danielle (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shrimpchipsss) wrote2023-10-03 02:30 pm
shrimpchipsss) wrote2023-10-03 02:30 pm
Entry tags:
Further critique on wlw genderswaps that are derived from mlm media
Featuring an imperfect case study using my own fanart.
Toxic yuri had a moment on the ailing Twitter/X app over the summer which is very exciting and [ariana grande equality gif] to see, but I want to put forth some critical thoughts for people to consider as part of the yuri zeitgeist.
Because the toxic (I’m being real broad here, think anger, aggression, etc, not just abuse or manipulation) aspect of toxic yuri is something that is comparatively hard to come by in wlw fanwork as opposed to in mlm fanwork, particularly in wlw femswaps that are derived from mlm media.
x_los wrote a critique on the state of wlw femswaps in MDZS fandom circa September 2020 that I think really gets at the odd loss of athleticism and physical capability as part of the alchemical genderswapping, and the tendency for cis wlw femswaps to be domestic, mundane, and soft when the couple that the genderswap is derived from is blatantly not. It’s the kind of genre or tonal shift that isn’t a Thing on its own but is an annoying trend across entire fandoms, the cozy-fying of athletic, martial ships as you turn them into women, and therefore worth examining.
I’m going to branch off from the [physicality] aspect of this critique into a [violence and aggression] sub branch because it’s interesting to me and I think it has implications on the original argument. Let’s go.
Take for example Lesbingqiu (lesbian BingQiu from Scum Villain). BingQiu are perfectly set up to be angry and fraught and toxic which they definitionally are in the Jin Lan Arc in the story. During this arc, they have an angry confrontation in an alleyway where Binghe chokes Shen Qingqiu against a wall, stops the blade of Shen Qingqiu’s sword with his bare hand, drags Shen Qingqiu up by the hair, and feeds him his blood (x_los has a GREAT angry fraught lesbingqiu fic that takes place during this arc which I highly recommend).
I have also drawn a scene from this arc. Sorry to use my own fanart but like, it’s right there.
As well as a modern AU wlw scene that is spiritually from the same source
Like if you have any visual literacy at all you can see that the two are the same.
But I’ve found that the angry fraught bathtub drowning lesbingqiu is less popular (by a factor of 7x tumblr notes at time of posting) than the angry fraught blood feeding mlm bingqiu.
I think this is partly because it’s a modern AU and so people see it and go “!!! domestic violence!” which is understandably uncomfortable. But fanart of violent modern AU mlms don’t give people the same pause.
Which is where we get into the societal stuff. Men are culturally permitted to be violent while women are not. The book Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons is all about the way that aggression among girls is suppressed from a young age which just makes aggression among girls secretive and vicious and insane. There’s a notable study on girls being hushed in a classroom for raising their voices when boys in the same class had been speaking more loudly. Big thanks topallas_rose for recommending this book to me in our discussion on this topic.
(As an aside, there’s also a weird association between women and violence necessarily meaning that the woman is a victim of violence which is a gut reaction I’ve noted in myself and am extremely suspicious of as it is some gender essentialist shit that would be very nice to unlearn.)
But to get back to girl aggression, which is an actual useful term unlike all the awful and misogynistic “girl dinner,” “girl math” stuff people are peddling these days. Women aren’t allowed to be openly violent or aggressive even though women are no less violent or aggressive. So in society, aggression among girls and women becomes hidden. In fandom, aggression among girls becomes a mythic creature, the platonic ideal of toxic yuri that people keep talking about but which is harder to actually come by.
I think this is because people are uncomfortable with overt aggression (see the bathtub drowning scene) on the one hand, but also can’t seem to come up with good ways of portraying alternate aggression on the other.
Allow me to introduce tshirt’s essay on girl yaoi, which can be found on page 55 in Yaoi Zine 2. This essay differentiates girl yaoi from yuri and provides some interesting alternatives to the sad, defanged lesbians that proliferate in fiction.
Because it isn’t that domesticity or mundanity is inherently less interesting, it’s that people portray domesticity or mundanity in such a way that is entirely about aesthetics and set dressing (COZIFICATION) and has little to do with the characters’ social roles as the women they are supposed to be now. The thing that makes girl yaoi girl yaoi is that it is about femininity and the identity and social roles of the women involved.
Which is a useful thing to consider for genderswaps because genderswaps have to be ABOUT gender (at least if they are going to be satisfying to me). Otherwise what’s the point? Choose any two other already-existing fictional women and write about them. Which, I guess this is a good moment to say that my critique has mostly been about cis wlw femswaps, as femswaps with even one trans/nb partner tend to have something interesting to say about gender and social roles.
I keep getting off track and now I’m angry but like femswap wlw doesn’t even have to be toxic to be compelling or to have something to say! I don’t know, tell me something about how the characters embody their gender! Consider Nana which is all about personal style and amatonormativity and the slow creep of being influenced by someone else’s taste until you become them, or The Handmaiden and the mirroring and identification of self in the other.
Lesbingqiu is perfectly primed for such a situation, what with Binghe needing to be socially respected in order to be a worthy partner to Shen Qingqiu. What does that mean for a Bingqiu that are lesbians, a Bingqiu in which Binghe is making herself in Shen Qingqiu’s image? There is oh so much to explore.
And for those who /want/ to portray the secretive aggression, can’t that play out in the context of social roles and relationally, in keeping secrets and threatening ties and stealing someone’s signature scent, copying their outfits and gossip and haughty looks and betrayal?
For people who want that good wlw media, tshirt and I compiled some recommendations from people based on enjoying The Handmaiden and made it into a zine. I’ve taken a few of the recommendations and they have been excellent.
Disclaimer: this wasn’t really a critique on the state of Lesbingqiu fic, my frustrations with them are that I am not a writer and I wish I could write the modern AU fic where Binghe steals Shen Qingqiu’s taste and mannerisms and social positioning to become the best girl. It’s girl yaoi. It’s transgenderallegory. It’s everything idk
Toxic yuri had a moment on the ailing Twitter/X app over the summer which is very exciting and [ariana grande equality gif] to see, but I want to put forth some critical thoughts for people to consider as part of the yuri zeitgeist.
Because the toxic (I’m being real broad here, think anger, aggression, etc, not just abuse or manipulation) aspect of toxic yuri is something that is comparatively hard to come by in wlw fanwork as opposed to in mlm fanwork, particularly in wlw femswaps that are derived from mlm media.
x_los wrote a critique on the state of wlw femswaps in MDZS fandom circa September 2020 that I think really gets at the odd loss of athleticism and physical capability as part of the alchemical genderswapping, and the tendency for cis wlw femswaps to be domestic, mundane, and soft when the couple that the genderswap is derived from is blatantly not. It’s the kind of genre or tonal shift that isn’t a Thing on its own but is an annoying trend across entire fandoms, the cozy-fying of athletic, martial ships as you turn them into women, and therefore worth examining.I’m going to branch off from the [physicality] aspect of this critique into a [violence and aggression] sub branch because it’s interesting to me and I think it has implications on the original argument. Let’s go.
Take for example Lesbingqiu (lesbian BingQiu from Scum Villain). BingQiu are perfectly set up to be angry and fraught and toxic which they definitionally are in the Jin Lan Arc in the story. During this arc, they have an angry confrontation in an alleyway where Binghe chokes Shen Qingqiu against a wall, stops the blade of Shen Qingqiu’s sword with his bare hand, drags Shen Qingqiu up by the hair, and feeds him his blood (x_los has a GREAT angry fraught lesbingqiu fic that takes place during this arc which I highly recommend).
I have also drawn a scene from this arc. Sorry to use my own fanart but like, it’s right there.
As well as a modern AU wlw scene that is spiritually from the same source
Like if you have any visual literacy at all you can see that the two are the same.
But I’ve found that the angry fraught bathtub drowning lesbingqiu is less popular (by a factor of 7x tumblr notes at time of posting) than the angry fraught blood feeding mlm bingqiu.
I think this is partly because it’s a modern AU and so people see it and go “!!! domestic violence!” which is understandably uncomfortable. But fanart of violent modern AU mlms don’t give people the same pause.
Which is where we get into the societal stuff. Men are culturally permitted to be violent while women are not. The book Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons is all about the way that aggression among girls is suppressed from a young age which just makes aggression among girls secretive and vicious and insane. There’s a notable study on girls being hushed in a classroom for raising their voices when boys in the same class had been speaking more loudly. Big thanks to
pallas_rose for recommending this book to me in our discussion on this topic.(As an aside, there’s also a weird association between women and violence necessarily meaning that the woman is a victim of violence which is a gut reaction I’ve noted in myself and am extremely suspicious of as it is some gender essentialist shit that would be very nice to unlearn.)
But to get back to girl aggression, which is an actual useful term unlike all the awful and misogynistic “girl dinner,” “girl math” stuff people are peddling these days. Women aren’t allowed to be openly violent or aggressive even though women are no less violent or aggressive. So in society, aggression among girls and women becomes hidden. In fandom, aggression among girls becomes a mythic creature, the platonic ideal of toxic yuri that people keep talking about but which is harder to actually come by.
I think this is because people are uncomfortable with overt aggression (see the bathtub drowning scene) on the one hand, but also can’t seem to come up with good ways of portraying alternate aggression on the other.
Allow me to introduce tshirt’s essay on girl yaoi, which can be found on page 55 in Yaoi Zine 2. This essay differentiates girl yaoi from yuri and provides some interesting alternatives to the sad, defanged lesbians that proliferate in fiction.
Because it isn’t that domesticity or mundanity is inherently less interesting, it’s that people portray domesticity or mundanity in such a way that is entirely about aesthetics and set dressing (COZIFICATION) and has little to do with the characters’ social roles as the women they are supposed to be now. The thing that makes girl yaoi girl yaoi is that it is about femininity and the identity and social roles of the women involved.
Which is a useful thing to consider for genderswaps because genderswaps have to be ABOUT gender (at least if they are going to be satisfying to me). Otherwise what’s the point? Choose any two other already-existing fictional women and write about them. Which, I guess this is a good moment to say that my critique has mostly been about cis wlw femswaps, as femswaps with even one trans/nb partner tend to have something interesting to say about gender and social roles.
I keep getting off track and now I’m angry but like femswap wlw doesn’t even have to be toxic to be compelling or to have something to say! I don’t know, tell me something about how the characters embody their gender! Consider Nana which is all about personal style and amatonormativity and the slow creep of being influenced by someone else’s taste until you become them, or The Handmaiden and the mirroring and identification of self in the other.
Lesbingqiu is perfectly primed for such a situation, what with Binghe needing to be socially respected in order to be a worthy partner to Shen Qingqiu. What does that mean for a Bingqiu that are lesbians, a Bingqiu in which Binghe is making herself in Shen Qingqiu’s image? There is oh so much to explore.
And for those who /want/ to portray the secretive aggression, can’t that play out in the context of social roles and relationally, in keeping secrets and threatening ties and stealing someone’s signature scent, copying their outfits and gossip and haughty looks and betrayal?
For people who want that good wlw media, tshirt and I compiled some recommendations from people based on enjoying The Handmaiden and made it into a zine. I’ve taken a few of the recommendations and they have been excellent.
Disclaimer: this wasn’t really a critique on the state of Lesbingqiu fic, my frustrations with them are that I am not a writer and I wish I could write the modern AU fic where Binghe steals Shen Qingqiu’s taste and mannerisms and social positioning to become the best girl. It’s girl yaoi. It’s transgender
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I may or may not have just binged like half of the freud zine (I have made it to part 5!), and will read more when I get the chance. I think I need to go write some meta about bingqiu and the blood-drinking/breast feeding and the entire medieval Christian mystical tradition of blood drinking from Christ's wound (but also the wound is described with vaginal imagery, but also there's a bunch of breastfeeding from Christ imagery). Binghe literally recieves the stigmata. I guess this is what Dreamwidth is for! Also fanfiction. I'm going to write some lesbian fanfiction about this also.
I was lucky enough to avoid most of the fandom osmosis for beefleaf. I had some understanding that there was a bit of tragedy, but no idea what to expect. Now I sort of yearn for a f!beefleaf fic that keeps all of the tragedy of canon. Or maybe a beefleaf Carmilla au. I think I am really primed to write that (though the tgcf fandom terrifies me). Something something the nature of consumption and ghosts and SQX (has anyone pointed out that one of the things SQX has taken away from them is the ability to transform into a female form? The form that they are the most powerful and comfortable in? I think about that a lot). I love what art I've seen of course, but I'm sort of desperate for some beefleaf with a little girl aggression. I have been in too many of those unhealthy, kind of homoerotic codependent teen girl friendships to not see beefleaf get a story with that.
The idea of girl aggression as pillow stuffing, as something that is expressed through the aesthetic and proper behavior is actually soooo Shen Yuan, come to think of it. The moment he wakes up as Shen Qingqiu, he is Performing, and the system is outright enforcing a very specific type of existence. It would be... so much fun to explore this through the lens of girl aggression. A female Shen Qingqiu, even more of a performance, used to even more restriction on what she is allowed to be. When she pushes Luo Binghe into the abyss, she herself is breaking a boundary by actualizing the girl violence as plain, physical violence, or something. If I am making any sense. What sort of Binghe would come back from this? She has to get the sword to escape, but the language of behavior she's been taught doesn't allow her to use it.
In any case, I feel like I should at least bring up Clear and Muddy Loss of Love at least once here. It's baihe rather than danmei, it's about gender (and also political drama), and I have no idea what to say about it at all. Except that it does not shy away from women and violence, but also both of the women committing that violence are already transgressing gender roles in some way (either through presenting as masc or becoming a female emperor). I loved that book. Then I went to look for fanfiction, and it was a majority really fluffy modern aus. I am still trying to figure out why that is.
Anyway, I continue to be entranced by this girl aggression concept, and am teasing it out in my head right now. It seems to come in a simultaneous enforcement and transgression of gender boundaries. Because, as you said, overt aggression isn't allowed to happen between women, it must be covert instead. The examples that you've given of where it can happen are great, honestly, and I am excited to think of more in the meantime as I figure out where in literature it can go.
I hope you enjoy the Fingersmith! You'll be familiar with the plot, because despite like 30 million changes (changes made to suit the visual medium, a transformation of setting and time period, having to stop at what is actually more of a halfway point in the book) it is a near perfect adaptation, I think. The heart and themes are All There, perfectly recontextualized.
I hope you enjoy my writing! I think when I finish the yaoi zine (and the freud zine) I'm definitely going to have a Lot of Thoughts. I'm sorry this comment was also still so long. I think my brain is full of thoughts.
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The whole thing of SQX losing access to their female form at the end of the story is Really Horrific if you think about it for a few seconds (like a lot of things that happen in MXTX's work...) there's so much gender horror to work with there! I'd love to see that kind of thing explored more.
And YES gender is performance and all that! I've read some really great takes where Shen Yuan is a trans woman who hasn't realized it yet, who transmigrates into cis woman SQQ and is like oh NO I have to pretend to be a woman now, and after years of that finally figures it out at some point down the line.
I got to about 80 chapters of Clear and Muddy Loss of Love and sadly couldn't stick with it! I couldn't be brought to care about the rest of the characters other than the main couple and it turns out it's not just that I tend to like stories with a strong ensemble cast but it's kind of a make or break for me. I've gathered the gist of the rest of their story though and I'm super in awe of the whole female emperor thing. Maybe one day I'll finish watching Empress of China but there are. so many episodes and they are. so, so long. And look there's some great examples of girl aggression in the insane harem politics and hidden plots to try to poison people or turn others against them.
If the whole girl aggression thing keeps haunting you I really do recommend Odd Girl Out, it's a fast and easy read because a lot of it is comprised of anecdotes. It's slightly of its time but still completely relevant and it put words to a lot of things I'd vaguely thought about, like how because girls are socialized to be caretakers and taught that their value comes from their relationships with others, one way girl aggression comes out as threatening to sever connections. It's, you know, emotional abuse. Love to see it in fiction!
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I'd really like to see SQX's gender horror explored more as well! There was a time when I read a lot of postcanon and au beefleaf fics, and something I noticed is that a lot of the more m/m-focused stuff almost... brushed over that part, or didn't really think about it? So I feel there's a lot to say it.
Thoses takes about Shen Yuan sound like so much fun! I feel like that is 100% something she would do.
And honestly, it took me a while to really get into Clear and Muddy Loss of Love and it's characters. I think what I ended up doing was a bunch of skimming when it focused on some of the other characters, until I just got so far in that I got invested. Especially when the female emperor stuff really started going. Empress of China sounds a lot like a harem politics drama I've been watching called Ruyi's Love in the Palace, and it's just the same. So much girl aggression. So much trying to outdo each other by being the Most Beautiful. To the point where I feel like it's less about impressing the emperor and more about Beating the Other Women.
I'll go and check out Odd Girl Out at some point then, because I'm still thinking about the girl aggression. I want to write more about the girl aggression. It's just so interesting. Like, this might be a weird one, but I keep thinking about this in relation to monasteries. I think we often see people depict monasteries as like, gay paradises (cries of "lesbian nuns!" and jokes about ) but they're still hierarchical structures. They still have SO many vectors for girl aggression, if not outright girl violence.
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No you're so right, harem intrigue plots have so much potential to be super homosocial. Everything hinges upon having the Emperor's favor but so much of the actual scrambling to get it happens among the women, their actions are as influenced by each other as they are by the Emperor.
I feel like people assume the same for single gender schools at all levels but what you mention about monasteries having hierarchy sounds suuuper intriguing.
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I feel like we often see harem intrigue plots end up with women in camps; not only are they competing for the emperor's favor but the empress, and the empress dowager, and whoever has any power at all.
Yeah, like there's some things that female monasteries simply cannot do (women can't take confession, at least in the middle ages), and of course there's the structure of the abbess and the prioress and the layers of general sisters out there, and some are full-fledged and some are still in training. It's people with power over each other, in a time where corporeal punishment hasn't been questioned (and pain for the divine is often seen as a good thing). I could see this going in a lot of interesting directions.