You know what’s awesome? Runaways. Seriously, it’s amazing. It’s among my favourite comics ever, even though it’s a Marvel book and I’m a hardcore DC fan. The characters all look different! They have different faces, different body types, there are even, gasp, non-white characters. If you haven’t read Runaways, do so at the next opportunity. (This is going to get mildly spoilery? So if you are spoiler-phobic and have not read Runaways up to the current Young Avengers crossover, skip the rest of this post.)
One of the main characters throughout the series is Karolina Dean. She’s a glowing rainbow-coloured hippie alien lesbian princess, which is astounding because she was created by someone who is not me. In the first volume of the series, she has a ridiculously obvious crush on one of the other girls on the team. Some people were apparently surprised when she came out? I’m not sure I understand this, but whatever.
Anyway. As awesome as Karolina is, this rant is only sort of about her. It’s mostly about her partner, Xavin. Xavin is a shapeshifter with an ambiguous gender identity, which is a great concept when done properly. Ze first appears in masculine form, learns that Karolina is only attracted to girls, and changes hir shape to be a hot girl, just like that. (Says Xavin: “On my planet, changing your gender is as easy as changing your hair colour.”)
This is not exactly true; Xavin’s species, the Skrulls, have been around since the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee Fantastic Four days, and have previously been shown to have binary genders. And Xavin definitely has a concept of masculine and feminine identities. After hir first appearance ze spends some time fighting in masculine form and talking to hir girlfriend in feminine form, for example. Eventually there is a conversation between Xavin and another teammate that makes it very clear (at least, it was clear to me; more on that later) that Xavin did not identify as either male or female. This was very well executed, and very interesting. It has been speculated that that scene existed to set the record straight, as some fans believed Xavin to be a guy who appeared as a girl to please his girlfriend. I am not one to tell people their readings of a text are invalid, but I (obviously) disagree with this one.
But after that issue, the original writer left the book. The next thing the team appeared in was an awful, awful miniseries entitled Civil War: Young Avengers/Runaways in which the team meets Marvel’s other group of teen superheroes, and the queer members of both teams get separated from the group and tied up and victimised by the villain. I wish I were making that up. The one high point of the series was when someone called Xavin Karolina’s boyfriend, and she responded with “He’s not my boyfriend, she is my girlfriend. Sometimes. It’s… Complicated.” Of course, the rest of the book didn’t live up to that statement, and Xavin spent much of hir time in masculine form, even when ze logically would use hir feminine form. Like… grocery shopping with hir teammates, for example.
So now we have two writers. One, the original creator, who views Xavin as explicitly genderqueer, and another, who agrees with the aforementioned fans in the belief that Xavin is male and everybody knows that but Karolina. This is one of the perils of a shared universe.
Then Joss Whedon takes over! Sometimes I think I am the only feminist media commentator ever who never really liked Joss Whedon. Buffy was okay, but it was hardly the feminist masterpiece I’ve seen it claimed to be, I have to say. Anyway, it’s generally agreed that Whedon’s run on Runaways was entirely disappointing, especially since it took him a year and a half to write six issues. He had Xavin start to default to hir female form, which I will admit made me happy at the time because I thought it would shut up the people who thought of Xavin as male. (It didn’t.)
So now we have the idea of Xavin as genderqueer overwritten by the new idea of Xavin as female. There is vast potential in an alien character who literally does not understand things we don’t realise aren’t universal, and I really do feel that giving Xavin a fixed gender identity is a bit of a cop-out, all things considered. We’re losing what made Xavin a compelling and interesting character, why? To make things easier for the fans to understand? To make things easier for the writers?
Dealing with characters that don’t fit our assumptions can be a challenge. I expect writers, especially writers with Whedon’s reputation, to be able to rise to that challenge. I expect readers to rise to that challenge and work on changing some of those assumptions. Obviously, one character in one comic book isn’t going to do very much to change real-world attitudes. But subjecting that character to all the rules that that same character could have questioned, broken, and changed? Well, that stings. Even for people who will accept without questioning time machines, psychic dinosaurs, black magic, and a little girl who can beat up Wolverine, a character who does not fit into a binary gender category is apparently too much.
(Wow, this wasn’t the rant I set out trying to write, but I think I like this one better.)
~Saoirse
thevagabonders
Saoirse
Aidan
hanashimasu
missnomered
