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It also annoys me that TV Tropes defines Buddy Cop as only male/male partnerships
I've started watching Warehouse 13. So far I am utterly charmed: I love the dynamic between Myka and Pete, how it's really playful and fond and full of mutual trust in the other's abilities even though they genuinely piss each other off. I also like the way the victims of the case-of-the-week keep on not dying or having anything truly horrible happen to them - I appreciate a crime-solving drama not based on the pain and death of one-off characters.
But it's also made me think a lot about the cliche of the logical by-the-book agent and the instinctual trust-your-gut agent, and the way when applied to a female/male partnership, Agent By-the-Book is always the woman and Agent Trust-Your-Gut is always the man. (My pool of examples is a bit thin, but it's true in X-Files and it's true in Bones and it's true more than once in Warehouse 13 and I don't know enough about any other female/male buddy cop show to judge.)
The thing is, I couldn't work out what I wanted from that cliche. It's not really that I want to see it reversed, because of course there is a long cultural tradition of women being incapable of logic and being ruled by their hearts and hormones and hereditary instincts, and this modern cliche is a subversion of that.
Only ... that's the thing. What annoys me about it is that the writers of all of these shows have clearly decided that they can't flip the dynamic the other way, because a female character trusting her instincts strays into the area of Women's Intuition, and that's a trope that nobody will respect. Which basically comes out as a subliminal message to the effect that a man's instincts are worth listening to, but a woman's instincts are laughable.
So I guess what I want, what I really really want, is to see female/male partnership dynamics that hinge around a different divide. Because that one is turning into the wrong kind of cliche.
But it's also made me think a lot about the cliche of the logical by-the-book agent and the instinctual trust-your-gut agent, and the way when applied to a female/male partnership, Agent By-the-Book is always the woman and Agent Trust-Your-Gut is always the man. (My pool of examples is a bit thin, but it's true in X-Files and it's true in Bones and it's true more than once in Warehouse 13 and I don't know enough about any other female/male buddy cop show to judge.)
The thing is, I couldn't work out what I wanted from that cliche. It's not really that I want to see it reversed, because of course there is a long cultural tradition of women being incapable of logic and being ruled by their hearts and hormones and hereditary instincts, and this modern cliche is a subversion of that.
Only ... that's the thing. What annoys me about it is that the writers of all of these shows have clearly decided that they can't flip the dynamic the other way, because a female character trusting her instincts strays into the area of Women's Intuition, and that's a trope that nobody will respect. Which basically comes out as a subliminal message to the effect that a man's instincts are worth listening to, but a woman's instincts are laughable.
So I guess what I want, what I really really want, is to see female/male partnership dynamics that hinge around a different divide. Because that one is turning into the wrong kind of cliche.
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