Viola's Bookshelf, Being Human

[slemslempike]

I've been looking at Viola's Bookshelf, which I saw linked at Hoyden About Town. It's a project where they take (publicly available) fiction and swap the genders. I've seen various things like it before, but mostly short snippets rather than full length fiction. It's a really interesting way of making the implicit assumptions of gender more apparent.

I was especially taken with this:

Sam had two giant chocolate labs and a very, very patient boyfriend named Laurie who’d put up with anything except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6 a.m. by 350 pounds of drooling canine.

Sam reached for his Mace as Alex jogged toward him, then did a double take and threw his arms open, dropping the leashes and trapping them under his sneaker. “Where’s the rest of you? Dude, you look hot!”

compared with this:

Alex sleepily mashed the keys on the laptop next to her bed, bringing the screen to life. She squinted at the flashing toolbar clock: 4:13 a.m.! Christ, who was pounding on her door at this hour?

She shouted, “Coming!” in a muzzy voice and pulled on a robe and slippers. She shuffled down the hallway, turning on lights as she went. At the door, she squinted through the peephole to find Sam staring glumly back at her.

Having it a normative assumption that male Sam will taken mace as a matter of course when walking his dogs, and be so alert for the possibilities of assault that he automatically reaches for it when there is a woman around, suggests that it's a "bad" neighbourhood. But it isn't, it's a normal neighbourhood, and it's the normal precaution that many women take. And then female Alex, rather than worrying about noises in the early hours of the morning, or trying to make it seem that she's not alone, is able to go to the door alone and without fear.

(I'm not saying that all women have these behaviours, but that they are not unusual, and that especially in fictional representations of women's lives, are often assumed to be necessary.)

I was also taken with this passage:

“Lass gets back to her hotel room after a brutal day of campaigning door to door, fires up her laptop, and types ’hot asses’ into her search bar. Big deal, right? The way we see it, for that to disqualify a good woman from continuing to serve her country is just un-American.”

I'll be interested to see the other stuff they do.



The fear thing reminds me of the things I didn't like about Being Human. It bothered me that the victims we saw were female - fairly traditional shots of eroticised female fear. We see the vampire killing/vampirising a woman, when the werewolf changes for the second time his ex-girlfriend is in danger of being eaten by him, and she has previously been assaulted by her boyfriend. There's also the woman in the bar who meets the vampire, and I felt uncomfortable about her representation, because along with the vampirised woman, she doesn't know that she's in danger, and it plays into the idea that women must always feel fear, and if they don't then they're responsible for the consequences. The ghost is the only one of the three supernatural beings who is not shown putting anyone in danger, and more than that, there is the suggestion (I thought) that she herself had been killed by her boyfriend. Also - why are all (or mostly - there was one whom I thought could potentially have been being not-male) the vampires at their meeting male? Either they're mostly going around siring men, in which case it was an even odder thiing that they opened with him biting a woman, or the women aren't allowed to attend the meetings. (Although if they're halfway as annoying as the portrayal of the bitten woman who shows up later as a vampire, perhaps I should be thankful. You can tell she feels more powerful as a vampire because she's acting more sexily.)

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this article by Dennis Kelly in today's Guardian?

DNA was originally written for the National Theatre's Connections project, which pairs young actors with new writing. It was to be performed by more than 40 different youth groups across the country, and when I wrote it, I stipulated that all the characters' genders and names could be changed according to the groups' needs. John could become Jane, or Leah could become Lee.... But the interesting thing was that, with all the different cast configurations I went on to see, I forgot the original sex of the character I'd written within 10 minutes.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen that - thanks. The angry youth leader's reaction is really interesting - boys and girls are different, and as such must be different from each other in the same groups or else it's wrong.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen "Being Human", but your report of it makes me think "Have these people never heard of Buffy?"

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Actually, I thought that Being Human was very good indeed. It's not trying to be Buffy (though the inclusion of vampires means that there'll be the inevitable comparisons). It was sweet and funny and engaging. I've never liked Buffy much ('ve not seen most of it), but this was very good television. It was a pilot stuffed onto BBC Three that deserved a much wider audience, but sadly it doesn't look like they're making a series.

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

Did you sign the petition?

(Incidentally, it was odd to click on the signatures and see two names of people on my f'list right next to each other, who, as far as I'm aware, don't know each other and don't have anyone but me in common...)

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

No, I don't generally do online petitions. I emailed the BBC and got a response saying that there were no plans to commission a series and told me to check out something I disliked. Boo, BBC.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link to Viola's Bookshelf, it looks fascinating.

I think I must be the only person on my friends list who gave up on Being Human within ten minutes - a combination of boredom and that uneasy sense of mainstream writers thinking they're terribly edgy for playing around with concepts that have been kicking around in genre writing for years.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I'd seen people on my flist saying they'd really liked it, so I think I went in with an expectation that it would be worth sticking with, and also the vampire was very pretty and the werewolf was terribly sweet. I think if it'd been different actors I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly so much.

[peeeeeeet.livejournal.com]

I wasn't terribly impressed with the first quarter or so either but inertia kept me on the sofa and I thought it steadily improved after that.

[ecila-etc.livejournal.com]

Although I largly agree, what about that whole scene where the warewolf beats up the bloke? As it was to defend the girl ,so it would possibly fit your reading, you might need to adjust it.

Overall I thought Being Human was ok enough, and had potencial as a first episode, but then I found out it was a one-off, and in that context, I thought it was poo.

[zoje-george.livejournal.com]

That excerpt makes me want to read Doctorow's book, but only the gender switched version.

I was just thinking about the safety precautions I used to take all the time back in the States. Until recently, I hadn't noticed that I don't have to do much of it anymore. The likelihood of me getting sexually assaulted here in HCM City is practically nil, at least by a Vietnamese man -- I'm not saying it doesn't ever happen here (this isn't a women's utopia by any means), just that it's really not likely to happen.

On the other hand, the likelihood of getting mugged or in a motorbike accident is exponentially higher.

Physical assault is also much less likely -- unless it's a purse snatching and I get dragged behind a motorbike.

Truth be told, Trash is much less safer on the streets here than I am. I can walk down the street at any time of night and feel reasonably secure; John being a white male foreigner is a bigger target than I am. Call it the Madame Factor again.

It's a disconcerting feeling in its own way.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Yes, I don't count him as being portrayed as a victim in his own right, as he was brought into the scene through his own attack on a woman, and also that he initiated the physical fight with the werewolf. More agency than the simple portrayal of women as victims that the show had.

I think it's also important that, although George was only just pre-change and so had some supernaturalness going on, it was (visually) an interaction between two men. The people who are portrayed as victims or potential victims specifically of supernatural powers are all women.

I think they'd hoped it was going to be a series (from the press release interviews, anyway). It's such a shame it's not - like you, I don't think it works well as a one-off at all.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Men are mostly statistically more at risk of assault than women in Western contexts too. The stark difference is that the violence that women experience is more likely to be sexualised - sexual assault and physical asasult operate quite differently. There is also the fact that, despite being more at risk, men experience less fear. Experiences of violence have a great deal to do with race as well - I wonder how a black female foreigner would experience it differently.

It's always odd to see how other societies operate differently, and what's normalised outside your own space. It really brings it home to me how much things are taken for granted as natural and universal in social relations.

[zoje-george.livejournal.com]

And men experience less fear because they've been trained to believe they have less to fear, which thus makes them more at risk in any situation than a woman would be. It was from a conversation about this very thing, Trash having been mugged and assaulted a few times whilst living in Atlanta is more alert to danger than your average male, that we compared what each of us has to fear and the different precautions we take. Although he'd always been aware of a woman's need for highly tuned awareness, we really explored what that meant in the context of "not just some random stranger, but that guy, and your friend there, and my best friend's boyfriend" -- which he carries around all the time now and deploys as needed.