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
- "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)
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Turning"; short story about a wife magically transferred into her husband's body, experiencing the freedom of male dress and petty sexisms.
- Robert A. Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil (man's brain in woman's body)
- 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)
- 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)
- Freaky Friday
See also
- "Freaky Friday" at TV Tropes wiki