Quality Human Meat For Less

"Because the decision rests entirely on the Montana Constitution, it is insulated from the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the principle of adequate and independent state grounds, the federal Supreme Court cannot review a state court's interpretation of its own constitution, so long as that constitution provides more protection than the federal one. [...] What this means in practice is that Montana's transgender residents now have a constitutional shield completely independent of the Supreme Court of the United State’s decisions."

Judging from interviews, anecdotes from people who knew them, and their performances, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, and Chappell Roan are/were all very aware that they are/were putting on personas that exaggerated stereotypes of masculinity/femininity. Bruce was deliberately dressing up like his blue-collar father to do the kind of work that his blue-collar father didn't respect as 'real' work. Dolly embraced her drag queen fandom, and Chappell takes style cues back from drag. These people are all self-aware performers doing art with the trappings of gender.

There's a damn good reason that Dean Winchester turned up in my mind as one of two possible directions for playing with stereotypes and trappings of gender for queer women. There's been a lot of ink spilled (most of it not by me, I'll defer to the experts, I'm just here for a good time) over how, when someone tries to build the most manly manly male fictional character, they tend to pile on traits that many real men have but not usually all at once. The sheer unrealistic weight of idealised masculinity makes it feel like a parody, like a put-on. And for an actor or writer to then give the character any sense of groundedness, to make him feel like a person instead of a caricature or a cartoon, the character has to be treated as though, even subconsciously, he's putting at least some of it on.

However. Dean Winchester is a fictional character, and so, is incapable of any real interiority. Given the facts of multiple writers who were apparently sometimes at war with the showrunner and the studio, the 'interiority' that he seems to have also changes by the episode. It's physically impossible for him to be self-aware and deliberately playing with the trappings of the role that he inhabits, because he doesn't exist, and so doesn't have an independent mind to make decisions with. Like any other fictional character, he's less an artist constructing a deliberate persona, and more a ready-made persona for an artist to identify with, play with, use, subvert, step into. (Possess? But that's another thread to pull, for another long-winded, too-serious and yet also too-silly post.)

Anyway. Point is. You have to be a real person with an independent mind to be able to put on a persona that is constructed by a 'real' self underneath. But you definitely don't have to be a real person with an independent mind for your persona to be constructed of an exaggeration of the trappings of masculinity - or femininity - or for that persona to be used, recontextualised, reconfigured, played with in deliberate ways that are compelling to a queer audience. And when I think of fictional women who embody stereotypical femininity to the degree of Dolly or Marilyn, there's really only one. One icon. One big name.

I don't know, in 2025, if there's a big mainstream household-name performer who's doing butch the way Bruce Springsteen and James Dean did butch who could stand as the counterpart for Chappell Roan.

I miss my powers. Yeah. Tell me about it.