Invisible Plane
Oct. 26th, 2010 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueCame in to work early to get a flu shot. Now my opposite arm is sore, because my brain likes to keep things lively.
Was reading an interview with Kate Beaton in which she mentioned in passing that she thinks Kitty Pryde is so popular among female fans because she somewhat uniquely doesn't have a rape backstory. I was thinking about it, and even Buffy has a degree of sexual predation in her past, which is not a shading male characters tend to have.
Ciro is somewhat preoccupied with the number of "waiflike but superpowered" female characters in genre literature (and I find his observations compelling), which extends to the female protagonist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it occurs to me that the superpowered female character is also usually a victim of rape or attempted rape, that we find it easier to endorse a small and vengeant female who is responding to or overcoming rape. I am sure part of this is the "last girl" response, the way that we want to see a maximally disempowered figure triumph, and can identify with that triumph when we feel the most powerless.
But in that case, why is the disempowered figure typically white, and not disabled? (Unless, of course, a mental illness is presented as a superpower.) It's disturbing to consider that we might view rape as a way of "activating" female power, or femaleness as the same "mutant" quality possessed by the X-Men - something they didn't choose and which causes them to be feared and hated, but which also has power over others, by for example making men unable to resist sex with them.
Unsettling. And hard to disentangle from the notion that these raped but powerful women can also be a symbol of overcoming entrenched patriarchy and the costs involved.
Was reading an interview with Kate Beaton in which she mentioned in passing that she thinks Kitty Pryde is so popular among female fans because she somewhat uniquely doesn't have a rape backstory. I was thinking about it, and even Buffy has a degree of sexual predation in her past, which is not a shading male characters tend to have.
Ciro is somewhat preoccupied with the number of "waiflike but superpowered" female characters in genre literature (and I find his observations compelling), which extends to the female protagonist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it occurs to me that the superpowered female character is also usually a victim of rape or attempted rape, that we find it easier to endorse a small and vengeant female who is responding to or overcoming rape. I am sure part of this is the "last girl" response, the way that we want to see a maximally disempowered figure triumph, and can identify with that triumph when we feel the most powerless.
But in that case, why is the disempowered figure typically white, and not disabled? (Unless, of course, a mental illness is presented as a superpower.) It's disturbing to consider that we might view rape as a way of "activating" female power, or femaleness as the same "mutant" quality possessed by the X-Men - something they didn't choose and which causes them to be feared and hated, but which also has power over others, by for example making men unable to resist sex with them.
Unsettling. And hard to disentangle from the notion that these raped but powerful women can also be a symbol of overcoming entrenched patriarchy and the costs involved.
Re: jqeGgLvaznDjj
Date: 2013-04-16 01:35 am (UTC)