About Repaper Press
Repaper Press lets you choose the gender of every character in classic children’s books. Change only gender, and our assumptions about gender come into view.
How it began
Long ago I played Ratty in a middle school production of The Wind in the Willows. Girls played every main character except Badger. (Still in awe of Cassie’s hilarious and unrepentant Toad!) I believe we kept the original pronouns in the script. I already loved the book and 1995 animated movie, but I couldn’t help wondering: Where were all the female animals?
In my twenties I reread the book, looking closely for a female animal, any female animal. I couldn’t find one, apart from the odd mother mentioned “offstage.” I remembered how well the main characters had worked played by girls, and wanted to try reading it that way.
I’ve been unconsciously “gender-shuffling” as a technique for comparing gender equality for most of my life. I grew up very close to my brother, and there’s a home video of me at age two asking, “Where’s my super lady?” If he had a Superman, it followed that there must be a Superlady somewhere for me.
Repaper is what I built instead of waiting for her to turn up.
What We’re Here to Do
1. Startle Camouflaged Assumptions into Sight
Imagine we’re trying to study purple moths, but they blend in so well against the purple damask wallpaper they live on that they’re almost impossible to see. Some people are convinced purple moths are mythical. Others ask why, if the moths don’t exist, the walls keep getting moth-eaten.
Now imagine we could quietly change the wallpaper from purple to neon green without disturbing the wall. Any purple moths would suddenly stand out.
Some of the most persuasive studies of gender discrimination give people identical résumés, descriptions or auditions, and change only whether the candidate seems to be a man or a woman. Repaper brings that technique to fiction, and lets readers be the researchers. It shakes loose the assumptions in how characters of different genders are written, and the ones in our own heads about how we read them.
2. Offer a Safe Harbor
Many readers have learned to keep their guard up with stories, films and games. They expect to see queer characters killed off, female characters threatened or assaulted, and male characters mocked for having feelings. Even when we watch for harmful tropes, some slip past us and shape how we judge ourselves and other people.
Plenty of people live with the real-life versions of these narratives and would like a break from them: to get lost in a tense, beautiful imaginary world without worrying they’ll be casually stabbed in the back. Bad things can and should happen in fiction. We just don’t think they should happen because of a character’s gender or sexual orientation.* Repaper lets every reader see people, both people like them and people unlike them, written as human first.
3. Teach Gender Literacy
Repaper’s gender literacy framework goes beyond the Bechdel Test and asks one question of any story: does it normalize inequality? It looks at a story’s world, cast, characterizations, relationships, plot goals and writing.
What About Race?
In text, gender is almost always explicit, because characters are referred to by pronouns. That makes it straightforward to swap: find the pronouns and the common gendered words (man and woman, girl and boy) and make them interchangeable.
Sexual orientation is less straightforward, because it may only become explicit when a character has a romantic plot. When one does, you can set the genders of their love interests to match the orientation you want them to have.
Race is harder still. If a text doesn’t state a character’s race, there’s no word to swap. When it does, it often does so through description (hair, eyes, skin) that is hard to identify reliably by program.
The problem is that one of the assumptions we most need to challenge is that a character is white and straight by default. How can we address that without inserting new material into the original text? We have some ideas, and we’d love to hear yours: write to us.
— Christel Trutmann, founder