sophiaserpentia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophiaserpentia) wrote2008-08-20 05:29 pm
sophiaserpentia) wrote2008-08-20 05:29 pm
Entry tags:
moon-blood, fate, and the gods: on transwomen in Sandman and The Invisibles
There's been some interesting discussion in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
transgender about "A Game of You," which was a story in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. (I'd link but it's a locked post.) You can read a synopsis of the plot at Wikipedia.
One of the major characters of this storyline is Wanda, a transsexual woman. Many of the folk in that community have, as do i, very mixed feelings about the way Wanda's place in the story was handled. Is it a sympathetic portrayal? An objectifying portrayal? Why is transgender even an element of the story at all? Was the purpose simply to make one of the characters quirky? Or is the intention to explore something deeper?
I'll start by saying that i do believe that Gaiman (and Grant Morrison, whose portrayal of Lord Fanny in The Invisibles i want to compare and contrast) does not seem to approach transgender as a metaphor or literary device (e.g. movies like "The Crying Game" or "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"). It doesn't "mean something," it is just a way some people are. He also does seem to understand that transgender is rooted primally in a transperson's experience. It is fundamentally an aspect of what it is like to be me; it does not come from culture or abstract gender conceptualization, although the way in which it manifests is shaped by those things. It is not a religion to which i converted; there was never a time in my life when i was not transgender. Gaiman seems to understand these things about Wanda.
I also want to say at the outset that authors are not required to do things that make us happy. I don't mean that in the sense of, was his portrayal tolerant or intolerant. I mean, sometimes an author may, if it suits his or her purpose on the way to making a bigger point, narratively affirm a concept or point which seems discordant.
And so it is during the part of the story when Thessaly, who turns out to be a witch who by hook and crook has kept herself alive for thousands of years, draws down the moon and creates a bridge into the dreamworld. Two other women who are present can cross; but not Wanda, because she was born male and has no menstrual blood to offer. A disembodied face Thessaly has nailed to the wall, who speaks with supernatural knowledge, affirms this and refers to Wanda as a man. Actually i found an excerpt of the dialogue between Wanda and the disembodied face:
In Gaiman's narrative the proposition that "chromosomes are destiny" seems to be affirmed, countered only by Wanda's stubborn refusal to accept it. It comes across as being something Gaiman as a person believes (hence the controversy in the trans community over this work). What adds weight to this conclusion is that (1) it fits in with the cultural meta-narrative, and (2) gender essentialism is common in the esoteric community. I've encountered it far and wide among ceremonial magicians and neopagans of various paths.
Howeeeeever, i'm not convinced that Gaiman is asserting gender essentialism as established fact. Rather, he seems to be opening a conversation on essentialism, and particularly on transgender as a rebellion against fate. Wanda tells the gods where to shove it, and in the end, when she is in Death's realm, we see her assertion vindicated. There's a number of ways to take that, but if you look at the issue from the perspective of the primary arc in the Sandman series (that all things, even those which are endless or divine, are subject to being challenged and/or forced to change) one might argue there is a "Yeah, but" disclaimer tacked onto Gaiman's narrative affirmation of gender essentialism.
I'm aware that i may be giving Gaiman more credit there than he deserves. For one thing, usually when an author has a character voice an opinion which is not what he or she "really" believes, there is some kind of indication that the author as a person does not hold that view. OTOH, it *is* a way to have it both ways: an affirmation of gender essentialism as the present reality but with an indication that the future reality is being pushed in a different direction by the reality of what it is like to be transgender. If it was his intention, he chose a risky way to show his views. How many parodies of racism or sexism (or other satirical works) have been mistaken for the real thing?
As i mentioned above i wanted to compare and contrast Gaiman's Wanda with Lord Fanny as shown in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, specifically the notable "Apocalipstick" storyline. Hilde (whose codename is later Lord Fanny) was born a boy but raised as a girl by her grandmother, a witch who needed a girl to carry on her tradition. The problem was, it was customary for the initiate to be presented to Mictlantecuhtli, the Lord of the Dead, when she has her first menstrual blood. Hilde, of course, cannot menstruate; but her grandmother pokes her inner thigh with a knife and hopes that this will satisfy the god. The god, when he appears, does not seem terribly concerned; he is not fooled, but accepts Hilde in the capacity in which she has been presented, telling her, "Do you think i have never seen your kind?"
The narrative in this case rejects gender essentialism. BUT, Morrison seems to interpret gender *entirely* as performance. While he is quite aware of and sympathetic about the ways in which transwomen are used and abused, he doesn't really seem to grasp the difference between a transsexual woman and a drag queen. In this work transgender experience is stretched and squeezed in order to fit an overriding story arc - in this case, an entreaty (reminiscent of Robert Anton Wilson) to challenge every last perception and conceptualization (mostly by violating taboos).
transgender about "A Game of You," which was a story in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. (I'd link but it's a locked post.) You can read a synopsis of the plot at Wikipedia.One of the major characters of this storyline is Wanda, a transsexual woman. Many of the folk in that community have, as do i, very mixed feelings about the way Wanda's place in the story was handled. Is it a sympathetic portrayal? An objectifying portrayal? Why is transgender even an element of the story at all? Was the purpose simply to make one of the characters quirky? Or is the intention to explore something deeper?
I'll start by saying that i do believe that Gaiman (and Grant Morrison, whose portrayal of Lord Fanny in The Invisibles i want to compare and contrast) does not seem to approach transgender as a metaphor or literary device (e.g. movies like "The Crying Game" or "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"). It doesn't "mean something," it is just a way some people are. He also does seem to understand that transgender is rooted primally in a transperson's experience. It is fundamentally an aspect of what it is like to be me; it does not come from culture or abstract gender conceptualization, although the way in which it manifests is shaped by those things. It is not a religion to which i converted; there was never a time in my life when i was not transgender. Gaiman seems to understand these things about Wanda.
I also want to say at the outset that authors are not required to do things that make us happy. I don't mean that in the sense of, was his portrayal tolerant or intolerant. I mean, sometimes an author may, if it suits his or her purpose on the way to making a bigger point, narratively affirm a concept or point which seems discordant.
And so it is during the part of the story when Thessaly, who turns out to be a witch who by hook and crook has kept herself alive for thousands of years, draws down the moon and creates a bridge into the dreamworld. Two other women who are present can cross; but not Wanda, because she was born male and has no menstrual blood to offer. A disembodied face Thessaly has nailed to the wall, who speaks with supernatural knowledge, affirms this and refers to Wanda as a man. Actually i found an excerpt of the dialogue between Wanda and the disembodied face:
WANDA: I am not a man.
GEORGE: Maybe not to you, you're not. But you've got the uh, you know. Male nasty thing.
WANDA: Listen: I've had electrolysis. I'm taking hormones. All that's left is just a little lump of flesh; but all that doesn't matter... inside I'm a woman.
GEORGE: She doesn't think so. And to be honest uh well even if you uh had the operation it wouldn't make much difference to the uh moon. It's chromosomes as much as uh anything. It's like uh gender isn't something you can pick and choose as uh far as gods are concerned.
WANDA: Well, that's something the gods can take and stuff up their sacred recta. I know what I am.
In Gaiman's narrative the proposition that "chromosomes are destiny" seems to be affirmed, countered only by Wanda's stubborn refusal to accept it. It comes across as being something Gaiman as a person believes (hence the controversy in the trans community over this work). What adds weight to this conclusion is that (1) it fits in with the cultural meta-narrative, and (2) gender essentialism is common in the esoteric community. I've encountered it far and wide among ceremonial magicians and neopagans of various paths.
Howeeeeever, i'm not convinced that Gaiman is asserting gender essentialism as established fact. Rather, he seems to be opening a conversation on essentialism, and particularly on transgender as a rebellion against fate. Wanda tells the gods where to shove it, and in the end, when she is in Death's realm, we see her assertion vindicated. There's a number of ways to take that, but if you look at the issue from the perspective of the primary arc in the Sandman series (that all things, even those which are endless or divine, are subject to being challenged and/or forced to change) one might argue there is a "Yeah, but" disclaimer tacked onto Gaiman's narrative affirmation of gender essentialism.
I'm aware that i may be giving Gaiman more credit there than he deserves. For one thing, usually when an author has a character voice an opinion which is not what he or she "really" believes, there is some kind of indication that the author as a person does not hold that view. OTOH, it *is* a way to have it both ways: an affirmation of gender essentialism as the present reality but with an indication that the future reality is being pushed in a different direction by the reality of what it is like to be transgender. If it was his intention, he chose a risky way to show his views. How many parodies of racism or sexism (or other satirical works) have been mistaken for the real thing?
As i mentioned above i wanted to compare and contrast Gaiman's Wanda with Lord Fanny as shown in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, specifically the notable "Apocalipstick" storyline. Hilde (whose codename is later Lord Fanny) was born a boy but raised as a girl by her grandmother, a witch who needed a girl to carry on her tradition. The problem was, it was customary for the initiate to be presented to Mictlantecuhtli, the Lord of the Dead, when she has her first menstrual blood. Hilde, of course, cannot menstruate; but her grandmother pokes her inner thigh with a knife and hopes that this will satisfy the god. The god, when he appears, does not seem terribly concerned; he is not fooled, but accepts Hilde in the capacity in which she has been presented, telling her, "Do you think i have never seen your kind?"
The narrative in this case rejects gender essentialism. BUT, Morrison seems to interpret gender *entirely* as performance. While he is quite aware of and sympathetic about the ways in which transwomen are used and abused, he doesn't really seem to grasp the difference between a transsexual woman and a drag queen. In this work transgender experience is stretched and squeezed in order to fit an overriding story arc - in this case, an entreaty (reminiscent of Robert Anton Wilson) to challenge every last perception and conceptualization (mostly by violating taboos).
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In the context of their time, Gaiman's presentation of queer and trans characters had more impact than it does now, simply because he includes such characters without making their queerness/transness central to the plot, and doesn't openly vilify them. On the other hand, there's a subtler tendency to make those characters both peripheral (Wanda's death is almost incidental to "A Game of You" -- it's indirectly Thessaly's fault, but its direct impact on the central plot is limited) and somewhat pathetic or pitiable.
I would make the comparison to Eddie "Rochester" Anderson on the Jack Benny show (from around 1937 until the early 1960s). Rochester was a groundbreaking black character in some ways (he got a lot of good lines, and he frequently was given some withering zingers at Benny's expense), but he was still in a fundamentally servile role -- Benny's butler/valet/chauffeur -- and in an expressly inferior position to the other characters (whom he always addressed as "Mister" or "Miss"). The show occasionally (especially before the war) had some fun with period racial stereotypes, but never really challenged them. It was edgy enough in its time to earn a certain amount of controversy, but to modern eyes/ears, much of it still seems reactionary.
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Hmm, that's an interesting point - and if you're right, then it reduces Hazel and her pregnancy (and therefore her womanhood) to being metaphors -- which is something i find difficult to accept. If aspects of the human condition are used as literary devices or metaphors for something else the author is on dangerous territory.
Wanda's death is, IMO, frankly gratuitous. At least the old homeless woman died saving Barbie. Wanda's death serves really no purpose for the plot, except to allow for some pathos as Barbie has to deal with Wanda's terribly transphobic family of origin. (In fact i wonder if Gaiman offered this as a counterpoint to the gender essentialism of the earlier part of the story? Worth pondering.)
It's hard for me to read "A Game of You" in the context of when it was published because i have only recently encountered it, but you're right, it needs to be considered in that context, which makes many of these sins a bit more forgivable.
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Furthermore, I think both Hazel and Wanda are in the story primarily to 'center' Barbie. When Barbie first appeared (in "The Doll House"), she was largely a caricature -- married to Ken (a bit of comic relief acknowledged diegetically), an almost absurdly girly femme who dreams of being a princess. Using Hazel and Wanda (and to a lesser extent Thessaly) as counterpoints makes Barbie the normal one, even though the plot is about a real exploration of her childhood fantasia. Finally, Barbie is given the power to dictate whether Wanda is a man or a woman (even the image of Wanda as a woman with Death is in Barbie's dream). It falls to the heterosexual, cisgender woman to set everything "straight" in the end.
If the final chapter of this story had been a stand-alone, without the rest of the fantastical plot, it would be moving and maybe even enlightened. In context, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
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You would think, in this day and age, that a story like Hazel's would be complete and utter fiction. Sadly, it is not. I've worked for the past four and a half years for a women's clinic and I hear patient stories like hers (and worse) so much that it makes me want to scream. :/
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Morrison seems less comfortable outside of cisgender norms than Gaiman. Fanny treads into caricature a lot, as does Jolly Roger (and what the hell was up with Robin's line about drag queens and lesbians hating each other? That one still nettles). Meanwhile Boy, who I gather was supposed to be a butch straight girl, suffers from Morrison's obvious uncertainty with what to do with her. I liked Roger in spite of myself (enough to make me rather angry with her ultimate fate), but both she and Fanny suggest a presumption of gender essentialism that makes me itch.
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I was extremely moved by Apocalipstick the first time i read it. It resonated in many, many ways with what i was going through at the time. Plus it was affirming to see Morrison's almost flippant denial of gender essentialism, as if it weren't even an issue worth worrying about. The drag queen material i can sometimes forgive because i have known and befriended numerous drag queens throughout my life, and i know the ways they use dramatic flair and flamboyance in layers, like veils, to reinvent their life into something colorful.
ETA: But, yeah, Morrison on the whole seems to have a very cissexual view underneath it all. He sees drag and transgenderism as "edgy" challenges to an unjust established order -- and not really fundamentally more than that. He is, at least, vividly sympathetic when it comes to mistreatment of transwomen, more than one might ask from other authors who have written in similar veins (i would expect much less in this regard from, say, RAW).
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I give Morrison some credit for not desexualizing Fanny; given the basic action-adventure underpinnings, I wouldn't have been surprised if the only hints of Fanny as a sexual being had been Dane's discomfort with her.
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Of course, one can be a gender essentialist and still have the decency to realize that even people who don't agree with you are people, and not freaks and monsters. Perhaps that is what is coming across in that story, which has always itched at me as well.
I agree with Argentla above that the pregnancy side of that whole plot -- the way the female character in that case was trivialized to the point of near non-existence -- was infuriating. I also found it stupid and not well put together.
I'm not familiar with "The Invisibles," so I can't make a comparison myself.
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Amen. Gaiman's primary strength as a writer is that he has a pretty good ear for dialogue. Given the arenas in which he customarily works (comics and then fantasy), I think that's given people an inflated opinion of his skills. His plots are frequently murky and deliberately anti-climactic, with a Chris Claremont-like reliance on ominous allusion and portent that isn't always paid off. There's also a preciousness and a tendency to pander to a perceived audience that sticks in my craw.
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In this case, I felt that Wanda was treated badly, both as a person and as a character -- one doesn't let characters who are important just sort of fall out of the plot like that.
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Years later, I read the interview with Gaiman in Hy Bender's Sandman Companion, where Gaiman says:
After completing the series as a whole, it was a lot less easy to read the triple goddess as the authorial POV character, too, but none of the first readers had that context.
And, okay, but gods and what they can do with their opinions aside, there's Wanda's death.
And then I've got to go back to Samuel R. Delany's intro to the trade paperback (read somewhere in the years between the comic and the Bender book), where he talks about that, along with the death of the single character of color in the whole story:
And you can find that. On the other hand, I've read it again recently and it still seems entirely too easy to read in such a way that it plays in to some of the very things it's attempting to criticize.
I mean, later in that same Bender interview, Gaiman explains that he kills Wanda because hers was the only death that made the story a tragedy. But she still dies. And dies a rather pointless death in the cause of advancing Barbie's plotline and emotional development. As does Masie Hill, the aforementioned black woman who gets tangled up in Our Heroes' story.
Wow. It's been almost 17 years now, and I'm still struggling with this one.
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This is what makes me say that Gaiman's risk basically backfired, if most of the readers are coming away with a reaction that is the polar opposite of what he was really hoping to convey.
Even so, i found the very end, Wanda standing there with Death, to be very moving. A bit melodramatic, but effective.
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A good way to correct ignorance is to openly admit it. So, I'm going to admit my ignorance...
What do you see as essential differences between transsexual women and drag queens?
Here's all that I know and understand:
To me, a drag queen is flamboyantly expressing female attributes. She may or may not consider herself to be 'truly' female.
To me, a transsexual woman considers herself to be 'truly' female. She may or may not be flamboyant.
Am I missing something?
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With that in mind, I suppose you can make the case that Lord Fanny isn't truly reflective of a real transsexual person. But... I still love the character regardless.
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That line, to me, reads like an authorial statement by Gaiman.
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George (essentialist): bad guy
Thessaly (essentialist): not a true bad guy, but not a sympathetic character at all
Wanda (non-essentialist): unreservedly one of the good guys, and a very sympathetic character
It's just that a lot of readers seem to think that George, in explaining that Thessaly, the moon, and the gods all hold the essentialist view, and the fact that the plot follows the essentialist course, is speaking with the authorial voice.
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I think last time we had this discussion, it was about The Giving Tree. Some people misinterpret Shel Silverstein's intention, but that's not because he wrote sloppily - it's because people tend to read through the lens of their pre-existing world-view.
In other words, I think Gaiman, like Silverstein, was perfectly clear, and understood by a great many readers, but when you are widely read, there is always a percentage of misinterpretation. Anyone who is half bright and has read enough Gaiman knows that the so-called "authorial voice" varies so widely that either he is a very talented writer with an excellent imagination and good empathy and expression of variant viewpoints, or he is schitzophrenic.
I think my sympathies in this matter are clear ;)
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How can you relate Lord Fanny in any way to trans? She is very clearly a drag queen. Im pretty sure that the books state that again and again. And while I love the grandmothers strategy and its success from a storytelling/mythological angle, how the hell can that be seen as something other than child abuse? I knew a guy in college who's mother wanted a little girl and used to play dress up with him. He had some issues. Lord Fanny may have embraced her "destiny" but the story never does much with the fact that it was somebody else's selfish design.
I love Lord Fanny in these books because the character (to me) represents just how complex and non linear sexuality and gender can be and intentionally obscures the line between nurture and nature/destiny. The moment where she losses faith and is re-empowered by the sin eater is one of the most moving things I've ever read. That scene encompassed the moment when Fanny took possession of her past and future.
Ok, so that came out as an emotional thing rather than really part of the discussion. I guess my point will be that Wanda is clearly trans and is Fanny is clearly a drag queen and Im not sure that comparing them is appropriate. Maybe if they were both written by the same author you might be able to say more about how he is understanding and representing gender by comparing/contrasting them.
It also seems to me unlikely that an author that is not trans or a drag queen or at least queer is likely to get this type of material "right". It also occurs to me that gender and sexuality are still hotly argued topics in academics and probably in their own communities and I bet that not all trans people would understand those characters the same. I would like to read that thread in the other community but as you said its locked.
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I think the comparison/contrast is fair to the extent of, how did Gaiman vs. Morrison handle the question of the character's male birth gender with regards to menstrual magic, and what were both authors using their male-born female-identified characters to say.
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