You may also be aware of the FREE HUGS meme. It’s quite sweet: you hold a sign with “FREE HUGS” on it, and people can come to you to claim their free hug. Because free things are nice, hugs shouldn’t be charged for, and aaahhh and d’awww and other such sentiments. FREE HUGSing is very prevalent at comic conventions.

Having set that up, let me tell you a tale.

The scene: a large and popular comic convention held in a large and popular UK city. It’s spring, verging on summer, and it’s warm.

Cosplayers roam the convention with absurdly large props and wigs, and excited teenagers clutch bags of stash from their favourite webcomic artists, faces flushed with glee. Someone is dressed as a cardboard box. Someone else has a large plush Totoro. Gangs of Stormtroopers march about, videogame demos blare and cameras flash.

Numerous people saunter about, idly holding scraps of paper with “FREE HUGS” scrawled on them in pen, either because it’s what everyone is doing, or because they hope for a tiny scrap of human affection in this amazing sea of other people’s playtime.

Something terrible jingles past.

A long, thin, white jingling thing, with no real face and long tentacular horns. It has claws and hooves and no eyes and… a FREE HUGS sign all of its own.

Jingle, jingle, slrrrrrrrp.

Do you hug it?

My costume monster, Babylon, is a non-gendered-but-femme creature, with no anthropomorphic secondary sex characteristics, but with performatively femme behaviour.

Now, as it is rare for women to “perform” their femininity, performative femininity generally tends to be the preserve of people that don’t identify as women – because “performance” indicates a degree of “artifice”, and it is unusual for someone to “put on” the presentation that’s generally considered “appropriate” for their identity.

(But of course, it does happen, because everything does, and identity and presentation are two different things and being a woman doesn’t make your presentation femme by default, so of course one can identify as female and also perform your femininity. That’s a thing that happens too. I don’t need to explain these things to you: you know about stuff, you’re all down with this. Back to telling the tale.)

So. Big, sparkly performance femme-ness is A Thing and a grand one at that – just, not necessarily tethered to a gender identity.  So Babylon is very hard to read. It’s too over-the-top femme to be a girl, but surely boy monsters are big and spiky, right?

Obviously, the answer is that Babylon is non-binary, but our average member of the public in need of a full Gender 101 isn’t going to assume that.

I had lots of fun wearing Babylon during the convention, mostly because it is nice to dress as a monster, but also because I discovered a few interesting things about how people interact with an ungenderable non-human costume.

• Teenage girls with stripy armwarmers shrieked with delight at Babylon, largely gendered it male, and happily gave it hugs.
• Women my age wanted photographs and loved Babylon’s boots.
• Older steampunk gentlemen gendered it female and wanted photographs.

But the most hilarious demographic by far was teenage boys, and other men in costumes.

Teenage boys roam in knots about conventions, all holding papery requests for hugs. Their knuckles blanched as their grip on their FREE HUGS signs tightened when Babylon indicated that their desire for hugs was the same, and came over to hug them.

Oh, they didn’t like it. Oh, teenage boys didn’t like the Babylon. Oh no.

“What is it?” they said.
“Urgh,” they said.
“Oh man, it’s a bloke, mate,” they said.

Babylon is not a bloke. I’m a bloke; Babylon is a Babylon. They didn’t want photographs.

slrrrrrrrpp

You probably see where I’m going with this. My next example is brilliant.

I Babyloned up to a group of Star Wars Stormtroopers. Now, I rather like masks and men in uniform, so I saw this as a brilliant opportunity to put the “play” into “cosplay” and be an alien at them. Which is what I did.

Babylon jingled everywhere and posed for photographs, and one of the chaps, reading Babylon as female, got a bit saucy with it. This is fine, and Babylon, of course, sauced right back, all jingly silver bits and long talons – and then the Stormtrooper asked us, “Getting a bit hot are we, ma’am?”

Babylon made a surprised gesture (it doesn’t have a mouth) and indicated that he was wrong, and it wasn’t a “ma’am.”

The Stormtrooper, who had been happily playing moments before, rasped, “Oh my god, you’re a dude,” and immediately stopped playing. He backed right off.

I wondered if this was the first time in his life that he had ever had anyone he had not been sexually interested in being flirtatious and forward at him.

I idly thought about all the times I’ve been out with lady friends of mine who’ve experienced street harassment. Random strangers making sexual advances they weren’t comfortable with. I suppressed the urge to tear off my monster mask and bellow, “HUURARRRGGH, FEMINISM, NYERRRGH” and spray liquid feminism at him from my nipples.

Remembering that I’ve been told that sort of behaviour “hurts the cause”, I kept my mask on and flounced off elsewhere.

What’s the moral to this post? There isn’t one, really. It was just an amazing, beautiful, interesting and inspirational experience to be both fully androgynous and have no face.

I’m androgynous myself in presentation and I get gendered more-or-less randomly, but I have a human face, and this means I get treated differently from if I don’t. Some of the roughest transphobia I’ve ever had was when I was masked, and I don’t think that was a coincidence. Babylon doesn’t have anything like a human face: just two slits with emergent tentacles, and this simultaneously intimidates people and makes them feel more free to loudly express their opinion of it.

I’ll be at the large, popular comic convention again at the end of October. If you’re going too this Hallowe’en, come and find us and give us a hug!

First photograph used with permission of the owner; second picture courtesy of the artist. Stormtrooper image Creative Commons, from Wikipedia. 

Other people have made better arguments (here’s one, and here’s another) than I could for why having a teenager with her tits out in the first few pages of a national newspaper might not be a particularly stellar idea. It’s objectification at its worst, and the empowerment argument neglects the fact that there are better, safer, and more rewarding ways to take your clothes off for financial gain if that’s what you truly want to do.

My argument against Page 3 is quite simple; if you don’t want to reject it simply because it’s in bad taste, insensitive, and chauvinistic, then reject it because it uses psychological techniques to manipulate your views into agreeing with whatever fits the Sun’s goals at the time. The Sun sees its readership not just as customers, but as bargaining chips and weapons.

Let’s take a quick look at a few examples of Page 3. The rather excellent Tim Ireland over at Bloggerheads, nemesis of Nadine Dorries, has been collecting these –  I hope he won’t mind me mirroring them here. Credit due entirely to him and anyone who might have scanned them for him.

Now, it’s quite possible that these women hold these opinions. It’s quite interesting, however, that they coincide with the vitriol that appears in the The Sun Says portion of the paper, home of a much more blatant attempt to tell their readership what to think.

Think about this, though – what if these statements are invented by the paper? Then, what we have on our hands is a cheap attempt to use the many cognitive biases that sexual attraction brings into play to form an opinion in the undecided. This person is attractive; you’re naturally more inclined to agree with people that you find attractive; your opinion is swayed. All the time, you’re seeing it as just a bit of fun, just a silly piece of paper with a pair of breasts. Every day, this message hits home. Over time, it affects people – they think the way the Sun, and thus the Murdoch empire, wants them to think.

Yes, alright, I’ve strayed a bit into tin-foil-hat territory. The fact is, though, that this is having an effect on the Sun’s readership. How big an effect is arguable, of course, but it’s non-zero. Also, don’t forget that there’s a huge line on the role of these women – they’re being used as tools, to have opinions thrust into their mouths. Even the names are probably pseudonyms. They are there for no reason at all other than to be a pair of tits, and that shit is just not on.

If you won’t boycott the Sun because you hate the exploitation and objectification of women that it represents, boycott it because you value your own power of self-determination.

Amalgamating the shop worker, flight attendant and businessman, McDonald’s latest uniform incarnation is a far cry from Ronald McDonald’s red and yellow clown suit.

The working ‘uniform’ is ubiquitous to a huge number of professions, despite the possibility that many of us associate it first and foremost with the service industries. By service industries, I don’t mean simply McDonald’s workers, Tesco employees or the like; service means serving you (the consumer) through labour. Retail fashion workers are a prime example, where the ‘uniform’ may not be a classic sweatshirt-and-trousers combo, but rather items picked solely from the collection of garments that the shop provides – living mannequins, in a sense. But this is getting way ahead of myself; let’s go back a bit.

Wearing a uniform, as so many sixth form debates have pointed out, has both positive and negative effects on the individual and the group in any given institution. School uniform has the apparent benefit of making everyone equal (at least, visually) while at the same time ensuring creative idiosyncratic fashion choices are made in the smallest details; how many buttons are done up, how the tie is tied, what badges you wear and the jewellery you sneak in. Even in a photo that has been posed for this Guardian piece, the same uniform turns up in many different styles. So what about the uniform at work? I’ve worked in enough poorly-paid retail jobs to realise what the proposed function of a uniform is, and what actually happens when you wear it.

Just like at school, a uniform is meant to show that all the wearers are equal – visually. For the consumer, workers are identified by what they are wearing; many a time I have been asked in various shops where the changing rooms are, because my particular garb is close enough to the ‘uniform’ of a retail fashion worker to confuse the consumer (although mostly this happens in charity shops. I’m down with that). Workers are set apart from consumers and grouped together as labour through their uniform.

However, looking the same and being the same are (duh) different. My manager and I wear the same uniform: shirt, trousers, and name badge – but are we the same? No. She’s the manager; she’s my boss. Confusing messages of similarity (and potential solidarity?) and hidden hierarchies abound with the working uniform, especially in retail sectors where more than one hierarchy is on the ‘working floor’. You might be able to argue that those industries in which workers are physically grouped by hierarchy – like the factory floor, where the manager is not as physically ‘present’ as on the shop floor – are able to recognise the uniform’s messages of similarity and solidarity more effectively than those where workers of disparate hierarchies are bundled in together.

From Bobby Pin, these are 1950s beauty salon uniforms:

From a 1950s magazine, uniforms that couldn’t be any more ‘feminine’: accentuating waist, hips, drawing attention to face and hairstyle. For this author, they’re utterly beautiful. But then I am a total sucker for ‘the giant coachman collar’.

As well as hierarchy being hidden (but strangely elaborated too, I suppose, by its hiddenness), gender too, is at least under an attempted disguise through the wearing of uniforms. Gone are the days of Mad Men, where women wore skirts and men wore trousers – now we all have to wear trousers, and horrible polo shirts too. An apparently gender-neutral uniform is provided in a number of sectors (mine was previously white shirt and black trousers – or skirt) that never really successfully disguises gender to the consumer in the same way that it conceals hierarchy to some extent. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work, especially if the size is designed for someone who doesn’t have breasts.

And that, my friends, neatly brings me onto those workplaces where you don’t have a uniform. Or, at least, they don’t tell you that you have a uniform. Explicitly, the dress code might be not much more than ‘no shorts or clogs’, but implicitly, the dress code will be bending and morphing round the individuals who are adhering to and working against it. This dress code will tie in gender and authority hierarchies, as illustrated by the business suit and its female equivalent.

From my employment experience (and others who have agreed with me), men wear business suits, but women do not wear business suits, despite this (again) apparently gender-neutral ‘uniform’ being available. A number of women working in offices might wear the female equivalent of the business suit (Next surely embodies this look), which more often than not includes a) skirt b) something frilly c) front-cover-flawless makeup. So it’s the business suit, plus a) traditional emblem of femininity b) annoying and impractical emblem of femininity c) emblem of femininity that is often perceived to be caused by heavy external pressures to look good at all times. The visual ‘uniform’ of the business suit is not gender-neutral, because it is adapted to become gender-specific; whether this is due to individual taste or workplace culture, I’m unsure, but it does inform the hierarchy of the office.

I. Love. Her.

Rather than looking at personal comments regarding taste that may be made about office workwear, my interest instead lies in how this implicit dress code dramatically affects the hierarchical makeup of a working environment, potentially without many of the individuals involved even being fully aware of how it is being shaped around them. If I arrive tomorrow at work with a ‘male’ business suit on, will I be taken more seriously? Or, as a woman, if I arrive in a simulated version of that ‘male’ business suit, will I be declined respect because I appear too much like one of the boys? Am I feminine enough for the office if I don’t wear flawless makeup – or any makeup? If I start dressing like the big boys, will they still know it’s me on the inside? I believe there is a definite question of sexuality and sexual preference here that comes into play with ‘levels’ of femininity in the workplace, although I don’t feel able to tackle this in great detail here (or just yet).

Workplace hierarchies are constituted through a vast number of factors, but the role of dress and dress codes is one that can’t be ignored. From traditional environments where gender and authority hierarchies may have been distinguished and designated by an explicit uniform placed upon the workers, contemporary working environments – especially those in the creative industries – now have to juggle with an implicit dress code that is created and defined by the workers themselves (across all hierarchies) in their clothing choices. Plus, there is the added element of workers’ perception of the importance of that dress code or, conversely, the desire to play with it and break some boundaries, in designating what you can, or can’t, wear to work.

• EB Snare is a full time writer who also writes freelance, makes and sells her own jewellery, drinks, smokes and listens almost exclusively to 80s electropop music. She completed her Masters in 2011, with a dissertation on fashion blogging as a contemporary labour form that included some sweet diagrams. Her blog, The Magic Square Foundation, covers fashion, culture and general life, or you can talk to her on Twitter: @ebsnare. And, yeah, we’ve snapped her up for Team BadRep too. Woo!

With a history spanning three centuries, Tatler is Establishment to its very core. It sells itself to advertisers as having ‘the wealthiest readership in the UK’ and accordingly peddles luxury goods and the accompanying lifestyle to Society dahlings and their postulant doppelgangers. The magazine worships the higher reaches of British class structures, fawning over those who through their money, their fame or their postcode can be considered ‘society’ and celebrating an incongruous, archaic social order.

Tatler seems an unlikely champion of diversity. The world it represents is one of deep privilege in which abide the casts of Jilly Cooper novels: men of title or profession and their charity-supporting wives; women in Jaeger gilets and and twentysomethings who order £19 martinis; the worst upper class caricatures made flesh for their own amusement and forwarded as role models for the aspirant gaggles. But editor Kate Reardon has noticed a problem: gay men, she says, are widely represented in Society but gay women are not, and she’s going to do something about it.

Her reasoning is thus: lady-lovers make people ‘either titillated or a little bit frightened’ – a conclusion I can only assume was arrived at with a sense of deep profundity at 3am and through the bottom of a cocktail glass – and claiming that parents are thrilled when their sons come out but embarrassed when their daughters do. Lesbians, she says, have never been accepted by High Society, a fact that Virginia Woolf, Natalie Clifford Barney and Betty Carstairs apparently missed the memo on. The way to address this problem, obviously, is to find some sapphic sisters and do a feature on them. Choose wisely, though. None too butch, none too… y’know… dykey, and if they’re over a size 12 then headshots only.

The fact is that she may well be right, but the issue is not one of sexuality but of gender – lesbians don’t have the status and visibility of gay men because women don’t have the status and visibility of men. A magazine which targets an overwhelmingly female audience (around 80%) is a routine place to celebrate women, and putting a handful of queer ladies in the spotlight is never going to be a bad thing.

We shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging lesbians and lesbianism, claimed Reardon in an interview on Woman’s Hour, and with this effort she’s ‘just bringing it up’; it’s up to us to talk about it. Noble enough, I suppose. The problem is that Tatler isn’t exactly bashful when it comes to creating a sensation when sales are falling (Anthea Turner naked but for a python, anyone?) and according to Janet Street-Porter in the Daily Mail that’s exactly what’s happening right now. With a drop in readership of more than 20% in the last year, and 25% within its target demographic, it’s easy to believe that Tatler is just trying to pretty up the sales figures. And why not? Vanity Fair saw a boost in audience with its infamous KD Lang/Cindy Crawford cover in 1994 just as defunct soap Brookside did with its Beth/Margaret kiss the same year. The mid-nineties may have been the height of lesbian chic, but the same trick might well work today. However easy it is to think that we’ve moved on in this post-Queer As Folk, post-Ellen world, the promise of a bit of girl-on-girl still sets the collective knees of the nation a-tremblin’.

The feature in Tatler is fluff, but what else did we expect? Seven fashion-plate photographs and an ad for a Belgravia-based lesbian and gay introduction agency make what the cover assures us is the definitive portfolio – though seven is not the definitive portfolio of anything, unless it’s colours of the rainbow – and takes up fewer pages than cover star Alice Eve. Whoever sent out the press release dubbing this ‘the lesbian issue’ was clearly overstating things a bit. Each photo is accompanied by a brief, soundbitey blurb in which such insights as favorite colour are revealed. It’s an exercise in mediocrity. I mean, they’ve managed to make Sue Perkins dull. How is that even possible?

Tatler’s website offers ‘behind the scenes at the lesbian shoot’ – a startling prospect given the physical magazine features a what to wear to a [game] shoot guide. As well as vaguely hinting that Tatler staffers get their jollies shooting wild lesbians in the Home Counties at the weekend, the dodgy syntax in this headline treats the women in the same terms that it does its fashion: the Marc Jacobs shoot; the unfathomably expensive sarong shoot; the lesbian shoot. These women are modelling an accessory, and it is lesbianism. Instead of celebrating gay women, Tatler has narrowed the playing field – as this sort of faux-diverse tokenism often does – by offering a blueprint for acceptable lesbianism, a whitewashed ideal for the rest of us to not quite live up to.

A black tie dinner (dubbed the ‘lesbian ball’) hosted by Tatler in celebration of this barrier-smashing seven-pics-and-an-advert brought 200 women, of all sexualities, together for an evening of networking and masturbatory self-congratulation which, while undoubtedly productive for those involved, did precisely nothing for the women (generally) and lesbians and bi women (specifically) who could actually do with a leg up. This was not a benefit for LGBT charities. It was not the launch event for a campaign seeking to address actual inequality. No speeches were made about why the event was held. It was a party. Just a party. For the most privileged group of women in the UK and with a guest list so diverse that knicker obsessive Mary Portas was invited even though she’s trade. According to one nameless attendee over on themostcake, a spiffing time was had by all, and though the photos don’t show it, I like to think the evening ended with a load of drunken women kicking off their Louboutins and singing ‘I am Woman’ at high volume in the taxi queue.

Tatler had an opportunity to do some grandstanding and they nibbled on canapes instead. Radical.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN , the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature.Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

A confession: I write fanfiction.

I’ll let that sink in for a moment, whilst you judge me and leap to all the usual conclusions. At least half of them will be reasonably correct.

For starters, let’s clear up some myths. Fanfiction isn’t about porn. Or, at least, it isn’t all about porn. There are as many different genres out there as there are genres of fiction, as many reasons for reading and writing it as there are readers and writers of it. And it isn’t exactly an obscure pastime; on fanfiction.net (the largest, if most mainstream and therefore frowned-upon collection of fanfic) there are 593,713 fics listed under the Harry Potter category alone.

Image: Jose Carlos Norte, Flickr (jcarlosn)

Here’s one of my favourite quotes about it, used by Sheenagh Pugh in her book The Democratic Genre: Fanfiction in a Literary Context:

It’s always been high praise in Fannish circles to be told that you wrote a story so good it should be published, but sometimes, the highest praise is that it can’t be. Its very uniqueness, what creates it, makes it impossible to be anything else. Lots of people can write stories that fall into readable (more than you think, actually, but I’m flexible on the idea of readable), and many can write stories I’d pay to read, and even some write stories that could be published and be great. But there’s this small, fascinating group that write a story that belongs only to the fandom that created it. It’s like having a treasure you never have to share. It wraps itself in the canon and fanon and the author’s own mind that created it and takes it as its own so perfectly that you are so damn glad you went into that fandom, just grateful, just absolutely thrilled, because you get to read this.

Every fic, without exception, is a product of its fandom. Reading a fic is not just reading a simple story: what you’re actually reading is an intertwining of fanlore, mixing in-jokes and terminology from one particular fandom, as well as from the broader history and narrative of fandom. That’s why they can appear so incoherent and ridiculous to the outside world at times. Fanfiction authors are less writing a story than weaving together a cultural tapestry.

Fanfiction has a proud and noble tradition, as anyone entrenched within the community will tell you. Every student of fanlore knows where the term “ship” arose (X Files fandom), and where the term “slash” arose (Star Trek fandom). We have our own history; from the pre-internet fanzines, to early Usenet groups, right through to the great shipping wars of Harry Potter and the arguments over whether RPF (Real Person Fic; fanfiction about “real” people) is morally acceptable (the earliest known concrete example of RPF comes from the Bronte sisters, who used to write reams of stuff about the fictional country of Gondal. It can be easily argued that there was a huge amount of RPF within the oral tradition, as people passed down stories about folkloric legends such as Robin Hood, King Arthur, and – yeah, I’m going to go there – Jesus). We know our lore and our mythology and our terminology, and we study it as arduously as disciples of any other body of text.

Whilst I do stress that a lot of fanfiction out there is non-sexual and non-romantic in content (it’s called gen fic, yo, look it up), there’s an inarguable trend towards sexytimes. I’m all down with that; I like a bit of story with my porn, and I’m not a very visual person, so fanfiction is where I discovered a lot about myself and my own sexuality. I think I started reading fanfiction when I was about 13 or 14, and nowhere near, ahem, “active”. My first ever ship was Rupert Giles/Jenny Calendar. It was a while after that until I discovered slash, although that discovery was, frankly, inevitable – I had a bit of a sweet-tooth for Harry/Draco (Drarry, if you will). Fanfiction was (and still is!) a safe space to explore my own sexuality, and discover the kaleidoscope of sexualities, genders and identities that are out there. It was many years before I’d hear the name Judith Butler, or even hear the slightest mention of ‘queer theory’, but when I did, none of the ideas seemed particularly new to me.

Whilst there are plenty of male writers of fanfiction (especially within the gaming community – shout out to my little bro!) authorship is overwhelmingly female, and I don’t think that that’s a coincidence. Out in the real world, it’s difficult to own our own sexuality; there’s simply no room for shades of grey. You’re either frigid or a slut; you’re either straight or gay; your sexuality and identity is whatever people perceive when they look at you. But within the fanfiction community, away from the patriarchal mainstream, we can discover and explore how we feel about our own sexual and gender and personal identity. That’s something that I think has had more effect on my life than anything else. Through the medium of fandom, we can find out who we are, and what we like, and how we feel, all through just reading stories together. And then hopefully – eventually – we get to write our own story.

This is people writing because they love it, for no purpose other than writing for themselves and for other people who they vaguely know on the internet. It’s done purely for the joy of the thing. And it isn’t just about the fic itself; the fandom community is the most genre-savvy, theory-aware, innovative group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to tangle with. This is a community alive with discussion about narrative, metanarrative, referentialism & self referentialism, literary theory, gender and sexuality, social justice, morality, pop culture and in-jokes. I’d also argue that it’s an innately queer community; it not only exists between the cracks, but thrives on the cracks. And in a world where deconstruction and theory are often frowned upon as “thinking about things too much”, fandom is where I found a home.

• Nat Guest is a girl who writes some things for some people some of the time; usually about pop culture, feminism and current affairs. She tweets over-excessively at @unfortunatalie and can play the spoons.

In 1937 Goebbels presented a birthday gift of 18 Mickey Mouse shorts to the Führer. […Disney] and Hitler […] shared an overall social vision. They dreamed of a dispersed post-urban society, with a population — kept in line by a strong domestic realm instilling a keen sense of blood loyalty and “family values” — that could be efficiently mobilized to serve either the military needs of the state or the labor needs of industry.

– Matt Roth, The Lion King: a Short History of Disney-Fascism

Everyone knows about Disney’s ongoing racism issues, so to hear that Uncle Walt was an active member of the American Nazi Party during the Thirties may not come as much surprise. But there were pink triangles as well as yellow stars in 1930s Berlin, and I want to know why pretty much all of Disney’s villains seem designed to display some kind of sexual or gender deviance.

An Actor’s Life for Me

An Actor’s Life for Me: The Fox seduces Pinocchio

It starts with Pinocchio, and the Fox and the Cat. Probably best remembered for their song ‘An Actor’s Life for Me‘, it’s this pair of crooks that first lure young Pinocchio off the straight and narrow. And I mean that literally: they’re Theatre Folk, dapper, urbane and not a little camp. Their bodies are constantly intertwining, grotesque and chaotic. I’m with Matt Roth when he says they’re obviously coded as gay – one of the key minorities Hitler argued, in Mein Kampf, were threatening the health and morality of contemporary European youth.

But this doesn’t end with the fall of Hitler; later Disney films work their way through a succession of sexually deviant or ambiguous villains. The first significant entrant is the terrifying Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty(1959). Like Aladdin‘s Jafar (1992), she is elegant and a bit camp, though fundamentally sexless (witness how unattracted Jafar is to Princess Jasmine, wanting her only for political gains). Maleficent inhabits a strange underworld where orgiastic parties are the norm, and, like so many of her villainous successors, she’s got no-one of her own, but still remains determined to thwart the monogamous, heterosexual union of the noble royals Princess Aurora and Prince Philip (whose name was chosen by Uncle Walt in the 50s, when our Prince Philip was still someone nostalgia-loving Anglophile Americans might feel dewy-eyed about).

Cruella de Vil – a withered, aberrant form of sexless femininity – squares up to the hyper-femme homemaker Anita

Two years later, 101 Dalmatians‘ Cruella De Vil continues the trend. She shares Maleficent’s ill will towards the heteronormative family sphere, and acts as a kind of child-snatching boogyman. Her hyper-femme fashion sense only throws her withered, sexless frame into relief, and unlike the blissful feminine home of her friend Anita – who has settled down and found a nice man to take care of, sorting out Roger’s chaotic life with a Woman’s Touch –  Cruella’s decadent mansion is completely falling apart, which we can probably assume also mirrors the state of her biological clock. Cruella’s flamboyant yet barren sexuality focuses itself instead on fetishising the traditional trappings of femininity, including fur coats made from the produce of wombs more fecund than her own – like Perdita, the sexy Dalmatian.

Dragged Up

In the 80s, long after Walt’s death, the intentional gender deviance of Disney’s villains becomes more blatant still: this time the Gays are even more obviously in drag, and they’re looking back to the golden Pinocchio age of seducing The Children away from their suburban homes: think of Ursula in The Little Mermaid (1989) and her contrast with the alpha male King Triton, his big beard, and the Barbie-style InnoDBl with her Princess Diana hair.

Dragged up… Ursula from The Little Mermaid

Ursula is overweight, flamboyant and dragged up; her tentacles, as my pal Matt Roth points out (you really must read this article, seriously), only make her the more sexually ambiguous. Like Maleficent, she lives in an underground other-world, with a ‘garden’ of corrupted young people now condemned to live half-lives as plant-like beings. Her stagey hyper-femininity presents her as a dangerous prospect for the heteronormative, cisnormative InnoDBl – whose voice she steals in order to seduce the also very straight Prince Eric.

Ursula is given a metaphorical kind of new life (after being conquered by, er, the erect prow of Prince Eric’s enormous ship) in the figure of Hades in Hercules (1997). He’s pretty much an exact counterpart to Ursula, black tentacles and all. His cabaret-style song ‘My Town’, from the Hercules TV series, introduces the underworld as a kind of underground New York, with its king a flamboyant, gender-ambiguous leader revelling in its delights:

It’s interesting, of course, that because of the source-text, Hercules must of necessity espouse the Ancient Greek worldview that says the Underworld – and therefore Hades himself – is a crucial part of the order of things; unlike the shady worlds of Pleasure Island and The Theatre in Nazi-era Pinocchio, ‘New Hades’, and the queers and deviants that inhabit it is a potentially corrupting influence that can be tolerated, as long as it’s kept firmly in its place. It’s much the same theory as the ‘Circle of Life’ proposed by Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) – the ghettoised handout-dependent hyenas and their liberal, childless and urbane overlord Scar are fine, as long as they’re kept in their own sphere (that is, the obscure Elephants’ Graveyard). When they take over, the Pridelands fall into ruin and corruption.

Hanging on

Intertwined: the hyper-masculine Gaston and the fawning creature Le Fou

There are also a whole host of less significant characters throughout Disney’s oeuvre who are mostly made ridiculous by virtue of their sexual ambiguity and concomitant lack of personhood. First up is the rotund Le Fou in Beauty and the Beast, who fawns, much like the Cat on the Fox, on the hyper-male Gaston (who is in strange contrast to the uber-femme but dragged up Ursula, and seems suspiciously uninterested in the various females laid on for his consumption).

Then there’s Chi Fu, the emperor’s advisor in Mulan. He is primarily ridiculed because he is camp and rather gender-ambiguous – he has bunny slippers and a woman’s scream – in what I’d suggest is a double-whammy of homophobia mixed with Orientalist racism, much like that currently directed against Asian-American basketball player Jeremy Lin (‘Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight‘ was a tweet from Fox sports commentator Jason Witlock on Lin’s recent sporting triumph). Or, to put it in Disney’s own terms, how about the notorious Siamese Cats in Lady and the Tramp, whose own gender is confused to say the least?

Miss Man

The only difference between male and female Mulan is a bit of grooming.

It’s interesting to compare these gender-fails with Chi Fu’s own filmic context – Mulan (1998), where the title character is herself cross-dressing. There are two direct references to drag in this film (strange, given that Disney doesn’t in general have much of Dreamworks’ obsessive-compulsive need to shove in over-the-kids’-heads jokes for the parents). The only one in direct reference to Mulan is Mushu (Eddie Murphy)’s Hilarious Ebonics – ‘Miss Man had to take her little drag act on the road’.

Yet, unlike the true weirdos doing it for a sexual thrill (like Ursula), Mulan’s is a noble gender-variance, taken on for the sole purpose of rescuing her ailing father and (ultimately) preparing herself mentally for marriage, which is how the film ends; note too that she has to become male in order to truly triumph in the male sphere, and that once this has been accomplished she can return home to her father and marry the sexy shirtless man (as she was unable to do at the beginning of the story).

It is therefore in keeping that her methodology basically amounts to ‘hair down = female; hair up = male’ – and no-one ever notices it’s all the same person, just with a different hairstyle (note how shocked the Evil Shan Yu is when she dons her ‘disguise‘): her gender-switch is more of a ‘sign’ to the audience indicating which social sphere she’s inhabiting than anything literally transformative. Interesting stuff here.

Hmm. So… From the Fox and the Cat to the villains of the 90s, Disney’s villains have represented a kind of ‘other’ that is almost always couched in terms of gender or sexuality, representing a challenge, and a threat, to the heteronormative worldview of the heroes and heroines – which always conquers, of course. What’s disturbing is that it’s so oft-repeated it almost becomes the whole unspoken tenet on which Disney’s works are based. The fight of good vs. evil is not so much a battle of objective morality as of sexual identity and preference.

Oops.