“It matters what you get out of the book.”

October 1, 2016 7:43 AM

Greg Rucka on Queer Narrative and Wonder Woman [Comicosity] [Interview] “Ah. We’re talking about the “Northstar Problem.” The character has to stand up and say, “I’M GAY!” in all bold caps for it to be evident. For my purposes, that’s bad writing. That’s a character stating something that’s not impacting the story. I get nothing for my narrative out of that in almost any case. When a character is being asked point blank, if it’s germane to the story, then you get the answer. But for me, and I think for Nicola as well, for any story we tell — be it Black Magick, be it Wonder Woman, be it a Batman story — we want to show you these characters and their lives, and what they are doing. We want to show, not tell.”
posted by Fizz (19 comments total)

Now, are we saying Diana has been in love and had relationships with other women? As Nicola and I approach it, the answer is obviously yes.

And it needs to be yes for a number of reasons. But perhaps foremost among them is, if no, then she leaves paradise only because of a potential romantic relationship with Steve [Trevor]. And that diminishes her character. It would hurt the character and take away her heroism.

I really, really, really like Greg Rucka. Even more after this interview! Any man who is willing to acknowledge how easy it is to diminish the character and heroism of female protagonists is ok with me! And that he unequivocally acknowledges that in Paradise EVERYONE is happy, which means, of course Paradise is QUEER. Yaaaaaaas. Run and tell that.
posted by pjsky at 8:11 AM on October 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

“Ah. We’re talking about the “Northstar Problem.” The character has to stand up and say, “I’M GAY!” in all bold caps for it to be evident. For my purposes, that’s bad writing. "

Speaking as a comics fan with tremendous respect for Greg Rucka: Buuuuuuuuuuuuullllllllllllllllllllllshhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttttttt.

Real LGBTQ people don't communicate their orientation to friends, family, etc, entirely through subtext, and -- more relevant to the "show, don't tell" canard -- straight comics characters get to have unambiguous on-panel romances with characters of the opposite sex.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:38 AM on October 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

I dunno. Compare Northstar's "coming out" issue, which was a ridiculous fight peppered with AIDS statistics, with The Flash at roughly the same time. In the latter, the Pied Piper was a character inthe story who was gay, and sometimes that was overt (him calling Wally West on some bullshit) and sometimes less so (appearing in a party scene with a date). In the former, that Northstar was gay felt way more like a stunt.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:56 AM on October 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Real LGBTQ people don't communicate their orientation to friends, family, etc, entirely through subtext, and -- more relevant to the "show, don't tell" canard -- straight comics characters get to have unambiguous on-panel romances with characters of the opposite sex.

True. Entirely true. But in "the real world" heterosexuality is assumed to be the norm. Why would that be the case on an island inhabited only by women. For centuries. Clark Kent doesn't need to tell Ma Kent he's straight. Bruce Wayne doesn't have to tell Alfred that he's straight. In a society where heterosexuality would not be possible in practice, why would Diana need to tell anyone she's queer?

Rucka is 7 issues into his current run. 7 issues into (yet another) line wide reset. I trust him to use tact and be respectful of his LGBTQ readership.
posted by lilnemo at 9:01 AM on October 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Clark Kent doesn't need to tell Ma Kent he's straight.

And yet there was a 29-issue ongoing series founded on the premise that Superman is attracted to women -- to Wonder Woman specifically, no less. That wasn't too heavy-handed an affirmation of his heterosexuality, apparently. I completely agree with the Pied Piper vs. Northstar comparison, but Hartley has explicitly stated his queerness tons of times, if only by referring to his date as his date. With Diana it's all implications and subtext.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:23 AM on October 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

With Diana it's all implications and subtext.

And I agree that this is a problem. When writers and artists just sort of hint at things as a sort of fan service, while avoiding any "incriminating" statements or actions that could undermine the "default heterosexuality" of a character, that's just kind of depressing. Not to mention that there is something more to queerness than who the writer has you sleeping with ; queerness, at least to me, has, a tension* with the dominant cis heterosexual culture, and that's as true for superheroes as it is for people in real life.

Now, I am on board with the idea that Diana would have no context at first for a lesbian, bi, and/or queer identity on first reaching the outer world; it's literally not an issue for her. However, being a smart and aware character, she would realize pretty quickly that there was a continuum to navigate, and she should be doing that explicitly in the comic, or what's the point or raising the issue in the first place?

I did like that Rucka seems sensitive to the problems that the original Wonder Woman origin story had -- that Diana abandons a paradise of women for literally the first man to come along (never mind that Steve Trevor has been generally the dullest thing about the comic in most iterations) -- and he seems to be working to counter it.

* At the very least, often more of an opposition just by offering a viable alternative
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:09 AM on October 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Bruce Wayne didn't have to tell Alfred that he's straight.

That's because Alfred is a British butler of the old school, trained not to ask presumptuous questions about his employer's affinity for teenage Dick.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 10:14 AM on October 1, 2016 [39 favorites]

So for me as a queer woman and a huge comics nerd - it seems to me that Diana would very quickly become aware of the tensions around queerness and cultural heterosexism, the ways people are making inappropriate assumptions about her, and the ways they treat her differently depending on their perceptions of her orientation. It may not be a big deal to her, but especially because it's not a big deal to her that will be especially weird and confusing, and it's a great opportunity to explicate how insanely weird and messed up cultural heterosexism is. It also seems like a great opportunity for her to seek out interactions with other queer people, and to explore how much of queer culture has formed in response to heterosexist oppressions and what impact that has on us as a community.

As much as I like Rucka, and I really do like Rucka, having a straight guy want to do things via implication and subtext and not get into these things makes me sad both as it is and because this is still more queer-friendly than comics usually get.

I guess I'll go pull out my old issues of Hothead Paisan now.
posted by bile and syntax at 10:54 AM on October 1, 2016 [21 favorites]

When writers and artists just sort of hint at things

Do you think it's the writers and artists who are pumping the brakes here? Or maybe it's the editors, publishers, and their Hollywood corporate overlords.
posted by thecjm at 12:33 PM on October 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

What is the average age of a DC comics reader at this point, 45? Who would be shocked at this point? I think they're mostly worried about losing merchandise sales of wonder woman kids Target clothing.
posted by benzenedream at 1:33 PM on October 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Who would be shocked at this point?

Given that there is zero chance of mainstream comics giving us a queer character who isn't sanitized to be made safe for straight people, I'd say a significant number of people.
posted by bile and syntax at 3:53 PM on October 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I appreciate the fuck out of this but part of me is still very "ugh" about this whole conversation because I have read these sentiments many times:

"[It's like] The character has to stand up and say, “I’M GAY!” in all bold caps for it to be evident. For my purposes, that’s bad writing. That’s a character stating something that’s not impacting the story."

and all the related sentiments like "I don't want it to be bad representation or just a stunt or something." I feel like it's missing this fact: as a fan, I am having conversations with other fans about this character, and if we can't agree on whether the character is queer or not, the conversation gets very heated very quickly. It goes like this:

Me: wow that was kinda gay
Other Fan: why do you make everything gay. there is no way this character can be gay. She's wearing makeup.
Me: But also that thing just happened and it implied that she likes girls. look at these details. this is why I think this.
Fan: those are normal straight girl things. You're stereotyping people. anyone can wear a rainbow shirt
Me: but because this is a fictional story -- look it's not like she just grabbed a random shirt this morning, because she's not a real dude. A person working on the show was paid a lot of money to choose that shirt. A writer put a lot of thought into writing this dialogue. Words mean things. Images mean things. Please see this link on semiotic theory
Fan: You're homophobic for buying into these homophobic stereotypes
Me: that's ridiculous. I am a certified Gay
Fan: That means you're biased. Only I, a Straight, can tell you whether this character is gay

It goes on and fucking on and usually the word they use is "delusional," and after enough go-rounds of this I started to feel a little delusional myself. Like, I started doubting my own perceptions. This is not hypothetical. It felt like being gaslighted, and the effect is the same even if I'm not the one in the conversation - if I'm reading someone else have this conversation on a message board, for example.

And I wish I could dismiss that person as just being a jackass, or being obviously wrong, but the entire reason it feels like being gaslighted is because there is nothing explicit to back me up, and there is nothing that will convince these masses of people - because there are so fucking many people who will take up the mantle of telling me my fave characters are straight; even if I could convince one, there'd be another one ten minutes later.

(The most toxic example of this is the character Dean Winchester in Supernatural, but that is by far not the only example. You can go back in internet-time and look at the Buffy fandom in the first half of season 4, when the show was deliberately dropping hints about Tara and Willow's burgeoning relationship. Many people picked up on these. Other people did not. I feel pretty certain people had this argument about Xena and Gabrielle - actually, with the remake in the works, it's happening again right now.)

But most of all, they're probably actually right. Because the character is not a real person; the assumption of heterosexuality is active in the minds of the creators; and the subtextual, implicit hints really could just be accidental. Or trying to imply something else. So, I have no confidence in my own position.

This is what people are talking about when they talk about queerbaiting, and wanting an explicit textual presence. They're talking about this whole toxic dynamic that results from plausibly deniable queerness.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 3:55 PM on October 1, 2016 [22 favorites]

That was a bit of an overreaction. I liked the article and the interview a lot, and it's a very good overview of the conflict here. But I do think that the theoretical talk about "reliance on canon creat[ing] an orthodoxy which harms and marginalizes perfectly valid queer readings" is ignoring the situation on the ground, as it were.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 4:27 PM on October 1, 2016

There is no way this character can be gay. She's wearing makeup.

POW! ZAP! I just choked on a little coffee.

A tiny insight: I've been involved in (the periphery of) Hollywood projects working from source material featuring characters who are either straight or of unspecified orientation, who are then deliberately cryptoqueered in the adaptation. They're not made gay, explicitly, but there are deliberate attempts to both raise and muddy the question just enough to engender (ptp) the types of argument Rainbo Vagrant summarizes above. It ends up possible to see the character(s) both ways, or multiple ways, for that matter, and multiple positions are, as in some of the examples above, fully valid and defensible.

But it's not a social agenda effort, clever or offensive or otherwise. It seldom comes from the creatives at all. Rather, it's a calculated marketing trick from on high, lifted straight from The Big Book of Big Tent Marketing*. The logic is that by toeing such a line, they can attract a wider audience, each of whom uses some kind of identity consumerism to see the thing they wish to see in the character(s). Double the sales, the thinking goes.

I remain unsure about whether the end result is positive or negative, much like this article triggers both reactions in me. Something is off about it, but it might just be the sound of cold money clinking.

* Available on Amazon just as soon as I write it.
posted by rokusan at 9:32 PM on October 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I feel pretty certain people had this argument about Xena and Gabrielle - actually, with the remake in the works, it's happening again right now.

I think with Xena and Gabrielle - like Willow from Buffy - a lot of that subtext was subtext for the characters as well as audience. They were realizing their feelings over a lot period of time - which is something that happens in real life.
posted by jb at 6:13 AM on October 2, 2016

But it's not a social agenda effort, clever or offensive or otherwise.

Then why do straight characters get to have their romances openly?
posted by bile and syntax at 9:35 AM on October 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

And that's not even getting into how often the acknowledgment of their queerness is extratextual, retroactive or both. Like the Kitty Pryde/Rachel Summers relationship, which was all subtext in the comics, but has been confirmed as intentional by Chris Claremont. (And that was decades ago, there are much more recent and egregious examples. *cough*Dumbledore*cough*)
posted by the latin mouse at 11:15 AM on October 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Holy shit. Okay so, fans talking about queerbaiting talk about that marketing motivation all the time and I figured it was bullshit, or at least unverifiable, because media production is deliberately kept opaque and I consider it impractical and rhetorically unsound to guess at someone's unknowable motivations

what I'm saying is, if you wanted to write an article about that, there are at least twenty people I personally know who would be interested. and deeply vindicated.

I know what you mean, though; within the typical frameworks - literary analysis, audience theory - it's hard to argue that it's overall positive or negative. I don't know if there's any theoretical framework for the feels-like-gaslighting effect I was talking about. Some variant on media effect theory? I think it does do real harm, but like most prejudice, the harm emerges from the overall pattern and context.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 1:38 PM on October 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

At least when it comes to subtext this isn't Chuck Dixon and claiming Oracle and Black Canary had no attraction going on.
posted by Francis at 1:32 AM on October 4, 2016