Fiona Moore wrote:
Now hang *on!* You can't separate power from gender, a point which I recall has been made by Neil, Una, Alison and myself among *many* others on this list.
And of course we all know that many people saying something makes it true :)
Right, not always :), but I see Neil, Una and Alison (if not myself...) as intelligent people, and if they're saying something I'm going to listen :).
Oh, I always listen to them (and to you as well); just don't always agree. ;-)
Gender is fairly straightforward
Really? *I* don't see it that way. There are fascinating variations in gender roles and relative status from society to society, which suggests there's more to it than just eat-drink-man-woman.
Sure; I said gender, not gender roles. Leaving out orientation, it's just male/female/other - pretty straightforward. As for the complexity of gender roles, ISTM that one problem in this discussion has been one side appears to be trying to oversimplify or restrict the roles that a female character can play without being defined _solely_ by her gender. Factoring in of gender doesn't bother me; making it the only thing that counts does.
; power is a complex combination of lots of factors. Gender can be one of those factors, but it doesn't have to be the defining one. Treating it as the defining factor every time there's a power imbalance between a male and a female doesn't combat sexism; it promotes it.
Not disagreeing with you on that, but I have a problem with saying that power doesn't enter into gender relations. It may not be sexism (Travis and Servalan, oo-er!) but to deny that there's a power aspect to *all* relations, including gender ones, is kind of hard.
I'm a little confused; I think we're at cross purposes here. I agree that there is a power aspect to all relations. Sally's got what I meant exactly right - just that gender isn't always the most significant factor in the mix. I'll grant that it usually is in the mix somewhere, but I won't go so far as to say that it _always_ is. For example, a father putting his small son and daughter to bed. That's not enough for me to say that gender is a factor at all; in absence of specifics, I won't agree that one's a sexist transaction and the other isn't, even though the father clearly has the power in both cases.
Similarly, the imbalance of power in Deliverance isn't to my mind _caused_ by gender; if Jenna had set off the rocket, she would still have had more overt power than Meegat, and the plot wouldn't have been much different. Jenna not being the one who's always trying to assert her superiority, however, it wouldn't have been nearly as amusing to see her mistaken for a god. I'll grant you that I'd feel significantly different about this ep if I weren't in the 'embarrassed Avon' camp; this is where, for me, details of a transaction can make an enormous difference.
Mistral