SubscribeI had an interesting discussion this afternoon about gender in science fiction in relation to one of the new characters in Slingers. What it boiled down to was an issue of the male default role – it’s brought into sharp relief as soon as you start dealing with robots (of all things). The majority of them are perceived as male even if they are not conventionally named as such or even have obvious male anatomy.
For example, both C3PO and RTD2 are male. It seems obvious with 3PO, but R2′s sex is projected on him by those around him. It usually takes a female outfit, name or a set of metal breasts to provide the audience a cue that a robot should be perceived as anything but male. Of course, this is all nonsense because they should be genderless. And yet we live in a time were female robots are being designed and built. It’s lead to a lot of discussion in the last month. Interesting stuff which no doubt I’ll come back to.
Taking a break from writing this afternoon I dipped into some old issues of 2000AD from 1979 and stumbled across this suggestion from the editor:
Haven’t seen any subsequent reader response yet, but two progs along I did spot this letter:
Awesome. I take it that Judge Anderson was just about to leave the drawing board. I couldn’t resist the temptation to skip forward to 1984 and see my favourite Joe Dredd and Casandra Anderson story, City of The Damned, kick off:
There’s a good reason I have Steve Dillon’s work on my arm. To me it was here that 2000AD really grabbed my attention and never really let go.
I wouldn’t be writing a TV show if it wasn’t for this comic. In particular, Slingers came from a direct response to the decline of the 2000AD. The story was originally called Rat Packers and owed a lot more to Robo Hunter and Rogue Trooper in those early drafts than the concept it’s now evolved into.
I’m also glad to say it has a whole bunch of strong female characters and that show #2, De-Tech, has a female lead. I may well have to rename her Casandra…
There’s another issue here about the gender trap of course. Some of my favourite later 2000AD writers and artists started out as readers and went on to influence yet another generation of readers. None of them are women.
I do remember Jan Shepard getting a mention in David Bishop’s Thrill-Power Overload. She was one of the original art editors on the comic. Her assistant at the time, Kevin O’Neill, went on to co-create Nemesis the Warlock, Marshall Law and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.
What became of his boss after she left for Starlord I have no idea…
It would be interesting to see whether the gender split has continued in the post-Buffy era, considering the Terminator spin-offs and characters, Dark Angel etc, etc.
In the Fantasy (rather than sci-fi world), there were definitely influential females, for instance Margaret Weiss who wrote most of the Dungeons and Dragons novels – for a short while I assumed her writing parnter Tracy Hickman was also a woman, until I finally read a bio somewhere and realised Tracy could be a bloke’s name!
Plus the likes of CJ Cherryh etc….
I think with robots, it may not be a human gender issue, but an anthropomorhpic trait… for instance, male drivers always assuming their cars are female in films e.g. Eleanor, Christine, etc, etc….
Having said that, I grew up with Judge Anderson and various female characters being portrayed in a much stronger manner than in the 60′s and 70′s books in my collection!
The anthropomorphic issue is something that we’ll be chewing over too. Get’s more complicated with the issues that something like Caprica raised in the pilot. Machines being assigned real personalities based on human beings and taking some of that particular gender over with them. Or not. Also a bit of a mine field.
I’m doing my best not to let our show slide into cliche but its been an eye opener at what is considered to ‘work’ in tv when it comes to female roles.
But I think one of the reasons that the Americans found Slingers so attractive a proposition was that it wasn’t very American TV in feeling . It still ticks all the boxes you need to get commissioned (fingers crossed), but comes from a very British sensibility. And I owe that to 2000AD.
I still can’t take superheroes seriously, because I grew up on Dredd and co. And reading stories with a bunch of strong female characters each week has hopefully also had some influence.
Looking forward to getting some women on the writing team too.
Really good points. It’s really striking that writers a) feel the need to anthropomorphise robots, and then b) when they do so, add on a whole load of gender stereotypes and gender presentation, not to mention biological sex characteristics, even though… they’re robots! They don’t reproduce! (late-stage BSG aside…)
Sci-fi is meant to be about expanding vistas and imagining new worlds and ways of being, but all too often, even the most basic sexist and racist assumptions go unchallenged.
Sociological Images has a really good example of this in a specific robot design, especially about ‘male’ robots being the default, and how the designers unthinkingly laden down their work with assumptions like… male robots will be more agressive, female robots will be… er… pink.
Kate Bornstein has also written a good post about the gender of the robots in Wall-E. There was actually a big discussion about this on a number of feminist blogs, about how Pixar had gendered Wall-E and Eve as male and female. But, as Kate pointed out, there’s plenty of room for interpretation:
I appreciate the discussion of these important issues, but HOLY SHITSTICKS: JUDGE ANDERSON FLASHBACK.
my first crush.
whatever good intentions prompted her conception, i seem to remember her veering sharply towards a lara croft/pris aesthetic: all tits & thighs – the lycra lawgiver. the posters they were giving out in the late 80s were basically cartoon centrefolds. legal porn for horny pubescents.
I stopped reading 2000AD about 15 years ago. But I still have a big nostalgia trip when seeing art from the old issues. Funnily enough I have mates that work on the mag now, but still can’t bring myself to pick one up.
I wrote to Tharg once. I sent him a drawing I’d done (age 16) entitled ‘Tharg the Fuc*er.’ He never replied.