Comments on: Sexual Politics, Farscape and Stuff.

By: Terry

Terry — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:27:12 +0000

Not to sound like I’m buttering you up or anything, Joel, but I really liked the way you wrote Cassandra’s sexuality. She didn’t feel like a male fantasy to me at all. She is very real and very human and you’re absolutely right that part of what makes her that way is her sexuality.

By: links for 2010-03-07 « AntiTerra

links for 2010-03-07 « AntiTerra — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:47:06 +0000

[...] Sexual Politics, Farscape and Stuff. | Babel Clash "I was thinking about this watching DVDs of Farscape, and reflecting that the character of Chiana (played by Gigi Edgley) was unlike almost anything you’ll see on TV — a ‘loose woman’ prone to seducing anything male just for fun, but who is also tough, smart, likable and is given some of the show’s best one liners. And the fact that it’s so rare that this type of character should be likable and even heroic is pretty sad, because it shows that popular culture still has a problem with female sexuality, with women who are overtly sexual in any way still insulted and disrespected, or otherwise treated as though they are no more than the sum of their sexual parts, while male characters are held to an entirely different standard." (tags: farscape science-fiction sexism secuality) [...]

By: Joel Shepherd

Joel Shepherd — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:31:40 +0000

Yeah, Farscape’s pretty rare in that it has lots of female characters, and most of them are interesting. Not necessarily strong, but interesting, usually in the sense that they’re completely politically incorrect.

By: Rene

Rene — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:52:55 +0000

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen that much Farscape.

But from what I have seen, part of what makes it work is that Chiana doesn’t exist in a vacuum (except, you know, space)– Aeryn and Zhaan are there, too, giving the viewer a range of female sexualities. Sometimes if there’s only one female character in a book, she takes on the burden of “representing” all women, or perhaps for the reader, fair or not, “what the author thinks” about all women. But as with Farscape, if a book has several women, then the onus of representing all women falls off any one woman’s shoulders.

Of course that’s not necessarily fair to the author, but I think it does happen. (Books where women would not naturally be, like the Aubrey-Maturin books are of course excepted, need it even be said.)