#performing gender

many authors writing painful books these days worry that readers will react poorly at them.

i worry that readers won't feel that i write pain to show i felt it, you aren't alone, i heard you.

that's the reason i make art these days

I did do one AU where Jake is the team nothlit.  And one AU where Marco is the one split in half as a starfish.  You could probably also count that AU where Tobias’s house ends up becoming the home base for the team.

But also I agree that messing around with backstories is always a great opportunity for characterization because it raises fascinating questions about what makes the characters themselves.

I saw a conference presentation make the argument that fan fiction which alters a facet of a known character’s identity is inherently about what it really means to have a that identity.  Gender-bent fic demands a definition of gender, and grapples with questions at the core of what gender is.

To use the original author’s example, if Tony Stark is instead Antonia Stark, what does that change and what does it not change?  Does this version of the character still use the hyper-masculine name of Iron Man, reflecting the trend of non-men pretending to be male in anonymized spaces (e.g. web forums) to avoid sexism?  Does this version use a feminized version such as Iron Maiden or Iron Woman, and to what extent does that suggest canonical Iron Man is fundamentally male?  How does Antonia Stark’s relationship with the press differ from that of her male counterpart, especially if she remains a sex symbol in this AU?  Would she even become CEO of a tech company if she was female, or would she be shut out of the field the way that a majority of women in STEM eventually are?  Would she still be talked about as “the smartest person alive,” or would she instead have to endure condescending comments about how nice it is to see a woman in engineering for a change?  Either way, what does that say about our cultural standards for intelligence, for excellence, and for meritocracy?  Where do sexuality and gender diverge, and what does that mean for Antonia’s possible romance with Pepper?  Where do gender and sex diverge, and is the fic more or less close to canon if Antonia is still assigned male at birth?  So on and so forth.

And while I definitely had some inklings about not being entirely cisgender prior to the pandemic, I became increasingly aware of my gender over the course of the Year That Wasn't, culminating in five days spent almost entirely solo where I mostly had no gender at all.

I'm not entirely sure how to label myself, but what feels comfortable right now is to say that I'm mostly a girl but sometimes I'm nothing.

💜