Celebrating Pride with further nb K/S headcanon details :D

[anghraine]

I enjoy headcanoning both Kirk and Spock as nonbinary in the same "technically but badly closeted" way that I interpret them as very much bi4gay—but also, as pretty different types of nonbinary. Spock describes himself as both a man and not a man (within the same episode, the iconic "Amok Time"). In many respects, he possesses the most purely unassailable masculinity of anyone in the show (this is a significant plot point in one of the Maximally Gender episodes, "Charlie X"). He wears make-up in the style of female Vulcans like T'Pring and T'Pau more than like how most men wear make-up, while surrounded by people who don't even know the difference, and at the same time, he's not at all uncomfortable with being identified as a man. To describe Spock as a man is incomplete information, not false. His "nonbinariness" consists very specifically of Man and Not-Man, and he tends to be marked by a highly consistent presentation of himself that blends gendered conventions, as suits his unique experience, but also makes him the most supremely masculine figure around when that's an issue at hand—a specific sort of bigender quality with some pretty obvious resonance with his experience as a biracial Vulcan.

Kirk, I think, doesn't consciously consider that he could be anything but a man, and is broadly okay with that, if the range of his gender performance isn't compromised by external pressures. But when he is pressured to occupy some specific gendered role, his resistance seems to go from 0 to 100 very fast. I imagine nb!Kirk as the kind of closeted-even-to-himself nonbinary person who assumes everyone's experience of gender is as tied to performance as his own, and surely, it's just obvious that it's all kind of fake outside of social dynamics, it's just that social dynamics affect people's lives and psychologies, and thus matter (the reality is more complicated, obviously, but it is a not-uncommon perspective among some kinds of nb people still figuring our shit out, cf. Judith Butler—my headcanon is that he's less bigender or multigender than "agender diva who likes to fuck around with conventions around masculinity and femininity and whatever else, but feels little allegiance to any of them as a stable state of being"). I do think that being reduced to a specific, exclusively masculine role by forces outside himself (despite being sometimes useful) pretty evidently grates on him more than the somewhat effeminate roles he sometimes gets steamrollered into (also sometimes useful), but since he's strongly implied to be AMAB, that wouldn't necessarily be unusual (assigned gender often has more baggage for obvious reasons, even if it's not more or less "wrong").

I do tend to think of him as transfem-leaning nonbinary at heart (one of my many quibbles with Tumblr TOS fanon is that I genuinely think Kirk makes 100x more sense as transfem than transmasc, and that his presentation in the peak Kirk Enrichment Enclosure episodes is far closer to femme than butch too when accounting for the limitations of the era), but the cisheteronormativity of the 23rd century is alive and well. The specifics of how he would fully express his actual sense of gender in a less restrictive world don't preoccupy him much as long as he gets to be the diva he was born to be and doesn't feel (gender-wise) like someone is actively clipping his wings. So he's just sometimes going to slip into announcing that gender is an insignificant distraction from the common personhood of all people, if a fun one, before breezing onto picking flowers or throwing himself into the occasional community theatre production or fluttering his eyelashes to escape the third trap of that week.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Interesting! I had not considered this angle before, but find it appealing.

You might want to list this in marchmetamatterschallenge the next time that rolls around.

Re: Thoughts

[anghraine]

Thanks! I didn't even know that challenge existed, so perhaps I will :)

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's great if you like headcanons or other meta. Usually a bunch of folks will post about their meta from the past year. I try to write one new piece for it, and archive my other stuff. You can look at what other people are doing and share yours.

Re: Thoughts

[anghraine]

Nice!

[beatrice_otter]

That is such an interesting take, with a lot of very fruitful avenues for both fic and further meta. (and bonus, I think Shatner would hate it....)

[anghraine]

Thank you! I think the intent, of course, was to essentially present alternative images of masculinity that weren't hung up on the usual baggage the writers/showrunners/actors/etc had to navigate. Spock is hung up on different baggage (more sexuality than gender) and I suspect the idea was more that a potentially effete-seeming restrained intellectual in dramatic make-up could be super manly actually, this is totally a way of being masculine without being trapped by it. And meanwhile, Kirk is a more liberated figure altogether and it's like ... deliberately blending conventionally masculine and feminine associations and behavior while emphasizing that he doesn't give a single fuck about what anyone thinks about it if they don't make it his problem is a different way of not being trapped. It's very 60s and all, but that can be refreshing after so much incurious complacence in the 80s and beyond - but a bunch of extra stars come into alignment when you throw in very queer writers like Sturgeon and traditions from theatre and how they use sexuality and gender to code Spock as alien and the extreme campiness of TOS and whatever the hell led William Shatner to make the acting choices he did in his 30s (something I doubt he will ever be capable of honestly explaining in this lifetime).

I'll admit, though, that LOL Shatner Would Hate It is not really ever a consideration with me. Once I started digging into interviews, production histories, etc, I did start to feel that he's not nearly as one-dimensionally awful as I'd osmosed (three-dimensionally awful at times, to be sure) and ST fandom has been pretty weird about him on multiple levels, so my general feeling is more that he's a strange, erratic, very flawed person but too peculiar and frankly too old for me to seriously think of in those terms. Roddenberry was far worse on every conceivable level and there it's like "well, his legacy is complicated and there are a lot of nuances to consider" so I mostly just end up at /shrug.

[alias_sqbr]

I really like this take!

[anghraine]

Thank you!! :D

[elperian]

I haven't thought deeply about the gender element so much yet as queer romance of it all and how that informs their identities, but I find all of this deeply interesting, especially in contrast to what fandom-at-large has come up with over the years. I tend to think of gender as something outside of Kirk that he performs but, like you said, is most Fuck You about it when someone tries to force him into a masculine gender role (something he slipped on, doncha know). With Spock, I think there's a lot going on with the biracial identity intersecting with the queer identity where all things can become fluid but he wants to use logic (even internally expressed if not externally vocalized) as a guidepost for himself. But that's as far as I've really gotten!