Gender and sexuality in three SGA stories

Meta
Title:	Gender and sexuality in three SGA stories
Creator:	cathexys
Date(s):	April 9, 2007
Medium:
Fandom:	Stargate Atlantis
Topic:
External Links:	archive link
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Gender and sexuality in three SGA stories is a 2007 essay by cathexys posted to The Cutting Board, a Stargate Atlantis discussion community.

The essay generated 83 comments.

The Introduction

I'm really interested in the way fanfiction uses, changes, and inverts tropes that are readily available in popular culture as well as the ones fanfic itself has created. I've argued elsewhere about fanfiction being repetition with a difference1, and looking at narrative tropes offers one way to instantiate both the repetition (in the way tropes repeat basic plot structures, archetypal characteristics etc.) and the difference (in the way every story fleshes out the trope but even more so in the way the trope gets altered and shifts in a given story but also over time).

One trope I'm particularly interested in is WNGWJLEO (We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other), which to me is the archetrope of old skool slash (i.e., I'd argue that the underlying structure is one that can be found in a large number if not the majority of traditional slash narratives even if the trope itself is not actually visible). I've recently talked at length about WNG and the way I think the underlying motivations have been updated to rid the trope of much of its homophobic sentiments (though I'd maintain that even as some of the stories were indeed violently homophobic, the trope itself never has been as I read it).

Three stories that came out recently illustrate to me the way in which this trope does and does not function. In the following, I want to look at thingwithwings's always should be someone you really love and then briefly at trinityofone's You're Pretty Good Looking for a Girl and toomuchplor's Straight As a Circle. The reason these three stories struck me as interesting (beyond all three being meaty, well written, longish McShep romances :) is the way they ultimately are *not* what I'd expect them to be given a brief plot summary, and each one uses versions of WNG to challenge and subvert the trope in interesting ways.

Concluding Paragraph

While these three stories explore different aspects of sexual identity and object choice and situate themselves in different places in regards to the role of biological hardwiring vs constructed desires for either, what they clearly share is a sense of awareness that none of these things are simple, that bodies and desires, gender and sexuality are more than binary and rarely simply constituted. Moreover, what all three stories share is an awareness and an engagement with fannish history and fannish tropes, a playful repetition with a difference that to me testifies to the vibrancy of fan fiction, where even the most tired cliche doesn't need to get dismissed but instead can be taken up and reinvigorated, and where stories participate as much in meta discussions as theoretical analyses do. WNG gets rediscovered and inverted; waking up straight gets played with; gender and body swaps become the premise on which these fascinating explorations into our characters' identities and sexualitis takes place. thingswithwings's male lesbians, trinityofone's genderqueer Cadman and politically queer John, and toomuchploor's John who ultimately chooses his queerness as much for himself as for Rodney all are examples of queer identities that do not align neatly along gender and identity lines, that are not biologically predetermined exclusively but always already exist in the interplay between nature and culture, sex and gender, bodies and cultural constructions--they are truly queer subjects!

The Essay's Headings

• Always Should Be as inverted WNG
• community belonging vs individual transcending love
• "Two men can defy the world."
• loving (as) women
• no return
• doubled bodies
• alien queer radical gender terrorists and tarin
• physicality: metaphor or not?
• noone's gay as genderqueer utopia?
• You're Pretty Good Looking and the vicissitudes of bodies
• We're Not Straight and John's queer identity politics
• Straight as a Circle as gay romance
• community and identity
• we've come a long way, baby