Courtship roles, reversed

[breakinglight11]

Someday I want to write something that pointedly subverts all the male-female courtship tropes. I want to reverse all the things we tend to expect for people's behavior during the building of a romantic relationship, having the man inhabit the woman's traditional role and vice versa. And I want to do it in a way in which they both come off as otherwise totally normative examples of their gender. I'm not talking about writing a butch woman and a feminine man. I'm talking about two people who are in every way cisgendered and even "normal" for their gender, but do not conform to the traditionally assigned roles that people expect to be filled for two straight people in a romantic relationship, because these things come from society, not anything in our nature.

Once I had an idea for something in which the protagonist was a sort of knight-errant figure who devotedly served and fought to save the kindgom of the beautiful, virtuous royal they loved from afar, in sort of the kind of relationship that Link and Zelda have in the Legend of Zelda video games. Only in this version, the knight would be the woman, and the object of the courtly love would be a wise and beautiful prince. I love that idea. I'd like to explore the notion that our traditional courtship roles are one of the most artificially constructed aspect of our gender norms. There's so much that we've settled on as the model for how these things works. Who is the pursuer and who is the pursued. What qualities make which partner "attractive." The things we're expected to want out relationships. Et cetera. I want to mess with all of those tropes, show that they're external to our expression of our gender and it doesn't change who we are based on what expected behaviors we express.

Comments

[morethings5.livejournal.com]

Re: the reversed-roles knight-errant story, have you ever read The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch? It is a silly funny children's book (by an amazing author), but basically is exactly that story with an amazing ending.