Body swaps and soul / personality migrations

Body swaps and soul or personality migrations -- where one person's personality goes into someone else's body -- is a common theme in SF.

In the gender context, can provide opportunities for humor and political commentary as psychically "other" characters attempt to adjust to the gender expectations and norms for their new body-gender. Focusing on one character who changes their sex, takes over or incarnates into a different sexed body, or swaps bodies with another character, lets the author explore otherness. Also inherently explores the question of the essentiality of gender and whether it resides in the body or the "soul", or both.

Also used to swap out people in different roles -- e.g., mother/daughter (Freaky Friday) -- different classes, different races/ethnicities.

Some authors have also used frequent sex changes as a way of de-essentializing gender or showing that it is No Big Deal; for example, by showing multiple reincarnations across gender (as in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, or simple and ubiquitous sex-change technology (as in John Varley's Eight Worlds universe.

List of examples

• Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign (1999) (a minor female character undergoes a sex change in order to get around primogeniture)
• Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve
• Samuel R. Delany's Triton (among other references, a male character grows functional breasts to nurse a child)
• "Switch", by Blake Edwards (a man is "punished" for his sexist ways when he dies by coming back as a woman; he redeems his evil ways by dying in childbirth)
• Lynn Flewelling, The Bone Doll's Twin and Hidden Warrior
• Robert A. Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil (man's brain in woman's body)
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (classic gender-exploration novel; the world is peopled with hermaphrodites who phase in and out of male or female genders ("kemmer"); in a later short story, Le Guin explored the differences in sexual experiences across the genders on this planet)
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) (reincarnation across multiple genders; some demonstration of sexism in society, but the characters' spiritual essence appears to be genderless)
• Geoff Ryman, The Warrior Who Carried Life (magical transformation of female to male body)
• Thorne Smith, Turnabout (1931) (an early instance of body swapping in literature; probably the thematic inspiration for mostly non-sexual "Freaky Friday" type body swapping films)
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928) (and see Sally Potter's film adaptation, (1993))
• Charlotte Perkins Gilmore, "Turning"; short story about a wife magically transferred into her husband's body, experiencing the freedom of male dress and petty sexisms.

• See "Freaky Friday" at TV Tropes wiki

See also

• Gendered "Otherness" Experiences in the Body
• Choosing gender
• Multiple persons in one body