some observations about gender, literary identification, and pain

[lotesse]

It's easier for me to project my trauma, insecurity, anxiety, and pain onto male characters. It's too - hot - to do it with female self-avatars. I haven't been able to casually re-watch the last season of Shameless before now, because the way I identify with Fiona is so intense and cathartic that I sort of don't want to touch it. Sometimes the nerve is too sensitive. Rose Campbell makes me just sob and sob and sob. Writing about Ekaterin Vorsoisson is like looking into the mirror and forcing myself to tell the truth about what I see. In some ways, these are the important identifications: they're the ones that are really keeping me going, the bedrock of story-stuff that I know will always be there for me to fall back on when I need support. They're the loci where I'm working through my shit; and I keep swearing to myself that, if nothing else, I will work through my shit. But it's fucking painful. With male self-avatars, it's a lot easier, a lot lighter, and pretty painless.

I think it's so much easier and so much more painless for me to work through trauma via male self-avatars for two reasons. One is that I've been culturally conditioned to love, forgive, and excuse men. In my real life, this has caused problems for me; through the transformative effects of fiction, it can give me a way to love, forgive, and excuse myself with greater ease and confidence.

The other reason has to do with distance; there's a line that I've always remembered but haven't ever been able to google down, from someone's meta about slash from way back in the early millennium, about how slash is a retreat from a figural female body "soaked through in semiotic ink." My own body is, for me, tremendously overdetermined; it all means too much. My selfhood has come to feel similarly; I keep touching off painful epiphanies and moments of unwanted self-knowledge, and it's a lot. Boy characters with whom I can identify - Will Stanton, Benton Fraser, Luke Skywalker and Miles Vorkosigan and Bellamy Blake and Daniel Jackson - let me sidle up to my damage without the incendiary risk. There's a representational veil that protects me, so that I can indulge in h/c or grovelfic or praisekink or whatever soothing stuff my id wants without self-protective sensitized pulling-back.

Comments

[cathexys]

I've just been reading a lot of old meta for my Mary Sue essay, and came across this quote: Male bodies are a "a clean slate on which we can write our own sexualities without dealing with all the politics and bullshit that normally has us messed up or angry or conflicted about our bodies” (Julad 8-17-05)

So yes, I wholeheartedly hear you on that second reason in particular. We may have gotten over many of the reasons why we used to pick guys as self inserts with so many awesome female characters to chose from these days, but this argument remains, I think.

I mean, if Flaubert can say, Madame Bovary, c'est moi, then I think we can likewise identify with Fraser or Daniel...