A note on gender swapping (in threatre/literature)

I am frequently interested in gender swapping in the arts, especially in story telling.  I can't understate the number of hours I have spent imagining the gender-swapped production of Les Miserables that I will someday produce when I am rich and famous.  And I'm really excited to be going to see an all-female cast of Julius Caesar next month, and I'm exited to hear about a Manchester theatre company's reimagining of Hamlet where Hamlet is a woman.

I think reversing genders, especially in well-known stories, when done seriously, is a great way to open minds to new perspective and maybe expose just how ridiculous our assumptions about people/characters can be just because of the gender stereotypes we believe in.  For example this.

I've been thinking about this lately because I was randomly reading this blog post (pretty photos!) and thinking about the book Stargirl.  I read it a long time ago when my little sister was in middle school I think, because she had to read it for school, and I think the idea was that is was supposed to be inspirational to young girls and get them to talk about bullying or something.

I really really unimpressed with the book.  It's been a while since I've thought about it, and I definitely wasn't the target audience, so maybe I'm being unfair to it, but as far as I can remember I found the themes borderline vapid, and frankly Stargirl was ridiculous.

Maybe that is the point of the book, and I just didn't get it, but I guess what annoyed me the most about Stargirl's 'non-conformity' was that she was just doing extreme gender performance---- EXTREME niceness, singing to people on their birthdays, decorating her desk with a table cloth, integrating sunflowers into everything, donning different (female) costumes.  Through all of this, the male protagonist learn a lot about himself and becomes a better person.  I know it's blasé to cry manic pixie girl, but it's pretty hard not to in this case.

The above mentioned blog post quotes Stargirl.  The book's male protagonist (classmate and briefly boyfriend of Stargirl) describes Stargirl.  But when you take that description and flip the gender, the description becomes pretty silly and really begins to showcase this very thing that bugs me about Stargirl/Stargirl.

"A strange, otherworldly, yet beautiful creature of a boy who doesn’t quite belong in the world, yet here he is on earth. No one knows quite what to think of him because he’s different. He doesn’t walk, he floats, he doesn’t shine, he glows. He possesses a childlike innocence and naivety like no other; perhaps that’s what makes him different." (emphasis mine)

What ridiculous things to say!  If someone described me like that I would be so offended at the shallow, romanticized, infantilized representation.  It really just sounds like the narrator is describing a Disney princess.  How non-conformist is that in the end?