moon-blood, fate, and the gods: on transwomen in Sandman and The Invisibles

[sophiaserpentia]

There's been some interesting discussion in 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).

Comments

[argentla.livejournal.com]

My viewpoint of "A Game of You" is shaped by Gaiman's unpleasant portrayal of Hazel in that story, with the shocking -- and frankly, entirely implausible -- naivety of her pregnancy. It seems to me like Gaiman was trying to create a dichotomy between Hazel and Wanda in this story: the irony that Wanda, whom George reminds is not a 'real' woman, understands more and is less naive about being a woman than Hazel, for whom the realities of biological womanhood are unknown territory.

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.

[argentla.livejournal.com]

Also, I had really mixed feelings about the portrayal of Lord Fanny in Invisibles. "Apocalypstick" gives a surprisingly nuanced picture of her background, but Morrison generally seems more interested in a semi-comic indulgence in stereotypes of the flamboyant drag queen. Although it was refreshing to see Morrison recall in "Kissing Mister Quimper" that Fanny could indeed be a bad-ass, she's frequently trivialized in ways the others are not. (Future-Fanny's admonition to Robin to tell her younger self to diet springs to mind.)

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.

[contentlove.livejournal.com]

Neil Gaiman is remarkably available to people who wish to discuss his work, or ask him other questions. I think the world of him, and suspect that you might be pleased with what you find if you engage him directly about this matter. Contact information is on his website.

[akycha.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I think you might be giving Gaiman too much credit as a writer. I know that he has a cult following, but I have found his work to be shallow and not particularly thoughtful. Gender essentialism seems right up his alley, in my opinion.

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.

[deifire]

I had a really hard time with this story when it first came out. (Which would have been in 1991-92 according to the copyright dates on my comics, and, wow, I was...younger then.) On the one hand, it seemed obvious by that point in the series that Death was the closest thing to a Gaiman POV character the comic had, and it was obvious where she stood. On the other, Gaiman's giving the opposite opinion, not just to any character, but to the gods themselves. All of them, if we're to take George at his word. And definitely to at least one pretty powerful female deity.

Years later, I read the interview with Gaiman in Hy Bender's Sandman Companion, where Gaiman says:

"Regarding the contentious page 19, where George comments that neither Thess nor the moon believe gender to be elective, lots of readers assumed that that was my position too, because who could argue with an opinion shared by an ancient witch and a lunar god? In fact, my feeling was always that that's an opinion the gods can take up their sacred recta. I feel the story makes clear that Wanda considers herself a woman; and that, at the end, Death does too. To my mind, that's all that matters."

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:

"It seems to me, as I was saying, that the key to this particular fantasy world is precisely that it is a fantasy world where the natural forces, stated and unstated, whether of myth or of chance, enforce the dominant ideology we've got around us today, no matter what...Making the supernatural forces in the tale enforcers in the dominant ideology is what makes it a fantasy--and a rather nasty one at that.
And it remains just a nasty fantasy unless, in our reading of it, we can find some irony, something that subverts it, something that resists that fantasy, an array of details that turns that simple acceptance of ideology into a problem--problematizes it."

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.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

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.

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?

[neko-special.livejournal.com]

Morrison actually went out on the town in drag and wrote down his experiences, then drew the Lord Fanny character from them. If I remember correctly, he mentions this most thoroughly in the Anarchy For the Masses book.

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.

[darkphoenixrisn.livejournal.com]

WANDA: Well, that's something the gods can take and stuff up their sacred recta. I know what I am.

That line, to me, reads like an authorial statement by Gaiman.

[cennetig.livejournal.com]

I love the Invisibles chaotic mess that it may be. The Apocalipstick story line and its direct connection to the way Lord Fanny defeats/saves Quimber is my favorite thread. I hesitate to say anything about the gender theory presented in the books because Im hardly an expert but...

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.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I always read A Game of You as questioning the gender essentialism of traditional magic. Yeah, the gods - the old gods - and the old traditions are binary about these things. That doesn't mean it's right, or that it'll always be that way.