The Jeopardy of Genderswap Storytelling: Un/Becoming Captain Nemo
The Jeopardy of Genderswap Storytelling: Un/Becoming Captain Nemo
Observations on Failed Imaginaries, Gender Equality, and the Not-So-Small Matter of Social Evolution or Revolution
The Jeopardy of Genderswap Storytelling: Un/Becoming Captain Nemo
Of all the characters in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics series, I love Captain Nemo best. What’s not to love about an enigmatic, insurgent, science-pirate who lives in a submarine wrought like a giant octopus, known to us as the Nautilus. A man who lived and died on his own terms, twice.
And it’s the not-so-simple matter of his deaths and resurrections that spur this essay. Specifically, his rebirth as a woman; that’s to say the decision made by noted British comics creators, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, to genderswap Captain Nemo. A narrative trope setting up an expectation of radical change, unfulfilled. A common enough fate for mainstream genderswap stories, a jeopardous mode of storytelling with the power to limit radical creativity, as we shall see.
Rather than tracking the trajectory of another failed attempt to imagine otherwise, I wish to use Captain Nemo’s genderswap to think about the how and why-of-it-all, especially the “what-goes-without-saying” as Barthes put it, of Moore’s and O’Neill’s mythmaking. To look under the surface explanations of the lives and deaths of Captain Nemo and examine the workings of these myths. My question is simple: how does Moore’s and O’Neill’s genderswap storytelling resist, disturb, preserve, or reinforce the status quo?
Finding Nemo: Prince Dakkar, Captain Nemo I
I first met Captain Nemo, or Prince Dakkar, in my childhood in the novels of Jules Verne — an encounter supplemented by old and unsatisfying Hollywood adaptations — and was immediately snagged by the story of this sea-faring anti-hero: hook, line, and sinker.
And when, at the end of The Mysterious Island (1874) having recounted his life story as the errant son of an Indian raja, he dies of exhaustion as an old man entombed in his beloved Nautilus, I bid him “Slán go fóill”, or “bye for now”, knowing I could always find him again between the covers of my dog-eared Nemo books. A legendary outlaw, a story, put quietly to sleep. Or so I thought.
In 1999, picking up a copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019) by British comics creators Alan Moore (writer) and Kevin O’Neill (artist), I discovered that Nemo didn’t necessarily die exhausted and alone in the Nautilus some 130 years previously. Moore and O’Neill breathed new life into this classic character, along with several others drawn from late-Victorian literature — including, Mina Murray from Dracula; Allan Quartermain from King Solomon’s Mines; Hawley Griffin from The Invisible Man, and the titular characters Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A rattle-bag of oddballs, misanthropic with a thick vein of monstrosity running through for good measure: a Gothicized superhero team, as many fans and scholars think. For me, the League is not so much about new life blown into traditional ideas of a superhero team but a harking back to earlier stories of supervillain teams put to work by government agencies, like Task Force X (aka Suicide Squad, first appearance 1959). Effectively ageing the story, the considered choice of “league” over “team” sets a baleful tone too, of being in league with the devil, or devils. And so I was, both on and off the page, because for me reading Moore’s stories is always an ambivalent experience— a long story for another time.
In this new story, the resurrected Captain Nemo picks up right where he left of at the helm of the Nautilus and beloved captain of his brigand submariner crew.
Despite frequent problematic characterisations and storylines, enough for several separate essays, it was the promise of Nemo’s presence that kept me reading the unruly series— spanning two decades and several publishers. That and the rip-roaring storytelling and astonishing art, and it must be said the rich and plentiful intertextual nudges and winks ever-present within Moore’s and O’Neill’s work. And so it went for ten years until the publication of Volume III: Century: 1910. When once more, to my chagrin, I found myself facing the death of Nemo. Again, an old, exhausted man dying slowly in his cabin aboard the Nautilus docked at Lincoln Island, albeit not alone this time.You might wonder at my chagrin at witnessing yet another dispiriting Nemo death, so unlike the traditional valiant deaths afforded heroes, if they die at all. (Undermining further the idea of the “League” as a superhero team.) My disappointment was not, however, simply rooted in the manner of Nemo’s death but in the necessity for it. For in this story at least, Nemo didn’t have to die. In the epoch-spanning League saga, there are more than a few immortal, or long-lived, characters: Mina Murray for instance, or Allan Quartermain, Orlando, or Dorian Grey. And so, the question for me became, why not make Nemo immortal too? Could he not just as easily have taken a dip in the Pool of Fire — the lake of blue plasma that grants Murray and Quartermain immortality, and previously Orlando (as Queen Ayesha) — and carried on fighting through time like the story’s other immortal and long-lived characters? Yes, certainly. But he didn’t. And he didn’t take that fateful plunge because Moore and O’Neill had other plans for Captain Nemo, hinted at by his name.
Fluent in Latin, Prince Dakkar knew full well the meaning of “Nemo” — nobody, or no one — when he chose it as his pseudonym. A meaning coming into full effect at the moment of his rebirth. Asking Captain Nemo, “Who are you?” prompts the tricksy answer, “I’m nobody (or no one)”; wordplay echoing Odysseus’ punning during his chat with the drunken Cyclops Polyphemus, wordplay protecting him from future retributive attacks, a strategy Nemo too could exploit. Moreover, in being nobody and no one, Nemo could, as we shall see, be anybody and anyone.
Nemo begins then to function, as is popular within superhero, action, and adventure genres, as a codename enfolding an identity and a legacy passed along from one person to another, as with Ra’s al-Ghul from the Batman mythos, Neo from The Matrix trilogy, or the masked avenger, Zorro. Indeed, the “legacy character” is a trope not uncommon in pirate mythology, as with the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride (1987):
I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts, he said. My name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.
As a catch-all term for a set of ideas and values, an approach to life, a way of being, Nemo is an orientation towards the world, anonymous and bodiless. Yet as a citizen of the world, Prince Dakkar perhaps knew too that in Oromo “Nemo” means, “The Man”. A meaning setting up a tension in the not-so-small matter of Captain Nemo’s rebirth, of which more later. Suffice to say, that the name Nemo has plenty of wiggle room when it comes to playing with the character’s identity. And it’s the quality and handling of this identity play that interests me, and its effect.
To Be or Not to Be Nemo: Princess Janni, Captain Nemo II
Early in the first chapter of Century: 1910, we meet Princess Janni Dakkar, wilful adolescent daughter of Prince Dakkar (aka Captain Nemo). After a moonlit skinny dip in the seas off Lincoln Island, she is summoned to her father’s sickbed by Ishmael, faithful companion and first mate to Captain Nemo and former crew of the Pequod, Captain Ahab’s beclouded whaler. A bitter argument ensues between father and daughter, one we sense has happened many times over, one concerning a father’s legacy, a dying wish to continue, to persist, in this world, somehow.
Captain Nemo needs an heir. Not any old kind of heir — any one of his trusted senior crew members could easily take on his mantle — he wants a consanguine heir; specifically, a male blood relation successor. But he has only one child: a daughter, Janni. Herein lies the problem.
Over the years, Nemo has neglected Janni. Not in a physical sense but emotionally— today, we might call it proximal abandonment (when a parent is physically present but emotionally absent, according to psychologist Allan N. Shore). Janni justifiably feels disconnected from her father, haunted as he is by his unfulfilled wish for a son, an anguish running so deep that he once decamped to Antarctica to try to escape, or reconcile, his great, and it has to be said, self-inflicted, disappointment; the symbolism of the frozen continent is not lost here, representing his frigid emotional state and the numbing solace he finds in seclusion, evoking too the journeys of other male characters in troubling times, such as Superman and his Fortress of Solitude (usually located in the Arctic) and the suicidal journeys of Victor Frankenstein and his creature to the Arctic.
Absorbing her father’s lament, Janni turns her frustration and anger inwards towards herself and outwards towards her father and his piratical enterprise: she wants no part of his world. Heartbreakingly, she understands that her father needs but does not want to pass on his mantle to her, a small but critical distinction. She is not his first choice; she is his only choice: “Who else but you”, Nemo despairingly asserts, “can carry on my work and my name”.
A rhetorical question indeed but one inviting reflection.
Stories Matter, So Does How We Choose to Tell Them
Captain Nemo’s resistance to his daughter picking up his story and making it her own is not uncommon; indeed, resistance to diversification is an invariable facet of modern media fandom, a particularly virulent one. (As when white male fans protest the increasing diversification of popular mass media, for example.) Nemo’s reactionary stance reflects his broader resistance to female empowerment and an adherence to (the notion of) traditional gender roles. As Janni rightly picks up, he needs but does not want to see a woman occupy his place in the world. For him, that’s a radical power shift, one he must if not accept then tolerate to protect his legacy, his story. Female diversity and equality are the price he must pay for immortality and continuing relevance. (Is it too much to draw a parallel here to the creative industries conflicted drive to increase diversity and inclusivity to survive and thrive — stay relevant — in a changing world, I wonder?)
Nemo’s conflicted response mirrors real world resistance to women — and indeed gender diverse people more broadly — occupying positions of power, fictional and real world; though it is permissible for women to, sometimes, hold them in domestic spheres: the strong mother figure, for example. Rooted in hegemonic patriarchal myths and mythmaking, this retrograde resistance to equality — on all fronts — does not, and indeed has not, gone unchallenged. Yet despite centuries of feminist resistance, global cultures are still variously transitioning towards, and receding from, securing gender equality— witness the ongoing battle for equal pay, the rollback of reproductive rights, or the Taliban’s obliteration of women’s rights in Afghanistan. Feminism is thus rightly often described as unfinished business. And as a work of imagination, the realm of stories. Storytelling is the beating heart of social action, as art, words, signs, symbols, spectacle, and their crisscrossings, work to help us imagine and bring about a just and equal world for all people facing gender-based oppression.
No longer mere fantasy, no longer simple escape, no longer elite pastime, and no longer mere contemplation, the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both work and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order. — Arjun Appadurai
It’s not enough, however, to simply notice how mainstream storytelling advances or limits our imagination of what is possible, we must scrutinize its mechanisms too: method does not always marry up with message. How does a mode or trope of storytelling further particular ideological agendas; that’s to say how does it work to disturb, preserve, reproduce, or resist the status quo? (Remembering that creators and producers choose the form their stories take, choices made purposely.
)On the surface, imaginative, speculative stories — tales of action and agency — can appear promising, loaded with transformative possibilities; we must resist the charm of simply seeing diverse media representation and before calling “Progress!” take time to pull back the curtain — or pelage — to ensure these stories are not sheep in wolf’s clothing, as is often the case. Mainstream media notoriously favours illusion over dimensional reality (or truth), after all, appearance over substance, surface over depth, as Kristen Warner describes in her valuable account of “plastic representation”, usefully blurring lines between “actual progress and its artificial counterpart”. How, we must ask, and with what consequences, are our, still predominantly white cis men, storytellers (choosing to) imagine and represent women — and more broadly, gender diverse people — occupying positions of power?
Genderswap storytelling is one such way. And, unlike a lot of descriptors, it’s pretty clear what it means: creators swapping an extant character’s sex and/or gender identity, so that a traditionally male(-bodied) character becomes female(-bodied). Thor becoming the cis-woman Jane Foster is a recent, high-profile example, lately played by Natalie Portman in Thor: Love and Thunder (of which the least said the better.). There’s also the genderswapped vampire hunter in the BBC drama-horror series, Dracula (2020): Sister Agatha Van Helsing, a young woman replaces Abraham Van Helsing, traditionally portrayed as an aged man. Or as we are seeing here Janni becoming Captain Nemo. In reality it’s a bit more complicated than that however, as Ann McClellan usefully points out.
As a mode of identity play, swapping practices, of course, extend beyond gender identity, most commonly touching vectors of race and sexuality, and can be multidimensional. For example: after 60 years of white male protagonists, a Black female character — “Nomi” played by Lashana Lynch — will front the James Bond franchise. Swap storytelling, if we can call it that, is an increasingly popular way to expand media diversity, and that’s one reason to better understand it. To dive deep into attempts by creative industries to confront and address their role in reproducing global systems of inequality, to “reimagine” the world. But it’s also an opportunity to ask other kinds of questions too.
What do genderswap stories tell us about (how we imagine) female empowerment, about how (we imagine) women taking center stage, in stories, in the world? About how it even happens? How do women come to occupy powerful positions, get inside power? What do these transitions tell us about (equalising) gendered power relations? What kind of “new” world are these stories helping us imagine, gesturing toward? What does it look like? What’s different, the same? That’s to say, in what ways are they radical, in what was do they, and invoking Angela Davis, grasp things at the root?
The world, the supremacy, of white straight cis men is being challenged, some, like the prolific writer, James Patterson, would churlishly say cancelled— a subject for different time.
And swap storytelling is no small part of that challenge. It is incumbent upon us to better understand the myths this prevailing mode of storytelling is selling. To think about the work these “progressive”, “radical” reimaginings are doing, and not doing. Eschewing the strawman argument of “forced diversity”, it is to think about why creative industries choose this method over, say, creating new female characters and female-centred stories, written by women and inclusive creative teams? A question 007 actor Daniel Craig pointed to in a recent interview: “There should simply be better parts for women and actors of color. Why should a woman play James Bond when there should be a part just as good as James Bond, but for a woman?” The issue here, I think, is not so much that identity swapping is an option but that it's becoming the go-to option to increase a story’s diversity, quickly, easily, and usually thoughtlessly. And as I get into later, maybe the clue is in the name.We might never know exactly why Moore and O’Neill chose to genderswap Captain Nemo, but what we do know is that they put a lot of thought, time, and energy into it; it was not lightly done but rather by choice, purposely.
Let’s take a closer look at how they did it.
Un/Becoming Nemo: “Mobilis in Mobili”
[Trigger warning: This section contains material about rape and sexual violence.]
I didn’t think he’d ever really die. — Princess Janni Dakkar
Janni does eventually claim her inheritance picking up her father’s name and his story, occupying his space in the world, reluctantly inhabiting his milieu. An important detail, one to which I will return. Having vanished to London and assumed an alias — Jenny Diver — to escape her father’s control and conflicted dynastic demand, Janni finds work as a cleaner in a cheap dockside hotel — The Cuttlefish Hotel — with a particularly rowdy public bar full of lascivious, thuggish men. Janni tries to go unnoticed, to the men in the bar, to her father and his crewmen, but she cannot completely vanish, and it’s not long before Ishmael appears before her to tell her that her father has died, and it’s not long after that that a group of men appear before her in the hotel’s yard and rape her, brutally. Moore and O’Neill, thankfully, do not — on this occasion — visually portray the rape scene. Through a skilful mismatch of cues — panel content and speech (here song), of image and word — the creators represent the rape scene through a song sung by Suki, another of the hotel’s female “staff”:
It must have got you hard when you had her in the yard…
… but you’ve no idea how hard things are getting.
And you think of what you’ve done as you’re buttoning your flies…
Of an act so bloody shameful you can’t look me in the eyes…
… and which you imagine you’re regretting.
Believe me, you don’t KNOW regretting.
Tuck in your shirt while she’s crawling and hurt…
Then return to your banter and beer.
Another night, another dockside victim…
… though she isn’t quite as she might first appear.
And the ship…
… the black raider…
… with old blood on its timbers…
…is practically here.
Soon after, Janni fires a flare gun summoning the Nautilus — now painted black with her father’s skull nailed to the forecastle — and its crew to her. Motivated by pain, loss, and vengeance, Janni has chosen to become Captain Nemo. And when the crew of the Nautilus land at The Cuttlefish Hotel, Suki starts to sing again, only this time the images in the panels match the words:
Now you think your leg is broke, and you’re crawling through the smoke, and a hundred bloody pirates are landing…
[…]
… and then you see her stepping out into the sunlight, with her hair down, and a rose behind her ear…
And the ship, the black raider, hoists a flag up its masthead and gives a great cheer.
Descending upon the waterfront, the riotous pirates annihilate everything and everyone except The Cuttlefish Hotel. Seizing a moment of calm, Broad Arrow Jack — another of the late Captain Nemo’s most trusted crew (and Janni’s future husband) deferentially presents Janni with her father’s greatcoat and sword. And as the swashbuckling rescue reaches it orgiastic climax, Jack presents her with one more thing: her hangdog rapists, asking if she would like them killed slow or quick, to which Janni, wrapped now in her father’s green oversize coat, assuredly replies, “Kill them slow”.
The issuance of her first order as Captain Nemo satisfyingly ends the lives of her rapists, but it ends Janni’s life too. Coming to London, she meant to lose herself, to become anonymous, to begin life anew as a nobody, and this small death — this petite mort — in twisted fashion grants her that wish, as she disappears forever into the folds of her father’s great green mantle, and into his name: their reluctant blood covenant now sealed, along with her fate. And like Oedipus, Janni would spend her life cursing a fate that had doomed her to do what she had not meant to do, to live a life that she had not meant to live, as the fearsome pirate-queen, Captain Nemo.
Before leaving for Lincoln Island, Janni meets Mina Murray — stalwart leader of the “League” and former comrade of the late Captain Nemo — who doesn’t yet know of the piratical power shift; Mina asks Janni her name only to receive the sardonic reply, one confirming her fateful loss of identity, “Me? I’m no one.” And with that the Nautilus dives to depth and cruises its ribald crew home to live in self-imposed seclusion. Exiting the scene and the story, until Moore and O’Neill resuscitate the residents of Lincoln Island for a trilogy of spin-off stories (running from 2013-2015), and effectively segregating this storyline — and the new Captain Nemo — from the main narrative.
Captain Nemo is now a woman, undoubtedly, yes. But as we see, even from my skeletal overview, not much else has changed. Janni doesn’t offer a different way of being Nemo; autocracy, or rather piratocracy, remains the name of the game. Hierarchies persist — captain, mate, crew — divisions between the named privileged class and the workers, the nameless rabble; those “below” work to support (the indulgences of) those “above”. (When Janni took the Nautilus and its crew on a dangerous jaunt to Antarctica — for adventure and to find her purpose — it reminded me of the trio of odious billionaires who recently blasted into space in redundant rockets, vanity projects funded by labour exploitation.) Under her rule, Lincoln Island proceeds as a patriarchal society: men “play”, women are playthings. Patriarchal notions of vengeance and violence still reign supreme, and competitiveness. Men persist as critical agents of change, still marking the lives of women, still saving them from other men: Janni’s rape pushes her to become Nemo (against her better judgement) and the Nautilus’ crew exact revenge on her behalf. Janni bears both her father’s names: Dakkar and Captain Nemo. She wears his clothes, adopts his style of dress, walks in his footsteps and his shadow, always wishing to go somewhere her father had never been. Even the Nautilus’ crew accept her as Captain Nemo, quickly and unquestioningly; a small detail that at first reads favourably but speaks further to the idea of a continuance of the status quo, no dramatic sea-change, otherwise the indocile crew would likely have mutinied. Curious too is that Moore and O’Neill fail to capitalise more generally on the riotous space pirates hold in the public imagination: if any group can stand a radical shift in how we imagine them, it’s pirate communities.
Change of a kind was also likely on Verne’s mind when he wrote Captain Nemo’s famous motto, Mobilis in Mobili — or Mobile, the phrasing of Nemo’s motto is unfixed in Verne’s books, itself pleasingly subject to change — which translates variously as “moving within a moving thing” or “changing through a changing medium”.
In Moore’s and O’Neill’s story, the motto is carved into the wooden frame of a mirror hanging in the first Captain Nemo’s cabin, a mirror that Janni perhaps now looks in, and I wonder, who does she see reflected, herself, her father, or a mix of both? Who do we, the readers, see looking at Janni as Captain Nemo? A strong woman, a pirate-queen in her own right, on her own terms, and in control of her destiny. (Re)shaping the world around her, leaving her mark upon a world. Or do we see a continuance of the same, finding comfort in the idea that whilst things might appear to have changed, all is the same, all is well.Given its elasticity, fathoming Nemo’s motto is tricky, but it suggests to me an understanding or regard for the idea that a changing medium can change meaning. (A motto foreshadowing genderswap storytelling, I wonder?) A seemingly radical invitation to play with Nemo’s meaning. A gambit Moore and O’Neill chose not to boldly play; a translation they failed to fully exploit: Nemo’s meaning did not substantially change by changing the medium, from Dakkar (man) to Janni (woman) Yet this failure of imagination does not, I think, lie squarely at their feet and indeed is portended by Nemo’s ambiguous motto.
The Jeopardy of Genderswap Storytelling
Moore and O’Neill may have had radical intentions when they set about genderswapping Captain Nemo, but their plan had a fatal flaw: it relied on reimagining not imagining. Building on what has gone before will not spark the radical imagination; it leads only to evolution not revolution. And reimagining is key to genderswap storytelling — indeed any kind of swapping practice — but reimaginings fail often to allow us to radically conceive characters, or the world, otherwise. The idea enfolded in Nemo’s motto — that a changed medium could appreciably change meaning, could, that is, subvert the status quo — is, as Moore and O’Neill discovered, erroneous, and popular. Their choice to use genderswap storytelling as a way of creating a radical representation of women and power — as I think they wished to do in writing Janni as Captain Nemo — was thus flawed from the beginning.
A flaw further compounded when we think about what it means to swap one thing for another. At its root, an action exchanging like with like; to give or receive something of similar value, meaning, or significance; to (ex)change without making or becoming meaningfully different, imperceptible change at best. Thus, after the swap, something of the original — value, meaning, memory, or significance — remains; the something acquired is not entirely new but retains a sense, an essence, of the original thing. Again, the sense of building on the past, of radical change interrupted, of succession. Qualities expressed in Nemo’s enigmatic motto, and heralding the elusiveness of securing impactful, meaningful change when so conceived, as a swap not a snap, evolution not revolution.
For in Nemo’s motto — changing within a changing medium — we too discern a sense that something of the original will always linger, a reflection of change upon a mirror’s surface: the appearance of “Nemo” — its medium or mode of expression — can change but not its meaning, its essence, its “Nemo-ness”. (For something to change, it must already and always be there as the “thing” changing, for without it there is nothing to change, and all would be newly made.) A discernment dispelling the motto’s hazy radical air, and genderswap storytelling more generally.In choosing to evolve the character Moore and O’Neill did then perhaps ably translate Nemo’s inscrutable motto, a motto emitting an idea of a continuing or unbroken line or lineage, a succession, an appearance of change — as with sovereigns — or as we might simply put it today, a swap.
Illusions of Change and Failed Imaginaries
Given the limitations of genderswap storytelling to help us imagine radical alternatives, we shouldn’t be too surprised to observe how little changes in swap stories, nor — and not to be too cynical about it — to see why mainstream creators and producers rush to adopt these storytelling methods. (Not to mention that the “swapping system” affirms notions of a binary world nor the idea that surface level change, or better still the appearance of change, is the only kind tolerated by institutional power: one cannot swap a mouse for the Gorgons.) Moore and O’Neill offer an illusion, the appearance of (radical) change, a promise of something different, a ripple on the surface. They do not imagine or represent other ways of being Nemo, just another way of looking like Nemo. Nor do they radically imagine female empowerment: what would Nemo’s demesne be like ruled by a woman? In sum: a powerful woman here acts and, in many ways, looks much the same as a powerful man. Yet their decision to genderswap Captain Nemo speaks surely to a desire to imagine the world otherwise. Choosing to create a powerful female character in a male-dominated story, genre even, is a radical move, choosing to do it via a genderswap, less so. A skilful legerdemain. The radical promise of genderswap frittered away in the hands of mainstream creators and producers, and a story for another day.
Observing this tension allows us to trace the trajectory of a conflicted creative impulse, from the imaginary realm to the page. (A radical urge — the creators wish to write a powerful female character — is stifled through its enactment — genderswap — only to briefly appear in characterisation — Janni’s reluctance to un/become Nemo — before being ultimately derailed via the chosen storytelling mode and a vaulted imaginary — Janni takes her father’s place, nothing changes.) A creative tension running through genderswap storytelling, anchored in ideas of succession, inheritance, and gradualism as routes to creating an alternative character, story, world, or future; a struggle reflecting real world tensions around how to induce radical alternatives, within stories, within social action; that’s to say the not-so-small matter of social evolution or revolution.
It’s just this coat. It’s so big and heavy sometimes. — Janni Dakkar, Captain Nemo II
Moore and O’Neill portray Janni as an unwilling Captain Nemo; a reluctant participant in the Nemo (his)tory. A portrayal curiously in conflict with their own position (no one made them do it, after all). Janni’s reluctance to un/become Nemo is not rooted in a fear of taking control of her own story, of captaining her own ship; in fact, she runs toward self-determination when she decamps to London: “I’ve made a new life here”, she tells Ishmael. She resists only the idea of being the second Captain Nemo. A resistance rooted in suffocating notions of succession and inheritance, of coming after and taking the place of another, of reproducing, imitating, and dare I say it, parroting what has gone before. Janni fears this shift — this swap — will snuff her out. And her fear is legitimate. No small part of her will have to die to make room for her father’s “burdensome legacy”, as she describes it. Even here, at this critical moment of self-determination, her agency is compromised: Janni “chooses” to become Nemo after her brutal rape, for vengeance; men’s actions propel her decision to un/become Nemo; men’s codes and actions avenge her, save her. This un/becoming process saw her taken over by her father’s spirit before she had time to discover herself; first his surrogate, and then growing together into a piratical symbiote, a process dooming Janni and immortalising her father. A metamorphosis seeing Janni become Nemo, become no one. Imagined by a male creative team, this is a truly bleak representation of a gender power shift, dispelling forever the symbolic force of her transformation from disempowered girl to all-powerful pirate-queen. Walking in her father’s footsteps would not serve her well, this Janni understood, her male creators, not so much.
Moore’s and O’Neill’s portrayal of the process of transitioning to a gender-equal world is grim and impoverished and does little to subvert established stories of power and female empowerment. Unintentionally, I suspect. A range of common-enough impressions of women’s emancipation emerges (rooted, of course, in the deleterious gender binary): nothing changes when women hold powerful positions; empowering women is doable only if nothing substantial changes; supporting women’s liberation is possible because there will be no substantial change; for women, the price of liberation is the loss of self; women in powerful positions will look and act like men. Realising that nothing would change with Janni as the second Captain Nemo, two of her most senior crew celebrate with relief: “You know, Ishmael”, says Broad Arrow Jack, “She’s as bad as her old man”. To which Ishmael replies, “Ha Ha! I’ll tell you what, Jack… She’s worse. Ain’t it bleedin’ wonderful?” Life, the status quo, the story will continue as before. The stark recurring motif: nothing changes. Remembering the meanings of Nemo, as anyone, as “the man”, we see here that anyone can indeed be Nemo, anyone that is who continues to enact male power.
Do we wish to join that procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? — Virginia Woolf
Notions of gradualism, inheritance, succession, continuation — or “procession”, as described by Virginia Woolf — mark the story of feminist social action too. I’m prompted here to note the politics of academic citational practices as well.
(A practice arresting the flow of any potentially alternative or radical “turn” coming from outside hegemonic knowledge production; change is accumulative, tied to what has come before, and controlled by those who have gone before, not favourable for subaltern scholars living in white supremacist capitalist patriarchies.) (Far too) Many feminists advocate for social change through small steps, patience, negotiation, legislation, assimilation, traditional politics, through any action that doesn’t rock the boat too much. Such practices tend not to bring about step change, and there’s always the risk that any progressive advance can be unravelled at any moment, as we are seeing with reproductive rights, indeed human rights, around the globe. They also take time, provoking frustration, stirring publics to feel “sick and tired of being sick and tired”, as Fannie Lou Hamer said. Unlike Jack and Ishmael, I find it hard to celebrate a moment of change, a mode of storytelling, gesturing to change so relationally, so casually conceived. And one speaking directly to real-world social action that similarly seeks to swap not snap its way out of the status quo.Janni’s assertion that she finds her father’s coat heavy and his legacy suffocating reflects, for example, the burden that many women occupying powerful or prominent public positions often feel; corseted into repeating old, established ways of being and doing things, of carrying on institutional legacies, of deferring to men’s knowledge and experience, of self-policing, because to do otherwise is to risk not being recognised or respected as a “strong” or “powerful” leader, above all, it is to risk losing that hard-won position.
As Mary Beard describes,we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man. The regulation trouser suits, or at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a signal of the refusal to become a clothes horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they’re also a simple tactic – like lowering the timbre of the voice – to make the female appear more male, to fit the part of power.
Despite advances, the pressure on powerful women to act and appear like powerful men is intense and prevalent. To be the first female president, editor-in-chief, vice-chancellor, party leader, or pirate leader, is to be measured always against what has come before, and given the unjust and unequal world we live in, that’s still all-too-often a man. Scratching the surface here reveals the unmistakable scent of something rotten, something lingering long past its sell by date, something a change of packaging will not remedy: social hierarchy. Moreover, and stretching the metaphor a little further, we can also sniff out the ruinous idea, expressed powerfully by Murray Bookchin, that the “assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking”. For in these swapping practices, fiction and real world, we witness first-hand the corrosive effect of failed imaginaries in systems change.
Do not relent because of pleasing promises, never submit to tyranny — Forugh Farrokhzad
Moore’s and O’Neill’s portrayal of women in power may be realistic, but they weren’t tasked with writing directly about the real world; they were writing a fantastical story, wildly speculating about another world and other ways-of-being-in-the-world, full of immortals, monsters, heroes, time-travellers, and a pirate-queen. And whilst giving all the appearance of doing so, they simply didn’t, wildly speculate, that is; a matter of creative choice or oversight, we’ll simply never know.
A similar malaise imperils media audiences and fans, and activists too; we are not immune to failing, through choice or oversight, to radically imagine the world otherwise. Encouraged (by mainstream media propagandising and so forth) it’s easy to get caught up in the distraction of “pleasing promises” and surface changes — for good or ill — and to lose sight of what little else actually changes, on and off page and screen. (Media fandom, it’s important to note, has a long and particularly rich history of imagining mainstream stories, imagining the world, otherwise.) The responsibility to imagine and create alternative stories, worlds, and futures rests upon all our shoulders.Publics are increasingly alert, however, to the necessity of critiquing not only the content of stories but methods of storytelling, to how we choose to create and represent alternative worlds and futures. And to who is doing the telling, the making, and the sharing (rampant corporatisation, for example). Think “bait-and-switch” modes of storytelling and representation, where creators and producers sell, or promise, audiences an idea, an illusion of something desired (more and better diverse representation, for example) but don’t follow through, a dereliction only detected after money has changed hands, of course.
More and more often, media fans and audiences are left feeling increasingly ambivalent towards “progressive” mainstream storytelling.The diversification of mainstream media is something to get very excited about; I know, I do. But sometimes — okay, a lot of the time — in my dealings with mainstream media, I feel deeply conflicted about how my dream of a gender-equal world appears on page and screen, especially in genderswap stories.
It’s not how I imagine it. And I am not alone in experiencing emotional dissonance around these kinds of stories, a cruel blend of progressive and reactionary messaging leaving few satisfied. Confronting these feelings is, however, critical. (Not so much to work out how creative industries can do things better — we already know that — but to strike out for the doing of those “better things” whilst continuing to find comfort and inspiration in alternative and DIY media.) To not only examine why these much wished for stories make us uncomfortable but to notice — and ultimately check — the effect of failed imaginaries upon our ability to bring about radical, alternative worlds and futures.And I wonder about how these veiled failed imaginaries — betraying, as James Baldwin memorably described, a “thinness of imagination” — represent broader shared failures to radically imagine emancipation, justice, and equality. What do we lose when apparently well-disposed creators produce this becalmed kind of work, all roar no bite, like a paper tiger? What purposes are served by creating illusions of change, and with what impact? For if the effect of “radical” imagining is not to show other ways of seeing and being in the world, then, I wonder, why do it?
A pressing question touched upon throughout this essay, but at its close I want to gesture to further tyrannies made possible by succumbing to the “pleasing promises” of mainstream swap storytelling. Moreover, given the vital role of stories in the social imaginary, I wish to underscore the need to remain critical of mainstream modes of storytelling, and vigilant. For whilst it may appear cynical to talk about a purposeful, systemic move to limit public ideas about the nature of social change and about what is possible, the idea is not without precedent: propaganda has been with us for as long as people have been telling stories, lurking in every book and artwork, as George Orwell reminds us. But what might mainstream swap storytelling be trying to tell us, to persuade us, about social change? What sensibilities might it try to cultivate within its audiences?
Confusion. Distraction. Indifference. Helplessness. A few aftereffects coming quickly to mind. Acclimatization is another: to accustom publics to surface-level change and to nurture the understanding that gender equality will not change anything substantively, systemically; the status quo will continue undisturbed. Inevitability too: to create the discouraging sense that the social world we inhabit is inescapable; it’s not worth thinking or imagining differently because things were always bound to turn out this way. It narrows the debate around gender equality and encourages the fallacy that creating original women characters is difficult, unrewarding, unprofitable, and not worth the effort. Curbing meaningful progress is another effect, a tempering of public expectations, as Kristen Warner identifies. Relatedly, that progress is best ensured through process of social evolution rather than revolution, evoking ideas of gradualism, gesture politics, symbolic transformation, and patience, to wait just a little longer for the “right” time.
Responding to the why-of-it-all reveals how insincere or “pleasing” storytelling can undermine the idea of change as both possible and useful, encouraging listlessness around the virtue of social change and thus discouraging radical social action. Conditioning publics that social imaginaries — genderswap storytelling, dimensional diverse representation, feminist action around reproductive rights, women in leadership roles — fail or are futile, will make us cease to even want to try, or so those in power hope.
But people are not helplessly hoping for authentic radical stories; they are out in the world making them for themselves, for each other; stories to enlighten, to empower, to provoke, to unite, to mobilise. Stories subverting the “radical” or “progressive” mythmaking of mainstream stories, inside and outside “official” storytelling systems. Media fans routinely produce genderswap fanworks, only when they do it, they usually call it “genderbending” or “genderfuck”. A linguistic choice suggesting and resisting the limitations of its mainstream swapping variant, as outlined previously. People successfully crowdfund genderbent stories written by people with lived experience of the stories they wish to tell, in films, comics, zines, songs. They call out bad practice by creative industries and through a range of actions — from hashtag activism to boycotts — call for meaningful change, on and off page and screen. Indeed, rising awareness of and action around the issue of behind-the-scenes inclusivity is helping exorcise the spectre of mainstream swap storytelling as it currently stands. Unlike, or despite, our creative industries, people understand that we cannot simply swap our way into a just and equal world.
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions. — Zora Neale Hurston
Stories as social imaginaries are key to imagining a just and equal world for all people facing gender-based oppression, and to enacting this radical power shift. Creative industries form an inestimable part of our storytelling apparatus, but bringing sunshine and rain into our lives, we must handle them with care; we must, that is, remain mindful of the processions we wish to join.
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Essay Cover Art: Jules Verne's Captain Nemo by floaty-real.
If not thrice, if we consider continuity discrepancies between the timelines of Verne’s two “Nemo” novels: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) takes place between 1867-1868 and The Mysterious Island (1874) between 1865-1869. Thus, the Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas was very much alive at the same time as the Nemo of The Mysterious Island was aged and dying. A scenario creating the possibility — outlandish though it is — of two Captain Nemos, existing simultaneously in different timelines. A possibility foreshadowing the idea, explored in this essay, that Captain Nemo is not so much a person as a moniker, a codename.
Distinguished in this essay from genderswap fan practices. Unlike mainstream genderswap storytelling, genderswap fan activities are rooted in lived experience and form radical responses to an exclusionary and often hostile mediascape. (For further discussion on this subject please see my essay on racebending cosplay as form of social action, available here.) As noted later, fan genderswap activities are qualitatively different to mainstream genderswap practices, differences suggested by the broad rejection of the term “genderswap” within fan communities in favour of the more immediate “genderbending” or “genderfuck”. Mainstream genderswap stories “fail” for lots of reasons, not always and only related to the quality of the project (casting, story, production etc.), fan politics and prejudices can also topple progressive undertakings.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874).
Well not quite where he left off but it’s too long to story to go into here; suffice to say that as an uncompromising anti-colonialist it was quite something to realise that Captain Nemo was now assisting the British government “protect the interest of the Empire” — a particularly cruel fate, I always thought, especially when we remember Nemo’s dying word, according to Verne and not his publisher/translator: “Independence”. Note: Verne’s French publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel enforced many changes and cuts to Verne’s work including altering Nemo’s last words: Verne wrote “Independence” and Hetzel changed it to “God and my country” (See: Dasgupta 2005).
So plentiful that they justly warranted the creation of a series of annotations compiled by Jess Nevins with the help of many League fans.
See The New Traveller’s Almanac (an encyclopaedic collection of writings included at the back of all six issues of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume II providing additional information and timelines etc.) and Nemo: Heart of Ice.
For further discussion on the issue of choice and swap modes of storytelling see “Crafting Representation: Deploying Racecraftian Techniques to Critique Gender- and Sexuality-Swapping in HBO's Lovecraft Country” by Alexandra Stamson.
Very briefly, the “genderswap” label conflates and confuses sex and gender: “genderswap by definition depends on gender as its primary category when describing stories about characters swapping sexed bodies”.
Patterson later walked back his comments.
Of course, there are “practical” reasons to do with branding, franchises, and familiarity all rooted in money-making or easier routes to money-making.
Perhaps to add another female lead to the male-dominated cast of League and thus increase the diversity of the series. (Though her quick despatch from the main storyline somewhat undermines that idea.) Or to explore gendered power relations. Or just to shake things up a bit, for shock value. In 2009-2012, genderswap storytelling was still quite rare and, in its way, a radical step to take especially considering comics predominantly male readership, often reactionary, particularly when it comes to revising classic and beloved characters, such as Captain Nemo. Or simply because Moore enjoys writing female leads and has done so throughout his long career, though not unproblematically.
The lyrics to Suki’s song about “Pirate Janni” echo those to the song “Pirate Jenny” sung by Polly Peachum in Bertolt Brecht’s play with music, The Threepenny Opera (1928). (Nina Simone’s rendition of “Pirate Jenny” is powerful and once heard unforgettable.) Alert readers will notice, of course, the copious references to Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera throughout this story giving just a small taste of the rich intertextuality of Moore’s and O’Neill’s work.
Verne’s publisher used the two versions interchangeably.
O’Neill deftly hints at the motto’s unfixed phrasing by cutting off the end of the phrase in his drawing of the mirror’s frame, leaving an opening for the reader to imagine both endings.
It’s worth noting that “genderswap” is only one way to describe these kinds of transformative practices, popular within mainstream spheres. Terms such as “genderbending” and “genderfuck” — the overarching term for fanwork tropes playing with gender — are more popular within media fandom and not only overcome my critique of mainstream genderswap storytelling but dispel the false gender binary set up by the “genderswap” term.
Evoking a feminist snap, drawn from Sara Ahmed’s work, snap here is felt as a generative breaking point, a sudden starting point, the unbecoming of something. See Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed: Duke University Press, 2017.
A disciplining method of looking back through a narrow lens (in the Global North: white, male, cis, heterosexual, non-disabled, capitalist, anti-ecological); of threading past through present and future, a practice of prioritisation seeing some (kinds of) scholars and epistemic traditions and erasing or marginalising others, a “rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies”, as Sara Ahmed describes.
There are, of course, always exceptions, women who want to carry on traditional expressions of male power.
It is, however, possible that their conflicted portrayal is a gentle commentary on the limitations of gender equality so shallowly imagined, in which women simply and somehow fit themselves into established male power systems, such as pirate hierarchies. A note on power as it is currently imagined. A critique of social action via gradual change, again the tension between swapping and snapping, evolution or revolution Given the character’s swift exit from the series, however, this all seems unlikely. The mishandling of the series’ other female characters and Moore’s problematic history writing women further increases the unlikeliness of these possible interpretations.
Revealingly, the “bait” here suggests, as Suzanne Scott discusses, intent by media producers to deceive audiences.