Let’s play the Genderswap Game!
Jim Hines has been doing a thing on his blog where he genderswaps character descriptions to look at how women and men get depicted. He did it first with classic SF/F novels, then with more recent titles — including his own.
It’s an interesting enough exercise that I decided to go through my own books and see what happens when I genderswap the descriptions. Results are below. I skipped over the Doppelganger books because quite frankly, describing people has never been a thing I do a lot of, and back then I did basically none of it, so this starts with Midnight Never Come.
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Elizabeth->Eliot, young:
The young man who sat on the floor by the fire, knees drawn up to his chin, was pale with winter and recent illness. The blanket over his shoulders was too thin keep him warm, but he seemed not to notice; his dark eyes were fixed on the dancing flames, morbidly entranced, as if imagining their touch.
Nothing gendered about this, except that it conveys character and situation more than appearance, which is (sadly) still a thing men get more often than women.
Eliot, decades later, as viewed by Michael->Michelle Deven:
She had seen him from afar, of course, at the Accession Day tilts and other grand occasions: a radiant, glittering figure, with beautiful auburn hair and perfect white skin. Up close, the artifice showed. Cosmetics could not entirely cover the smallpox scars, and the fine bones of his face pressed against his aging flesh. But his dark-eyed gaze made up for it; where beauty failed, charisma would more than suffice.
Invidiana->Invidianus, meeting Eliot; I’ve changed the clothing to masculine period style:
Tall, he was, taller than Eliot himself, and more slender. He wore a sleek black doublet, close-fitting through the body but flaring outward into trunk hose and a high standing collar that gave his presence weight. Jewels glimmered with dark color here and there, touching the fabric with elegance. [..] Slender as a breath, he should have been skeletal, grotesque, but far from it; his face and body bore the stamp of unearthly perfection, a flawless symmetry and grace that unnerved as much as it entranced. [..] The faerie was a sight to send grown men to their knees, and Eliot was only twenty-one.
These passages are interesting to me because of the period. Back in the Renaissance, impressing people with your clothing was not nearly as feminine-coded of a thing as it is now, so talking about Eliot and Invidianus in that way doesn’t sound that odd; and where the focus is on beauty, it’s beauty-as-power in a way that also doesn’t read (at least to me) as specifically feminine. Overall, the impression I was trying to give here is one of presence and strength, and it mostly just comes across as a little more conventional when the characters are men.
Tiresias->Tiresia; the “he” here refers to Invidianus:
No footfalls disturb the hush as the woman — not nearly so young as she appears — passes down the corridor, floating as if she walks on the shadows that surround her. […] Her clothes are rich, thick velvet and shining satin, black and silver against pale skin that has not seen sunlight for decades. Her dark hair hangs loose, not disciplined into curls, and her face is smooth. As he prefers it to be.
I couldn’t really convey more of what that last line means without quoting way too much text, but the whole “this is how Invidianus prefers her to look” thing is skeevy here, and was meant to be skeevy in the original. But they don’t read quite the same, because “her appearance is tailored to a man’s wishes” and “his appearance is tailored to a woman’s wishes” just don’t carry the same weight for the audience. (Also, the “smooth face” bit reads weirdly here, because a woman doesn’t generally need to shave her chin.)
Michelle Deven, meeting Eliot:
She had prepared for this audience with more than customary care for appearances. The seamstress had assured her the popinjay satin of her gown complemented the blue of her eyes, and the sleeves were slashed with insets of white silk. Her dark hair, carefully styled, had not a strand out of place, and she wore every jewel she owned that did not clash with the rest. Yet in this company, her appearance was little more than serviceable, and sidelong glances weighed her down to the last ounce. But those gazes would hardly matter if she did not impress the man in front of her.
Utterly conventional, in its swapped form. One of the things I liked about writing this period was the fact that “you need to peacock yourself up” thing applied equally to men, and that it was a woman Deven had to please, in a less creepy way than with Tiresia.
Lanval — I decided to go with an Arthurian name swap for Lune — disguising himself as a human:
The rippling, night-sky sapphire of his doublet steadied and became plainer blue broadcloth. The gems that decorated it vanished, and the neckline closed up, ending in a modest ruff, with a cap to cover his hair. More difficult was Lanval’s own body; he had to focus carefully, weathering his skin, turning his hair from silver to a dull blonde, and his shining eyes to a cheerful blue. Fae who were good at this knew attention to detail was what mattered. Leave nothing unchanged, and add those few touches — a mole here, smallpox scars there — that would speak convincingly of ordinary humanity.
Doesn’t seem much different in tone to me, except that I left the neckline comment in there, which doesn’t quite apply to period styles.
Lanval, again in human disguise, as seen by Michelle Deven:
Frost glittered on the ground and the bare branches of trees like ten thousand minuscule diamonds, forming a brilliant setting for the gem that was Andrew Montrose. With his hood fallen back, his unbound hair shone palest gold in the sun, and his wide eyes, a changeable grey, would not have looked out of place on the King of Winter that featured prominently in last night’s masque. He was not the greatest beauty at court, but that mattered little to her.
Okay, here the weight of it shifts more noticeably with the gender-swap: this was the first introduction of Lune’s alter ego, whom Deven was in love with, so I was playing up some of the male gaze thing, which here becomes female gaze.
Lanval, not disguised, as seen by Michelle Deven:
Hair — silver. Doublet — black feathers, trembling with him. And his face, imperfectly warded by his hands, refined into otherworldly beauty, high-boned and strange, with silver eyes wide in horror and fear.
Making this a male faerie instead of a female one automatically makes me see him as more of an anime bishounen, as that’s one of the few genres where this type of male beauty is a norm.
Moving on now to In Ashes Lie . . . if there’s any place in there where I wrote a concentrated description of either Antony or Jack, I can’t easily find it, which is interesting all on its own.
Eochu->Eocha Airt, as seen by Lanval:
The three who entered stood out vividly from the courtiers filling the chamber. Where the fae of his realm mostly followed the fashions of the human court, with such alterations as they saw fit, the Irish dressed in barbaric style. The warriors heeling the ambassador from Temair wore vivid blue cloaks clasped at one shoulder, but their breasts were bare beneath, with bronze cuffs around their weapon arms. Eocha Airt herself wore a splendid robe decked with feathers and small, glittering medallions, and bore a golden branch in her hand. […] Her strawberry hair, long as a man’s but straight, fell over one eye as she straightened from her bow. She might be an ollamh, the highest rank of poet, but the Irish expected their poets to be warriors, too. The scowl was fierce.
Bare breasts definitely read differently from bare chests! I gave up on altering “long as a woman’s” to something that fit the period, though, because it would have changed the body language. I like the ferocity here.
Lanval, as seen by Antony->Antonia Ware:
Lanval stood by his chair of estate, with the alert, arrested posture of a deer. The elaborate curls of his silver hair still trembled against his cheek, for he had turned his head sharply just before the usher’s cry. They outshone the cloth-of-silver of his coat, and made the lutestring silk of his doublet and cloak a richer midnight by comparison. Sapphires winked in his circlet, each one worth a lord’s ransom. Their eyes met; then Antonia blinked, breaking the spell. A faerie king was a powerful sight, however often one saw it. And she had been some time away.
For me it’s really the body language here that reads oddly when Lune is gender-swapped to male.
Wayland Smith, as seen by Lanval:
The voice came from behind him, a deep, friendly growl. For such an enormous woman, Wayland moved far too silently. The Queen of the Vale did not look obviously fae; at first glance, she seemed nothing more than a brawny blacksmith, with muscles cording her arms and straining her plain leather tunic across her chest. But Lanval offered her a respectful greeting, never forgetting he owed this royal cousin his present sanctuary.
We don’t see a lot of brawny female blacksmiths, do we? I should do more of this kind of thing.
Nicneven:
Nicneven could never have passed for an Onyx Courtier. His face — neither handsome nor unhandsome — had a wildness to it that made Irrith look tame, from the sweep of his cheekbones to the high wings of his brows. The garb he wore would not have seemed out of place in Scotland these thousand years or more, a kilt of intense woad-blue and leather shoes cross-gartered on his legs. But for all his rustic dress, he carried himself with the presence of a King.
Over on Jim’s blog, there was some discussion of the different values conveyed by “beautiful” vs. “handsome” depending on which gender they’re applied to. I haven’t altered that wording at all in these excerpts: where I described a woman as beautiful, I kept it as a beautiful man, and Nicneven here was always described in terms of handsomeness. I just changed pronouns and turned a kirtle into a kilt.
Let’s take a look at A Star Shall Fall . . . .
Galen, in his first scene:
She stepped free carefully, ducking her head to avoid knocking her hat askew. A footwoman stood at the ready; Galena gave her name, and tried not to fidget as the servant departed. Waiting here, while the chair dripped onto the patterned marble, made her feel terribly self-conscious, as if she were a tradeswoman come to beg a favor, rather than an invited guest. Fortunately, the footwoman returned promptly and bowed. “You are very welcome, ma’am. If I may?”
This isn’t really description as such, but I included it because Galen is depicted as being anxious and uncertain — which are traits much more commonly attached to women, not men.
Irrith, as seen by Galena in their first meeting:
Galena’s own muddy prints were obliterated by an enormous smear as the dripping and filthy figure shifted, slipped, and landed unceremoniously on their backside. “Blood and Bone!” the figure swore, and the voice was far too low to be female. […] That he was a faerie, she could be certain; the delicacy of his hand — if not his speech — made anything else unlikely. But she could discern little more; he seemed to have rolled in the mud for sport, though some of it had subsequently been washed off by the rain. His hair, skin, and clothes were one indeterminate shade of brown, in which his eyes made a startling contrast. They held a hundred shades of green, shifting and dancing as no human irises would.
Again, this becomes more conventional when gender-swapped. Women rarely show up in the text covered in mud. The delicacy still reads a bit oddly, though, like all the faerie men in the story are meant to be coded as gay.
