casting memes and the uneven swap

[allchildren]

[please do not link on newsletters etc.]

I'm thinking a bit about the exchange rate. Not of money, but of actors -- and actresses -- in roles.

A year ago the chromatic casting meme took the internet by storm and I, in a characteristic act of completely overdoing a good thing, decided to take on the ever-more-sprawling cast of Mad Men. No, it didn't make a whole lot of sense, because the whole premise of Mad Men revolves around a privileged white class trying to keep a grip on hegemonic power, but that also made the project more interesting, IMO. For example, my lead as Don Draper was John Cho -- chosen primarily because I reallyreally love John Cho, but additionally satisfying to have what is modern pop culture's absolute paragon of sexy masculinity being portrayed by an Asian man. Bert Cooper, objectivist Japanophile, portrayed by actual person of Japanese descent, George Takei. (Plus: Sulu! Collect the whole set. My cast also included Avery Brooks as Roger Sterling, LeVar Burton as Duck "sexlessly turtlenecked" Phillips and I think I even worked Rosalind Chao a.k.a. Keiko O'Brien in there somewhere. *Trekkie chest thump*) I had to abandon the project because it was making me crazy in the literal and extremely unfun sense, but for a while there, I was having a blast.

But the women were harder. What was an almost cathartic experience of taking away the original cast's white male privilege and giving it to some of my favorite actors turned out to be a deeply uncomfortable double-edged sword when choosing women of color to be disempowered -- sexually harassed, humiliated, and objectified. Mad Men is a show known for its excellent female characters, and much admired by many feminists for being truthful (in a very limited Freidanesque white scope) and sympathetic about the plight of (some) women in their limited social roles in the 1960s. Turning that plight over to WOC has some unfortunate implications, though -- a sea of subordinate secretaries who're literally chased around the office by their bosses; an unloved, cold, and cuckolded housewife; a bright young woman whose ambitions are derailed by pregnancy; a curvaceous sex bomb who everybody desires but nobody has to take seriously. My first choices for the big three were, respectively, a black woman (Kandyse McClure), a Latina (America Ferrera), and a Latina (Sara Ramirez), and I couldn't help but notice walking into some gigantically gross and harmful stereotypes.

I could shuffle things around, try some different approaches, but the stereotypes were inescapable (as was my increasing awareness of the dearth of dark-skinned black actresses) because those are the roles. They're meant to be taken with a heaping spoonful of white privilege; we sympathize with Mad Men's women because they represent ~women~. But being disrespected only on the axis of gender isn't actually possible for most women. I could trade the men up a rung on the kyriarchical ladder and have everything be swell, but the female characters only moved down.

Now on tumblr the latest fad is the genderswap casting meme. The name is inaccurate and binarytastic, but otherwise I'm okay with it, although heathershaped rightly noted how much more appealing it is to swap in female versions of male characters than to replace our beloved female characters with YET MORE DUDES. Remembering the disaster my Chromatic Mad Men project turned out to be, I didn't really want to do that to myself again, but what can I say -- a Summer Glau as Dexter Morgan graphic appeared on my dash and I was suddenly inspired. Without getting too caught up in it, I found it pretty easy to come up with the skeleton of my male-turned-female Dexter cast.

Here's the thing: Dexter is a show about serial killers and violence, and as such it is quite often violence perpetrated by white men against women. This is generally mitigated on a meta level by having Dexter's own (narratively endorsed) murder victims be those white men; he has had very few female victims and is always deeply protective of the women in his life. I'm not unacquainted with these thoughts; nor am I without reservation and criticism (hoooo, am I ever not) regarding the way female characters have been written on the show, completely apart from their death rate.

Still: as with Mad Men's white male privilege being infiltrated by dudes of color, it's rather satisfying to subvert the narrative and have a bunch of badass killer ladies roaming around, like they all broke out of some Tarantino zoo. Still: as with Mad Men's axis-enabled white women, any change to the axes of privilege Dexter's female cast reside on is confounding as hell, if not impossible, and highlights awfulness within the narrative.

The men of Dexter are free -- free from suspicion, free to lead double lives, fuck around, defend their women. The women -- and understand as I type this that Debra Morgan is one of my top five female characters of all time and I don't say a thing like that lightly -- are tied in the lives women. Rita is a survivor of abuse and marital rape; her concerns are entirely domestic; [spoiler] she gets fridged. Deb's start as a cop undercover as a prostitute is crucial to the first season plot, as her series-long search for love is to the whole show. Lumen's entire plotline -- all of season five! -- is about rape. And I hate to even mention the vortex of terribleness that was season two, but Lila is the vampiric temptress who uses false rape charges as a weapon and ugh Maria sleeping with Esme's fiancee ugh ugh ugh ugh.

How do you translate those roles into men's? Okay, [could be triggery] a gang of seemingly normal women kidnaps, gang-rapes, and murders a series of blond men. Sure, this is already a fantasy world where there are a significant number of female serial killers, so what the hell. Except -- why? It isn't that I feel bad for the imaginary victimized men. It's that putting men in these roles makes them look ABSURD because they all depend on gendered violence that, out of context of what we're desensitized to seeing happen over and over again to even the best female characters of fiction, IS absurd. It is absurd at best that these are the cream of the female role crop. Like when they made Salt a movie about a woman and had to rewrite the wife-now-husband's role because when a man played it, it suddenly looked absurd.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

And I don't know if other people's experiences doing casting memes are anything like mine. The chromatic casting meme did start in the world of comics, not 1960s Madison Avenue. And probably most other shows have less explicitly gendered violence. Maybe I'm just drawn to doing this with extremely ill-suited sources.

Or maybe the swap should become a standard writing tool to test the strength of your characters and your anti-fail. If these roles look wrong on any other axis, maybe your role needs a kick in the ass. I'm not saying that any specific context should be interchangeable with any other. We do need stories about race and disability and rape and gender. But what is the story SUPPOSED to be about? Why should it be? What's slipping right by without notice?

Who in the exchange rate is getting shortchanged?

Comments

[wordsatourbacks]

Consider this a placeholder for further thoughts, in a non-"have a cookie!" way - I VALUE YOUR BRAIN.

[allchildren]

Back atcha! (I still haven't had time/brainspace to do justice to your SCC post, but it is on my list.)

[wordsatourbacks]

Hey, no rush! It'll be awesome whenevah.

[wordsatourbacks]

(I don't even know if I have things to add that other commenters haven't mentioned, but APPRECIATION LIFE for your brain.)

[crossedwires]

I think it's a lot easier to do this meme with sources that, like comics (and other SF/F stories), pretend real life oppressions don't exist while superimposing a fictional oppression (like mutantism) over everything. And in doing so, they actually perpetuate RL oppressions by erasing or warping fictional representation of disenfranchised people. So, to me, the meme was a very basic, visual way of showing how wrong this was, and what changes when a character isn't white, and what doesn't because whiteness isn't a necessary trait to be a superhero.

I think it does get more complicated when a source takes into consideration, however limited, how oppressions affect certain groups in a more realistic way. But if the meme makes people think about these things -- how it works, how it doesn't, how it runs up against other stereotypes/intersectionality -- then, IDK, I tend to think that's a better result than simply being able to swap characters' race or gender without much thought? (Along that train of thought, I don't really understand the point of swapping an existing character of colour for a white actor, which to me runs kind of counter to the exercise -- unless maybe it was to show the difference in who gets marginalized ('see my token white character'), but I don't think I've seen it done that way.)

ETA: Also, re your Mad Med example, I think if it were chromatically re-cast, it would also affect the characters' class/social status, because it's not like there weren't publications and advertisements by/for POC at the time, but they likely were not in the same social worlds as the Mad Men characters? Like a TV show about the making of a magazine for/by/about POC could exist, but I'd imagine it wouldn't be as glamourous as Mad Men seems to be.

Although, in some ways, I'd rather it not be recast (because IDK how anachronistic it would be to have John Cho in the lead role, without much else about the character changing, as much as I would like to see it), but the worldview expanded so it showed the lives of different, less privileged people (and possibly how, say, men of colour are at a disadvantage in some similar ways to white women, but how racism works to prevent these two groups from banding together, or how women of colour might be disinclined to join a movement that doesn't take into consideration their experiences or the intersectionality with racism).

[allchildren]

sources that, like comics (and other SF/F stories), pretend real life oppressions don't exist while superimposing a fictional oppression (like mutantism) over everything. And in doing so, they actually perpetuate RL oppressions by erasing or warping fictional representation of disenfranchised people.

Oh, awesomely said.

But if the meme makes people think about these things -- how it works, how it doesn't, how it runs up against other stereotypes/intersectionality -- then, IDK, I tend to think that's a better result than simply being able to swap characters' race or gender without much thought?

Totally agreed. In almost every case I am an advocate of more thought. :D That's why I suggested it as an anti-fail check because I think in writing and in criticism we tend to overgeneralize our metaphors, whereas this points to how specific and non-metaphorical factors that both reveal what is actually being written about, and what isn't.

(BTW, I am v. aware that I owe you a comment from like a week ago! I got all excited and flaily when I read yours because SO MUCH TO SAY and then promptly lost my ability to sort any of it out. Which is to say, I utterly agree with your suggestion of Mad Men's worldview expansion and have a very conflicted relationship with the show for that reason.)

[allchildren]

"That's why I suggested it as an anti-fail check because I think in writing and in criticism we tend to overgeneralize our metaphors, whereas this points to how specific and non-metaphorical factors that both reveal what is actually being written about, and what isn't."

Well, this sentence makes a startling lack of sense even for me, so I apologize for that. *headdesk*

[crossedwires]

One reason why I'm so *_____* over Alaya Johnson's Moonshine is because it's I think the first time I've read a story where the supernatural elements parallels the issues marginalized people have (in NY in the 1920s), instead of being a metaphor, so what suffragettes were fighting for, vampires are also fighting for similar rights -- and it's all textual, so it doesn't seem appropriative of RL situations. And where being otherworldly doesn't erase, say, being left out or looked down upon for also being POC; there's also the acknowledgement of immigrants and the mythologies & their own supernatural creatures that they bring with them. (Plus, it's pretty much a fun, perhaps even fluffy, non-didactic book, so it's possible to have these intersectionalities & 'social justice agendas' without getting bogged down in them.)

(Also I'm excited about The Wire and A:TLA for similar reasons -- not just for their own stories, which I find pretty awesome (not perfect, but more inclusive than most shows), but also for the possibilities of this type of storytelling that I find is kind of unusual: a kids' show that recognizes and fights against imperialism? *_____* US show that isn't afraid to put only POC in some scenes? *_____* Heh.)

That's why I suggested it as an anti-fail check because I think in writing and in criticism we tend to overgeneralize our metaphors, whereas this points to how specific and non-metaphorical factors that both reveal what is actually being written about, and what isn't.

Very true! One day I might write a post about where, for me, limitations in a text turns into fail, or why certain use of oppressive/problematic language or depictions of ~isms work and when they don't. Or maybe I will wait for someone else to write it! Heh.

BTW, I am v. aware that I owe you a comment from like a week ago! I got all excited and flaily when I read yours because SO MUCH TO SAY and then promptly lost my ability to sort any of it out.

Hee. No worries!

still the worst at replying

[allchildren]

Hey, I read that book! You make a very good point about supernatural oppressions existing alongside RL ones. Unfortunately the story/writing itself was not really my cup of tea, but I quite enjoyed the mere fact that it exists. Community is another show that regularly has POC-dominated scenes, and often really does acknowledge the axes of privilege and oppression the characters exist along -- but it's also fucked up plenty, too. :/ ♥ATLAAAAA♥

One day I might write a post about where, for me, limitations in a text turns into fail, or why certain use of oppressive/problematic language or depictions of ~isms work and when they don't.

Oh, do, do! I seem to be coming back to thoughts like this a lot lately, and I'm sure your take would be more articulate than mine.

[recessional]

Like when they made Salt a movie about a woman and had to rewrite the wife-now-husband's role because when a man played it, it suddenly looked absurd.

See, for me, I hated like fuck that they did that because it wasn't absurd. It isn't absurd that a frigging ordinary scientist who studies spiders needs rescuing. Or gets rescuing. The idea that it's somehow ~emasculating~ for a male character to be vulnerable, to be hurt, to need to be rescued or supported or have a significant ugly personal-vulnerability experience is what's absurd, at least to me.

But then, I hate the "men cannot be victimized" tropes of most fiction as much as I hate the "women MUST be victimized" tropes. And for roughly the same reasons. And spend a lot of time writing counter to both of them.

[allchildren]

Oh, I totes agree that it's not absurd for a male character to be in a weak or dependent position. (I haven't actually seen Salt, and probs should have phrased that bit differently - I remember reading articles about it that rightly pointed out the absurdity of this concern over emasculation, and I'm all onboard with that, but instead am focusing on the shittiness of roles without agency at all.) When I started doing the Dexter swap I didn't want to lose the established female characters, but it was somewhat appealing to put male characters in a position outside the norm, although I do think cultural conditioning had something to do with alarm bells going off in my head, until I realized what an entrenched pattern there was and then became more interested in that than in imagining the victimization of dude!Lumen.

That would be a really fucking interesting story, though.

[jlh]

Completely agree with crossedwires on when it's easier and when it's harder. A while ago dark_agenda did that Racebending Revenge Challenge, and while the story didn't really work so I haven't posted it, I took on How I Met Your Mother. The swapping itself, though, worked very well because it's fairly ridiculous to have a sitcom set in New York and have only white people in it. I think I'd add most sitcoms and mainstream network dramas like Parenthood or Brothers and Sisters or even The Good Wife to the SF/F and comics that you can race or gender swap and have it still work.

(I'm thinking about racebending Castle, suddenly, and the only aspects of it that I think would significantly change would be Martha's career and Castle's upbringing, and how Martha not knowing who Castle's father is goes from some hippy dippy "she's an artist" thing to an unfortunate stereotype. But Beckett, Ryan, Esposito, even Alexis and Castle, wouldn't be that different. Castle is wealthy, yes, but he writes successful pulp mysteries and he's the son of an actress; he's not a blue blood.)

But gender or race swapping something that runs on the idea of gender and race privilege of course is going to be messy because the source is self-aware. If the point of the thing is to note when and how we are unselfaware, well, that really isn't the issue for a show like Mad Men, which is doing a thing and knows what it's doing for the most part. (And changing the race or gender of Betty isn't really going to highlight the ways in which the show treats her badly, I don't think.)

So to that end, I'm not sure if using the swap as a tool to test fail is always going to work. It might help to see fail that you didn't realize was there, but if your writing is actually trying to grapple with various -isms, then maybe what you need to do is swap on the axes that you aren't using. For example, what would happen if you changed the character's sexual orientations, and not in the no-consequences slashy way?

[allchildren]

I think Mad Men does know what it's doing for the most part, and I respect the narrative's right to frame the story and follow that -- but whether for the writers or the fans, I think the white-centric nature of its oppressions could use a little more pointing out. And this might just be my grudge because I tend to think MM is one of the most clever/galling exercises in "having it both ways," on all kinds of issues which really deserves its own post, but as much as I love the show I think it gets cut SO much slack because of its affectation of self-awareness.

It might help to see fail that you didn't realize was there, but if your writing is actually trying to grapple with various -isms, then maybe what you need to do is swap on the axes that you aren't using.

Ooh.

[wordsatourbacks]

I tend to think MM is one of the most clever/galling exercises in "having it both ways," on all kinds of issues which really deserves its own post, but as much as I love the show I think it gets cut SO much slack because of its affectation of self-awareness.

ITA.

[jlh]

Totally agree with you about Mad Men and the ways it gets away with things (very reminiscent of BSG, actually) and I'm really of two minds about shows that get away with things because they're actually trying at all. Like, on the one hand I think you should get points for not being Two and a Half Men, and I think we don't spend enough time giving shows that aren't mainstream points for not being mainstream. We think it's understood, but it very much is not outside of our little bubble of not watching NCIS or whatever. I guess, it's important to criticize and to give credit, and I find that very few bloggers are particularly good at that.

I think your exercise with Mad Men points out that we need to have many tools in our arsenal, and when one doesn't work that isn't a dead end, because it not only makes us think about the limitations of the tool itself, or how it can be adapted to other things, but also what we might need from the new tools.