(no subject)

[dolari]

One of the issues the readers of Closetspace bring up is something I've just started calling the "Denise Bryson Conundrum." I've had the conundrum for a while, but I just found a name for it last night. David Duchovny shows up in Twin PEaks as a crossdressing DEA agent. He doesn't pass very well...but he's not unpassable at all. I thought he was downright cute as Denise, while my roomie wasn't as enthusiastic.

Anyways, one of the major complaints I get about the comics is that Carrie passes as a woman too well. I'll grant you that. Not many of us pass as well as Carrie. But I've also gone out of my way to keep Carrie from being too perfect. I draw her with male proportions, albeit very lanky proprtions. This is best seen in http://www.dolari.net/cs/224.htm where Carrie wears a swimsuit. Her neck is thicker than a womans, the shoulders are wider than her hips, and while she does have a narrowed waist, like me there's no hips to speak of.

That isn't to say I don't have characters who don't pass. There are transwomen who don't pass, or pass poorly (one of the first crossdressers I met looked like Walter Matthau, I myself have a massive double chin). Vixen, Victoria's significant other, is drawn with a very square jaw, large nose and prominent Adam's Apple (best seen here http://www.dolari.net/cs/143.htm ).

(silly trivia note: Vixen was actually an alternate design by Dov Sherman for Victoria that I decided to use after I sent her a morre complete work up of Victoria's character)

I've always scratched my head when it comes to those EMails. For ever EMail I get saying Carrie passes too well, I'll get one that says that Vixen doesn't pass well enough. Or another that THANKS me for drawing Vixen as unpassable. Some of them are very...insistent about their viewpoints.

Vixen is going to have a larger role in the next few storylines. But now I have a model for her. Wonnder if I'll get more EMails and what kind.

Comments

[pazi-ashfeather.livejournal.com]

I find those criticisms a bit bizarre when authors do trans characters -- I mean, I get that not everybody is quickly and easily taken for cis, but some people *are* -- one of my exes was being taken for a dykey cis woman before she even came out, and once she'd femmed up her presentation even a little bit...yeah, she's never had passing issues.

Representation can be a pretty tricky issue (there are lots of different experiences of being trans, and a few particular variants dominate most of the media's attention span), but I don't think you've done badly with Closetspace. When Tab Kimpton over at Khaos Komix switched to drawing Charlie differently based on this sort of feedback from fans (even going so far as to redraw old strips of her), it kinda bugged me -- it seemed so unnecessary, you know? It felt a little lurid and exoticizing, to be perfectly honest, like she went from being a character who was trans and this is just a thing you know about her, to every other strip being kinda gawked at and zoo-exhibity. I'm sure some people felt it as a breath of fresh air, too, but there really is no one right way to handle this. What we need is more well-handled trans characters in more things, generally -- not for every trans character, especially in media created by trans artists, to match some particular subset of trans experience.