*mission impossibles down from the ceiling*
whispers in your ear: Jean Grey is trans
*ziplines back up through skylight*
whispers in your ear: Jean Grey is trans
*ziplines back up through skylight*
*hoists self down again*
whispers: "canonicity" wrt fiction is an invention of capitalism.
*ripcords back up*
whispers: "canonicity" wrt fiction is an invention of capitalism.
*ripcords back up*
I don't have to "queer" Jean Grey; from X-MEN #1 Jean's arc is the question and interrogation of gender normativity: what does it mean to be the "girl" on the team? How do these men regard her? What do they see, and what does it mean to be seen?
Jean's queerness is reflected in her tendency to fractalize: among a series of copies, who is - and what does it mean to be - the "real" Jean Grey?
Its impossible to read the anxieties of and generated by Madelyne Pryor except through an extremely Claremontian queer narrative: is realness a function of who imitates who? Of who can furnish biological reproduction? Is realness always already eugenics?
It is significant that Jean Grey so often has no codename - instead, characters with the name negotiate their relationship *to* that name, and the authenticities they thereby assert.
(The limiting factor is that Jean, like so many X-Men, is usually written and narrativized by cis dudes (even as I am doing now, whose horizons for the kinds of narratives she can be used to tell usually cycle towards death)
