While there's much for FTMs to find to identify with in Enid Blyton's George/Bill/Jo, etc, there's also much that butch women, gay women, and perfectly cisgendered female tomboys could find to identify with too. All of them are presented as female characters and referred to by female pronouns, so I think it's a little hasty to declare them all to be FTM characters without qualification (and I seriously doubt that was Blyton's intention). Which is not to say that interpretation isn't valid, but it's not the only one available. And honestly, also, the implication that tomboyishness must automatically = transness is one that makes me a little uncomfortable, though I am trans myself. It's worth bearing in mind also that in the era Blyton was writing, girls were much more restricted in terms of acceptable behaviour and activities, so for her characters, identifying as like a boy/as good as a boy was often an issue of asserting competence and independence as much as it was about gender identity.
Similarly, the phenomenon of girls having passionate crushes on each other was part of the British boarding school culture, and wouldn't necessarily have been considered to be a sexual thing, and the usual expectation was that girls would just grow out of it. I have a number older YA books which talk of girls having "pashes" and crushes on each other as a matter of course and in total innocence. Which, again, the interpretation of lesbianism is there, and it's certainly interesting and valid, but that's unlikely to be the light the author intended to present the relationship in. I think there's a definite danger here of imposing modern - and quite binary - interpretations of behaviour and identity on a very different culture.
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Date: 2010-09-06 04:57 pm (UTC)Similarly, the phenomenon of girls having passionate crushes on each other was part of the British boarding school culture, and wouldn't necessarily have been considered to be a sexual thing, and the usual expectation was that girls would just grow out of it. I have a number older YA books which talk of girls having "pashes" and crushes on each other as a matter of course and in total innocence. Which, again, the interpretation of lesbianism is there, and it's certainly interesting and valid, but that's unlikely to be the light the author intended to present the relationship in. I think there's a definite danger here of imposing modern - and quite binary - interpretations of behaviour and identity on a very different culture.