Gender flipping

A two part Star Trek comic came out recently in which the Enterprise is commanded by Captain JANE Kirk, whose crew is entirely female. (Except for Uhuro, who is not showing nearly as much leg in his male incarnation.)

I have not seen the comic yet, but it is a fascinating idea that could be applied to many of the books in our libraries and classrooms.

Would Harriet Potter and Veronica Weasley skip exam revision to play Quidditch? Would Herman Granger tut at them from the sidelines before turning back to his books? How would the Hunger Games be different if we were following Kurt Everdeen into the arena?

Michelle Nijhuis balked the first time her five-year-old daughter insisted that Bilbo Baggins was a girl, but she soon found that Bilbo made a very good heroine, so she kept going. Gandalf became a woman, and then she switched Susan and Peter Pevensie’s pronouns while reading the Narnia books aloud.

There are some great possibilities here for classroom and book group activities. Read a scene from Harry Potter…or The Hunger Games…or Macbeth…and then ask your students to flip the characters’ genders and rewrite it.

You can get in on the act yourself while reading aloud. Give Harriet Potter and Veronica Weasley an outing and discuss how and why this might change your students’ perceptions of the characters and the story. Or, perhaps even better, read your students a book none of them are familiar with and gender flip from the start. How will their perceptions of the characters change after your big reveal?

Please share your experiences in the comments. I would love to hear about how you get on and how your students react!

Image: April Fool Guild Wars Gender Flip by FlipSide3 on Flickr