extremely long multiple paragraph post about the wicked years, gelphie, gender, and queerness as a social class.
essentially i think what makes gelphie very complicated is that the wicked years series establishes them as clearly romantically linked but never establishes them as queer, or makes an attempt to establish queer women as a legible class with complex relationships to gender and society. I think they arguably do for queer men--for example Sarima refers to Crope and Tibbett as "inverts" and Trism mentions that gay sex isn't accepted in his social class. They also mention that there's a tradition of men playing the role of the female fairy Preenella during celebrations so there's also a history of drag. It's also clear that crope and tibbett approach gender in a way that's linked to their sexuality. but at the same time Trism balks at the idea of dressing like a woman, so gender fluidity isn't universally accepted. There were also a couple different instances where male characters cohabitated in what was implied to be a romantic way. that tells me that queer men exist in the wicked universe, that they're socially recognizeable and legible to other characters, and that it is possible for average people (or Animals) to make a life with each other.
at the same time, we don't really get that same degree of clarity with queer women. someone calls elphaba "a woman who prefers the company of other women" in the opening and like 3 books later someone tells Rain not to get too attached to female teachers. But there doesn't ever seem to be any evidence of how "a woman who prefers the company of other women" is recieved in the world. what is their relationship to gender? what's their social station? there are a couple characters besides glinda and elphaba who are implied to be queer (oatsie manglehand and lurline/preenella) but they're never really discussed as a social class. their queerness is never legible to other characters. also the hints of homophobia that elphaba and rain experience (see above) are never applied to Elphaba and Glinda's relationship. Nanny says that Frex and Turtle Heart are "flirting like schoolgirls" or something like that, but she only says that Elphaba was "devoted" to Glinda in a way that never registers to her as strange.
I think the first book especially is dedicated to exploring the different ways someone who is nominally a woman can be considered evil. queerness is ostensibly one of them, but the social impacts of queerness are never addressed, so it never really makes sense. why would it matter if elphaba had gay sex if we never find out what people think about women who have gay sex? we hear a lot about what Glinda thinks about basically every aspect of society (including "theatre people") and a lot about how people interpret her, but her relationship to elphaba as a specifically taboo relationship or her attraction to women is never something that comes up at all, even when she's talking to other queer characters. And that's the crux of it all. Glinda and Elphaba behave in ways that are queer (and this was done knowingly, and with intention) but they don't understand themselves as part of a class of queer women (even subconsciously, ie "I know what I feel is wrong/different") and neither does anyone else.
And yet when queer women talk about those characters, they not only identify the characters as queer but speak specifically to how their sexuality affects their relationship to society. ie in the movie Cynthia, Marissa Bode, and arguably Ariana are all very invested in the characters' sexuality. Cynthia and Ariana have made it clear that they view Elphaba's queerness is related to her sense of otherness and Glinda's queerness as part of what motivates her need to perform. they were also conscious that queer women as a social class would respond to the characters in a specific way for those reasons.
I also think that legibility is VERY important to queer women generally because a major way that bi women and lesbians experience homophobia is as erasure. For example when pluribus was airing, people were very frustrated that news outlets never identified Carol as a lesbian, because that label is important for people because lesbianism as an identity is so often erased or disputed. or I just finished reading A Desolation Called Peace (also written by a queer woman) and even after two female characters have made out twice, one of them asks the other if she actually likes women. OR how the bridgerton showrunner (a queer woman) talks about the sapphic bridgerton couple is very direct in a way that's very different from how gregory maguire talks about gelphie.
I think there is demonstrably a noticeable mismatch between what the Wicked books think queer women would think about themselves and how they actually ARE talking and thinking about themselves. I don't think it means they're bad books or "bad representation" and I actually really like them, even if I don't agree with everything they say (esp about disability among other things). HOWEVER I do think that queer women reading them will inevitably pick up on the fact that what the author values is slightly different from what they value AND people with homophobic inclinations can and do use the ambiguity around Glinda and Elphaba to deny that there's any sexual or romantic element to their relationship at all. This means that not only are they reading the text against authorial intent and losing crucial pieces of information about major characters' motivations, they also make discussions of the book actively hostile to queer women. I mean I'm not trying to attempt an epic cancellation on a very old bostonian gay man here BUT I do think there are several valuable lessons to be learned here about ourselves and our world
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