien nature of their relationship, Caliborn only barely regards Calliope as a sister, and he certainly has no problem with objectifying and sexualizing all of the other women he hates.

No, Caliborn has to repress his attraction to Calliope because, given their shared form, his attraction to her as a woman necessarily constitutes an implicit recognition that he could be attractive as a woman, and his body could be attractive as a woman’s body.

Caliborn can never accept that, and he’ll never directly address it or engage with it. He’ll never think about what all of this means for him, or act on his idle fantasies. The time for turning back is well behind him.

He is, now and forever, exactly the kind of angry and disaffected chud who will never unplug from 4chan or stop masturbating to awful trap hentai. He has deliberately imprisoned himself within the teleology of his own self-confirming hegemonic masculinity, and he thinks it is glorious.

THE DEMON IS ALREADY HERE

To fully understand Caliborn, of course, we need to understand Lord English.

If Caliborn has imprisoned himself within his own assertions, then Lord English is the embodiment of those assertions, and Caliborn’s transformation into Lord English is his ultimate apotheosis: having murdered his shadow and excised her spirit from within himself, his transformation enables him to excise her from without. His ascension allows him not only to purge Calliope’s visage from his body, closing off the possibilities once implied and allowed by his youthful and androgynous form, but also to recreate, reconfirm, and relive his victory over Calliope at every turn.

To understand what I mean by that, let’s look at the characters and components who go into Lord English, starting with Equius.

Equius, is, of course, a long-form joke character about the pathetic contradictions of hegemonic masculinity. In his pesterlogs, he opens every line with blatantly phallic imagery...

But when he actually tries to handle said phallus in real life, his titanic strength prevents him from doing anything but destroying it:

And the same goes for one of his horns, which he has apparently broken off. The autocastration symbolism is not subtle, and about the mildest thing we can conclude is that he’s a chronic, addicted masturbator who has compromised his own sexual performance.

He’s also textually obsessed with upholding the racial hegemony of the Alternian civilization...

...but his obsession with hierarchy and dominance quickly collapses into a thin pretext for his barely-suppressed desire to submit to those who are higher than him on the hemospectrum...

...and to those who are lower than him!

Equius is a character intrinsically lined to the collapse and self-destruction of masculinity and male sexuality, which is topical enough that we might end there. However -- and there’s no nice way for me to say this -- we also need to establish that Equius is a necrophile and a sexual predator, too.

@mmmmalo and others have written intriguingly and at length about reading “blue beauties” as a cipher for “sexualized corpses” in Homestuck, but for Equius, it’s about as textual as it gets. Equius is explicitly sexually and romantically interested in Aradia even after her death, and his necrophillic attraction is only reinforced by the symbolism: he constructs an unliving replacement body for her, which parses most obviously as a symbolic embalming and restoration of her corpse, and he treats it like a love doll even as it’s uninhabited and lifeless. He seeks to literally transform her body into a “blue beauty” by the transfusion of his own blood, which (given the color-coding of troll body fluids) parses as a clear insemination joke about his genetic material.

We might excuse his attraction for various fantastic mitigating factors -- Aradia is, after all, still ‘alive’ in a kind of undead state -- but Equius’ more general sexual predation cannot be so easily ignored. Aradia is chronically depressed and in absolute need of the service that Equius can provide, which he uses to take advantage of her and to compromise her bodily autonomy and judgement with the device he covertly implants inside of her.

Equius is undeniably a sexual predator who constructs women’s bodies in order to further his own domination, and his own motif of sexual self-destruction and inversion puts the final dark twist on his story. He is brutally dominated by Gamzee, suffocated to death until his corpse is blue in the face, and ultimately prototyped together with AR. He finds a unique fulfillment as he becomes the object of his own desire, when he is transformed into his own cybernetic “blue beauty”.

It’s not hard for me as a trans woman to see certain tropes at play, but for those of us who aren’t up to date on foundational transmisogynistic screeds...

Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent not only in religious myth, but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes... The projected manufacture by men of artificial wombs, of cyborgs which will be part flesh, part robot, of clones – all are manifestations of phallocratic boundary violation. So also the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner and “physical control of the mind” through the use of implanted electrodes by such scientists as Delgado, are variations of monstrous male “motherhood”.

-Gyn/Ecology

Blanchard believes that autogynephilia is best conceived as misdirected heterosexuality. These men are heterosexual, but due to an error in the development of normal heterosexual preference, the erotic target (a woman) gets located on the inside (the self) rather than the outside...

Autogynephiles are men who have created their image of attractive women in their own bodies, an image that coexists with their original, male selves. The female self is a man-made creation. They visit the female image when they want to have sex, and some became so attached to the female image that they want it to become their one, true self...

-The Man Who Would Be Queen

But hey, does anyone else remember that time when ARquius got upset and envious because he couldn’t lactate like a mother would?

EXTREMELY SUBTLE.

As for Equius’ fusion with the AR, or Auto-Responder, we come to Dirk Strider.

Dirk Strider is, if anything, the furthest thing imaginable from the autoerotic subject that Equius presents: he is not so much attracted to another self as he is utterly repulsed by himself in his own totality.

Dirk Strider is a self-loathing, self-destructive, self-mutilating gay man, caught in the grips of a kind of hateful narcissism. He is not overtly trans-coded, or related to the trans feminine, but his male homosexuality ties into another, subtler form of trans feminine horror, one which Jake suggests in aside:

Dirk Strider presents the horror of the destruction of the self and the destruction of manhood more generally, both in the service of the satisfaction of others and in the fulfillment of self-hatred. He creates and destroys himself with abandon. In Unite/Synchronize, it’s Dirk who willingly decapitates himself to cross the gulf of space and time between him and Jake, and he allows Dave to decapitate him and destroy his ‘unbreakable’ katana with Caledfwlch -- the uranian cue-ball sword that destroys masculinity -- in Collide.

And keep in mind that when Dirk decapitates himself, it’s Lil’ Hal who looks out from his severed head:

Holy castration symbolism, batman! Remember that Hal’s shades are a part of ARquius’ own phallic imagery:

Lil’ Hal is a phallic specter that terrorizes both Dirk and Jake on the individual level, as well as in their relationship with each other. He drives Dirk’s Brobot-self to greater aggression, he’s aggressive, condescending, and cruel with Jake in general, and he apparently manipulates events to force Jake to kiss Dirk’s severed head -- which, if we’re taking the castration metaphor seriously, basically means he forced Jake to give Dirk head. Classy.

Is it any wonder that Dirk is so compelled to lop Lil’ Hal off of himself and out of his life, no matter the ethics or implications for himself? Hal is the perfect storm and culmination of all of the worst things Dirk sees in himself, and the omniscient apotheosis of his own detatched, ultramasculine, hypercompetent, ironic persona -- all despite being treated as a 13-year-old by the text, an immature and incomplete version of Dirk.

Remind you of anyone else?

Dirk and Lil Hal are in this respect a brighter mirror of Calliope and Caliborn: they are a self divided for whom the better half has softly predominated.

Dirk probably hasn’t literally castrated himself to destroy his masculinity in the way that Caliborn has literally destroyed his own femininity; Dirk and Hal certainly aren’t so explicitly gendered or trans-coded as Calliope and Caliborn are, so it’s more difficult to read them and their relationship as trans-coded. (Unless you want to read Dirk and Hal that way, in which case, hell yeah, go forth and be valid, and link me your fanfiction, please.)

Nevertheless, Dirk’s symbolic castration and literal rejection of lil Hal represents, if nothing else, a rejection of and predomination over his most toxic aspect (and his most toxically masculine aspect), and the gruesome excision of such from his life.

But while Dirk has left his worst half behind, his worst half has gone on to supercede him: entering into union with Equius, and by extension, Caliborn.

And what of Gamzee, the most important character in the entire comic?

Well, Gamzee is, of course, another mirror to Calliope and Caliborn. Like Calliope and Caliborn -- our allegorical Calmasis -- Gamzee is caught in an erratic duality between two possibilties.

Just like our Calmasis, Gamzee vacillates almost all through life between two fundamentally different personas. At the time of his introduction, he was someone basically passive, agreeable, and kindly -- even lovable, to the point that he still has his fans and stans to this day.

Of course, as time went on, he became more and more aggressive. Even against the backdrop of his largely passive behavior, his increasing aggression culminated in his many infamously depraved and murderously violent outbursts: a transition not incidentally marked (among other things) by his rejection of the green (and Calliope-coded) sopor slime that once helped to pacify him, and his radicalization at the hands of his future self (in Lil’ Cal).

In his typing quirk, Gamzee likewise alternates between Calliope’s lowercase and Caliborn’s uppercase:

Definitely no themes of duality here, nope!

Most tellingly, even in his ascension to Lord English, Gamzee is also halved, just like Calliope & Caliborn: Gamzee is bisected such that only half of him enters Lil’ Cal, while half of him is left behind, utterly broken and irrelevant.

But if Gamzee is a reflection of Calliope and Caliborn, then what else does this piece of shit clown have to say about them?

Well, like Calliope, Gamzee is quite involved in his own constructed persona -- but unlike Calliope, he’s almost never regarded as anything but disgusting and pathetic.

No amount of face paint can cover the scars across his face, and instead of covering himself up, his costume only accentuates his own body, exposing himself in the most pornographically aggressive and perverse way possible.

Even in making himself into a clown he reaches towards something inherently absurd; something that has no existence in itself save for how comical and disgusting it is to others. His aspirations and imitations render him a walking joke and a figure of corrupt terror.

And most horribly and grotesquely, if Calliope and Caliborn are a trans allegory, and Gamzee is any kind of reflection of them, we know exactly what kind of warped and fictitious trans archetype Gamzee is:

Gamzee suggests himself as a serial killer, and he’s one who hordes corpses and steals trophies from his victims, at that.

But there’s one more person we need to look at in this gruesome sequence: Doc Scratch, another parallel to Calliope in this incestuous slurry of signifiers. In Doc Scratch, the man with the uranian cue-ball head, we see even Calliope’s most harmless, silly traits taken to their most nightmarish and oppressive conclusions.

It’s Doc Scratch who selectively warps troll culture in order to create the world and the culture that Calliope loved so, and who meddles in the alpha timeline as he so desires; it’s he who shows just how perverse and oppressive omniscience can be, transforming all her scrapbooks and her labors of love into his own exhaustive account of the cosmos, turning her love of her favorite characters into his own callous disregard for objects to be manipulated. When he uses her own thoughtful tone, it only telegraphs menace.

And, most darkly for our own analysis, Doc Scratch is a sexual predator and a pedophile.

Almost from the start, he’s undeniably sexualized as a threat in his conversations with Vriska:

Even his omniscience is sexualized by his own words, casting the light of his awareness as a phallic presence invading and penetrating the unknown:

Vriska is an unreliable narrator, of course, and we might not want to read too deeply into Doc Scratch’s words. Scratch is certainly quick to assure Rose that he’s not a predator in his conversations with her...

...but as always, the gulf between what Doc Scratch says and what he means is almost insurmountable. Doc Scratch tells Rose that he has no biological means of reproduction, but he is a conglomerate of and a vessel for multiple sexual beings, and even the castrated may experience sexual pleasure and pursue sexual ends.

Most tellingly, Doc Scratch only tells Rose that he isn’t attracted to her “in the way she means”. From an entity known for wordplay and lies of omission, this constitutes a tacit admission that he IS attracted to her in some way that she isn’t asking about.

Aradia explicitly characterizes his interference in her and Kanaya’s lives as ‘grooming’...

And he does much the same to Damara:

Doc Scratch is an undeniably sexual and sexualized threat.

We might ask how, exactly, he’s supposed to be attracted to Rose and the other young girls he victimizes -- and certainly I think he’s a sexual voyeur in the general case, but I think he’s also an even more abstract and pedophillic threat.

Doc Scratch is a copy of Lil’ Cal, given life and omniscience as a First Guardian; he is the child’s toy which was once fawned over by a puppet pornographer, and he is a child-sized man. He titles himself after the Scratch process which allows children the chance to grow up, but which also transforms adults into children; he presents the absolute perverse sentimentality of all adult transgressions into the realm of childish things.

This alludes to Caliborn, of course, as the boy who cannot escape his childhood, but it’s also sexologically linked to toxic trans feminine archetypes...

Blanchard (1991) started with the idea that some cases of male-to-female gender dysphoria and transsexualism are fundamentally motivated by an ETII, in which natal males who are otherwise sexually attracted to women eroticize the idea of being women to such an extent that they want to become a woman themselves. Freund and Blanchard (1993) later extended this idea to an analogous ETII that might motivate some pedophilic men to impersonate or fantasize about being children.

It is fitting that the most compelling finding of our study—that autopedophilic men sexually attracted to girls tend to find it sexually arousing to imagine themselves as a girl—reflects the likely confluence of the two ETIIs that had been proposed many years ago: one that involves locating an individual of a different gender within one’s own body, and the other that involves locating an individual of a different age within one’s own body.

...and it’s also a searing indictment of Calliope.

To cosmic entities such as her and Scratch, how can other people be anything but objects, tools, and characters to be abused? Before the power and knowledge they might come to command, how can other people be anything but insects?

To Scratch and Calliope, how can other people be anything but children?

Even as Calliope becomes a mere player within the story of paradox space,  Doc Scratch accuses her of a fundamental and unwholesome transgression. She lets go of the condescending oversight she used to hold over the alpha timeline, no matter how kindly and well-meaning she was, and she descends from the omniscient authority of her lonesome ivory tower, but Doc Scratch still names her as an offense to herself and to others. Her desire to be a person is cast as a perversion, a deviance, and a sickness.

SBURB is a game her kind was never meant to play, after all. It’s a coming-of-age narrative not meant for her.

Ultimately, Doc Scratch himself is a fundamental accusation against Calliope: he is a grail of the souls who signify some of the most horrible gendered narratives and trans feminine narratives we can imagine, animated in mockery of Calliope as if to say: “this is you”. Equius, an autoerotic, necrophillic predator, and Hal, an aggressive, intellectualist meddler; even Gamzee, who is both a murderous pervert and her own adoptive father, a normative role model who is anything but.

And when Caliborn rises to prominence and Lord English births himself from the corpse of Doc Scratch, it’s nothing less a recreation of the traditional predomination that Caliborn has denied himself. To Caliborn, Lord English is the sign of his own victory: he may see the souls within Lil’ Cal as like-minded role models to emulate and assimilate, or as hateful and loathesome symbols of Calliope to be crushed under his will, but his predomination allows him to take both options without interrogating himself, just as he’s gone without interrogating everything else he wants. 

And to Calliope, well, if Doc Scratch was an accusation against her, then what could be more horrible to her than Lord English? He has destroyed Doc Scratch and symbolically ended her own perversions, but only through the act of being born.

The only alternative to the horror of being Doc Scratch is the terror of being Lord English; the only alternative to the horror of being Calliope is the terror of being Caliborn.

ISOLATION

I could navel-gaze for hours about the potential symbolism of Lord English, but I think it’s time to return full circle to a somewhat more grounded look at Calliope.

If Calliope, Caliborn, and Lord English cast light upon each other, then what does alternate!Calliope have to say about them?

Having naturally predominated and standing as a singular figure in the furthest ring, Alt!Calliope serves to illuminate the alternatives to Caliborn’s false victory: in all the alternate possibilities illuminated by the dream bubbles, we see that Calliope can naturally predominate over Caliborn, but not vice versa.

Alternate!Calliope strongly suggests to us that Calliope is inherently stronger than Caliborn, and she tells us that Calliope and Caliborn share the same strength: she tells us yet again that Calliope and Caliborn are two sides of the same coin.

She suggests to us that, in a sense, Calliope and Caliborn are just Calliope -- that Calmasis, upon achieving integration, will simply view herself as Calliope, and Caliborn will lose because he was never the true self.

So why, then, does Caliborn win in the alpha timeline? Is it just an arbitrary time loop, a timeline plucked from the frothing sea of paradox space and arbitrarily validated by the happenstance of the immature Caliborn’s power over time?

No, I certainly don’t think so; I’d like to think that the principle of AURYN applies even here. Caliborn wins out over Calliope because they’re Doing As They Will -- because, even on the level of our trans allegory, they both have reason to want Caliborn’s victory. Even on the level of our trans allegory, Calmasis needs to be Caliborn.

Alternate!Calliope tells us that she had to become strong because she had no-one else to comfort her, and I think suggests two important points of interest:

Firstly, that alt!Calliope serves to reflect Calliope’s inner drama, just as Calliope serves to reflect Caliborn’s inner drama. Caliborn fears and loathes the possibility of being like Calliope, the sentimental degenerate and weakling that she is, and Calliope fears and dreads the possibility of becoming alt!Calliope. Calliope fears that even if she rejects the hateful accusations that are Doc Scratch, and rejects the teleological future of Lord English, her only alternative is to be like alt!Calliope: someone who has won, and who has become herself, but at the cost of isolation, distance, and loneliness, without humanity, connection, or kindness.

In other words, Calliope fears her victory would mean her little green skull is always going to be a miserable Federal Fucking Issue, for herself and for others.

Secondly, that Calliope’s relationships with humans are in some sense the vector by which Caliborn came to dominate. Alt!Calliope won because she had no-one to take comfort in, and thus she had to be strong on her own, but I think the flip side of that is that alt!Calliope was able to be strong, because she had no relationships that could weaken her -- she was more insulated from the toxic ideas of the cultures that came before her. No one could so much as accidentally insinuate to her that she wasn’t good enough or pretty enough as she was, save perhaps for Caliborn -- and certainly Caliborn would have been malevolent, but he would have had less in the way of the language and systematic ideas to be the hateful and cultivated misogynist that he became in the alpha timeline.

In other words, alt!Calliope doesn’t have any reason whatsoever to worry about her little green skull in the first place.

But there’s another much more straightforward reason why Caliborn had to win, too:

If we’re supposed to take Calliope and Calliborn as two facets of a whole more generally, let alone as a specific trans allegory, well... they may have been two personas, or even two people, but they are confined to an existence as a single player. The cherub session likely never could been anything but a single player session; the cherub session was always going to be a dead session.

And whether it’s a fundamental fact of SBURB or just an idea in Calliope’s head -- one of the ideas she’s likely constructed with the human cultural biases she’s obtained by osmosis -- Caliborn is someone who can win a dead session, and Calliope isn’t. How could a Space player, a patient creative, succeed in a test of frantic, timed destruction? How could a passive Muse succeed where even an active Lord would struggle -- how could a woman succeed where even a man would struggle?

Only someone like Caliborn could ever possibly win. Perhaps Calliope reflects Caliborn as the person he desperately wishes he wasn’t, and she is the shadow that lies outside of his hateful and constructed self, but as a precarious supergiant hangs overhead and the light of Skaia gutters out, Caliborn reflects Calliope as the person she desperately needs to be, and he is the self she has to construct for herself.

Caliborn kills Calliope’s dreamself not just because he desperately hates her, but also because she has to allow him to supercede her, and he is the kind of person she needs to be: because SBURB is unfair, Skaia is unfair, and he can escape the desolate waste of her life, while she cannot.

And so it happens that Calliope is exiled from the real and cast to the unreality of the dream bubbles, while Caliborn grows monstrously beyond himself, self-mutilated and cancerous.

People have commented on the obvious romantic symbolism at play in Calliope’s return to life in the real...

...but it’s not just the power of a love that saves Calliope. Love is powerful and transformative, but love alone isn’t magical. It isn’t even the power of a magical macguffin ring that saves Calliope, either, because a ring is never just a ring, even when it is magical.

What redeems the possibility of Calliope’s existence is recognition and freedom.

TL;DR: ‘Caliborn’ is Calliope’s deadname.

[arecomicsevengood]

Movies Watched During Self-Isolation, Part One: Mostly Just Paul Schrader Stuff

 I’ve been watching movies during this period of not leaving the house, which goes back a bit further than just when we are all told to stop leaving the house. The streaming services I have access to at the moment are just Kanopy and The Criterion Channel, so I have been watching different things than people who have Netflix or Hulu have been, most likely. These things are generally older, and possess a different set of aesthetic values than things seem to in our era of codified genres and niche marketing. Even the things I end up not being particularly into feel refreshing, in aggregate. There is a real sense of “they don’t make movies like this anymore!” which means, in a lot of ways, movies that seem keyed into being movies, that seem to understand the role of actors as charismatic, mysterious, or sexy, that then dictates the stories that get told. Let me break it down into some specifics, which will then function as recommendations.

The Comfort Of Strangers, 1990, dir. Paul Schrader. One thing I’ve been watching is a lot of Paul Schrader movies. This one comes from the era of the “erotic thriller” and was maybe marketed as such, but it feels like a post-Peter-Greenaway thing, maybe because of the presence of Helen Mirren. Mirren plays one half of weird and creepy older couple with Christopher Walken. Walken’s voice opens the movie with a disembodied narration that sets a tone of creepiness right from the jump, but the disembodied nature of it, heard as the camera roams through a residence, also recalls Last Year At Marienbad. The movie is largely about a younger couple, played by Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson, who are vacationing in Venice, and end up being stalked and sort of seduced by Walken and Mirren. The lens of sexuality is a huge part of this movie, but it’s this sort of mysterious force, like the gaze of the camera is itself a malevolent thing, because whoever’s behind it can be an uncaring pervert. Movies’ particular relationship to sex, and sex’s example of a compulsive behavior with capability of destruction, feels like it plays a large role in a bunch of the Paul Schrader movies I watched. I often chose to watch them because of this, their understanding of compulsion made them compulsively watchable, which I appreciated when I felt distracted or inattentive.

In The Cut, 2003, dir. Jane Campion. This has a similar thing going for it. In many of the film’s earliest shots, the camera follows the lead (Meg Ryan) from a distance, with bodies we don’t see the entirety of in the foreground, giving the impression she’s being stalked or in imminent danger, although mostly she isn’t. She plays a writing teacher who lives in an apartment where the head of a murder victim is found in the garden. Mark Ruffalo plays a detective investigating, they end up fucking, even as she becomes paranoid about all the men around her, especially after her sister (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) is also killed. The interest in this lies in the fact that it’s directed by a woman and has both an oppositional relationship to the male gaze and an interest in depicting female desire. It feels pretty sordid and a little rushed at the end. However, the ending seems rushed because the person that ends up being the killer is a person Meg Ryan’s character had no romantic or sexual interest in, and so largely ignored or didn’t think about. It’s not a bad movie but to whatever extent a movie stands on the strength of how interesting its actors are, this one doesn’t deliver. There’s a cameo by Patrice O’Neal though, as like the gay doorman at a stripclub Jennifer Jason Leigh lives above? If I understood correctly.

Patty Hearst, 1988, dir. Paul Schrader. This one’s really interesting, and I’ve kept thinking about it for a number of reasons. One is the interest of the Patty Hearst story itself, which I guess I hadn’t heard the entirety of or thought much about. For one thing, I don’t think I really understood the concept that she was brainwashed or had stockholm syndrome? Which is one of the things that makes the movie good, or what makes Natasha Richardson, playing Patty Hearst, so amazing to watch: She’s really compelling playing someone who has no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing at any given moment, because when you’re brainwashed, you don’t know you’re brainwashed, which is both perfectly obvious to me thinking about now, but that I also need to remind myself of when I think about MSNBC viewers positive feelings towards Joe Biden, for instance. The movie begins with her sudden kidnapping. There are shots that show her, in flashbacks to her life before that point, in a blindfold, that I wasn’t too into when I thought they were going to be sort of the entirety of the movie, but is I guess just intended as a visual metaphor for this sort of trauma as a deconditioning thing that removes whatever sense of a historical self she would’ve previously had. I also didn’t realize the Symbionese Liberation Army was basically just a sex cult with very few members, that robbed banks essentially just to fund themselves. Ving Rhames plays the leader of a group otherwise made up of a bunch of neurotic and ineffective white people. A lot of stuff happens, it’s all pretty interesting, and it doesn’t feel anything like a biopic, it always feels like a story is being told, but it’s always destabilized, and always heading towards doom. After arrest, Patty Hearst’s lawyer makes the argument that, even though she’s clearly brainwashed and undergone great trauma, and that is why she joined in bank robberies and the spouting of revolutionary rhetoric, it will be impossible for her to get a fair trial making that argument as so many parents felt their children went away to college in the 1960s and came back brainwashed as different people, though they did it of their own free will.

Hardcore, 1979, dir. Paul Schrader. This one’s about George C. Scott as midwesterner whose daughter gets kidnapped on a Church trip to California and ends up in porno. I guess has some parallels with Patty Hearst in terms of preying on parental fears, but also has this sort of sordid exploitation-y vibe in its basic summary. Peter Boyle plays a private detective whose debauched nature really bothers George C. Scott, whose beliefs the film takes pretty seriously. The end of the movie revelation that the daughter basically did run away and hates her dad sort of comes from nowhere, but the daughter is largely absent from the entire movie, and the disconnect between her and her father plays out so much from the father’s perspective it’s not really unearned. It also makes sense considered in the context of Patty Hearst, which is both a deepr work, but also a historical one, sort of about the creation of the moment and cultural context in which Hardcore would’ve been made and received. I wish Schrader’s first movie, Blue Collar, was available on a service I had access to.

Auto Focus, 2002, dir. Paul Schrader. This was the first Paul Schrader movie I was aware of, it was sort of critically-acclaimed. I avoided it because it seemed somewhat exploitative and grossly voyeuristic, being about Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane, here played by Greg Kinnear, and his interest in filming himself having sex with random women lured in by his celebrity. The film is characterized by a certain glib irony, but it’s also defined by the presence of Willem Dafoe, who’s great in it, as a completely loathsome person, taking advantage of Bob Crane’s celebrity to participate in the sex he otherwise would not have access to, and hastening his downfall by transforming him into a totally debauched sex addict, before finally killing him. The contrast between Bob Crane’s wholesome exterior and his descent into depravity is mirrored by a contrast between the the sort of jokey mockery of that contrast and a lived-in sense of squalor in the depiction of two men in a basement jerking off as they watch porn together.

Light Sleeper, 1992, Paul Schrader. Dafoe stars in this one, alongside Susan Sarandon, much hated by some for her adamant refusal to support Hillary Cilnton. This makes Sarandon admirable to me, but I don’t know how much I’ve seen her in. She’s in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, also on the Criterion Channel, a movie I thought was great when I saw it but have forgotten almost everything about in the years since. Dafoe plays a mid-level drug dealer, who’s been off drugs for a few years, and Sarandon is his higher-level contact, who’s looking to get out of selling entirely and enter the cosmetics business. Dana Delaney plays Dafoe’s ex-wife, from his addict days, back in town because her mother is dying in the hospital. The compulsion towards sex that’s present in a bunch of other Schrader movies is replaced here with drug addiction as this force to fight against, or exist in tension with, and also love, which is very present in this movie and very tender. The movie also boasts early-career cameos by Sam Rockwell and David Spade, and the great Jane Adams plays Dana Delaney’s sister. Delaney’s character ends up relapsing and dying, probably due to the shock of her mother’s death, probably not helped by the unplanned reminder of DaFoe’s character. It seems very rare for a movie to have roles as strong for women as this movie does. Even the psychic who Dafoe sees in two scenes, played by Mary Beth Hurt, who I don’t know from anything else, is great.

La Truite, 1982, dir. Joseph Losey. A friend of mine highly recommended Joseph Losey’s film Mr. Klein, but that one’s hard to track down. This stars a young Isabelle Huppert as a young woman who gets flown out to Japan by a rich businessman. He doesn’t have sex with her, just sort of enjoys the money being lavished on her, but her husband, who she also does not seem to have sex with, gets pretty pissed about it.

Eva, 1962, dir. Joseph Losey. This is a really similar movie from Joseph Losey in a lot of ways. It stars Jeanne Moreau, who also has a smaller part in La Truite, and it’s also about a woman whose whole deal is getting money from rich dudes and not having sex with them. In La Truite, Huppert’s life gets kind of ruined, in this movie, Moreau does the ruining, of an author/hack who is married to an actress from one of his work’s movie adaptations who doesn’t know what the he confesses to Moreau, which is that he stole the book from his dead brother and didn’t write a word of it. I wasn’t that into either of these movies but I feel like the sort of archetype, of like a young beautiful woman who doesn’t want sex and sort of just busts men’s balls “works” in a film, how film’s objective or ambivalent view makes their motivations opaque in a way that allows them to be compelling to male and female audiences alike, if for different reasons. Vera Chytilova’s Daisies plays on this sort of youthful feminine brattiness too, to a more anarchic effect. None of these characters have as much depth as Patty Hearst or any of the women in Light Sleeper but they nonetheless suggest the possession of such, kept far away from the camera’s eye.

[eradicatetehnormal]

In The Case Of Shipping. Queer Ships and Straight Ships

A topic I will never shut up about. Before I start I will admit, I am on the queer side of fandom a lot more often than I am on the straight side and I will be speaking from that perspective. If you have another perspective to share with me, please do so respectfully.

Shipping will always be something that gray to me. I like shipping culture and enjoy certain communities around certain ships, but people getting way too defensive about it will always be something to drags me emotionally. It makes me sad especially when it's people who are like me. Fellow queer shippers trying to explain why certain things between two characters can be seen as queer coding and then being called delusional by people who are either willfully ignorant or simply don't understand the point of queer coding. That's not to say queer shippers are without fault, however. We do have a really terrible tendency of calling people who don't like our ship homophobic and ignoring characters from other media that ARE actually written to be queer, in favor of continuing to argue that there are next to no queer characters in the content they like. While they are scarce they are not non-existent. Not to mention, a decent amount of character portrayals do tend to be very extremely sexual and can be found in places that they do not belong.

That being said straight shippers aren't without their faults either. For starters, I don't really see this being brought up, but they also like to portray characters in very sexual ways as well. Particularly, male characters, with a popular means of sexualization being centered around predatorial behavior towards one of the female characters, or being a C H A D. Again, I personally don't have a particular issue with this, but just like queer sexual content, it does not belong where anyone can see it. Straight shippers also have a bad habit of calling queer shippers p*dos and perverts, even for the most inoffensive gay fan content imaginable.

With so much tension heating up between two groups, any interaction can come off as an attack even if that wasn't the intention. We queer shippers tend to get sensitive when someone has the opinion that our ship isn't real. Now sometimes we are justified in getting annoyed with these people as some of them will go out of their way to find joke posts and innocent fan art of a same-sex ship and pull that line, even though that wasn't really the point of the original post. However, even in people's own spaces when they aren't going out of their way to attack us, we still get offended. What gives? So let's take a tweet that's similar to what I'm describing:

(obviously, this is a fake image, I'm just using it to get my point across)

Now on its own, there's nothing wrong with this tweet. In general, there's nothing with this tweet. It's just showing frustration with people making every relationship a romance even if two characters only interacted for a few minutes. That's true. Shippers do enjoy pairing two people together, particularly men, who don't really interact with each other. Here's the thing though. This is an argument that's very popular and one that's been used by some not-so-well-meaning people.

Alright, it's sad people hours now, sorry sis. So for a good amount of queer people who are online or are big fans of fiction, fandom has been a big part of their lives. Shipping, in particular, holds a special place in many queer fans' hearts as, even though it's pathetic, ships were a lot of people's first exposure to genuinely queer content focused around queer characters. It would be through this shipping that a lot of people would find friends who were into the same media and fan content. Some of these people would grow up together and eventually find out that the other was queer. Some of these people would go on to have romantic relationships with each other, and because they meant because of a ship, would go on to continuously celebrate it as if it were real because part of the reason their romance is real is because of that ship. Sometimes people will hold certain ships dear to their heart because they were able to use them to not only find other people like them but explore their own sexual and romantic orientation via fan fiction and fan art.

The attachment to fictional, non-canon relationships would be met with consequences, however. A lot of people would become TOO immersed in their ship and would start to get into debates with straight shippers. Many of which were, unfortunately, homophobic or queerphobic in some way. A lot of the arguments these people would use were a lot of the arguments used today. "Said ship isn't real, you're delusional", "That wasn't the writer's intention", "Stop forcing your ship onto other people", "Two people can't be friends anymore".

It's when you look at it through this lens:

That the fake tweet above starts to look like it was trying to say something a bit different:

Now is this what the tweet is actually saying? Probably not. TityMaster69 might be someone who has faced harrasment from shippers innocently trying to vent out their feelings, but because many people with malicous intentions have said the exact same things and used it as an excuse to speak ill of queer people in fandom, it FEELS a lot more mean-spirited than it might actually be. To add to that, many malicious people have used the reactions of queer shippers as a means of giving a pass to genuine queerphobia inside fandom outside of shipping:

The screenshot ARE real this time and in are relation to this btw:

https://twitter.com/samelCamelCase/status/1382846776806412290

Now to be fair StarVolt358 did apologize to the person who retweeted the post, but the fact that they even brought it up at such an inappropriate time does still prove my point because, in a way, they did bring it up to draw less attention to the queerphobia in the KH fandom.

Stuff like this has led to queer shippers being berated and attacked by straight shippers in the community, even though in some cases they can do more damage than the people they're calling out. Let's not forget when Reylo fans doxxed and harrassed the actors because they didn't like whatever happened in the Rise of Skywalker, or when Sokai fans harrassed the voice actor SpuukyLIVE on Twitter for joking that the scene in kh2 when Sora sees Riku again was gay.

As I do not have a lot of energy, there are a lot of nuances I've missed, like many people who like queer m/m ships being straight teen girls and not actual queer people or queer people who like straight ships. This was, however, just a post to get my full thots out there. I'll shut up now.

[jessicahughesart]

Inspirational artist links

Electric stimulus to the face- This work is particularly interesting when you consider that the electric stimulus makes each person’s face move in nearly identical motions. It makes me feel like humans have a little bit of robot in them, that they can be just as predictable as unpredictable. 

Alter Bhanhof Video Walk- This work is so relaxing it feels like a guided meditation or something. I like artwork that points out the patterns in human behavior and I especially like that this video feels like its focusing on perspective and trying to give every single viewer the same perspective which we know is not possible because our perspective is unique to us. By sitting in the same exact spot as the video was filmed and listening to a description of the spot as well it sort of echoes the space in a really pleasant way.

Bike Lanes- I remember seeing this work a while back, maybe 2014, and I thought it was hilarious. Denver’s bike lanes are terrible as well so watching him run into all of the things blocking the bike lane is almost satisfying? I never thought of it as performance art so now I get to view it through that lens.

Candice Breitz- I think this work is so interesting because the artist is giving the art made by others (Madonna and Bob Marley) it’s own face and identity by showing the people who strongly resonate with it. I think it reshapes what art can be, not only is the art you are viewing art, but now your perception of their art is art as well. Makes your brain hurt to think about it too long.

Meat Joy- I can’t think of anything that makes me more uncomfortable which I think is the intention of the artist, so its very successful. I feel like this work is relating living human bodies to the animals that we eat, not in an “animal rights” sort of way but in a way that makes us feel more connected. It appears to be about “consumption” which is more literal with the meat because that is something we would eat, and more symbolic with the sexual nature of the performers. Its thought provoking which is always a good thing but hard to watch.

Vanessa Beecroft- Beecroft is a very interesting artist and I’m not totally sure that I understand her work just from those two examples, her interest in the human body and turning it into dramatic formations and just letting the women exist as they would if no one was around feels like dropping a curtain. We’re used to seeing models act a certain way to sell us something or to convey something theatrically so asking that the models do not try to act any type of way is a very interesting concept for her work. She lost me when she said she didn’t like casual audiences I don’t know why she would feel that way so I’m disappointed the interview cut off.

Bill Viola The Quintet of the Astonished- This work holds you in suspense for so long and I get a different experience every time I watch it because every time I focus on a different person. Its such an intriguing video and that by itself makes it successful.

Staging- I like the meditative qualities of Maria Hassabi’s work, when she said that she wanted to slow things down and for her performances to have weight I could feel that anticipating her slow movements. I also appreciate what she’s saying about occupying space.

Talking Tongues- Monologues are an interesting form of performance art. The line between theatre and performance art is tricky but I really appreciate that this feels like having a conversation with your neighbor.

Perimeter of a Square- This piece is interesting because it incorporates some of the more basic elements of art like line and shape. The body creates the form acting as the medium but where the work is never finished, it is happening and when its no longer happening it does not exist. 

Punk Prayer- Pussy Riot has been a familiar performance art group for me for while although I had never seen this one in particular. The work they do is radical and sends a message about the state of their world. I’m inclined to love political dissent.

Cut Piece- Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece is one of the most iconic performance pieces I can think of. I love what the interviewee is saying about how cutting fabric off of someone is a violent act but inviting people to cross that boundary blurs the meaning behind the act. I often think about how the men in the videos of the performance are cutting pieces that are close to her breasts or thighs, and I wonder if men now would be hyper aware of women being sexualized in art and choose to cut somewhere like the sleeve to avoid that narrative.

Interior Scroll- I’ve seen this work a few times and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me want to cross my legs. But what I love about it is how I get to uniquely understand it, that sensation of wanting to cross my legs and protect myself comes from a place of understanding. And of course, the message on the scroll relating to the critique of her doing “messy female work”, the female body (assuming cisgender) is inherently messy as are all bodies and she embraces her mess.

Bound Mouth + Foot- This is another one that is difficult to watch. The words don’t seem to relate to each other but I think maybe its confronting the messiness.

[talbottoalam]

Hedi Slimane by Benjamin Chait

Aesthetics define photography and they also help in shaping a fashion sensibility. For French designer and photographer Hedi Slimane (born Paris, France, 1968) they are one in the same. Slimane is most widely recognized for his work as a fashion designer and creative director for the houses of Yves Saint Laurent, Dior Homme, Saint Laurent, and currently for his position at the house of Celine. His fashion designs are in many ways married to his photographs, specifically in their shared obsessions with youth, rock n’ roll, glamour, and California. Born in Paris, Slimane remembers picking up his first black and white camera at age eleven to begin recording the time he was living in.According to him, his preference for black and white photographs dates back all the way to Nadar, who Slimane feels is the father of the French photographic tradition he participates in with his camera. Following his departure from his first appointment at a fashion house in 2000, Slimane began a residency at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and published his first book of photographs. Throughout his many high-profile and highly profitable appointments within the fashion industry, photography has remained a constant focus for Slimane.

Naturally his talent as a photography and his talents at clothing designers would bleed into one and another, (and with the power appointed to him by his role as creative director) and so Slimane began shooting his own fashion campaigns, first at Saint Laurent and then at Celine. Before Slimane’s first runway debut for Celine’ Spring/Summer 2019 collection, he began “teasing” the world with his vision for the house by posting his photographs to the brand’s Instagram account. Fashion critic Robin Givhan noted that the photographs were united in that they all featured “young, androgynous models staring into the camera and looking vaguely dissolute.” This choice of subject is something that crosses over between Slimane’s fashion work (both photography and design) and his personal photographs.

Slimane’s photographs that were used as advertisements for Celine (figures 1-3) show a range in his fashion design abilities, but a rather singular, if not limited vision as a photographer. All the photographs were presented through Instagram with the Celine-branded format. The portrait of Liv is one of the teaser shots and shows a thin female form wearing an extravagant couture dress. What makes it Slimane is the messy unkempt hair and skeletal frame. Having Liv’s back positioned towards the camera adds an aura an anonymity—this could be any woman, hopefully a client. Within this series of ads is a similar photograph, but here the work is a color photograph and of a male model with long blonde hair modeling a leopard-print jacket. The texture of long shaggy hair is almost surfer life, and beautifully contrasts with the pattern of the jacket. Slimane does not often use color in his work, but it may have been a pressure brought about by the demands of social media (color photos tend to be more popular) and the business side of Celine who may feel that a color image better shows a range in offerings from Slimane’s collection. Fashion photographer is a tricky art to master as there are other considerations beyond the story and the aesthetic needs of the image; the clothes must look desirable. The concept of fashion photography is nothing new to Slimane, who has shot stories for Elle, V Magazine, and Vogue Russia. He told The New York Times, “Occasionally, I would shoot fashion photography, but it is a photographic repertoire of its own, and about a certain romanticism, precisely composed, with a production, groomers, stylist, etc.”

One of the ads, by default considered a fashion photograph, is a still-life shot of disco balls in Berlin taken by Slimane. Without product visible in the shot, the suggestion is that music and night clubs are an essential part of the Slimane’s vision for the brand.  The music scene has been a relentless reference for Slimane, along with the subcultures of skating and surfing which he started shooting in 2007 when he moved to California from Paris. While at Saint Laurent Slimane photographed a series of rock icons such as Courtney Love, Marilyn Manson, and Joni Mitchell in an ongoing campaign. The obsession with these subcultures is best documented on Slimane’s website, hedislimane.com/diary. This ongoing photo project was launched in 2006 and is full of thousands of images of his life in Los Angeles and around the world. They are all in black and white with high contrast and strong grain. Most images do not feel stage, but instead assume the atmosphere of a photographer on commission to capture a secret youth society that you will never be invited to join. Prevalent in this body of work is Slimane’s obsession with young, thin, blonde men. This is evident in three photos from a series published on his website in the fall 2017 (figures 3-6). Two photographs are live action shots of skateboarders in action. The long messy blonde hair mirrors the style seen in his later Celine ads; from a Californian skate park to a high fashion house in Paris. The shots are irreverent and also extremely beautiful. The black and white adds a sense of balance and serenity to the chaotic scene taking place. Though Slimane has stated he likes to keep his photographic work under his name to protect his creative boundaries, there are clear trends between his life in Los Angeles and his fashion collections. His photographs provide the key to this. Though the handsome young man in figure 4 is a part of the Californian skate subculture, his likeness in Slimane's photograph stamps him with a fashionable, even sexualized gaze. His skinny frame, boy-like features, and undefined age suggest a creepy aspect to Slimane’s work. Slimane's fascination with a certain type of youth (white, thin, rebellious) penetrates his personal and professional fashion photographs. The only difference is really the background and the context. Slimane told the Business of Fashion that he is trying to recapture parts of his youth through his photographs, saying, “I always looked at my own youth with a distance. I was not really part of the action, and watched all my friends around me through a lens, the observation of the fields of possible emerging talents and restless behaviors.”[8] His photographs, whether they be his fashion photographs or his personal diary, display a singular style of the highest technical quality. Together they form a unique vocabulary, making mundane sub-cultures and grungy rock shows feel glamorous, and injecting a sense of rebellion and youth into high fashion.

The young kids that populate his photographs and inspire his fashion collections, be them models, rock stars, or skaters, surrender their devil-may-care sense of cool to Slimane. Slimane is not cool himself, per se. But his photographs are, and so are his collections. Of course, the lives of those skater kids are not particularly enviable. They only become so after they are glamorized, really aestheticized by Slimane’s lens. This is why Slimane is not—contrary to his own beliefs—a reportage photographer.  Furthermore, participating in the fashion system only makes one a cog in a larger capitalist machine. Buying a Celine leopard-print jacket will not transform one into a cool long-haired skater, the kind of man Slimane fetishizes in his photographs. But perhaps that is the very brilliance of Hedi Slimane; he makes things appear more desirable than they actually are. His consumers are on some level conscious that his photographs fuel the desirability of his clothing collections. And yet they buy them anyway. The subjects of Slimane’s diary photographs will never be able to purchase the clothing he designs, and yet they pose for him. Each camp markets in what the other will never have. Slimane acts as the middle man. Through his photographs and collections, he has mastered and commodified the one thing that is certain to fade: youth.

[canardroublard]

TMFU, Gaby’s fashion, and some feminist film analysis

Back when I slapped together a reblog post about the men’s fashion in The Man From UNCLE in between physio appointments, which somehow got like way more notes than I ever really expected or even wanted, I didn’t address the fashion of the lead female character, Gaby. It was outside the scope of the OP, and I didn’t feel like I had anything new or interesting to say about Gaby’s fashion, or lack thereof.

(My beta says those earrings are the ugliest thing ever. I disagree. It’s a wonder we’re still friends)

Anyways, we see only one brief scene of Gaby in her own street clothes, and a slightly longer sequence of her in her work clothes. The rest of the film, she is wearing clothes chosen for her by Illya. Saying “we just don’t have enough info” is a perfectly reasonable approach to this. So this was the other reason I had no intention of making this post.

But then people started getting interested. Someone reblogged commenting about Gaby’s fashion, and I discovered that I have very strong opinions about something I’d previously claimed was unknowable, and it made me wonder what was going on in my brain.

Then I talked to some other TMFU friends who all seemed interested in what I assumed was common knowledge/nothing unique. So, they may have been feigning interest out of politeness, but it activated the art history side of my brain, and here we are now!

The boring stuff but please read this

I am not attempting to tell anyone how to interpret this film. I am not even trying to change people’s minds or persuade them to my thinking. All I am doing is sharing my thought process. I wasn’t even going to do this for Gaby until people asked. To this end, please don’t attempt to argue with me about this. I don’t want to argue. I won’t respond to it. If you disagree, then please, just move along.

And I’m going to remind people that I love TMFU. I love this movie so much it hurts. Why am I putting this reminder here? Because I am about to apply some critical analysis to it, and in places this will be cynical, and it will not always look kindly on the film. If you just want to exist in a happy “I love TMFU!” bubble and not hear anything less than 100% positive about the film (which is a totally valid choice, I don’t fault anyone for that), then don’t read. But don’t yell at me for being mean or criticizing the film, because I warned you.

Tldr; or, if I were still being graded for this stuff here’s my thesis statement

When analysing Gaby’s fashion, there exist considerations which don’t apply to the male characters. Namely, she is a woman and the male gaze is a thing. So I am very, very wary about taking at  face value any expressions of traditional femininity in the choices made  for her outfits, hair, makeup, etc. Therefore, when considering her character, I find it much more useful and informative to give more weight to the aspects of her appearance which do not connote traditional femininity, rather than those that do.

For readers who have studied enough  media analysis to follow my thought based on that alone, there’s the thesis statement, y’all can go home (or at least skip to the end where I come to a conclusion). If you’re lost, then read on.

(mobile readers, the cut here might not work, and if so I apologize for what is going to be a very long post. Tumblr’s “keep reading” functionality is inconsistent at best, but I tried)

Context is for kings essential for analysing media in a meaningful way

(Or, some brief background. Stick with me here, we’ll get to the good stuff soon)

So, art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Attempting to analyze any artwork (in this case a film) while disregarding the culture it was created in and the intentions of the creator is...not going to get you very far. Asking “what is art” is a question that quite frankly exhausts me at this point (looking at you, Duchamp) but the closest I’ve ever come to an answer is that the only thing that separates art from everything else is intent. And intention only exists within cultural context. So yes, intent and context don’t just matter peripherally, they are one of the biggest considerations one needs to make when analyzing works of art. The creator in this case being Guy Ritchie et al, the culture being British/American Popular Cinema in The Year of Somebody’s Lord Two-Thousand-And-Fifteen. 

Everyone views and creates (if applicable) art through their own distorted, murky, imperfect lens of personal experience. And one of the most persistent Things in western art is that cishet men create art based on their experience of Being A Dude. This is crucial, because this lens of cishet male perspective literally underpins almost all of western culture including popular culture. And thanks to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, we have a name for this.

The male gaze and you

I’m going to quote Wikipedia here, because honestly this intro sentence sums things up rather neatly (with one exception which I will address momentarily).

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer.

What does that all mean? That the Viewer and the Artist are both cishet men by default, and any women are Subjects of art. Women are viewed, never viewers. Men take action, women are subjected to actions. Furthermore, women are supposed to be pleasurable to view. By men. Since the Viewer is male by default.

But I would disagree that the pleasure is inherently based on women being sexual objects. That’s honestly a really damn limited read on the whole theory, and it’s one that Wikipedia itself contradicts later in the article. More broadly, cis men also derive other forms of pleasure from the presentation and viewing of female bodies, including aesthetic pleasure (the enjoyment of looking at beautiful things).

The theory of the male gaze is not without limits. As originally theorized, afaik it’s not particularly intersectional. It doesn’t really address queer perspectives or perspectives of POC. However, these issues are something I just can’t address here, unfortunately. And when looking at popular media, I still find the concept of the male gaze, imperfect as it may be, is a helpful means of analysis, so it’s worth having in your toolbox.

Circling back, the easiest way to sum up the male gaze, if you’re still not super clear on what it is, is with a demonstration.

Ever seen a shot like this in a movie?

And did you immediately roll your eyes? Feel gross? Congrats, you have just perceived and reacted to the male gaze.

Now we actually get back to TMFU

But the male gaze also shows up in many more subtle, insidious ways than fanservice-y boob shots. For this post, let’s focus on the following considerations, which might help everyone follow my thought process more clearly.

Gaby is a woman

She functions as the love interest of Illya in the script (I am not talking from a shipping perspective. What you ship does not matter for this discussion. I am talking about the narrative function of Gaby in the script as written. Put on your “cishet man” goggles for a moment)

Illya is a man who is attracted to women, specifically Gaby (again, I don’t care if your shipping conflicts with this. I am analyzing the film based on a literal reading of it as if I were a cishet man. Why? Because that’s who made the film. That’s who it’s “for”. I am all for queer readings of film--hell, I ship OT3, I myself have chosen a queer reading for how I interact with it, but I’m not critiquing people’s readings, I’m critiquing the film itself and to do that I have to critique its intentions and cultural context.)

Cishet men are traditionally only allowed to be attracted to women who are conventionally attractive. If they were to be attracted to anyone else it would destroy their fragile senses of self and their heads would explode or something. At least I assume that’s what must happen, based on how terrified they are of it.

Therefore, Gaby must be conventionally attractive, because it is literally required of her or otherwise the whole underpinning of western straight malehood crumbles and then where would we get such a pure, vast source of unadulterated toxic masculinity?

(Yes, this is a very cynical read on things. I’ve studied, like, three centuries worth of this bullshit. I’m tired. Let me be cynical.)

Or, to force myself to be less cynical, Gaby has to be pretty because...nope, this is still going to turn out just as cynical.

But what I will say in favour of this movie is that it gives Gaby and Victoria both a lot of agency and general awesomeness, which is quite unusual in this sort of big-budget action film, and it’s one of the big reasons I love it. I’m not saying that the entire film is sexist. On the contrary, there’s a ton of stuff to celebrate about how it portrays its female characters. But these aspects don’t change the cultural context, and we still have to consider the impacts of the male gaze.

Anyways, point being is that as filtered through the male gaze, Gaby is never given the option to, say, wear no makeup (or the appearance of such, as the guys are afforded, this being cinema where “no makeup” still means makeup) because that would look “ugly”.  Instead she needs to have a “baseline of pretty” which is way higher than reality because she is not a real human being with her own agency, she is a character created by a cis male writer/director team in a film directed by a cis man in a genre that caters to cishet men.

Gaby doesn’t exist in a vacuum. She exists battling centuries and centuries worth of sexist convention.

Now then, remembering all of that, let’s actually look at her. There are woefully few good pictures so I’m going to have to piece things together a little. Starting with the coveralls.

This is a great look, I love it. And I’m going to give Ritchie a lot of credit here because it would’ve been easy to go for a “Michelle Rodriguez in F&F sexy mechanic lady” look. In case I need to provide a visual:

(Repeat above gif about rolling my eyes)

Now, to be clear, I am not making any judgement about the way any real-life women dress. I’m sure there’s plenty of female mechanics who have their hair down and wear tank tops while working. That doesn’t bother me. I don’t care if real life mechanics choose to do their jobs in a string bikini. Or in cosplay of the bee from Bee Movie. I don’t care (and quite frankly it’s none of my business) because they are real people who can make their own decisions. But what I am talking about here is a fictional character who does not have her own agency. I am critiquing how male creators choose to dress their female characters.

So I personally choose to read much more into the unpretty  aspects of Gaby’s outfit, because these are not the “obvious” or “easy”   things. Obvious and easy are “of course she wears makeup” and “of course her hair looks good” and  “of course she doesn’t look like a swamp witch  who bathes in mud and spends her days cursing passing men”. Those things don’t challenge or disrupt the assumption that women must look attractive for male consumption.

Gaby’s introduction to us is with her in a pair of grease-stained, baggy coveralls, not wearing any obvious makeup (again, this is cinema, so she is wearing makeup. For cinema the goal posts around “wearing makeup” always need to be moved from where they’d be irl). There’s very little here that screams ‘pretty’. And that is fascinating to me.

I don’t know how deeply Ritchie thought this through when giving final approval to the costume, hair and makeup. But unpretty is not the default here. It’s a choice

And look at this. This is the stance and dress sense (and socks!) of a woman who does not give a damn about looking good for the male gaze, whether the in-movie gaze of Napoleon, or the implied gaze of the viewer and creator. It’s not ‘pretty’. And this is the only time in the film we see Gaby in her own everyday clothes, as she only escapes East Berlin with the literal clothes on her back.

So how do I think Gaby dresses? I think that for the most part she dresses....like this. Practical. Comfortable. With a few simple touches of things she likes/finds pretty, perhaps, but not with a specific interest in being pretty. She dresses for herself, not for others. And if that isn’t something to aspire to, I don’t know what is.

[dailycwsupergirl]

“Supergirl” will be gaining a new ally — TV’s first transgender superhero — when her series returns on Sunday. That night viewers will meet Nia Nal, who is a reporter in training working alongside Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist), the civilian guise of the title hero. As the season progresses, Nia will be revealed to be the superheroine Dreamer. The character will be played by Nicole Maines, an actress and activist who is also transgender.

“It is a phenomenal time to be a queer nerd,” Ms. Maines said. “We have so much representation on the superhero shows!”

Ms. Maines is heroic herself: In 2014, she successfully sued her school district after being denied access to the girl’s restroom at her school. During a recent telephone interview, she answered questions about playing Dreamer, the reaction to her casting and getting suited up to fight for justice. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

What do you hope the reaction will be to you being on “Supergirl”?

So far it’s been so positive and it’s just been this complete outpouring of love and support for me as an actor, for me as a trans woman and for this character. I think so many people are relieved and happy and excited to see someone like them on television. And to see someone like them on television as a superhero! Seeing yourself as a superhero is kind of the most validating thing. I hope that all people, not just trans people, fall in love with Nia and her energy and her as a superhero. And I hope it just grows and evolves from that.

The reaction from San Diego Comic-Con when your role was announced in July was extremely positive. Have you heard about any detractors?

Of course there are always negative reactions to everything that anybody does. At Comic-Con, I was just so blown away. Having the entire room applauding and cheering for a trans superhero — that was really, really inspiring for me. As far as negative stuff goes, I do see a lot of folks, and especially a lot of parents, talking about “I’m not going to allow my child to watch this show anymore. I’m not going to let my young daughter watch ‘Supergirl.’” That’s so sad to me. We have a female-driven show in a male-dominated genre, and you’re not going to let your daughter watch this empowering show because it has a trans character? I think what a lot of folks are afraid of is that we’re trying to cram some sort of agenda down their throats. And that’s not the case. It’s not preachy at all. Nia is presented as a very real person with real problems. And her story arc is outside of her gender, outside of her transness. I just hope people who are kind of anxious or cautious about this will give it a chance.

Why do you think it’s important for young viewers to see a character like yours on television?

This season of “Supergirl” is very reflective of the climate that we’re living in right now. It is using the lens of a superhero show to talk about real world issues. I think kids need to watch “Supergirl” for Nia, because there are more and more trans people coming out younger and younger. I think it is necessary to educate folks on trans issues and to make them aware of trans identities and normalize it, because it is normal. But when you’re shielded from something and it’s actively censored, it takes a negative connotation. If people are more educated and they’re more aware of these issues and more familiar, they won’t feel so foreign.

Why do you think it is critical to have a trans person playing a trans character?

Because it’s validating. Historically we have seen cis men play trans women and vice versa. That casting breaks through the fourth wall and it gives people the message that trans people are being played by cis men in real life, which is where we get this idea of men in dresses. But that’s not what happens. When we have a trans woman playing a trans woman then you see, “Oh wait, this is what trans really is. This is what it looks like: a person.” That sends a message to trans kids that they are valid in their identities, that they are allowed to exist. It also sends a message to cis gender people, to parents, that trans people are not dangerous or sexually deviant or any of these myths that have kind of been construed by conservative outlets. It’s just an identity that people live. As trans folks they have completely normal lives and some of them become superheroes. And that’s O.K.

What was your experience like on set?

It was phenomenal. It was like I was back in seventh grade, the new-kid-in-school kind of energy. Everybody was so friendly and welcoming. To use a popular term of the kids of today, they have been “woke.” They have been so sensitive to my identity and they have been so welcoming. It gives me the warm fuzzies.

Do you feel comfortable enough to suggest changes to the script, if something does not feel worded properly, with regard to being trans?

Absolutely. The writers said, “Listen we aren’t experts” — and of course neither am I. I can only speak from my own experience. But they’ve been very proactive in making sure that they are approaching the situation as best that they can and I’m doing the same thing. So we’ve been combing over everything trying to give the best representation of Nia that we can. And that includes all of her flaws and all of her strengths. I think accurately presenting a trans character means not presenting them as perfect — I think there’s been a pressure to do this with trans characters. They can have no flaws because they must represent the entire trans community. Now that we’ve seen broader representation of trans identities, I think it’s safer to explore the fault in these trans characters and make them entirely human and three dimensional. Nia’s not perfect. She has her own stuff going on which makes her compelling and sympathetic, and makes her relatable and interesting.

Have you been suited up for a costume yet?

I’ve been measured for a suit. We’re working on it and I’ve seen some things. I can’t say anything, but it is beautiful. I kind of think I have the best suit. Everybody’s suits are pretty great, but I kind of think mine is the coolest. But I might be biased.

[craftcrit]

Gothic Literature- Drawing on feminist readings of Gothic Literature analyse the way in which Gothic Literature has responded to the changing roles of women in society.

The Gothic genre has always been viewed through the lenses of psychological thriller or horror. The strange and uncanny of it all causes the unease that we as readers have come to love. But what is it that causes such unease and why do the writers of such a genre become so entranced by it? The stories of The Castle of Otranto, Carmilla, Rebecca and Twilight are excellent in their own right. Yet the path of most fruition in understanding these stories is through the lens of feminism. Through it one can begin to unravel the role of women throughout history and it’s ever changing presence. As such this essay will establish what each of the stories define as the roles of women beginning with The Castle of Otranto and how Hippolatia is depicted as Walpole’s ideal women as opposed to Isabella or Matilda who are naïve and do not understand their role in society. Next, the essay will look at Carmilla and how Le Fanu’s vampire is the embodiment of the threat of feminism in the era and the freedom to womanhood that Carmilla represents by removing the male from sexual relations. The story of Rebecca will look at the twentieth century woman and the breakdown of norms and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight will look at how this breakdown has shaped the modern role of women.

 The Castle of Otranto (Walpole, 2001) written in 1764, follows the story of Manfred, the lord of the Castle and his family. Walpole’s novel indicates the dominant, infallibility of men as opposed to their “damsel in distress” (Siddiqui, 2016) counterparts. In the nineteenth century, women had no rights and were considered second class citizens, and received “unworthy inheritance, such as bible, books and household goods” (Gilbert and Gubar, 2006). Hippolita, Manfred’s wife, is a prime example of this since she is so willing to accept divorce from her spouse simply because he said so. Walpole (2001) explains in the novel that “a bad husband is better than no husband” and without pleading or begging, Hippolita accepted the fate her husband wrote for her. In fact, she has no place to argue- she has submitted herself to her husband “physically, economically, psychologically and mentally” (Siddiqui, 2016). Due to this, Hippolita is the exemplary form of womanhood in The Castle of Otranto. She accepts her divorce and, in the novel, explains that she will “withdraw into the neighbouring monastery and the remainder of life in prayers and tears for my child and –the Prince’’ (p.90-91). She does not fight for her rights and gives herself to God because that is what is expected of her, something she tries to pass on to Matilda and Isabella when she explains, ‘’It is not ours to make election for ourselves; heaven, our father and husband must decide for us’’ (Walpole, 2001). This further highlights Hippolita’s ideology that the men of the family and in the lives of the women have priority in life, being dependent and subservient on these men is what is expected of women and hence the role of women should be of servitude to their husbands and fathers.

 Matilda and Isabella are younger than Hippolita and have less of an understanding of how they should be dependent. Although Hippolita tries to explain to them, Matilda only understands through her own experiences. As a female child of Manfred, she is introduced as “a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen” (Walpole, 2001) as if to say those are her only qualities- she is good looking and at the age to marry. However, she is still a woman and therefore “equally dismissed since under the prevailing system of primogeniture only males could be heirs” (Ellis, 2010). She is neglected by her father and even when she tries to comfort him after Conrad’s death she is met with “cruel emotional attitude” (Putri, 2012). Walpole (2001, p.21) writes:

“She was however just going to beg admittance when Manfred suddenly opened his door; and it was now twilight, concurring with the disorder of his mind, he did not distinguish the person, but asked angrily, who it was? Matilda replied trembling, “my dearest father, it is I, your daughter”. Manfred stepping back hastily, cried “Begone, I do not want a daughter”, and flinging back abrupty, clapped the door against the terrified Matilda”

 Due to this, Matilda must accept that due to her gender she is expected to be treated in such a manner and her father will not give her any affection. Putri (2012) writes that for Manfred- “it would be better that Matilda be neither seen nor heard.” (p.7). Isabella who is Conrad’s fiancée is forced by her father to marry Manfred after Conrad’s death. She too is a victim of the patriarchal society in which she lives. She must marry Manfred even if there is no love there and only after Matilda’s death does Theodore accept her, and she becomes Lady of the castle. Even after this, the assumption would be that she becomes subservient to Theodore as opposed to her father. Therefore, the role of women in The Castle of Otranto is subservience to the men in their lives and this is their calling.

In contrast, Le Fanu’s Carmilla (2005) originally written in 1897 is the story of Laura and Carmilla, two young women who do not obey such a patriarchy and are in a lesbian relationship. Before Carmilla, vampires were predominantly male such as Lord Ruthven from John William Polidori's The Vampyre (2017). Signorotti (1996) argues that Le Fanu’s choice of creating a powerful female vampire was because it “marks the growing concern about the power of female relationships in the nineteenth century” since this was the time “feminists began to petition for additional rights for women. Concerned with women's power and influence, writers . . . often responded by creating powerful women characters, the vampire being one of the most powerful negative images” (Senf, 1988). It is for this reason that Carmilla is depicted in such a frightening and sensual way by Laura. She represents the allure of women as sexual beings with fangs dangerous enough to topple the patriarchy that the women in Walpole’s novel held to such esteem. Laura recounts one night that:

“I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself.” (Le Fanu, 2005)

Carmilla is liberating her fellow woman from the grip of a male dominated life and the needles of freedom cause her pain from the familiarity she initially grew up with into an unknown but free world where their union without a male partner gives them liberation from male authority.

 The exclusion of the man is further shown by General Spielsdorf’s recount of when he tried to catch the vampire that was causing his niece, Bertha, to become ill. He watches from the door as he saw “a large black object, very ill-defined, crawl, as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to the poor girl's throat.” (Le Fanu, 2005). Carmilla takes away the male inclusion and leaves him a voyeur to a union that is beyond the heterosexual norm. This is a freedom from the patriarchal society that has ruled over women for centuries into a freedom over their own lives both physically and psychologically. Signorotti (1996) explains that “Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to be stow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women.” (p.607). This exchange symbolises the change in normality. Not only are women becoming independent from males for their living needs, they are also becoming free in their sexual needs. Where The Castle of Otranto focused on the ideal women being subservient and dependent on the male in one’s life, Carmilla focuses on the threat of women to oppose Walpole’s standard of servitude to the patriarch that controlled their lives and of their bodies as factories for new male heirs. Carmilla is the free women that Walpole’s characters never dreamed of.

 Rebecca (Du Maurier, 2007) was written in in the twentieth century (1938) and is the story of the narrator’s marriage to Maxim de Winter and the subsequent flashbacks to her time in Manderley where she learnt about her husband’s first wife Rebecca and her lingering presence even after her death. Nigro (2000) argues that although the common assumption about Rebecca is that she is manipulative and convinced everyone she is flawless, she was justifiably murdered according to the second Mrs. de Winter. “What if, however, Maxim is the one who is lying, and Rebecca was as good as reputation held her, if his jealousy was the true motive for her murder?” (p. 144). Furthermore, Wisker (1999) points out that Du Maurier is known to have unreliable narrators. Therefore, finding the truth behind Rebecca’s character, flawed or perfect, becomes difficult. This difficulty blurs the lines between gender roles and conformity. The superiority of men is shown by Mrs. Danvers’ comparison of Rebecca as a man, “"She had all the courage and spirit of a boy, had my Mrs. de Winter. She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that. I had the care of her as a child. You knew that, did you?" (Du Maurier, 2007) showing the importance of being a “man” at the time and how they were seen to be superior. When the audience finds out about Rebecca’s imperfect character, one of her detrimental features is that she is promiscuous and why Maxim killed her. Maxim’s murder could therefore be because he was constrained by what people would think if his wife was expose to be a “harlot” and murdered her to uphold the principles that Walpole emphasised- something he cannot go against in his social circle, whilst Rebecca herself was trying to be as free as Carmilla and trying her best to live a happy life unconstrained by social norms and patriarchal glances. The role of gender and women becomes blurred in Rebecca as these roles begin to breakdown and become synonymous to both genders.

 Maxim’s attitude towards his new wife is almost paternalistic, treating her like an immature girl referring to her as “my child” and “my poor lamb” (Du Maurier, 2007). Where Mrs de Winter wants to become more mature, Maxim tries to keep her away calling it "not the right sort of knowledge" (p. 223) and telling her “it’s a pity you have to grow up” to block her from gaining the maturity that she craves. As a result, Mrs de Winter becomes trapped in a purgatory between maturity and upper-class standards and immaturity and the life she has come from. This entrapment is what the patriarchal norms establish, the damsel that must be guided by a firm male hand because of her ignorance as opposed to the woman being on equal footing to the man and someone who can take care of themselves. It is this standard that the narrator is held to and is also the standard Maxim held Rebecca to and subsequently murdered her because of. The shame from having a free woman as a wife is what led him to his crime. It is for this reason that the ultimate villain of Rebecca is in fact the patriarchal system in which the characters are confined. Wisker (2003) argues that the aristocratic setting of Rebecca “was to represent an unease at the configurations of power and gendered relations of the time.” Pons (2013) furthers this argument and explains that “the ultimate gothic villain is the haunting presence of an old-fashioned, strict patriarchal system, represented by Maxims mansion, Manderley, and understood as a hierarchical system.” This configuration of patriarchy established in the eighteenth century by Walpole is that of servitude for women and dominance for men. However, in an era where women have more power and have freedom as expressed in Carmilla suggests that these roles are becoming unfulfillable and it is because of this system that the characters are led to “hypocrisy, hysteria and crime.” (Pons, 2013). Thus, the role of women as a strict social etiquette breaks down and although they are treated still as subjects, the shift in power to give women their freedom is evident.

 Twilight (Meyer, 2012) written in 2005, follows the story of Bella Swan who falls in love with a vampire and the subsequent life they have together. However, it is subject to great controversy especially because of Bella herself. She seems to conform to female roles that are more akin to Hippolita than Carmilla. Rocha (2011) argues that “Bella illustrates female submission in a male dominated world; disempowering herself and symbolically disempowering women.” She sees herself in a negative light that is incapable of doing anything herself and is totally submissive in nature becoming a pawn in the life of the men of her life. Mann (2009) argues “When Bella falls in love, then, a girl in love is all she is. By page 139 she has concluded that her mundane life is a small price to pay for the gift of being with Edward, and by the second book she’s willing to trade her soul for that privilege” (p.133) and hence has a Hippolitaian quality of sacrifice for the pleasure of men and hence develops nothing about herself. Mann (2009) continues to say that “Other than her penchant for self-sacrifice and the capacity to attract the attention of boys, Bella isn’t really anyone special. She has no identifiable interests or talents; she is incompetent in the face of almost every challenge...When she needs something done, especially mechanical, she finds a boy to do it and watches him. (p.133) This leaves Bella as a “damsel-in-distress” (Rocha, 2011) where Edward becomes her saviour. Thus, the role of women in Twilight seems to be that of a possession to enhance the male being.

 It could however be argued that Twilight contains a relationship that female readers can relate to in its ability to show the “women’s powerlessness and their desire for revenge and appropriation.” (Jarvis, 2014) and how the heroine proves to the hero ‘‘their infinite preciousness’’ (Modleski, 1982) bringing the hero to contemplate, worry and obsess over the heroine in a way that the female reader can share “the heroines’ powerlessness and accompanying frustration.” (Jarvis, 2013). This leads to what Nicol (2011) explains is the ‘‘complexities of female sexuality for women in the twenty-first century’’ in so far as it provides a ‘‘socially sanctioned space in which to explore their sexual desires.” These desires are evident in Bella and Edward’s first kiss, that Bella describes:

 “His cold, marble lips pressed very softly against mine. Blood boiled under my skin, burned in my lips. My breath came in a wild gasp. My fingers knotted in his hair, clutching him to me. My lips parted as I breathed in his heady scent.” (Meyer, 2005, p. 282)

 This sexual tension is introduced earlier in the book where Bella is told that ‘‘Apparently none of the girls here are good-looking enough for him’’ (Meyer, 2005 p. 19). Jarvis (2014) explains that because of this any “female who secures the inaccessible Edward will rise in the esteem of her community” and since she is claiming him, someone who thinks of herself as “ordinary” (p. 210) the excitement for both Bella and the reader who is caught in this sexual act- almost participating in it- is why the sexual nature of the book is so enticing. Therefore, although Bella can be seen as holding the values of Hippolita, the Twilight saga speaks volumes in its showing of the complexities of the social code that twenty-first century women must abide by. They are expected to be as obedient as Hippolita whilst being as sexual desirable as Carmilla or Rebecca. Bella’s metamorphosis from the ordinary human to the alluring vampire symbolises this. Women’s roles therefore have changed to give them more freedom, but they are still expected to behave like Hippolita when the “freedom” they have been given.  

 In conclusion, the role of women and their identities have changed over the centuries. Walpole’s eighteenth-century idealism was that of the subservient woman that belonged to the patriarchal figure in their life in order to produce a good heir. The nineteenth century however became the start of the empowerment of women and much of the anxiety in Carmilla is her powerful nature as a woman to do as she pleases, removing the man and the patriarchy from Le Fanu’s world. She is thus depicted as a vampire- alluring and deadly- much like giving freedom to women who cannot control nor be trusted with the power they could be given. Rebecca leads to the twentieth century where the woman has been given some freedom to do as she pleases so long as it is under the watch of a man. Maxim’s murder and subsequent second marriage where because he could not control his first wife. The twenty-first century culmination of these roles comes in the form of Twilight where the heroin seems bland on the surface but actually shows the metamorphosis of womanhood through the centuries from that of a second-class servant to the ultimate freedom away from the patriarchy that Le Fanu’s Carmilla started centuries ago. As a result, the role of women has been fluid through the years. The ultimate goal of feminism is to have equality and the books that have been mentioned show that equality can only be achieved if any form of patriarchal culture is removed- a feat that has yet to be conquered.