That sounds totally awesome! I would love to read it. :D
Aaaaaaand sob, this, this right here, this is the reason I can't enjoy "a plucky young woman dresses as a boy to serve her country for great justice!" narratives. :(
Yeeeeah. They really reinforce a totally cis-normative view of history, and do so in part by misrepresenting the historical evidence that exists. Soldiering provided a chance for mobility and a new community group - but so did sailing, and simply moving out of the village into the town or city. That last was an iffier prospect, because higher paying occupations other than soldiering and sailoring generally required apprenticeships, which could be hard to come by without family to arrange them for you. But soldiering can be cast as adventure, and as patriotic service - using it as the center of a narrative about a cisgender woman crossdressing allows for a recasting of many different stories that moved many different directions into one unified narrative that gives us a young, cisgender, heterosexual woman who sows her wild oats in the only way possible: passing as a man. She's always brought back into 'correct' gender relationships and systems by the end. She'll marry a man as a woman, and that's her happily ever after.
I have never read of any historical person whose life followed this trajectory. Ever. And yet... this single narrative is reproduced over and over in modern fiction. It obscures an awful lot of actual history, and the ideological intent behind it is unsubtle. Sometimes feminist versions of it change parts of the narrative, but they don't manage to engage with the deep problematic roots, which is the vast multiplicity of experience, especially the survival strategies of transgender people, that the narrative hides.
no subject
Aaaaaaand sob, this, this right here, this is the reason I can't enjoy "a plucky young woman dresses as a boy to serve her country for great justice!" narratives. :(
Yeeeeah. They really reinforce a totally cis-normative view of history, and do so in part by misrepresenting the historical evidence that exists. Soldiering provided a chance for mobility and a new community group - but so did sailing, and simply moving out of the village into the town or city. That last was an iffier prospect, because higher paying occupations other than soldiering and sailoring generally required apprenticeships, which could be hard to come by without family to arrange them for you. But soldiering can be cast as adventure, and as patriotic service - using it as the center of a narrative about a cisgender woman crossdressing allows for a recasting of many different stories that moved many different directions into one unified narrative that gives us a young, cisgender, heterosexual woman who sows her wild oats in the only way possible: passing as a man. She's always brought back into 'correct' gender relationships and systems by the end. She'll marry a man as a woman, and that's her happily ever after.
I have never read of any historical person whose life followed this trajectory. Ever. And yet... this single narrative is reproduced over and over in modern fiction. It obscures an awful lot of actual history, and the ideological intent behind it is unsubtle. Sometimes feminist versions of it change parts of the narrative, but they don't manage to engage with the deep problematic roots, which is the vast multiplicity of experience, especially the survival strategies of transgender people, that the narrative hides.
/wordy