Greg Rucka's Post 9/11 Pin-ups.

In the opening gambit to Greg Rucka's Queen and Country, Tara Chace sits poised for her first hit. Freezing and exhausted, her target; a Russian General the American's want dead, slides out of a car. Tara fires a single bullet straight into his skull and thrusts her frozen bones into the shadows. Moments later she is spotted and makes a break for it, cue chase sequence, bullet to the leg, then eventual escape. The cold seductive killer, watches, destroys, then slips away into shadow.  That should be the end of it.. but upon return to London the mission, which was simply a favour for the CIA, has lost any shimmer of glamour. Her first kill was meaningless when it should have been for Queen and Country.

Batwoman: Elegy tells the story of a disgraced twenty-something dismissed from the military academy that had promised vengeance. Kate Kane is a vigilante super-heroine. In the opening glossy two page spread Batwoman has her sensible red boot pressed against a young man's throat. "You know what I want Rush" Her shocking red lips against her grey-white skin are a wound and a threat. "I want your secrets, I want where and I want when, I want her name. And you ... really... want to give it to me."  This emphasis bristles with sexual tension, she is the potential dominatrix, ready to punctuate her questions with the brutal work of her fists.

 But the cliched questions and the overblown dialectic suggests that she is new to the role... This is outlined beautifully in an article by Q Magazine's Colin Smith.  Referencing the moment she meets Batman, He writes: 

It's a lack of substance on Kate's part that's emphasised as she stumbles backwards with the shock of The Batman's appearance, faced with a character that's as solid and unmoving as a fundamental moral principle. Kate, we're surely being told, is a cartoon of herself, but this man in a mask is profoundly real. 

For Smith, Batman's assured competence (READ: white, wealthy hetero-normative power) sits in stark contrast to Kane's approach to vigilantism which is fueled above all by anger. When Kate's father discovers a cache of weapons she has stolen from his barracks he informs her:

 "I was actually relieved when I realized what you were doing with all this stuff. But here's a little biscuit for you to chew on, Kate. You're not a soldier anymore, and you're not a cop. Just because you survived beast at the point and you were senior elite in gymnastics doesn't mean you're a damn crimefighter and its going to stop now."

His anxiety is gendered. Jake Kane highlights his daughter's feminine achievements: the moment she survived the attack of "beast" referencing a potential rape, and her talents in gymnastics. In so doing, he airbrushes over his daughter's successes in military school. Only once Kate informs him "I've found my way to serve", proposing that the work will bring direction and discipline to her life, does Jake Kane accept her decision. His attempts to undermine her plans give her a platform to explain the decision. Rucka filters her personality through several layers, purposely weaving a narrative that shows more how others respond to Kate, rather than asserting and reasserting her core values. The following double page spread, stunningly produced by artist J.H. Williams, reiterates the reference to gymnastics.

Also she's a keen trainspotter.

 Five images of her fulfilling masculine mocked-up missions in army gear is overlaid by her contorted body as she retrains on gym beam. It is this flexibility to deny and reclaim gender stereotyping that makes Kate Kane so powerful.


In contrast, Tara Chace is unbending, determined, masculine and, as a result, brittle. Running on empty, Chace freezes, gets into fixes, gets shot, and above all is driven almost mad by the bureaucrats in London and undermine her decisions and treat her as a commodity. Following being attacked and electing to CHARGE at him like bloody lunatic  Chase is chastised by Mister Kinney; a higher up. "You! Chace! I want an answer by God! You stupid Bitch! Your orders were to draw them out, not to engage!" She is visibly exhausted, fag in mouth, the adrenaline having ripped through her. In a rage, she passes him "You have a problem with my performance, you're free to take it up with D-Ops.... at which point I'll be delighted to tell the home office about how you arrived just after the nick of time." The next time they meet, Chace is given a chance to explain her decision. [left] She smiles. "Next time you find someone shooting at you... and you're unarmed, try running towards the shooter" Then scowls "And pray the shooter isn't me."

Colin Smith, in his review of batwoman opens :

It's impossible to say whether "Batwoman: Elegy" is an angry comic book that's been written by an angry man.

But I strongly suspect that it is.

Not only is Rucka angry, but Kate Kane is furious and Chace, livid. In both series this anger is given meaning by the discrimination it responds to. Chase crumbles under the pressure of fulfilling the masculine role of spy, whilst being undermined by her female body; which gives scumbags like Kinney the opportunity to call her anything they want, undermine her decisions and insinuate that she is unable to cope with war. The female body takes the brunt; Chace self-medicates alcohol, cigarettes; whilst the brutal work of the active spy, and the stress and the strain of London politics additionally take their toll. The final panel of her time in the series shows her body dealing the final blow to active service as she sits holding a positive test for pregnancy. The battleground of Queen and Country is located not in Afganistan, Iraq, or in London, but in Chace's body which is devastated by active service. Despite this, Rucka does not suggest that Chace is unsuitable for active service, but rather that her female body impacts how the men around her respond to her work. It is society's perception of the woman at war which eventually destroys her career.

Kane on the other hand is removed from the army when she admits she is a lesbian.She removes herself from the institution that would seek to undermine her by choosing vigilantism. This choice allows her to experiment sexually and lose control of the stark and austere persona she had pursued in military school.

Another torn apart female body. 

 The choices she makes in her own appearance, sexual preferences, and the feats she performs are not politicised. Unlike Chace, she has less responsibility, and her body is not the battleground. Rucka's Post 9/11 pin-ups attack the institution. Not the military or MI6; but the institution of gender which expects women to perform like men, but continues to undermine them for the gender they attempt to conceal. Kate Kane's desire to serve her government has been squashed. Time and again that the insults of others; that she is too sexual, too feminine, too gay, too much, only feed an overarching desire to serve herself. Only by rejecting the constraints of  "institutionalised" gender roles and by living through their decisions, can Rucka's heroines coherently construct identities that are strong and female.

Etiquette

I'm offended by all of the supposed-tos. I don't like women telling other women what to do or how to do it or when to do it. 

  -- Jessa, Girls 

Trawling through a charity book shop I come across a sociological texts that was published in the 1980s. It uses yellows, and blacks and whites and is called something like: female voices or traumas of single womanhood or the vagina dialogue. It is a collection of narratives about women. I point it out to mum, and she glances at it and laughs, saying, I read all of those, "I read them all until one day, when your brother was five or six I read that I really should send him away to live somewhere else, because once he hits eight years old, he'll start oppressing women. And I thought, what a load of bollocks." She gave up on reading the guidelines, and lived an albeit feminist lifestyle without adhering to all of the prescriptive writing. 

When Jessa, from the HBO TV show Girls is told by a book that sex from behind is degrading, she shrieks: "What if I want to feel like I have udders". Her outburst seems peculiar at first but then reveals the underlying problem that feminism has become a second set of prescriptive writing that tells women what they should be, what they should want and what form their sexuality should take.  "Bad Feminism" by Roxanne Gay voices the frustration of an on-the-fence feminist: "I keep reading these articles and getting angry and tired because these articles tell me that there's no way for women to ever get it right. These articles make it seem like there is, in fact, a right way to be a woman an a wrong way to be a woman. And the standard appears to be ever changing and unachievable." Frustratingly this punchy closer is followed by a list of things she feels she gets wrong, so she subscribes to the idea that there is indeed a right way, and she falls short of it. Gay reinforces the stereotypes of extremely outdated feminism perpetuate: that sex must be a certain way, that women must be militant, that they must hate pink... etc. etc. 

I too have felt the stress and the strain that Gay articulates, but I realised that I didn't care if a handful of people, men, women, feminists or not were offended by my particular sexuality, penchants and tastes. Furthermore, I don't mind being told what to do sometimes. I enjoy articles which tell me of a new thing I need to think about, because I still have a mind, and a choice which allows me to construct a nuanced and relativistic approach to feminism. Roxanne Gay is wrong to assume there is a right way to be a woman, or even a right way to be a feminist, since both the gender and movement are forums open to discussion and negotiation. A place to toss your two cents, and then carry on regardless, because feminism suggests you should be able to justify exactly what makes you feel comfortable and happy as liberation; provided it doesn't hurt others. 

--------------------------------

Post Script on Video games. 
What do women want from female protagonists?  

My Two Cents: I want lots of them, I want them to be all kinds of different types of women. I look at Bayonetta and I think yeah: interesting. But that's been done now, can we have something else. Something different. Another refraction, a different collection of tropes, beliefs, fantasies, and shapes. Please? Pretty Please?

In case you were wondering: This is Bayonetta kicking someone with a giant stiletto made of her own hair.

Madness Returns: Puberty is Pretty Rough.

'This unmitigated disaster is your doing. And it will get worse. Your Train keeps a hellish schedule. Get moving... The change has begun'

'The train is perfectly capable of terrifying me, Cat.'

Alice: Madness Returns is not the best game ever made, but it is certainly the best in-game exposition of female puberty.

Video games traditionally under-represent women. With a couple of exceptions such as Metroid, Portal, and Red Dead Redemption, women in games are not well rounded. Thinking on the characters that come to mind from this brief list, what makes, Samus, Galdos, Chell and Bonnie different is their overt masculine qualities. Feminine and vulnerable women are generally over-sexed, whiny or difficult. They are foils to the protagonist, that is, if they merit inclusion at all.

Initially Alice circumvents these issues by presenting it's eponymous protagonist as a child. She begins the game in a doctor's office, as she leaves a very young kid enters the office saying: 'It's my turn to forget, Alice.' No delineation, other than height, is made between the teen Alice and the six or seven year old boy. She wears the simple smock of her infantile brethren, and whilst she is almost twice as tall as these strange dwarfish children she is similarly wan and pale. She has been in therapy a long long time. Her vulnerability is her initial personality. Her wonderland seems at best escapist: the game to stop a runaway train is Alice's attempt to eradicate the memory of childhood trauma.

The wonderland we first encounter is captivating, light and absolutely stunning. Whilst helpless in London, unable to so much as jump; in her fantasy she is lighter than air. Her skirts allow her to triple jump across wide expanses of sky. Alice's initial experience of wonderland is childhood fantasy becoming a reality. Careless and and free she negotiates the simple and linear opening level of Madness Returns with ease. That is, until she finds the vorpal blade, and meets her first enemies, dolls and black slime, combined together. Blood, and the shedding of blood, becomes her first taste of dealing with the difficulties and frustrations of an aggravated childhood. Her transformation from child to adult is initiated through these attacks.

As Alice grows steadily more experienced in violence, and aggression she gains an adult understanding of the world. The game's writers links narrative transition directly to character development. As pubescent fantasy, the story is carried predominantly by Alice's sexual experiences. The more blood she sheds, and the more deeply entrenched she becomes in wonderland, the easier it is to re-examine her past. Her childhood, we learn was torn apart by the fire in which her parents and sister were killed, as she struggles to piece together these experiences she battles the horror and fear which all teenage girls encounter. But Alice has the advantage of experiencing these emotions and the difficulties through a fantasy in which she wields a razor sharp knife. Lucky girl.

Perhaps if such monsters were not presented, the knife would be turned upon her own body. Wonderland offers not simple a childish escape but the opportunity for action. As she destroys life, Alice becomes the active character in an inert world. This is emphasised by her encounter with the Walrus. As in the original Alice game, the side characters are unable to escape the clutches of passivity. The Walrus has Alice round up his cast, mutters the inescapable riddles. The side characters, with the exception of the cat, watch the oncoming destruction of wonderland without batting an eyelid. They welcome and submit to oncoming disaster because inaction is so tempting, so easy. They too, seem like children, trapped in the fantasy of wonderland but unwilling to take the action which would allow them to grow.

By continually battling the violent the demons which plague and destroy her childhood wonderland, Alice is negotiating the path to adulthood. Unable to remain as it was, wonderland is a spectre to which Alice clings but can no longer sustain. Either she chooses to forget, to ignore the traumas of her past as her Doctor suggests, (The doctor later reveals his true motives) or she fights through and embraces the trials and difficulties of puberty. In creating this narrative the developers have produced a brilliantly polished character The narrative is driven, not be the illusive and ridiculous notion of a gothic train, but by Alice's desire to grow. The train represents the onslaught of technology and development, these are things Alice does not really reject at all. She recognises that her nostalgia for wonderland is destructive, another kind of forgetting, which would ultimately lead to her own destruction. Whilst all around her cling to the past, she fights for the future. The train is not her enemy, it is merely her means of getting places.

Alice is no longer able to stay in her childhood fantasy, she must except the onslaught of puberty. This is made particularly clear when she comes to the red queen's castle and is confronted with a long heart-shaped passageway. Red and slimy, it drips, it is, after all a vagina. This blood is not limiting, it is liberating. By walking the passage Alice's development continues and culminates in meeting with the red queen. A mirror image of Alice herself or perhaps her sister, the queen decodes the riddle: 'The train is trying to destroy all evidence of your past, and especially the fire.' Through self-reflection, Alice can find the truth. Through individual growth she can save herself. The deadliness of self-reflection is another theme throughout Madness Returns. The potent philosophy of escapism and avoidance is encouraged by wonderland's cast of characters, but Alice must defy them.

As a videogame Alice: Madness Returns thrives because it counteracts the persistent lack of control present in Carroll's novel with interactive gameplay. The game allows that sense of self-control, and engagement which the original story never delivered. As Alice becomes more deadly, and more aware of sex the in-game collectable memories offer a new narrative.

Rather than simply being told things the narrative allows Alice to re-experience memories in a new and sexualised light. She talks of the fluffy undergraduates who fell in love with her older sister. And in one unerring moment of self-consciousness, Alice remembers the advances of one creepy old man whose advances turned towards her younger self. This, is Carroll himself, or rather Charles Dodgson who appealed to the real Alice Liddell, sent his manuscripts and it is believed; asked for nude photos. The writing in this game is astounding, revealing and dangerous. Rather than shirking responsibilities, or being too attached to the material, (one thinks of Burton's Alice) it interrogates the author, and the story.

Madness Returns is a game all girls should play. Alice is weak, she is terrorised, tortured only to be empowered by action. Her puberty is a process of violence, death and emotion. Rather than being tempered, she fights, rather than being sexy she is sexually aware. By smattering the game with sticky juices Alice becomes a gripping and engaging experience, which encourages reflection. Rather than escapist fantasy, wonderland becomes the space in which Alice can investigate her own burgeoning self-awareness. The game offers teenage girls a similar space to encounter the realities of a bloody and violent puberty so rarely touched upon by mainstream culture.

L.A. Noire: The Wrong Side of The Yellow Tape.

LA Noire was almost genre defining. The first time I sat down and played it the scenery was overwhelming. It reeked of the noir landscape. The dark alleyway, the torches, and the cars, the streetlamps and bloodstains were completely believable. The straight-laced cop Cole Phelps was a tiring and dull cardboard cutout. By producing a character so overtly lawful 'good', we were left with a long string of repetitive actions with little or no motivation to continue with the plot.

My theory: Cole Phelps should have been a private detective. The LA landscape was excellent, but without the difficult protagonist the game was completely unable to fit into noir film genre. The police are boring. They have to be boring to keep us safe, they have to be boring to be uncorrupt, they are boring because if they weren't boring they would be dodgy. Private detectives are intrinsically difficult characters. They sit on the divide between private and public, at once affecting the atmosphere of political environments whilst simultaneously being self-serving only. They have power without responsibility. A dirty difficult protagonist in the spectacular LA environment would have created a game which not only had great set pieces (as in the cases) but an engaging over-arching plot. I haven't gotten anywhere near far enough into the game for this very reason. I'm not feeling the story.

My experience of this game has also been coloured by reading a book entitled Queenpin by Megan Abbott a crime fiction writer who has recently appeared in local libraries everywhere and is being rather patronisingly called a 'debutante' on the cover each of her novels. Queenpin follows the story of an anonymous (and thus liminal) woman who finds herself working for a mover and shaker (The Queenpin). I certainly entered into the book as green and fresh as the girl who fast becomes embroiled in the sexy criminal underworld. It's a great, easy and refreshing read, and I would recommend it. It is also soaked in more noir than your average pastry: it is the tirumisu of crime fiction. Yum. As we watch the girl's fall from grace, we are voyeur to this seedy world. It is this voyeurism which LA Noire utterly lacks. Were the protagonist a private detective, the potential for watching would be far greater. Whilst the police officers palate operates in fullcolour, a private detective can only ever be sepia-toned. Brown, grey and black.

Players of GTA weren't ready to go to the other side of the yellow tape. They didn't want to legitimise the policeman they have obnoxiously slaughtered for fun since the late nineties. If they are anything like me they certainly don't sympathise with Phelps. But the more anarchic role, the role of being at once part of the law, and yet against it, was what made red dead near perfect. It is also what would have made LA Noire a masterpiece.

It's official, I'm a pervert...

But then, so are you. And so is your best friend, your mum, your neighbour. In fact it's getting so fucking crowded in here that I'm wondering why I ever aspired to being a pervert in the first place.

I went to a seminar today run by Dr Adam Phillips, a psychologist so renowned he has a proper wikipedia page which might have been written by someone other than him. It was the use of the word "perversion" in clinical practice. For swathes of the 20th Century perversion has been a term designed to separate people in categories. Specifically "normal people" and "perverts" and these categories have been created based on the normative values of particular groups. Psychoanalysts and Christians being just two. Oh what company the scientists are keeping.

However more recent study of psychoanalysis has veered away from seeing people in these categories and has begun to look at the tendencies. Perverse activities vs. perverts. These activities are defined as actions which excite people because they are explicitly or implicitly forbidden by parents. Perversions are activities you believe you shouldn't be indulging in.

They are a way of dealing with and controlling your own sexuality. So if your particular fetish happens to be feet, in my opinion that is no different to being coprophiliac or having a perverse interest in heterosexual penetrative sex with a significant other. Pic related.

It was also fascinating to gain a grounding in psychoanalytic theory. Which perhaps will not help me particularly with my Renaissance Literature MA but continues to fascinate me in ways which probably aren't healthy. The most perfect and simple example of the issues presented by Freud were quoted to me today. "To the child the mother is everything, but to the mother the child is not everything." All those times our needs went unfulfilled, are what drives us to treat our partners the way we do. The way we with-hold sex. Because we can and because we couldn't always get food when we wanted it as a child. It's a fascinating topic, but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

As Phillips today informed me, psychoanalysts are the ultimate sadists. They categorise people as perverts in order to have the false sensation that they control the "norms" of sexual behaviour. They do this because sexuality is unnerving. We wonder why people choose to have sex with people of the same sex, why on earth they enjoy pain, or fetishize feet because we are afraid of these different sexualities.

Plus the heavy reliance on Freud leads to some weird conclusions. Men we are told are more perverse than women because they fear castration, so they must find things which arouse them in case they lose their penises. This bullshit has never really flown with me. Women are just as perverse as men, but why on earth would they show it. I am inclined to believe (alongside the unnamed woman in stoller's article: "The Term Perversion") that once women's liberation is fully realised that women will be able to be as open about their own sexuality. They will stop pretending to be content to be the object, (if they still are? This is weird territory for me,) and be more able to talk about what interests them. Having spoken to women about masturbation and most of the time, hit a brick wall, I feel that openness about sexuality will continue to be limited to the bedroom. Or worse cosmo magazine. (Try Scarlet, it got a bit tiring after a while, but it is actually attempting to explore sex, as opposed to normalise.)