Thing: Gender Gap: Gender Discussion/Expression in (Fan)Fiction

[chasingtides]

So, I'm writing a story and I'm unsure of how to label it. Because I came up with this idea in church, I'm going to call it divinely inspired, but I'm mostly exploring boundaries in fiction that I am curious about in real life. And the purpose of exploring these boundaries, is, in part, exploring them as a dialogue, so I will be doing it through fanfiction and, of course, this post.

I've been intrigued by the character of Jack Harkness for a while. I'm also interested in what he could represent and how he defines himself by lack of definition, rather than by definition itself. (While most characters and people would, for example, say, "I am straight," or, "I am gay," or, "I am bisexual," Jack says, "Those are nice categories.")

Ever since the end of the second season of Torchwood, I have wanted to write a threesome fic (Jack/Ianto/Gwen), exploring the codependency/independency issues presented in the show as well as relationship dynamics. After watching Children of Earth, I wanted to look at preconceptions of Torchwood running up against preconceptions of the rest of the world.

I took a prompt off of a community, "Jack/Ianto/Gwen, family, heatwave, night in." It was the family that got me - I've never done it before, but writing a pregnancy fic would be really cool. And Jack said, in the first episode of the series, that he had been pregnant before. Wouldn't it be cool to do a pregnant Jack story? What would it be like for his girlfriend to have a pregnant male lover? How is Ianto going to deal with the fact that it's his male lover who is pregnant, not his female lover? That'd be awesome!

It also gives me a chance to write out an idea I've been toying with for ages now. My friends and I have tossed around the idea of Jack's pregnancy a lot. I've gotten strange looks in the supermarket because, when I'm picking out the milk and on the phone, I might dive into a lengthy discussion about Jack and his gender identity and his biology and, really, it's possibly not the most normal phone conversation.

But the theory boils down to - Jack presents as male, but has, in the past been pregnant. Additionally, the Doctor pointed out that by Jack's time, humans had interbred with aliens. And who says that alien sexes remotely resemble human ones? So Jack's somewhere in between male and female - or entirely outside it, depending on your perspective. But if he's a time traveler who is traveling, judging by his habits and Captain John's clothes, pre-women's lib eras, it's probably in his best interest to present as male, whatever his actual gender status (particularly if his gender is outside male-female dichotomy).

It's okay if this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I plan to be playing it out in my fic.

But I don't know how to label it, particularly as I start to look for betas.

Jack uses a male pronoun in English and presents as male in appearance, so it could be mpreg. But, to me at least, that conjures up images of assbabies and feats of science and magic I'd rather not think about and general unnatural processes. As Jack doesn't plan his pregnancy and does have a functional uterus and ovaries, it could, by some definitions, be just preg-fic. But Jack most certainly isn't female.

I'm struck, suddenly, by a sharp gender dichotomy - even in a world fans have created, where men can become pregnant and sex pollen exists, there appear to simply be two genders - male and female. I, and I try to be aware of this sort of thing, have no idea how to label this or explain it without a bit of fumbling and back story.

How do I label it? Do I not label it? I'm pretty sure that as soon as they read the, "Jack gets pregnant," bit, most people will label it mpreg themselves. I feel like, "A non-binary gendered Jack gets pregnant," is really clumsy. Thoughts? Ideas? Raging insults about how Jack Harkness is so totally a man-man-man-man-man?


ETA: I'm not suggesting that Jack be transgender here (though, admittedly, that is a very interesting line of thought). I am suggesting that Jack could be a non-binary sex and gender, a third or fourth sex and gender, outside of what we typically think of. (Okay, we being me - Irish-Catholic raised in Massachusetts.)

Comments

[xtricks.livejournal.com]

well, Jack's *gender*, which is the social and mental concept of your identity, is pretty clearly male. He dresses, self-identifies, and seems comfortable in male roles, being treated like and behaving like a man. His *sex*, which is that not-entirely-cut and dried combination of genes, hormones, biology and physical enviroment is hermaphrodite of a type that doesn't currenlty exist in humans.

I our culture, sex and gender are often treated as the same, and fixed by (percived) biology. In the sort of idealized concept of Jack's world/time, it's easily possible that sex and gender are recognized as not neccesarily linked or fixed - and certianly not a binary, which is false even in our time and place.

Part of the issue is that intersex or hermaphrodites are absent in most people's conception of sex/gender and the human world so the idea that Jack's sex is different from ours isn't really thought of much. Plus, of course, starting to think of the idea that he may concive of himself as a completely different gender and sex than we understand ... well, how do we talk about something that isn't part of our culture at all except as negatives: not-male, not-female etc (which can start seeming to be negative=wrong).

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

Trust me, I am fully aware that sex and gender are hardly the same thing. In this imagining of Jack, it's that he considers himself to be outside of the common male-female binary more than that he's a transguy (which is what I think you're hinting at, let me know if I'm wrong).

If I recall correctly (and god, I might not because it's been so long since I've watched all of the Torchwood episodes), the pregnancy comment isn't the only... non-binary-type comment he's made on the show, for lack of a better term. More accurately, he's expressed himself as more flexible than that

[xtricks.livejournal.com]

I wasn't suggesting that he's neccesarily a transperson per se. My interpretation of his actions/etc would be that he's gender: male, sex: other/intersex(or whatever term he'd use for his own biological combination of sex-related characteristics).

The only referents to his 'flexibility' are in his sexual partners and sexual behavior - I don't recall him ever saying or implying that he considers himself other than male. Though, again, that can simply be because we don't have the concept for the gender he is at this time and place.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I guess, in my mind, Jack's gender identity and presentation don't have to match up. Perhaps he presents as male because male-roles/figures/ideas are more comfortable than female-roles/figures/ideas, in a society where he's faced with a binary choice or perhaps they're closer to his presentation in his own time.

(Or, you know, something else entirely, because who the hell knows what the 51st century is like, especially if we've integrated into alien cultures? It's not like all of Earth is stuck on this idea of two genders and two sexes.)