Liminal Hotness
No one cares but me, but this stuff was banging on the inside of my brain.
"I think I am just as masculine as I am feminine. A nice balance..." -Katherine Moennig
I made an interesting correlation in my brain recently regarding Shane and how she's what I would call a "liminal hottie." It's kind of like how Spike, as frimfram and I decided, is like an electrical field that fucks with people's previously programmed patterns of sexuality. Case in point, creepy-straight-guy-in-the-shed (Mark)'s bizarre fascination with her.
So here's what made the synapses start crackling... I remembered how deeply uncomfortable I felt for Shane when she was forced to wear a dress in a recent ep. It was just so *weird* and her discomfort was so evident. But then...I also remembered how when Moira made that comment to Shane about "let's us butches unload the car" (or whatever other internalized paternalistic crap she was projecting blah blah) *that* seemed just about as weird to me (and Shane too, judging by the expression on her face).
Because Shane isn't exactly butch or femme. But she is the sex.
There are other ways that Shane represents a crossroads on the show. She seems to be the one most likely to be friends with men, and with straight people--to treat people as people, regardless of what else. She is also the one who is most playful/irreverent about identity categories, making jokes about lesbian cliches and whatnot.
"I think people like to categorize things too much." -Shane
Kate Moennig's star text is very much wrapped up in the the grey areas where gender is less defined, considering that her most prominent roles have been Shane, a M-to-F trannie on Law & Order, and Jake on Young Americans, who is a (straight?) girl cross-dressing. In the time that I have spent blipping about the web, I have seen some pretty irritating comments regarding why KM chooses these roles/is typecast/questions about her sexuality/etc. But then, gender is a serious hot button for people and seems to 'cause gaps in language like nothing else I've seen. And I don't need to know *why* she made these choices (although I'm betting it's probably because she can, and she's good at it, and a lot of people wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole) in order to see how their correlation come together in how we read her as a performer.
What's also interesting is that the *only* thing that those roles have in common is that they have something to do with "unusual" gender formations. Otherwise, the characters are completely different, in unrelated situations, and Kate played them totally differently. Another thing that adds to KM's "star text" in terms of Shane is how she picks the wardrobe for Shane, so essentially, Shane may behave differently from KM (I have no idea), but she *looks* just like her. It's called verisimilitude, people. Perhaps this is related to why people are so desperate for KM to be "out."
"Yep! Okay! I'm da man! Oh my God. I'm da man." -Jake/Jacqueline
Young Americans. Ah yes, what a ridiculous show overall but the Jake/Hamilton thing kinda blew my head open a little. The A plot is overwrought and cheesy. I went to boarding school and the way that they depict it is totally unrealistic. But whatever, the WB *does* like its navel-gazing white boy protagonists. *cough*Dawson*cough* This is a show that has a girl posing as a boy in order to go to a boy's prep school (to mess with her negligent mom apparently?) and then falls in love with her best friend there and much sekrit canoodling ensues.
Here's where the hot comes: He wants her when he thinks she's a boy and thinks he's gay! *diez* It's het that looks like slash. Gah! And it has KM on motorcycle.
OK, back to being serious. Although the show seems to try and push the lid back on the can of worms that they opened (signifying Jake's "girlness" via teen magazines, and comments about "cute" clothes), it ultimately can't push back the most subversive thing: the utter hotness of Jake, regardless of how she's dressed. Also, whether it's trying to do it critically or not, it reveals the performative nature of gender (those same aforementioned femme cues and also how "Jacqueline" transforms herself into Jake). AND it shows how traditional male/female roles are fucked and how too often people read power imbalances into gendercoding. I.E. When Jake dresses as a girl and they go on a date, Hamilton starts acting lame and dudical until she calls him on his shit (and makes him ride bitch on the back of her bike, yesssssssss). It's just interesting that her change in clothes makes him not know how to behave when he's been totally natural with her up until then.
And beyond all else, images have power. Jake *looks* like a dyke (or at least she looks other than femme girl and yet is still deemed attractive by the show) and that's sure to make an impression on people who need to see someone like them staring out of the TV screen. Also, she pulls off her "deception"--even when the other guys start suspecting that she and Hamilton are together, they just assume that they're gay. The whole thing is queer, or at least it makes me feel queer (heh), because I can't put a label on it and that's what "queer" means to me.
And just for randomness value, I'll post two pics of Desire of "the Endless" in the Sandman comics.
Of course the iconic representation of Desire is androgynous/mutable in gender! Because when gender bumps against gender, things start boiling.
And since I can't seem to make a post lately without a vid rec, go here and watch obsessive24's Jake/Hamilton vid (scroll down to the YA vids) set to "Somebody Told Me" by the Killers. You don't have to have watched the show to witness the hot. (Did I mention that Hamilton is played by Ian Somerhalder, he of "hot gay boys jumping on a bed to George Michael" fame? Oh yeah, and Lost or something)
Um, I need to go watch my downloaded "L Word" eps now.
"I think I am just as masculine as I am feminine. A nice balance..." -Katherine Moennig
I made an interesting correlation in my brain recently regarding Shane and how she's what I would call a "liminal hottie." It's kind of like how Spike, as frimfram and I decided, is like an electrical field that fucks with people's previously programmed patterns of sexuality. Case in point, creepy-straight-guy-in-the-shed (Mark)'s bizarre fascination with her.
So here's what made the synapses start crackling... I remembered how deeply uncomfortable I felt for Shane when she was forced to wear a dress in a recent ep. It was just so *weird* and her discomfort was so evident. But then...I also remembered how when Moira made that comment to Shane about "let's us butches unload the car" (or whatever other internalized paternalistic crap she was projecting blah blah) *that* seemed just about as weird to me (and Shane too, judging by the expression on her face).
Because Shane isn't exactly butch or femme. But she is the sex.
There are other ways that Shane represents a crossroads on the show. She seems to be the one most likely to be friends with men, and with straight people--to treat people as people, regardless of what else. She is also the one who is most playful/irreverent about identity categories, making jokes about lesbian cliches and whatnot.
"I think people like to categorize things too much." -Shane
Kate Moennig's star text is very much wrapped up in the the grey areas where gender is less defined, considering that her most prominent roles have been Shane, a M-to-F trannie on Law & Order, and Jake on Young Americans, who is a (straight?) girl cross-dressing. In the time that I have spent blipping about the web, I have seen some pretty irritating comments regarding why KM chooses these roles/is typecast/questions about her sexuality/etc. But then, gender is a serious hot button for people and seems to 'cause gaps in language like nothing else I've seen. And I don't need to know *why* she made these choices (although I'm betting it's probably because she can, and she's good at it, and a lot of people wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole) in order to see how their correlation come together in how we read her as a performer.
What's also interesting is that the *only* thing that those roles have in common is that they have something to do with "unusual" gender formations. Otherwise, the characters are completely different, in unrelated situations, and Kate played them totally differently. Another thing that adds to KM's "star text" in terms of Shane is how she picks the wardrobe for Shane, so essentially, Shane may behave differently from KM (I have no idea), but she *looks* just like her. It's called verisimilitude, people. Perhaps this is related to why people are so desperate for KM to be "out."
"Yep! Okay! I'm da man! Oh my God. I'm da man." -Jake/Jacqueline
Young Americans. Ah yes, what a ridiculous show overall but the Jake/Hamilton thing kinda blew my head open a little. The A plot is overwrought and cheesy. I went to boarding school and the way that they depict it is totally unrealistic. But whatever, the WB *does* like its navel-gazing white boy protagonists. *cough*Dawson*cough* This is a show that has a girl posing as a boy in order to go to a boy's prep school (to mess with her negligent mom apparently?) and then falls in love with her best friend there and much sekrit canoodling ensues.
Here's where the hot comes: He wants her when he thinks she's a boy and thinks he's gay! *diez* It's het that looks like slash. Gah! And it has KM on motorcycle.
OK, back to being serious. Although the show seems to try and push the lid back on the can of worms that they opened (signifying Jake's "girlness" via teen magazines, and comments about "cute" clothes), it ultimately can't push back the most subversive thing: the utter hotness of Jake, regardless of how she's dressed. Also, whether it's trying to do it critically or not, it reveals the performative nature of gender (those same aforementioned femme cues and also how "Jacqueline" transforms herself into Jake). AND it shows how traditional male/female roles are fucked and how too often people read power imbalances into gendercoding. I.E. When Jake dresses as a girl and they go on a date, Hamilton starts acting lame and dudical until she calls him on his shit (and makes him ride bitch on the back of her bike, yesssssssss). It's just interesting that her change in clothes makes him not know how to behave when he's been totally natural with her up until then.
And beyond all else, images have power. Jake *looks* like a dyke (or at least she looks other than femme girl and yet is still deemed attractive by the show) and that's sure to make an impression on people who need to see someone like them staring out of the TV screen. Also, she pulls off her "deception"--even when the other guys start suspecting that she and Hamilton are together, they just assume that they're gay. The whole thing is queer, or at least it makes me feel queer (heh), because I can't put a label on it and that's what "queer" means to me.
And just for randomness value, I'll post two pics of Desire of "the Endless" in the Sandman comics.
Of course the iconic representation of Desire is androgynous/mutable in gender! Because when gender bumps against gender, things start boiling.
And since I can't seem to make a post lately without a vid rec, go here and watch obsessive24's Jake/Hamilton vid (scroll down to the YA vids) set to "Somebody Told Me" by the Killers. You don't have to have watched the show to witness the hot. (Did I mention that Hamilton is played by Ian Somerhalder, he of "hot gay boys jumping on a bed to George Michael" fame? Oh yeah, and Lost or something)
Um, I need to go watch my downloaded "L Word" eps now.