Slipping the trap @polytropic-liar - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
Slipping the trap
@polytropic-liar
Hi, I'm polytropic, though most people call me "please stop talking." My pronouns are they/them and he/him.
I blog about things I like: speculative fiction, bright colors, queerness, subversive masculinity, theory.
I used to blog about activism and current events: now I'm a movement lawyer in my daily life, so I don't use this blog for that any more, because boundaries are important.
I welcome messages, including if you're struggling with gender feelings and want some support or advice.
Please don't message me for legal advice. I'm a lawyer, not your lawyer.
Everyone's seen the @dcfanmadezines fanzine by now right?? Isn't it beautiful????
A while ago I saw @jesncin make a references post for one of their awesome fancomics, and I was inspired to jot down notes as I was working on my first-ever attempt at a comic script. So read on if you would like to see what I'm referencing and why I made certain choices in the fanzine comic The Woman In The Refrigerator!
(This is part one of a series because I wrote too much. The problem with doing semi-academic writing for free on tumblr.com is that no one forces me to edit it down. Seriously it's so long, there's something wrong with me.)
Part 1: Refrigerator Dialogues
It's 1993. You are Ron Marz, DC writer, and you've been tasked with killing Hal Jordan, the current and longstanding Green Lantern, and transitioning the comic to his successor. How are you going to make people invest in and connect with Kyle Rayner, your new protagonist? Especially since this change is part of an editorially-mandated shakeup of DC legacy characters being replaced by a younger, wisecracking, """edgy""" new generation who still needed to fit comfortably into the mold of masculine, white, staunchly capitalist men (e.g. Superboy, Impulse, with Connor Hawke as a notable exception whom DC then spends decades not knowing how to write or draw). Kyle's an artist, which is already a little worryingly non-normatively-masculine, especially compared with Hal "fighter pilot" Jordan. How will you make sure people don't think the new guy is a wimp?
Obviously, you murder his girlfriend.
It's the oldest trick in the book, right? Make up a character who's pretty cool (actually, maybe a little too cool, to the point of threatening Kyle's masculinity herself by having more ambition and competence than him; good thing she isn't sticking around!), put her in the alternating roles of cheerleader, mommy, and trophy for a few issues to motivate and support your protagonist, and then pick a random villain to...cut her body up and put it in a refrigerator for Kyle to find.
Great. Kyle gets to show his masculinity by beating the villain up brutally in revenge, and now he's got manpain and an origin story, so you're good to go. Foolproof plan, nothing can go wrong here.
Except then in 1999, future comics writer Gail Simone uses your story as the centerpiece of her commentary on brutality against women in superhero comics. And she calls the trope "women in refrigerators." And a lot of people take a minute to stop and think and realize, yeah, actually, isn't it weird and fucked up that so many women in comics not only are raped, beaten, and murdered, but that many of them are created as characters for the specific purpose of being raped, beaten, and murdered as plot devices for a man's storyline?
Marz, unfortunately, did not handle this critique particularly well, writing in his defense that...yeah, exactly, he created Alexandra DeWitt solely to be graphically murdered, specifically because he wanted people to empathize with her boyfriend's pain. But he totally wasn't thinking about gender when he did it, so it can't be misogyny.
Simone's insight and coining of the trope have had a much wider cultural impact than the specific Green Lantern storyline the name came from. "Fridging" is now in the dictionary, with the meaning of treating a character, usually a woman, as disposable for the benefit of another character's plot or development.
Catherynne Valente and Annie Wu added to this conversation in 2017 with their graphic novella "The Refrigerator Monologues", a set of monologues from dead women parodying some of the most infamously fridged women in comics canon.
In this work you can see the discussion of the trope really solidify as being about dehumanization: Simone focused her critique in her original letter on how widespread the use of violence against women was, while Valente focused on the narrative roles that disposable women characters play and how they mirror dehumanization of women by their real-life male partners. Please read this book, it's fantastic and fantastically angry.
Subsequent work has examined fridging as applied to Black characters, disabled characters, and queer characters. Incredibly, Kyle Rayner's run as Green Lantern shows up again in the queer fridged characters list: in 2001, new Green Lantern writer Judd Winick introduced Kyle's friend and colleague Terry Berg, wrote an awkward but well-meaning coming out storyline for him, and then in 2002 wrote a story where he is brutally beaten in a homophobic hate crime. The story focuses almost exclusively on Kyle's feelings and his reaction: he once again enacts violent revenge on the perpetrator of the attack, and then loses his faith in humanity and leaves Earth for a while (so that they could write him in space as Ion). Terry disappeared from the comic in 2004, never to be seen again now that he served his purpose. (I brought him back in my script. I also made him a tarot gay. Sorry Terry, you now represent queer people's fundamental human right to be kind of annoying and still be alive and loved.)
We've had about 25 years of solid, thoughtful feminist critique of the women in refrigerators--though I will say, I'm disappointed in the lack of examination of intersectionality in the body of work on it so far. (Some very good articles have tackled intersectional feminist themes in comics more broadly, but I'm really missing a critical, intersectional examination of this trope in particular.) But I thought we could go farther.
Quick vocab note: "queering", as a verb, is a term academics use to express that they're doing something weird to a text. Sometimes the thing they're doing is critique, sometimes it's building off of a theory in a new different direction, and sometimes it's making a new thing taking pieces of the old one. Queering has implications of doing something "non-normative", questioning binaries of various kinds, and radical truth-telling. (It's often brought up in the same conversations as "decolonizing" a text, aka doing something to it that questions colonial perspectives and assumptions.) Fanfiction is a type of queering a text, not just because the fanfic is about queer sex/romance/identity and/or written by queer people, but also because it's doing something weird to the text of the canon, often in a way that questions that canon's assumptions about identity and normativity more broadly.
So when I started looking at queering the infamous woman in the refrigerator storyline, what I started thinking about was the gender binary at the heart of it: the man outside the fridge and the woman inside it. When we blur those lines, suddenly the whole thing gets a lot less stable and a lot more interesting. Who is in the fridge? Who's standing outside the door? Who put the person in there and why?
One might summarize the original Marz storyline as saying: the woman has to go in the fridge so the man can be a man. We have to kill her and chop her up and shut her away because he has to lose her in order to be a hero, to play the role he's supposed to play.
When you phrase it that way, it starts to sound suspiciously familiar to a lot of trans experiences, doesn't it? How many of us tried to cut out and shove down and lock away the parts that we thought were holding us back from the roles we were supposed to play? I sure did, for years. It almost killed me.
My queering of this narrative asks: what if the woman in the refrigerator is the man standing outside it too? What if you can't cut her out and lock her away, because she's you and you're her? What can this new reading show us about this fraught genre trope? What can it show us about the character of Kyle Rayner, who's already got some pretty interesting Gender TroubleTM going on?
FINALLY READ WOMAN IN THE REFRIGERATOR!! BANGER STORY huge highlight for me in the collection so far!! Excited to read more meta surrounding this story because I'm not caught up on Kyle lore but it was clear the comic made several homages to his many arcs that was readable to a newbie but I bet was a huge treat for Kyle fans.
aaaaahhhhh this makes me so happy!! Your DC fancomics were the inspiration for me to try my hand at writing this script; reading (Don't Call Me) Superboy especially was really inspiring for me to think about how we can do whatever we want with these characters and we should because we have new things to say about them. I'm so glad to hear you liked the story, this is literally senpai noticing me lmao
part 2 of the meta is in progress! I will @ you when I post it if you want?
I've been fascinated by the "Forced Entry" Green Lantern storyline and its legacy for a long time, ever since the first time I read it and hated it wildly. It's become such an iconic moment in comics misogyny--inspiring Gail Simone to coin the "woman in the refrigerator" trope--and it's also shaped so many of Kyle Rayner's future storylines as writers have tried to somehow write around or in response to it. I got really interested in what it would mean to queer that story, especially in conversation with many of Kyle's other stories that also grapple with gender and identity and normativity.
I love fanworks because they let us do things that canon can't or won't! To me this story represents the freedom and creativity of fanworks, the chance to speak back to the corporate canon and say: "there are so many more possibilities for us than you can see. I took your story about violence and manpain and women as tragic props, and made something completely different with it instead."
I hope that readers who are already Kyle Rayner fans will recognize the character they love, and love seeing that character in a new and different way! And that readers who aren't as familiar with the canon will still love following Kyle on a very personal journey (and maybe will even want to read some of the comics that I drew from!). I *know* they will love the art, because what I've seen so far is fantastic; I'm blown away by it and I know readers will be too. And I especially hope that trans and genderqueer readers will find things in this story that resonate with and celebrate them.
@johnnyanger:
I'm not very familiar with Kyle's stories (or the Lanterns in general), but anything that has to delve into the inner mind or psychic spaces in comics always immensely interests me. As someone who's had to do some admittedly less fantastical self-reflection on my own gender identity, I really felt the frustrations and the catharsis in the process of discovery come through as I was working on this. Hopefully Kyle's experience with the process in this comic can bring some familiarity and comfort to others, as it did to me :)
Like I said about really feeling those frustrations, it was such a relief to draw that *aha!* reveal where everything clicked into place and the door finally opened. It's such a freeing feeling, and I loved getting to show that happening to someone else.
I'm not going to show the reveal itself, so I think the sequence I have to go with is this one! This is a very introspective comic, and the emotions are really high. It's been an honor to get to draw for this, and I hope people like it just as much as I liked working on it!
just rewatched Jupiter Ascending and sorry not sorry that movie holds up actually. "technically speaking I'm an alien. and from the perspective of immigration, an illegal one" "luckily for you a woman owns this car /slaps a pad from the glove compartment on a bleeding wound/", harvesting eggs vs harvesting people for live-forever juice as a metaphor for capitalist exploitation, "the human beings on your planet are merely a resource waiting to be converted into capital." the aesthetic, the fashion, the CGI, the "I love dogs, I've always loved dogs." sean bean is there. literally this movie could not go harder.
listen I’m so glad you all are having fun with the dragon incest show, but I need you to understand that from the outside all I see is approximately 14 posts per day of people in truly horrific wigs with captions like “baegael did nothing wrong except all the murders”
in honor of this showing back up on my own dash again, a PSA: if you're gonna make a mildly funny post about a fandom you're not in, please be advised that if that post gets even a little bit popular, you will absolutely know for the rest of time every time there is a new development in that fandom lmao
this is not a complaint; I'm still, 4 years later, so glad you all are having fun with the dragon incest show. good luck with whatever those lesbians have going on. <3
Hi! With the bundles, will you need to purchase the digital merch separately from the paperback+bundle and/or merch only bundle? I know everything is listed but a frog can hope..?
ALSO! (I say this with much love): RUDE! You're making me pick between 3 covers!?
Hi there! Yes, the physical items and digital items are all listed separate. You can, however, add them to the same cart on ko-fi with a little fake out! If you back out of your cart after adding one item, you can still go back and add another one and ko-fi will keep track of what you had.
And hey, don't I KNOW it! We got insanely lucky across the board with our artists and writers, and our incredible cover artists really exemplified that! The good news is, all three covers appear in the zine -- if they aren't the cover of the one you order, you'll still find them as pin-up pages!
But seriously, @johnnyanger, @sillywillyco and keanurye really outdid themselves. It is one TOUGH choice!
I'd like to also give a special shoutout to Johnny, who did our main cover -- I (Editor TJ) was originally meant to do it, but got way too swamped and he jumped in after already completing THIRTEEN stunning comic pages for The Woman in the Refrigerator. On top of being insanely talented, he was such an incredible team player! Thank you Johnny!!
As today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it’s a great time to revisit Dinah from Devon’s memory of this historic event. And yes, still makes me laugh.
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