I understand if you don’t want to answer this because the temperature is so high about this discourse, but may I ask something about the gender discourse in good faith? I am not trying to bait you or belittle you, I would just like to try to understand your perspective and share some of my own.
When you said “It’s because there is nothing else that can be tangibly pointed to” on Louis’s gender in your last ask, I suppose what I want to ask is what would be tangible grounds to say Louis is femme or feminine in canon i.e. what would be the canon depiction that you would find convincing enough to say that Louis is feminine? I have read posts that stated if Louis dressed and presented in a more feminine fashion, then more people would accept him as feminine, but since he does not and Lestat does, Lestat is feminine. But I think that has the potential for troubling gender essentialist connotations as well e.g. if clothes make the gender, then is a woman that does not perform femininity with fashion less of a woman?
I suppose this is a debate feminists have been having for ages and we will find no easy answers. But I have been troubled at times by some of what people say “against” a feminine interpretation of Louis and in support of a feminine interpretation of Lestat, that Lestat is The Woman and The Mother in the relationship because Lestat is flamboyant and wears feminine fashion. I know many people do the converse for Louis and say he is The Woman and The Mother in the relationship and they appeal to academic ideas of social gender to support that argument, but I remain unconvinced by those as well e.g. if social roles decide gender, such as being a victim of domestic violence means a person is feminine, does that not contribute to de-gendering a victim of domestic violence that may identify as a man?
I know this is discourse is a minefield and you have gotten very bad messages about this in the past so I do not begrudge you if you don’t answer, but I am sending this in good faith. I feel as though there is one box that says Lipstick Makes The Woman for supporters of Lestat as The Woman, and there is another box that says Oppression Makes The Woman for supporters of Louis as The Woman. I don’t think there are tangible grounds to say either of them are.
Of course you can ask, anon, and I agree that the stress on clothing, make-up and outward presentation can lead to some pretty gender essentialist talking points too, although I don’t think it should be ignored / is irrelevant either. The DV as a metaphor for gendered oppression argument is kind of similar in that regard given it's a very complex thing to ascribe to characters, particularly male ones, but also shouldn’t be ignored, particularly when you take into account the fact that the books do generally fall into the female gothic which was built on the back of things women felt dread about.
In that sense, it is tricky, because so much about gender in conversations like this is, in my opinion, about personal identity, and the ways that that is reflected or shared or felt varies in such a huge way that there isn’t really any one way to talk about it. I think that’s probably why the discourse runs so hot in this fandom, as you said.
For the record though, I don’t view either Lestat or Louis as The Woman, nor really even The Mother. Claudia has two fathers, and yes, I think you can make the case for both Lestat and Louis trying to fulfil a maternal role for her and both of them not being very good at it (which isn’t to say that that’s because they’re men, more just because they’re not very good parents). That said, I do think there is a sense of the maker as the birthing parent which can sometimes [although not always!] influence a dynamic. I think it does with Lestat and Claudia, and I actually think it does with Louis and Madeleine, albeit in a really different way. That’s not really here nor there though for this post, so - -
More to your point, what it comes down to for me right now is honestly textual expression.
I think that Louis’ emasculation by white society in his mortal life is not only explicitly detailed in the show, but pretty pivotal to this version of his character, and the complexity around his relationship with gender – because I do think he has complex feelings about it – which stems from the fact that he is a Black, gay man in the early 1900s, which is an identity he claims in the actual text of the show.
That might seem silly to say about the queer vampire show, but he’s literally the only character so far who has stated his sexuality textually, and he’s done it with identifiers about his race and gender, so I do think that’s incredibly important. It’s even brought up in the trial – Santiago talks about Louis' race and his desires in the context of reminding us of his character, and while obviously Santiago is not an authority on Louis, of course he's not, you’d think that if there was a chance to address Louis’ relationship to gender there both Santiago/Armand and the show would have.
My reading of Louis’ character is that his sexuality and the systemic racial abuse he experienced compounded his feelings of gendered inadequacies, which is why both Grace and Claudia were able to weaponize it against him. It’s why him calling himself ‘the housewife’ when he was in a depressive episode wasn’t him claiming an identity, but rather him fixing on the worst perception of himself – the very thing he never wanted to be. The fact that it was initially tossed at him in the same breath that Claudia called herself a mistake after Lestat had called her that I think makes it abundantly clear. They are all trying to hurt each other, and they’re all good at it, because they know each other well enough to know what will land, not because it's what it speaks to a truth in them, but because it speaks to something they desperately don't want to be.
With Lestat, it is genuinely harder to know how the show is going to approach his relationship to his gender going forwards, because I truly don’t know how much they’re committing to, but at the same time, it has already been explicit that Lestat’s not doing drag in a vacuum. If he was, then yeah, I wouldn’t read all that much into it – Lestat’s from a particularly flamboyant era of history, and he’s ever a performer – but again, he hasn’t been. Pissabataille actually did a great gifset of it here, but as much as the fandom can shrug it off or put it down to Lestat’s flamboyance, he has used feminine pronouns or identifiers on multiple occasions now. We can discuss the weight and interpretation of those moments, yes, but they are textual in the same way that Louis self-identifying as a gay man is, and that all the arguments around influences and Shelter and which character’s actually being pointed to in Louis reading Madame Bovary is not.
This isn't even getting into Carol saying his Mardi Gras costume needed to be equally masculine and feminine, because again - - this is just text, and it does lend, in my opinion, greater weight and nuance to his relationship with drag and make-up. It's all present, textually, no matter how you or I or anyone else chooses to interpret said text, and I’m always kind of left wondering how different the discourse around these things would be if it was Louis who’d called himself aunt, mother wolf, she and not Lestat.
Which really comes to my point, I guess. I think I’d need Louis to express it on a textual level, in dialogue or in meaningful gesture, something that centred his relationship to his gender in any way that positioned him as anything other than a cis gay man, because the show has demonstrated that it will do that, and that that is a part of the language of the show. I’m not saying Louis needs to use feminine pronouns like Lestat did, but I think these reaches to influences or gendered oppression, as you said, really are reaches to a potential subtext that eschews the - - well. Text.
I’ve said it on here a few times recently, but I actually don’t think Interview is a particularly complicated show. It’s excellent, don’t get me wrong, and layered and compelling and so emotionally rich, but I feel like it wears its heart on its sleeve. I feel like it keeps telling everyone what it is, and who these characters are, and people become convinced there’s something beneath the paint, so they scratch at it until they tear the canvas, y’know? Louis is textually a Black, gay man. Lestat is textually white, French and non-discriminating, which is probably going to be – in my reading – the show’s approach to his relationship with gender too.
