degenerate-perturbation:

here is my opinion on genderbends. I think they are cool and great because it’s endlessly fascinating to me how character archetypes are gendered. if you flip everyone’s genders and don’t change anything else about the characters, how Weird is it? does it change how that character is contextualized? does it change my affect towards that character? What character relationships remain essentially unchanged and which are totally sideways now–particularly same-gender relationships? thoughtful genderbends are cool because of what implicit gender assumptions we hold; they reveal the invisible/unnoticeable.

in particular I think genderbends are most interesting when they’re text-only. visual design-swaps are interesting but only to the degree that they stimulate my thinking on the former stuff, especially since in a text-only medium all you’ve changed is the pronouns and maybe the names. you don’t have to reference secondary sex characteristics or gender presentation at all; all you’re changing is the association-chain triggered in the reader’s brain by the variable pronoun.

Ron Moore talked about making Starbuck a woman in the Battlestar Galactica remake because the original had Han Solo-like roguish charm and he thought shifting gender would add in some incongruity and highlight that someone who reacts to basically the extinction of humanity by constantly gambling, drinking, and taking lethal risks was probably dealing with a lot of things.