The Male Hysteric

So I just saw the monthly "Is Haruka/Sailor Uranus genderfluid" post on Reddit and they're at it again, arguing about how gender works in Japan vs the west and lots of quibbling over terminology of what did or did not exist in 1994 when the character was invented.

I think it's very tiring to read this because regardless of the creator's intent, Haruka Ten'oh is probably the clearest, unambiguous, most simply read genderfluid character I've seen in a lot of media. Sometimes Haruka is a girl, and sometimes Haruka is a boy, and she's enough of a girl that she's in the 'girl only' group of sailor scouts, but also enough of a boy that she lives through her private school system as a boy in a boy's uniform without any of this presentation being questioned. This is different in the anime, apparently, which I have not seen all of, where she clearly denies being a boy at some point, but in the manga the read is startlingly unambiguous, and the waffling is from people who deny that gender fluidity is possible or real, and want to couch her existence in safer terms, like 'really' being a girl who likes to dress in boy's clothing.

And, like... I do think there's a huge cop out here when labeling characters as 'only' butch lesbians vs genderfluid, transgender, etc. Because the pervasive labeling of a character like Haruka as a butch lesbian is never a real analysis of her identity but always couched in making her safer and simpler to understand to a cis audience, when this is not the reality that actual butch lesbians who are actively read as men in real life situations experience. The 'only a woman in man's clothing' has been a label to soothe cis people and has not protected butch lesbians from gendered and sexual violence for their existence and does not necessarily reflect their views on their own genders. There's multiple writings by butches on how they don't feel like women, and they feel like men forced to live in some kind of liminal space or otherwise not women, and how they feel like they can't actually express this. This is not to discount possible butches who do see themselves as women in men's clothing, but to shove off a character into the category of 'butch' does not mean that they are devoid of gendered feelings, complexity, and interiority that would make a cis audience uncomfortable, and Haruka's actions do demonstrate that whether the audience likes it or not, regardless of any vocabulary used. Gendered subcultures like butch, genderfluid, nonbinary, etc are historically very fluid but this does not mean the formalized gender is correct, just that it is a forced choice forced by a society that cannot tolerate ambiguity.

I'd call Sailor Uranus genderfluid but she could be read as butch. But she's not 'just' butch. She's not 'just' anything.

As the hellsite has been dying I've been up to my usual shenanigans there as long as it will hold out (my mastodon instance has been down all day) and I've found a very bizarre yet thankfully somewhat trivial discussion to get caught up in instead of the rampant -isms constantly directed at me.

The discussion is based on this very bizarre statement about Viktor from the show Arcane while people were arguing about the Jayce/Viktor ship -- and that is that Viktor is somehow "cold and professional".

I don't care if people actually ship JayVik (though the morality police coming after shippers for shipping them because of Jayce's "like a brother" comment "means it's incest coded" is deliriously stupid if it's not actually straight-up in bad faith, which I'm sure it is), but the idea that Viktor is somehow "cold and professional" is so contrary to what actually happens in the show that I'm sure we could not have watched the same thing. The guy tried to explain sneaking a near-exile into a lab as some kind of intimate tryst, he openly berated the majority-shareholder of their company, shrinks away from spotlight and shirks professional responsibility to work on personal projects, waxes openly sentimental and mournful about his impending death, and this is not even getting into the tender looks he gives Jayce at every touch that the shippers keep obsessing over. Viktor is absolutely NOT cold or professional. He has wide range of expressions and body language like the other major characters in Arcane, which is one of the show's major strengths and definitely worth analyzing. VIktor's expressions read more as passionate which is an interesting contrast to his frankly slimy habit of doing whatever he pleases when he thinks everyone around him isn't paying attention. I think if he wasn't the blorbo du jour or if the things he was doing this way were more unsympathetic in nature people would point this out more -- but as it is, people weirdly do not mention this part of his character and kind of seem to ignore it, and when wanting to find character flaws go digging in his League of Legends character profile instead.

No seriously, if I talked to the majority shareholder of my company this way my ass would be fired so fast...

Anyway, back to the original comment, "cold and professional." It's a very weird comment unsupported by the text -- we know that viewers will see what they want to see. Viktor's a man, white, in STEM, and he's one of the few characters with a thick accent and that accent has specific stereotypes associated with it. Possibly part of the 'professional' comment is due to the fact that we see essentially nothing of his personal life except a flashback and use of experimental drugs and even those are still 'sciencey'. We have certain weird assumptions about men in STEM, about emotions even in general. Anger isn't an emotion, and with a broader brush only actual tears are the sign of 'getting emotional', which we never see Viktor do. I wonder if the 'cold' comment has to do with him not being demonstrative with typical displays of affection -- while he's obviously receptive to Jayce touching him with casual affection, he never seems to initiate it himself, but that seems more evidence of some kind of culture clash or at best taken as evidence that they're not really an item, but his response is never cold. 

I assume there is something of a Rorschach going on here. He has a lot of cues that viewers are primed to read a certain way. Are you paying enough attention to see what's actually there?

It's like the same discussion I saw elsewhere on Tumblr earlier this week, about Daphne from Scooby-Doo weirdly enough. Every new iteration of Scooby-Doo claims that they're doing something new with Daphne, that they're making her 'actually competent' and not 'just the hot one' out of some sort of misguided 'girl power' message, failing to account for how in EVERY iteration of Scooby-Doo was competent with useful skills even if she was not as technically inclined as Velma. Instead of paying attention to anything actually occurring onscreen, she's a teenage girl who's attractive and interested in fashion -- that must be all there is to her.

With Viktor, I don't know if it's because I grew up with these kinds of guys that I know there's way more to them than what media and even they themselves may want to project -- my dad was an engineer, my grandfather was an architect, my brother tried to go into medicine, my uncle is a trekkie, I'm a programmer myself, my family a few generations back came over from central and eastern Europe, etc -- but I kind of don't think that's it, because that's not really a super common environment, and it makes me wonder about things I've experienced from others. People have such a hard time reading my emotions and expressions to the point it often feels malicious. It makes me wonder if it's a neurotypical/neurodivergent thing going on here. Apparent 'masters' of reading body language, aren't they supposed to be? Every time a new 'body language' article is published online it's about how to tell if someone's being 'deceptive', perhaps making people search for paranoid readings of bodies and expressions instead of reading the plain text right in front of them. Or maybe it's like the 'empath' trait described in other pop psych articles -- someone has already decided this person's emotions for them so there's no need to look at their actual face and body to get what they're feeling, and if they say something else, they're obviously lying.

I don't know. I may have more thoughts on this later. Something is afoot.