The author and maker of television comics, Grant Morrison, who has an impressive list of works to his name, including Doom Patrol, The Flash, JLA, The Invisibles and Green Lantern comics, as well as SYFY’s Happy! and the recently interrupted Brave New Peacock World, from a television perspective, have shown that they are not binary. In a recent interview with Mondo2000.com, Morrison talked about his various projects and shared his vision on the timing and process of their implementation, and how the evolution of language has given them the words to describe their experience as a person without a binary system.
In the section on the power of words – forever or ever – Morrison explained that words didn’t really exist when they were younger to describe their experiences, experiences they immediately described as non-binary, and something they had been since childhood.
When I was a child, for example, there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience, Morrison says. I was in my tenth grade. I wasn’t a binary, gender-neutral faggot when I was twenty, but the conditions available for what I did and how I felt were few and far between. We had transsexuals and transvestites, who looked like DSM’s classification, rather than lifestyle choices! I didn’t want to be labeled as a medical aberration because it wasn’t what I felt or what was cut, dried and made. I didn’t want to go beyond my feminine side or just embody my feminine side, so I had no idea where I belonged.
They added that terms such as gender and non-binary were out of fashion until the mid-1990s. So children like me had very limited opportunities to describe our attraction to sluttiness and sexual ambiguity. There is now a brand new dictionary that allows children to understand exactly where they stand on the chromatic circle of ground and sexuality. So I think it’s normal to lose a few dubious words when creating new words that offer a finer approach to the sensation.
Mr. Morrison also talked about the importance of gender in considering the stories they tell.
In Wonder Woman, for example, what I do, I actively avoid writing a story about a boy hero who is so omnipresent it seems inevitable – a familiar story about Tom the Champion, Joseph Campbell’s phonometry that animates so many Hollywood movies, and the fairy tales of YA, they said. We’ve seen it. The Lion King. The boy loses his mother, his father or his comfortable place in the tribe, and he must fight to save the kingdom from his corrupt old chief before pretending to be a captured princess and the new king and … ad infinitum. The cycle of life, when it comes to boys. I was wondering, where’s the story of the mythical heroine? In Ishtar-Raising, Wilson talks about Inan’s myth and how she descends into the underworld and has to give up everything to gain the wisdom and experience she can bring to her tribe. Prefer the network, not the sovereign.
They went on, and when I thought about the difference between hero and heroine, it gave me a lot of different ways to work. It was quite liberating to find a way to avoid repeating the boy hero’s story. It gave me a lot of new ideas, an interesting new way to tell stories that are not based on the hero’s journey Campbell is talking about.
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Photo rental : Jesse Grant/Getty Pictures for WIRED.
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