13th
A friend of mine once complained to me that women wouldn’t really act the way Vaughan’s characters do — that “Y” simply “puts a wig on” the familiar world. That’s actually exactly why “Y” works, in the same way that Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” makes its satirical points about the British upper class by pretending not to be about British characters. Vaughan and Guerra’s murderous female supremacist Victoria, for instance, is totally unconvincing as a woman character — because she’s a perfectly convincing male supremacist in drag. The wig is a distancing device, a way to look with fresh eyes at the assumptions about gender that normally go unspoken and the stereotypes that are common currency, and make points about how strange they are and what perpetuates them. It also makes for a much more interesting story than a serious consideration of how the world might be fundamentally different after a “gendercide.” (via The end of men | Salon Books)
