Also Emily was into kink
Now they’re doing it to the Brontes, because of course they are. The Bronte Parsonage Museum announces:
It’s week three of our series celebrating Pride at the Museum! This time, we’re exploring gender identity and the Brontës.
Well don’t. Explore how the Brontes (Branwell apart) dealt with being female by all means, but leave genner idennniny out of it.
Throughout their lives, the sisters never settled for society’s expectations for women, and – as scholars discuss – the female (and male) characters in their novels explore what life beyond gendered barriers could be like…
Bollocks. Did Rochester “explore what life beyond gendered barriers could be like”? Give me a break.
Oh SHUT up.
It’s the gender identity zealots, not their critics, who very much settle for society’s expectations for men and women. Gender ideology entirely subjugates the biological sexes to the societal roles prescribed to men and women. There are no men and women anymore, only the stereotypes themselves, and the noblest thing you can do is medically fix your body to better fit them. It couldn’t get further from defying stereotypes, it’s handing the whole realm over and forcing the sexes to kowtow to their new stereotypical overlords.
Logically, in terms of advancing women’s rights, it’s the most regressive thing possible. But aesthetically, from a distance, all that noisy jumbling of masculine and feminine and male and female and woman and man looks like a great big stereotype-smashing party, doesn’t it. It’s the fact that transwomen are so obviously, visually, unmistakeably men dressed as women and vice-versa for the women with their he/they pronouns, that lends the superficial appearance that these are political iconoclasts out to smash stereotypes. Nevermind that every single time they open their mouths they contradict that by adamantly insisting that stereotypes are the most important thing in the fucking world. Nevermind that when a woman with natural armpit hair insists that this literally un-womans her, she’s completely undoing and reversing whatever visual statement she was supposedly making against stereotypes by showing her natural underams in a photograph.
Part of the problem is the Instagrammification of identity politics: if you just idly scroll through the little pictures on your phone, the trans brigade looks like it’s trying to break stereotypes. It’s only when you stop and pay attention and mentally process what they’re actually fucking saying that it hits you: this movent is full of deranged people who have become obsessed with upholding stereotypes. They’re literally promoting the surgical modification of children’s bodies out of a terror that those children would supposedly suffer and die, so unbearable their existence would be outside of the fucking stereotypes.
The Brontës might have been turned into lifelong medical patients if they were coming of age today. In that sense, I’m glad they’re dead so that they can only be metaphorically, not physically, transed.
Weren’t the female parts in Shakespeare’s plays performed by boys? That makes Shakespeare queer theatre, right?
They were indeed. Women weren’t allowed to be actors.
There’s a lovely bit in the opening of Olivier’s Henry V in which Olivier as player at the Globe adjusts a boy’s costume or hair or something. Very breaking the fourth wall.
Week Three? Still another week to go? Will the blue haired student they’ve hired be able to drag more tenuous notions from their archives?
I bet after this they think about dropping their Stonewall membership. Far too much trouble. Just imagine all the Bronte fans coming in to the Parsonage and doing double takes at all this. “Excuse me, but your sign is WRONG.”
If a writer writes three dimensional characters, some of whom defy stereotypes, then said author is genderqueer? Does that mean one should keeps one’s breasts, but add a penis? Or something? To fit what other people, people who are narcissistic and child-like, think we should be – or are?
Leave women’s history alone, you twits. We have few enough role models and inspirational figures, don’t “trans” the ones we have. (Note: Don’t baptize them into the Mormon church, either).
Tangentially (it’s the other side of the coin), I was reading an item in the news today saying that it’s time that white authors stopped writing Maori and Polynesian characters because they don’t really understand the culture and what it is to be those people. There is an element of truth and if you’re writing specifically about some aspect of another culture you’d better make a damn good effort to get it right. Often though NZ authors have written stories about the conflict inherent in trying to bridge cultures, or the effects of poverty, racism, etc. Some characters may well be Maori, or women, or gay. Writing is an act of imagination and empathy. not everyone will do it well, but I do believe authors should be allowed to give it a go and take fair criticism if they get things wrong – that allows for growth and reflection. If we follow this criticism to its logical conclusion, we’ll only ever write about ourselves, because how can we really know anything else? Ugh. Funny though that a male transitioning in middle age just inherently knows exactly what a women is…
To come back on thread, I know little about the Brontes, but I always understood that the point of some of the characters was that they resisted being pushed into the mode of behaviour society expected of them because they were women or their station of birth. That doesn’t sound at all queer to me, just an author exploring concepts of feminism and egalitarianism out of frustration with the status quo. I’ll let you more erudite types put me right.
Jane Eyre, both novel and character, was seen as obnoxiously rebellious and disrespectful of class distinctions. The bitter resentment of the way her aunt treated her for instance – shocking.
Rob@6:
Yeah. Writing characters who have a significant difference from yourself (be it sex, culture, race, sexuality, faith) is notoriously fraught. And of course, this is doubly true when dealing with an author with some aspect of privilege; the nature of privilege is to blind, so as a white man, when writing a woman or a character of color, I should absolutely do research, maybe even talk to other authors who come from that background, to make sure I’m not just writing my women as men with brain damage (a phrase I am lifting from a Stephen King novel, because it really is a good way of talking about how a lot of men seem to view women at times).
However, it’s gone from being a warning sign to being a crime in and of itself (“How dare you write a character who is from a background other than yours?”). The ironic part, of course, is that this actually harms the effort to increase representation in media, since those authors of privilege make up a disproportionate segment of the writing population–if white authors can’t write about black characters at all, then you end up with a very white literary canon.
(I recall an article by a Pacific Islander woman who was very upset about Disney’s Moana, because it inserted an actual narrative–specifically, a typical Campbellian Refusal of the Call story–into the “Just So” stories that she grew up with. Her complaint, of course, ignored several facts, most notably that without a narrative of some sort, Just So stories are not capable of supporting a movie release, and also that this is no different than what Disney did to the Grimm’s tales. The notion that the exposure to Islander culture in the movie might inspire people, especially kids, to actually learn something about it completely escaped her.)
To further the interesting discussion, it is also a fact that a white author writing about people who are like them (white) will receive relentless criticism from the ‘lack of diversity’ in their works. Writers are told they need to include all perspectives, but when they are white, they are not allowed to include all perspectives.
And it’s not just race. Eve Ensler was given shit because The Vagina Monologues did not include women of color or same sex attracted women. She listened, did research, and added that. She did it the same way she did the rest of the play: talking to actual women and getting their experiences, then incorporating them into the script. She got just as much shit for that; how dare she write non-white, non-heteronormative characters? She had no right.
In short, you can’t win. Even when you have people of color/LGB people who are working with you and glad you are doing the writing, you will be reminded that one person (or several hundred) don’t speak for the community. But one offended person (even if they are white, straight, and male) can be assumed to speak for the whole community and get the author condemned.
Meanwhile, people who haven’t the ability to write their own story, or have no way to get it published, lose their voice.
iknklast, I very much agree.
This issue is current in NZ because of the publication of a biography by Paul Moon of the Dutch New Zealand photographer Ans Westra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ans_Westra). Westra became famous, or infamous depending on your view) largely as a result of photographs of poor rural Maori that she took over a five month period living in the community in 1963 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washday_at_the_Pa). While lauded by some (Maori and Pakeha) her work was criticised by others (again Maori and Pakeha).
Publication of the biography has resulted in competing reviews taking very different stances about Westra and her work. I’ll give the final word to this entertaining and sharply written review by a Maori woman.
https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/06/20/book-of-the-week-everyone-is-wrong-about-ans-westra-except-talia-marshall/