Amy Ponds of the 99% (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
allchildren) wrote2011-02-15 03:59 am
allchildren) wrote2011-02-15 03:59 am
Entry tags:
casting memes and the uneven swap
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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, althoughheathershaped 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?
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?
no subject
(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?
no subject
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.
no subject
ITA.
no subject
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.