Tag Archives: queerness

Julia Serano on Call Out Culture

Posted on by

I have an interview with Julia Serano up today at the Atlantic, in which we talk about her wonderful new book Excluded, which you should all go out and buy right now.

The interview got cut a little for space reasons, so with the Atlantic’s kind permission, I decided to post the excised bit over here.

You talk a bit about call out culture and where you see problems with it. So, thinking about the Hugo Schwyzer mess in particular, I wonder if you could talk a little about how you think activist communities can be inclusive and open to difference, while still being able to respond to or deal with folks who actually are undermining their goals or exploiting them.

The chapter in which I talk about call-out culture is the last chapter and it’s called “Balancing Acts.” And I talk about how activism needs to be a balancing act between the fact that we each have our own issues and concerns and agendas, and then there are other activists coming from other perspectives who have their own issues and concerns and agendas. And the best thing for us to do moving forward is to create intentionally intersectional spaces where we both talk and listen to one another, and where we give people the benefit of the doubt.

I think that can happen on a very conscious level, especially in smaller situations.

It becomes a real problem on the Internet. Just because, as you pointed out, there are bad actors, and people who are either going to be selfish and only talk about their own issues, or who are purposefully undermining other people. And you usually can’t police who shows up at your blog post, or who comments or who doesn’t.

As I was writing that chapter, I knew that it was a very complicated issue. But I do think it’s important to try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I know for myself, that I grew up in straight mainstream culture that didn’t really have a feminist analysis and that was very anti-queer. And I learned what I’ve learned as an activist slowly but surely, and I went through various stages of probably being messed up in my perspective, just because I was new. And I think that we need a way to give people who are new to activism a chance to learn, and to be given the benefit of the doubt if they say something that other people think is problematic, as long as they’re willing to listen to others and learn moving forward.

The other reason that I bring it up is that a lot of exclusion that happens within feminist and queer movement comes from having some minority member of the group being called out under the assumption that who they are is inherently oppressive. So there’s a long history of trans women in feminist and queer spaces being accused of having transitioned in order to have heterosexual privilege, or being accused of upholding heteronormative ideas of what women are and so on. So that was another concern of mine.

 

Excluded_print-467x700

Queer Silence and the Killing Joke

Posted on by

Recently, as part of an interview with Kevin Smith, Grant Morrison claimed that all these years no one has gotten the ending of Alan Moore and and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke (1988).  Morrison claims that those obscured and silent final three panels are meant to suggest that Batman is finally killing the Joker—breaking his neck or strangling him. In other words, The Killing Joke is a form of final Batman story.  In the interview Kevin Smith reacts to this interpretation as if it were some form of big revelation that utterly changes the framework for understanding the story.  The reaction on the web was mostly similar, just look  here and here and here.  Comment threads on stories reporting this were filled with a lot of speculation about how this killing interpretation holds up in light of the fact that some of the events from The Killing Joke (like the crippling of Barbara Gordon) made their way into the main Batman continuity, because clearly the Joker is not dead.

I think it an adequate, but nevertheless anemic interpretation. Sure, the killing exists as a possibility, but other and more sweetly radical possibilities might actually redeem (in part) a great, but flawed book, that Moore himself later repudiated. The Killing Joke is built on the uncertainty inherent to the serialized superhero comic book medium, so we can’t look to what was included or not included from it in the main continuity as evidence of the acceptability of Morrison’s interpretation, because the book itself works to remind us of how the history constructed by long-running serialized properties are incoherent. No. I think the interpretation’s weakness comes from being an unimaginative ending to the Batman story.  The Killing Joke reminds us that as a series of events the Batman story makes no sense, but rather it coheres through the recurring structural variations within that history.  Moore is having Batman and Joker address that structure in a winking and self-referential way.  Violence, even killing, is already a central part of the recurring interactions of these characters (how many times has the Joker appeared to die only to return?), so why give weight to an interpretation claimed as an end that only gives us more of what already explicitly pervades the entire genre—violence?   Instead, a close “listening” to how Moore and Bolland use sound (particularly, the lack of it in certain key panels) to highlight the queerness of the Batman/Joker relationship provides the reader with a different way to interpret those final panels.

I contend that rather than indicating violence, that final silence is recapitulating an intimacy between the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime that is found in several silent panels throughout the work and that echoes the intimacy implicit in the structure of the Batman/Joker relationship.  As such, in the end, when the Joker tells the joke that makes Batman join in the laughter, when the Batman grabs the Joker by the shoulders and the panels shift their perspective to show the Joker’s hand kind of reaching out towards Batman’s cape amid the depiction of their laughter and the approaching sirens, followed by a panel that shows only their feet (and a wisp of Batman’s cape), and then finally just silence amid raindrops making circles in a dirty street, instead of violence, I imagine they are locked in a passionate embrace and kiss.

TKJ-laughter

TKJ-finalpanels

In his book, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock does a great job of breaking down how The Killing Joke is structured in a such a way to comment on the contradictions, misprision and re-imaginings that pervade the histories of these characters. While Moore’s comic plays on the idea of the Joker and Batman being two-sides of the same coin—two men playing out their psychotic breaks in different (but dangerously violent) ways after experiencing “one bad day”—the profound similarity between the two is one that emerges from the structures of the serialized medium they appear in (and in the multiple mediums versions of these characters have appeared in over the years). They both have deeply entwined “multiple choice pasts” that outside of their individual encounters of repeated conflict makes for a farraginous and incoherent history. It is the structure of the relationship and the homosocial desire it represents that provides a foundation for understanding their stories regardless of the confusion of how long it has really been going on and what from it may or may not really “count.”

TKJ-scrapbook

The Killing Joke  is an even more brutal and direct indictment of the superhero genre’s state of arrested development than Watchmen (1987) was. Moore’s work seems to want to drain any remaining appeal from their accreted and subsequently problematic histories by appearing to complete the trajectory that Batman expresses concern about in the text itself. Unfortunately for Moore, however, it didn’t quite work. A work built on highlighting the artifice of the comic pastiche becomes something of a lauded lurid spectacle. Even though The Killing Joke seems to consciously want to stand outside of continuity it nevertheless falls victim to continuities’ power to assimilate or exclude narrative events. Thus, the maiming of Barbara Gordon and the suggestion that she’s raped were later rehabilitated into the main continuity of the Batman line (wheelchair-bound, she becomes the superhero dispatcher, archivist and IT-tech, Oracle).   So, in the same vein it is not outside the realm of possibility that Grant Morrison could be right and the death of the Joker has simple been excluded from continuity in the same way that “official” history ignores Bat-Mite or the Rainbow-colored Batman costume.  However, within the skein of The Killing Joke itself, the possibility of a kiss, of a breaching of the limits of their homosocial bonds to transform it into a homosexual one not only fits within the structure of their relationship, but levels a more powerful indictment against the pathologies of repression and violence that pervade the genre.

TKJ-jokershand

Batman killing the Joker may be a suddenly popular interpretation of the end of The Killing Joke because many readers seem uncomfortable with the unresolved ending of the two of them standing in the rain laughing until their laughter fades away under the howl of an approaching siren and then becomes silence. For some, for Batman to laugh along with Joker is too “out-of-character” and/or shows that the Joker is right all along—the world is an unjust and disordered place and for Batman to think he can provide order by dressing up as a bat and beating people up is as crazy as running around performing random and outlandish acts of violence as a way to get a laugh. But I see that shared laughter as indicative of not only an unresolved narrative tension, but also sexual tension. It is a “here-we-are-again-drawn-together-but-at-an-impasse” kind of laugh (which is an echo of the joke itself). Sure, the idea that Batman and Robin had/are having some kind of sexual relationship has long existed, but there is a kind of rough intimacy to the Joker and Batman relationship that makes me agree with Frank Miller that their relationship is “a homophobic nightmare.” Joker can be seen to represent what happens when you allow queerness free reign, Batman when it is closeted.  They are both extreme reactions to a comic book world where queerness is defined as deviancy, and as such deviant behavior is the only way to express the queerness underlying their relationship.  Any chance to express intimacy outside of those confines is engulfed in silence, and it is by seeking out these silences in the text (or how sound and silence interact) that this special bond between them is demarcated.

TKJ-hands

The book opens with three straight pages (22 panels) without a word of dialog and no narration. Instead we have the typical establishing shots that perfectly capture the prison for the insane/sanitarium trope used whenever the Arkham Asylum set piece appears. Batman is not here to solve a mystery or quell a riot. He arrives to pay a personal visit to the Joker. When the silence is finally broken, Batman speaks. “Hello. I came to talk.” This is a profound reversal. The panels here alternate between a normally taciturn Batman doing all the talking—expressing his feelings, seeming almost desperate in his desire to reach the Joker—and the normally boisterous talkative Joker being silent. The scene is punctuated by the the “FNAP” of the Joker putting down cards in a game of solitaire.  The scene has the rhythm of a tense discussion regarding a topic long in the air, but only finally broached by an anxious or disillusioned lover. There is a desperation and emotionalism that seems to emerge from long contemplation on the part of Batman about his relationship to the Joker. The visit suggests that Batman has come to accept that violence will not resolve the conflict between their extreme reactions to a queer identity. When the man in the cell turns out not to be the Joker at all, but a double duped into taking his place while the real Joker escapes, that moment melts back into something like the “typical” Batman and Joker story. Joker has escaped and needs to be captured before he accomplishes some outlandish and murderous scheme.

This time, the Joker’s outlandish plan involves driving Commissioner Gordon mad as a way to get Batman to admit their similarity through madness. The image of the Commissioner stripped naked and made to wear a studded leather bondage collar does a lot to equate madness and queerness run rampant.   The Joker’s desire for Batman to “come out” and admit they are the same echoes a dichotomy between the closeted and the “out” individual. The Batman character is largely about his secret identity, the construction of a hyper-hetero playboy cover for his life in spandex and a mask, tackling, wrestling and binding (mostly) other men in the guise of combating criminal deviance.  He is homophobia turned inward. The Joker on the other hand has no identity outside of being the Joker.  He embraces his mad flamboyance and doesn’t see it as deviant, but as a different form of knowledge about a world that could create him and/or Batman.  The Joker is dangerously queer and that is his allure. He is the manifestation of licentiousness that homophobia conjures when it imagines queerness.

Even the past given to the Joker in The Killing Joke reinforces this idea.  Sure, he is given a pregnant wife in the version depicted, but her death frees him from the yoke of a heteronormative life as much as being chased into a chemical vat by Batman does. It is suggested that losing his wife is just as much to blame for Joker’s particular madness, but the real clincher is Joker’s assertion regarding his past: “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” Despite the choice between these varied pasts, what remains constant is the centrality of Batman to the Joker becoming who he is, which helps to fuel the Joker’s desire to have their relationship be of primary importance in Batman’s life (as it is in his).  Whatever violence the Joker commits, whatever other desires he may evince, they are subsumed in that primary desire.  In a genre where beginnings and endings are written, erased and rewritten so as to become a palimpest, it is the recurring structure of the characters’ engagements that define them more than any sense of origin or goal.

TKJ-understand

This intimacy explains the uncharacteristically intense tenderness with which Batman seeks to confront the Joker. When he catches the Joker near the story’s end, Batman finally gets to broach the subject, to bring up the issue that precipitated his attempted visit with the Joker earlier.  He says, “Do you understand? I don’t want to hurt you,” and makes the offer: “We could work together. I could rehabilitate you. You needn’t be out there on the edge anymore. You needn’t be alone.”

Look at the panel right after Batman makes that offer. There is a vulnerability to how the Joker is depicted. He is slightly hunched as if suddenly aware of the cold rain, his eyes are in shadow as if to hide tears and he is looking at Bats from over his shoulder with a frown that is at odds with his usual exaggerated grin. It is perhaps one of the few (if not only) human moments between these two characters and it is a silence.

TKJ-joker-vul

The strange thing about Batman’s offer that the Joker contemplates in heavy silence is that “out there on the edge” exactly where Batman lives as well. The offer to rehabilitate the Joker is also an offer to rehabilitate himself—to rid them both of the desires that repeatedly and destructively bring them together. This is Batman as Brokeback Mountain. By making this speech, Batman is revealing himself to be something of a hypocrite, unless he means to find someway to admit his own flaws and overcome his own secrets, to really become a part of the “togetherness” that he suggests can help the two of them to avert their fate. The Joker refuses, saying “it is too late for that. . . far too late.”
 

batfamily

 
Silence marks several other important panels throughout the work, including Batman’s wistful look at the portrait of the anachronistic “Bat-Family.” The picture (made to emulate a Bob Kane sketch) depicts characters that no longer existed in the main continuity at that time. The original Batwoman and Bat-Girl (not Barbara Gordon) were editor-mandated creations—romantic interests for Bruce and Dick in order to combat the accusation of Frederic Wertham that Batman and Robin are a “wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” The inclusion of the portrait serves to destabilize the notion of coherent history that the whole of The Killing Joke is working at. But it is also a signal of the need in the past for Batman to have a “beard” written into the story to deflect gay accusations. It is a reminder that even the lighthearted era of the (now false) Bat-Family was part of a structure of secrets and lies meant to cover for fear of a repressed desire. The nostalgia of this scene is laid with irony, since the call to a simplistic normative family is belied by the constructed nature of that “family” and the queerness of their life of masks and costumes.

batman_yaoi_time_by_manawua-d1vfftt

Even the most contentious scene in the graphic novel, the brutal shooting of Barbara Gordon, leading to her disrobing, (likely) rape and photographing, is attended to in silence. Now, I think the scene itself is part of what makes The Killing Joke flawed. Its brutal treatment of a beloved female character, who has been shown on more than one occasion to be able to hold her own, is egregious. The sexualization of the violence against her also serves to give the scene just the kind of morbid appeal that plagues a lot of contemporary comics, and distracts from the ways The Killing Joke can be seen as a (re)visionary text. It is completely unnecessary for Moore to make his point. Yet, regardless of its failure, the scene’s silence casts it as part of that unspoken attraction between Batman and the Joker. Like an especially twisted reference to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), this is a love triangle, with Barbara playing the proxy for the desire between the “rival suitors.” Sedgwick writes, “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power. . . this special relationship may take the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the two” (25). Thus, the maiming and violating of Barbara Gordon is not about her at all, but about the Joker’s desire for Batman. She is the proxy through which this desire is expressed as it literally serves to summon Batman to attend to him so they may take up their “highly conflicted, but intensively structured” relationship. It is this very structure that helps the Batman oeuvre to cohere despite its historical ambiguity.

The silence of those two final panels echoes the silence immediately following Batman’s offer, just as it parallels the silence that attends many of the scenes that highlight their intimacy. The silence is a recapitulation of that moment of tender vulnerability seen in the Joker as he contemplates the offer, and I think that silence is best filled not with violence —violence is loud and obvious and strewn throughout The Killing Joke and the entirety of the Batman canon—but rather with tender love. The silence is the signal for that which cannot be depicted or spoken aloud. It is an actual act of bravery on the part of Batman, proving to Joker that it is not yet “too late.” The Killing Joke’s abundant self-awareness regarding the incoherence of comic history also suggests an incoherent future where anything is possible as long as it can be enclosed in the broad structures of their relation—even Batman and the Joker as lovers. That—not violence, not a killing—would be an end to the Batman story as we know it.

I don’t see the kiss as the definitive action of those panels—I can’t say what really happens in because there is no “really happened”—but find it much more profound than killing. The kiss is a more delightfully radical possibility than the usual violence of the genre. It upends their entire history, but somehow still fits within its skein.  The off-panel action remains unseen because that’d be a real end.  Violence doesn’t change anything in superhero comics, it is a normalizing force that builds routine, and killing is just the beginning of a come-back story.  It is love that transforms. Sure, it would be best if superheroes could move beyond the pathologizing of queerness, but to even have a chance to imagine a world where Batman and the Joker could both be saved from their violent self-destructive spiral through loving each other is too wonderful to dismiss.
________
Osvaldo Oyola is a native Brooklynite. As a kid in the early 80s, in the days before people got the idea that they might be worth something, he would scour flea markets and yard sales for cheap old comics from the 60s and 70s. These days he’s still obsessed with Bronze Age comics, but mostly for how they represent race, gender, and urban spaces. He is currently completing a doctoral dissertation on the intersection of pop culture and ethnic identity in contemporary transnational American literature, writing on Los Bros Hernandez, Junot Diaz and Jonathan Lethem. He still lives in Brooklyn, with his poet wife and cats named for Katie and Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He writes briefish thoughts on comics, music and race on his blog, The Middle Spaces.

“What good is hurting them back?”

Posted on by

Laika1

 
When the Studio Laika film ParaNorman came out last summer, discussions regarding the last-minute revelation of one of its character’s homosexuality fell upon depressingly familiar lines. Had the film come out, say, 6 years previous, there might have been a cacophony of hysterical accusations and impassioned defenses of the film’s decision, but in 2012, the overall response seemed more like a quizzical shrug. Sure, there was the specter of “unwanted questions” being raised from the National Review, and calls of the scene making the movie “remarkable” from the Huffington Post, but the act of a gay character coming out at the last minute and marking himself as queer seems hardly revolutionary. While there was once a time when Ellen could come out and risk losing major corporate sponsors, the name of the game has changed and the act of coming out, even in media geared towards young adults (Glee being the most egregious and unfortunate example), seems almost passé. This isn’t to say that we’ll be seeing a gay Disney prince anytime soon, but it isn’t surprising that ParaNorman’s largely safe, sterile and last minute depiction manages to fly under the rader, occupying a space somewhere between the mainstream queer parable of “well, aren’t we all really just the same underneath it all?” and the loud-and-proud fearlessly commercial “born this way” aesthetic.

Even if the film isn’t outwardly, bold, however, it suggests a more nuanced reading of queerness and its portrayal in the media. In a subsequent interview, the co-director of the ParaNorman explicitly said that the inclusion of a gay character was not merely a throwaway gag, but an explicitly political statement by Studio Laika itself. “If we’re saying to anyone that watches this movie don’t judge other people,” Chris Butler told Electronic Urban Report, “Then we’ve got to have the strength of our convictions.” He is referring, of course, to the strong themes of anti-bullying and acceptance that resonate throughout ParaNorman and the studios previous film, 2009’s Coraline. Both films depict young and isolated protagonists, loners who find little but dissatisfaction and loneliness in their regular lives and inhabit parallel worlds where they can better be themselves. These parallel worlds become places that they can express themselves freely, where they are accepted and loved, but ultimately, worlds that cannot, and should not, be inhabited fully. Ultimately, they must return to the real world, with all its pains and travails, but they do so not by abandoning their parallel worlds but by reintegrating them into their everyday existences. In this way, the protagonists neither become separatists nor assimilationists, but delineate for themselves a communal space that they have control over within the greater space of the world itself. This process of reconciliation with the world and with finding a safe space parallels the struggle of many queer youth, who find themselves ostracized, alienated and tormented by their peers and the world around them. In examining the intersection of queerness and youth, Laika does more than just say “bullying is wrong” and add shove the prefix LGBT in there. It analyzes the hard realities queer youth face, and suggests strategies for them to grow, to learn, and to resist without separating themselves from the world or assimilating to a more “acceptably” queer version of themselves.

Before continuing, it seems necessary to define the parameters of the word “queer” in its current context. Queer is an endlessly contested word, loved by some, loathed by others. Its usefulness lies in its elasticity, its ability to reference any number of identities or orientations without singling them out. But the ambiguity of the word makes it seem at times almost formless, an amalgamation of ideas with all the conviction of mush. And compounding its slippery nature is the illusiveness of queerness is contemporary media itself; trying to figure out whether or not a queer reading even exists in a text often feels like looking through a kaleidoscope, trying to figure out if one specific shape is purposeful or just a trick of the light. Part of this, of course, stems from the institution of heteronormativity; any overt deviance from a heteronormative paradigm is preemptively erased, leaving only faint hints and clues to its existence. Queerness, therefore, is predicated on difference, but more specifically on deviance; where it exists, it must be erased. This is the definition that ParaNorman and Coraline use; the protagonists of both films, though not explicitly queer (nor explicitly heterosexual, it must be mentioned), are clearly the oddballs in their respective worlds, and throughout their films have various forms of violence and erasure inflicted on them. In ParaNorman, the protagonist Norman, capable of talking to the dead, is endlessly mocked and ridiculed by his school and neighborhood, at times physically threatened and harassed by bullies. In Coraline, the titular protagonist’s loud, curious, and boisterous personality is constantly stifled by her parents, who clearly have no time for her antics. In both films, the narrative of not belonging emerges, with both protagonists feeling enormous pressure from their families and communities to simply stop being who they are and to “fit in”.
 

Laika2

 
What distinguishes queerness from other intersections of oppression is the insistence on the part of the dominant culture that it is a falsity, an illusion, something to be erased. Because queerness is not explicit, must be explicitly delineated, and can often be masked in ways other identities cannot, the assumption that it is false or performed solely for attention constantly arises. This is where the idea of the “fake” bisexual teen girl, the “transtrender” and countless other myths and boogeymen arise from. When Norman tells his family about the ghosts he sees, he is assumed to be sad and lonely and needy for attention; when Coraline speaks of the parallel world she finds in the fireplace, it is simply a product of her overactive imagination. The experiences of both characters are erased, and the burden on “proving” their experiences lies on them, rather than on the people around them to simply accept who they are. In Coraline, however, the parallel “other” world becomes a place of acceptance, or at least tolerance; her Other Parents dote on her and encourage her imagination, show her wondrous things and ask her if she wants to be their daughter. They only ask one small, simple price; for her to sew black buttons into her eyes, the same ones everybody in this world wears. The movie thus engages the logic of assimilation, central to heteronormativity; Coraline’s queerness is tolerated to a certain degree, but only if she makes it quiet and nonthreatening, subsumed to the dominant cultural logic around her. It is queer erasure at its most insidious; when she refuses, the other parents become angry, and attempt to use guilt, manipulation and outright violence to make her comply, threatening her real parents in the process.
 

Laika3

 
Ultimately, Coraline triumphs through subverting the Other Mother’s expectations of her; she challenges the Other Mother to a game, knowing that it’s rigged from the start and that even if she does win, the Other Mother won’t let her go. Armed with this knowledge, she tricks the Other Mother and manages to escape, retaining her identity and saving her parents in the process. And while it’s not as easy as playing a single trick for queer youth to negotiate their own identities, it is through knowing and understanding the nature of assimilation that Coraline manages to subvert it and ultimately gain acceptance on her own terms.
 

Coraline movie image

 
While Coraline engages the nature of assimilation, ParaNorman focuses on the nature of plain-faced oppression itself. The focus of the story is the tale of Agatha Prendergast, a young 18th century girl who, like the protagonist Norman, could communicate with the dead. Condemned to death by her Puritan community, her spirit haunts the town, placated each year by a bedtime story so that she won’t cause havoc and destruction. Even in death, her anger is obfuscated and ignored, smothered out with the false platitudes and insistences of innocence that accompany all historical wrongdoings. Ultimately, Agatha’s spirit is once again loosed on the world, full of three centuries’ hate and rage towards the people who hurt her. Norman, who has experienced similar, if not as violent, treatment at the hands of the town for his abilities, understandably has sympathy for her cause. He shares her rage towards the world that has demeaned and brutalized them, but he also recognizes the self-destructive tendencies that accompany it. When he ultimately confronts her, he poses the question “What good is hurting them back?” directing her rage and hatred towards him. Although it is tempting to read this as a sort of “we shall overcome,” message, ParaNorman isn’t particularly interested in moralizing; it is the well-being of Norman and Agatha it is invested in, not that of the townspeople who hurt them. Anger as a purely destructive impulse, while emotionally cathartic, is also destructive; as Agatha’s fury becomes greater and she can find no means of reconciling it, she starts taking it out on Norman, someone who has suffered just as she has.

For Agatha, inner peace comes not from forgiving the townsfolk or absolving them of their injustices, but by remembering the people in her life who cared about her; the people who accepted her for who she is, and the people who understood her suffering as they experienced the same. While anger gives an impetus for change and action, solidarity directs its course. Norman and Agatha’s thereby reconcile their anger and their queerness, being able to at once learn to accept themselves and the people who care about them and remaining angry and determined to resist various forms of oppression and erasure.
 

Laika5

 
Working through these characters, Laika suggests means of negotiating the apparent contradictions queer youth face; the pressure to both assimilate and to “be themselves”, the struggle of opposing heteronormativity whilst having non-queer family and friends, and ultimately that parallel and “ideal” worlds cannot exist in vacuums. Instead of drawing away from others, the protagonists of the films learn to both be who they are and to place the onus of acceptance on others, rather than have to “prove” they have a right to exist. And even if the conclusions aren’t revolutionary (there are no revolutions, no world changing events in these films), it is the films’ small victories, ones like the protagonists finally making their friends, family, and loved ones understand that they are who they are, that will make all the difference for queer teens wedged between bare hatred on one end and the insidiousness of forced conformity on the other.

Wandering Son

Posted on by

A little boy is mistaken for his older sister and is bewildered by the feeling that this stirs in him. Thus begins the story of the Wandering Son, a daring fairy-tale about two unusual children in the time before the riot of puberty and their struggles with who they are and who they want to be. The series’ author, Shimura Takako won acclaim for the naturalistic sensivitity of her groundbreaking yuri title Aoi Hana, which depicts young women who consciously and confidently identify as lesbian. Wandering Son, which runs in the alternative manga magazine Comics Beam in Japan and is published for the first time in English by Fantagraphics, follows the ordinary lives of kids who as they grow up do not find their biologically assigned sex to be a perfect fit.

Shuichi Nitori is a shy and gentle-hearted fifth grader who loves to bake, write plays and looks just like a girl. His “cute” attributes almost take on the quality of a spell that protects Shuichi in the period of his life before his boy’s body begins to betray him. Adults and peers alike are enchanted by his natural androgyny. To a point. His dry-witted mom is entertained by a lark in a girl’s sailor-suit school uniform, but abruptly has to remind Shuichi to quit staring at it hung on his door. His fascination eventually crosses a boundary in her mind.

He tests the boundaries of the spell further when his classmate Saori Chiba, an old soul prone to impenetrable melancholy takes to a fascination with dressing Shuu up in girls’ clothes. When his older sister catches them, the sight repulses her.

His friend Takatsuki Yoshino is more sure-footed in her wish to be a boy. She brushes off her parents’ repeated attempts to buy her dresses. Instead she is a tomboy who dresses in jeans and loose-fitting hoodie sweatshirts. Direct and specific, she takes a small-time bully in hand with astonishing ruthlessness but is transparently crushed by her oncoming adolescence which makes itself cruelly visible every month.

Takatsuki introduces Shuichi to her hobby of traveling to distant parts of town where no one will recognize them in drag. They sit in the sun, browse shops and eat hamburgers as approximations of their ideal selves, and are exhilarated by the ordinary. Everyday objects, a hairband, a handed down school uniform, a barrette, that blend Shuu and Takatsuki with their desired selves take on a mystical importance as totems of their transformed selves. An ordinary haircut together is a riveting experience imbued with supernatural power, one of the few small choices allowed them to channel their inner desires to the outside world without attracting undue suspicion.

The artwork in Wandering Son is appealing and sensitive. Negative space employed around close-ups of the characters’ faces is pregnant with consideration, doubt, hesitation, epiphany. Shimura allows us to follow snatches of overheard conversation through scenes that flow into one another as if in a dream, perhaps an adult’s remembrance of childhood with great revelations interwoven through the banal maneuvers of the classroom or the family dinner or an argument with a sibling. Sparse sections rendered in delicate watercolor are light and airy, while dream sequences are rendered with an apprehensive black background, the eternal possibility of humiliation and ostrasization underscoring the fantasy of the ideal self.

Japanese culture has experienced a different arc from my own, with various examples of gender nonconformity at all levels of society. The difficulties of a contemporary Japanese trans-kid are likely not an exact mirror to their counterparts in America, where a strict bianary is rigorously enforced with humiliation and often violence. Reading about the lives of Japanese kids in the context of my (still shamefully limited) understanding of gender-queering in American culture raises plenty of questions. Wandering Son mercifully isn’t a political screed and its characters, equally mercifully, are not pressured into making political points out of their inner lives. As they grow, Shuichi and Takatsuki adapt to new clothing styles. Their hair is left to grow and is cut short and restrained as often. Their emerging affections have little to do with “straight” or “gay” and they experience tremendous self-doubt as their fast-approaching secondary sex characteristics begin to underline the limitations of their dressing up and playing the part of who they want to be. They are allowed under a protective charm to explore their feelings and identity and are treated with the utmost compassion and dignity by their author.

That makes Wandering Son a most compelling fantasy, one in which the gentle-hearted are protected by their friends and youths hold the key to wisdom and self-knowledge in the form of a headband Would that every profoundly different kid were granted the same freedom and gentleness by society that pushes them in conflicting directions. Even this first volume, which focuses on the most flexible time in a kid’s life, is keenly aware of the unfairness of this system, which looms over a sissy or a tomboy like a distant god’s arbitrary cruelty. Wandering Son chooses for the most part to dwell on the possibility of choice, of self-knowledge and the love of a friend who knows your secret.

Michael Arthur is the author of Go Ye Dogs! In the interest of full disclosure, he is a former Fantagraphics editorial intern.

Fractured Shell (No Ghost)

Posted on by

For my temporary stay here at the Hooded Utilitarian, I’ll be doing a series of pieces on the intersection of comics and related media with queer genders and sexualities, including how these issues have touched on my own life. I thought I’d begin with the gender politics of the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

 

 

Two panels from the Ghost in the Shell manga; Motoko Kusanagi points out to a colleague that they can’t really prove that they’re human.

 

It was as a freshly-minted teenager that I was first captured by Mamoru Oshii’s original film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. I was at a transitional point in my life, having just been transplanted into a new family and still learning to grasp uncertainties around gender, sexuality and my own body, and Oshii’s Motoko Kusanagi did something for me. She fulfilled a function, acting as an icon of strength outside of the conventional definitions of gendered behavior – and the borders of human life – with which I was familiar. I was able to construct a narrative around her which served a desperate need for some model of humanity I could relate to.

Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, in Queer Images: a History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America, write about this as a common queer spectatorial experience:

“…the desire to see queer characters onscreen was an important one. Such images could let isolated queers know that other queers existed and how they possibly looked, acted, or lived their lives. Such images could validate a queer spectator’s very existence, even if the images were (as they usually were) stereotyped, derogatory, or even monstrous. Queer audiences thus learned how to read Hollywood films in unique ways – often by looking for possible queer characters and situations while ignoring the rest. As Henry Jenkins explains in his study of media fandom, specialized audience members (such as queers) learn how to ‘fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprints, salvaging bits and pieces of the found material in making sense of their own social experience.’ That process formed the basis of queer reception practice for most of the twentieth century.”

Many films became widely known for their queer readings – All About Eve and The Wizard of Oz being prominent examples. Queer filmmakers such as James Whale and Dorothy Arzner encoded queer signals in their work, and queer overtones were present with varying levels of menace and stereotype in a variety of classic films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Old Dark House, Queen Christina, Rebel Without a Cause.

Although it’s difficult to exactly describe what made Ghost in the Shell and its lead character so appealing to me, certain anchoring points of that appeal are in hindsight quite obvious. Motoko Kusanagi is at once powerful and beholden to power, at once commanding and enslaved to uncertainty. She is constantly on top of her situation, always the quickest of mind and fleetest of foot; in an elite team of cyborg special agents, her dominance is unquestioned. Yet, she comments to Batou after going diving that while her body may be able to process beers in minutes without a trace of hangover, the body which allows her such control is completely owned by the government for which she works. Were she ever to leave Section 9, she would have to leave her body at the door along with her uniforms and equipment; she retains her power only so long as it is used according to the wishes of those with greater power still. Neither can she be certain as to her own origins; “Motoko Kusanagi” is stated in at least one iteration of the franchise to be a pseudonym, and even though in at least one case she’s given childhood memories, she can never be certain they weren’t simply programmed into her head. In both the first Oshii movie and the original comic, she points out to a co-worker that she can’t prove that she’s not just an artificial personality programmed into a cyberbrain; indeed, her inorganic body leaves her open to being mistaken for a robot, and in the comic, she is – by a sexbot collector, no less. She is at once heroic and very relatable for someone as mired in identity uncertainties and as alienated from those around them as my 13-year-old self was.

A page from the original Ghost in the Shell manga: the Major discussing with a colleague the definition of “human,” and the impossibility of really knowing if either of them is human.

Then, of course, there is her gender encoding. There seems to be within geekdom, and popular culture at large, a sacred circle of acceptable gendered appearance and expression for “tough chick” characters outside of which creators (mostly cisgender [non-transgender] men, of course) very rarely step. The territory outside of this circle is in one way or another too uncomfortable for the assumed male gaze of the audience – too “mannish,” too far outside of binary conceptions of gender, too little interested in catering to what is understood to be hetero cisgender male taste. The hetero cis male majorities within fandom certainly take part in policing the sacred circle’s boundaries; I’ve seen forum threads ridiculing designs of female characters for being just a bit too masculine, too square of jaw, too muscular, not enough designed for sexual objectification. Even Xena and Buffy, famous girl-power icons, are well within this sacred circle. Oshii’s Motoko Kusanagi is not. Such characters can hold a totemic power and be quite alluring and empowering, as any Rocky Horror Picture Show fan can attest.

 

Motoko Kusanagi as Mamoru Oshii and his team constructed her: well outside of the circle of fanboy-safe “tough chick” gender expression, and well outside of Masamune Shirow’s own vision.

 

The incident in the manga in which she is mistaken for a robot by a lecherous male sexbot collector draws attention to another significant way in which the Major is unfree. Although Oshii’s construction of her gender encoding steps firmly outside of the sacred circle of acceptability and grants her periodic nudity a sort of liberated power only fully available in absence of the obvious tropes of objectification under the heterosexist, cissupremacist male gaze, this was clearly never Masamune Shirow’s intent. In fact, Ghost in the Shell is an exercise in essentialism; the idea of a ghost – an essence – existing within the body forms the very title of the franchise. This essence grants a body personhood, regardless of whether that body is organic or manufactured. Shirow goes even further in embracing the “spiritual essence” narrative, endorsing the spiritualist concepts of souls and extra-sensory perception. His essentialism allows him to elide the obviously severe implications of cyborgization, ghost dubbing and cyberbrain technology for social constructions of gender and gendered expression. By assuming the existence of essential differences between (feminine, “female-bodied,” male-attracted) women and (masculine, “male-bodied,” female-attracted) men, he is able to skirt these implications and resume policing gender in ways that please his gaze and keep the gendered underpinnings of the erotic fantasy that is Motoko Kusanagi intact.

In the original Ghost in the Shell comic, as in Appleseed and other Shirow works, the assertive and militaristic female lead is in many ways kept in her place: put in highly male-gaze sexual attire and situations while male characters are frequently designed in ways that are clearly meant to be read as at least unsexual, and at most quite ugly, paired with enormous and extremely masculine male leads (Briareos, Batou), shown breaking down in tears while those male leads remain stoic. Their environments are filled with feminine female characters, frequently in subservient roles (informational robot, nurse, assistant, sexbot, even wall decoration), and masculine men in commanding positions (bureau chief, politician, general, weapons dealer, government council member, commando, company president). In fact, there is a sort of “femdom” role-reversal narrative to Motoko in particular. She seems to provide titillation to the presumed hetero cisgender male reader by deviating from her own assumed feminine nature; this excitement could not be had if the roles, and the rationale for their existence, were not re-asserted in the first place. His essentialist logic prevents Shirow from considering, for example, the social implications for a male-assigned/male-identified person of having himself transferred to a body which consists of a box with legs and manipulators (the president of Hanka Precision Instruments) or the logic of using “he/him” pronouns on an intelligence born in cyberspace, and whose first physical body is presumably meant to be perceived as “female” (Project 2501/the Puppet Master).

This thinking is fully exposed in all its spectacularly thin logic at the end of the comic. The Major has fused with Project 2501, and Batou has transferred Kusanagi/2501 into a new body, long-haired and feminine in appearance. Kusanagi/2501 informs Batou, to his surprise, that zir new shell is that of a “guy.” Confronted with his shock, ze replies, “Yeah. This is a male body. You want proof?” The reader is led to believe that zir new body has a penis, which apparently settles the question of its “maleness.” Bodies are not only sexed but inherently gendered, the transcendence of human bodies and brains be damned. A body can throw all sorts of signals outside of those approved for “men,” but as long as it has a penis (and no significant breast tissue, one guesses), it is sexed male. Motoko/2501 goes off to find a more suitable, “female” body. The Major can even merge with a cyber-intelligence, but as long as she inhabits a body, she cannot escape the social slavery of coercive gender roles to which all human beings are subjected. Even if she were to transfer to a masculine, male-assigned body, she would only trade one set of social strictures and assumptions for another. She might find herself more or less suited to the body’s advantages and disadvantages and to the social roles it would shove her into, but she would be restricted either way.

I cannot imagine how Masamune Shirow would respond to being confronted with a transgender person of non-binary gender such as myself. As much as I admire him as an artist and storyteller, I’m not sure I want to know.

 

Shirow’s big reveal at the end of the original Ghost in the Shell manga: genitals are destiny! The divide between “male” and “female” must be maintained, even when the “woman” in question is actually the fusion of a previously female-assigned person with an autonomous intelligence born in freaking cyberspace.

 

Like other queer and transgender people, I’m used to scavenging for my queer and gender-variant stories, situations and characters amongst works made by overwhelmingly cisgender, predominantly heterosexual creators in fields dominated by men and by male gaze. This scavenging process can be incredibly gratifying, but also deeply problematic. It means embracing images of gender variance and queerness which are built to fit the perceptions and satisfy the desires of people who are not queer or trans, and may know little of real queer and trans people’s lives. These images can be as coded, as stereotyped, as condescending, as negative and as thoroughly exoticized today as they were decades ago. It can be deeply frustrating finding one’s empowerment in yet another character created as some cisgender straight guy’s wank fantasy, and cisgender straight women’s wank fantasies often aren’t much better. Just as frustrating, if not moreso, can be to see powerful and defiantly non-gender-conforming characters “put in their place” by cis straight male fans (and, again, sometimes cis straight female fans) eager to turn them into fodder for yet another tiresome role-reversal or power-stripping fantasy. This is done in the form of constant commentary within the fandom, doujinshi, slash, or simply fan art which modifies these characters’ gender coding in various ways and drags them back into the sacred circle of acceptable gender variation. However, it doesn’t seem sensible or right to allow these norm-reinforcing readings center stage. Benshoff and Griffin again:

“As critic Alexander Doty describes his own spectatorial response to popular culture in his book Making Things Perfectly Queer, ‘I’ve got news for straight culture: your readings of texts are usually ‘alternative’ ones for me, and they often seem like desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture.”

This is the part where I go out on a limb.

I’m no semiotician or Theorist, but I think there’s something interesting going on here. If we refuse to accept Masamune Shirow’s essentialist assumptions about gender and instead focus on the act of gender as it is “performed” by the fictional character on the comics page, all sorts of interesting possibilities are opened up. Even laboring under the assumption that Motoko Kusanagi is bound by an underlying essence, we must admit that this binding essence is fictional – that in fact “Essential Motoko” is a construct we amalgamate out of images and ideas accumulated from consuming the Ghost in the Shell franchise in its various forms. Abandoning this idea, we are free to focus on the Major as she in fact is: a series of images and text snippets juxtaposed. Seen this way, gender can be read into just about everything: into the whole book, into whole characters to be sure, but also into scenes, pages, panel sequences, environments, color/tone palettes and individual colors/tones, outfits and items of clothing, poses, facial expressions, speed lines, patterns and symbols, inking techniques, even single lines. The changes in gendered expression from line to line, color to color, face to face, panel to panel are often tiny, but they are important because they provide an entirely different image of gender in comics. This image is not one of an immutable essence limited to characters and rarely or never changing, but as an everpresent jumble of tiny shards of signification, only semi-coherent at best and only even pushed into appearing as constant (if fluid) by the reader’s ability to imagine the gaps in information between panels – the device of “closure” described in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Gender overgrows in every direction, abundant shards of it popping up wherever the particular reader’s subjectivity allows it; it is subjective, certainly, and also cumulative and temporal, agglutinating and morphing as the reader reads and re-reads, consumes new additions to the franchise, looks at new pieces of fan art, comes to greater understanding of plot points, digests criticism. Each of these experiences provides an abundance of these shards of gendering for the reader to plug into their gender-concept of the entire franchise, the individual story or character, the individual page. The reader is selective in doing this, and the shards from which they select appear different as the reader acquires different sets of eyes.

Various different Motokos from the original manga, each with her own marginally coherent assemblage of gendered signals to give off.