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2/2/12 22:45![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI have been watching Deep Space Nine. Which is really good! It was too political for me when it was first airing -- I preferred the morality-play-in-space/adventure-in-space of TNG, and rewatching it now I see that I wasn't really mature enough to get DS9.
But it's so conservative. (Okay, okay, I will give it points for the episode where Dax meets her wife-from-a-former-life and they still love each other. It's not as progressive as it wanted to be but I still enjoyed it.)
I haven't even read that much history, but I've read enough to have some conception of just how contingent and arbitrary gender roles and sexuality and courtship rituals really are. We don't date like people dated 70 years ago, and yet we're getting 24th-century plotlines where everyone dates pretty much like late-20th-century people. And, I mean, I understand that it's TV science fiction and you have to write plots that people are going to be able to instantly relate to, even if that means baseball and other cultural artifacts that seem unlikely to survive to the 24th century. I understand, too, why the people on Merlin date pretty much like late-20th-century people even though that's provably anachronistic rather than just speculatively so.
It's the same with a lot of YA dystopias, it's the same with a lot of urban fantasy where if gender roles are different from contemporary American gender roles, it's because men are biologically determined to be more dominant or something. :\
I guess I'm thinking about all of this because of a thing I'm tinkering with that has faeries in it. And honestly, I can't imagine that faeries would be bound up in the same gender-binary framework as the (contemporary American) human characters. But can you even say that without implying that the gender binary is an inherently human thing? Or without linking that to amorality? (I do think that faeries ought to be kinda amoral because they're faeries. But the character I'm thinking of made one very grand, noble gesture for love's sake, which I'll count as redemption enough). I'm prepared for that answer to be "no." I don't think I want to buy into that collection of stereotypes where the faeries are ultra decadent and have a lot of "transgressive" sex and that proves that they are bad people. Nope, really don't want to go there.
I guess that is what is interesting about writing fiction. Figuring out where else there is to go, after you've figured out where you definitely don't want to go.
But it's so conservative. (Okay, okay, I will give it points for the episode where Dax meets her wife-from-a-former-life and they still love each other. It's not as progressive as it wanted to be but I still enjoyed it.)
I haven't even read that much history, but I've read enough to have some conception of just how contingent and arbitrary gender roles and sexuality and courtship rituals really are. We don't date like people dated 70 years ago, and yet we're getting 24th-century plotlines where everyone dates pretty much like late-20th-century people. And, I mean, I understand that it's TV science fiction and you have to write plots that people are going to be able to instantly relate to, even if that means baseball and other cultural artifacts that seem unlikely to survive to the 24th century. I understand, too, why the people on Merlin date pretty much like late-20th-century people even though that's provably anachronistic rather than just speculatively so.
It's the same with a lot of YA dystopias, it's the same with a lot of urban fantasy where if gender roles are different from contemporary American gender roles, it's because men are biologically determined to be more dominant or something. :\
I guess I'm thinking about all of this because of a thing I'm tinkering with that has faeries in it. And honestly, I can't imagine that faeries would be bound up in the same gender-binary framework as the (contemporary American) human characters. But can you even say that without implying that the gender binary is an inherently human thing? Or without linking that to amorality? (I do think that faeries ought to be kinda amoral because they're faeries. But the character I'm thinking of made one very grand, noble gesture for love's sake, which I'll count as redemption enough). I'm prepared for that answer to be "no." I don't think I want to buy into that collection of stereotypes where the faeries are ultra decadent and have a lot of "transgressive" sex and that proves that they are bad people. Nope, really don't want to go there.
I guess that is what is interesting about writing fiction. Figuring out where else there is to go, after you've figured out where you definitely don't want to go.