Eddie Diaz and Masculinity
Sep. 27th, 2024 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleI have watched all seven seasons of 9-1-1, and now I can speak much more authoritatively about the connection (or not) between the actual show and the way the fandom talks/writes about the show. Last time, I had a lot to say about Buck, and I stand by all of that. Having watched the show, I now understand why everyone in the LA of the show adores Eddie. (I can't stop thinking about a Tumblr post that referred to him as something like "LA's specialest boy.")
Eddie, Masculinity, and Parenting
There's a lot in the show and the fandom about what a good father Eddie is. And he is! One of my favorite Tumblr posts on the subject I've seen is a side-by-side of Eddie taking his father to task for his bad parenting and Eddie doing the complete opposite of each of those things with Christopher. With the exception of telling Chris they're together and going to be okay when I think Chris just needed to know it was okay to be sad about his mom's death, I think he genuinely does a good job as a parent. He clearly adores his kid, he does his best to reach the appropriate balance between protecting Chris and letting him have his independence, and he really lets Chris have and express his emotions without trying to stifle him.
And I think he's a good father to a son, but I'm not sure he would be as good a parent to a daughter. The first place I started to really notice this is in "Eddie Begins" (3x15), where we see him at Christopher's birth. He is clearly overjoyed when he says, "We have a son," to Shannon. One of the things Eddie talks about his dad doing is telling him when he was 10 that it was time for him to be a man around the house, and he is clearly trying so hard not to teach his son the same stifling lessons about masculinity that he learned - see also the time he tells Frank, the only therapist in the show's LA, that he doesn't want Christopher to be like him - but it's still very tied up in masculinity. Eddie isn't parenting a child; he's parenting a son. I think the show also emphasizes this every time Eddie calls him "son" in direct address, which I expect they chose to do because they were translating "mijo" to English. I don't know enough about Spanish-speaking culture(s) to know if "mijo" has the same connotations, but to me "son" really emphasizes the gender, not just the relationship.
Eddie and Relationships; or, He's Not Gay, He's Just Sexist
Now that I have watched the show itself, I'm even more baffled by the fandom's strong, strong fanon that Eddie is gay. He is not. He is absolutely delighted to hook up with Shannon when they reunite. He gets flustered the moment he meets Ana because she's pretty. He's so pleased to see Marisol when they run into each other again at the hardware store. He canonically has the kind of sex with women that ends up with them the wrong way around on the bed (we see him that way with both Shannon and Marisol).
The show itself finally says in season 6 that Eddie doesn't know how to date because he's never really done it before, which I think is an important note about his romantic relationships. The only relationship he had before we met him was with Shannon, who he describes as the first girl he ever loved. They met when they were teenagers and got married right out of high school. (More or less; the show's timelines do not make any logical sense.) Eddie tells Bobby that he loved being married to Shannon, which is an interesting comment to make considering how much of their marriage they spent apart. I think part of what he needs to come to terms with is the fact that Shannon's death means he will never have a chance to be a good husband to her.
One of the ways we see Eddie grow over the series is that we see him learn to be emotionally intimate relationships, and one of the most fascinating things about it is that he only has those relationships with other men: Buck, Bobby, Frank, and his dad. There is so much fic where he hangs out with some combination of Maddie, Linda, and Karen that I was genuinely surprised by how little he ever talks to them or to other women. So much of the fic dealing with his parents is about his mom, and yet the emotional journey on the show is about his relationship with his dad. The times we do see him open up to women, he's not doing it to be open with them, he's doing it to help them, like his conversation with May or the time he talks a woman on a call through an exercise he tells her helped him when he had panic attacks. I'm guessing fandom puts the women into these stories because they want someone like them to have a place in Eddie's life in some way and/or because they think he's gay and being gay makes him like a woman, but that doesn't reflect the reality of the character.
I do think Eddie gets better. Fandom is pretty dismissive of Eddie's ability to have a relationship because he asks Marisol to move out just after she moves in, but I actually loved that conversation and thought it was very emotionally mature. Eddie is admitting he needs some time to process and Marisol is admitting she kept the fact she almost became a nun from him on purpose. They're open with each other, and they're both happy about her moving out and taking a step back.
But he doesn't have close women friends. And while the writers might not have done that on purpose (the show is so unserious that I don't know that I trust them to have done anything interesting on purpose), I do think it's part of the same masculinity, and its attendant sexism, he learned from his dad and is trying not to pass on to Chris.
It's very interesting to me that the fandom thinks he's gay, and yet doesn't seem to acknowledge the way his life is so full of men.
Old Fangirl Continues To Yell At Cloud
I find all of this so frustrating because there are some super interesting things here! You could look at Eddie's combination of being pretty, tendency toward emotional repression, love of drama, catty remarks, and emotionally intimate relationships with men and think that that's an interesting way to be a man. Or you could take the sexist and homophobic path and think that only a gay man could be like that.
Eddie, Masculinity, and Parenting
There's a lot in the show and the fandom about what a good father Eddie is. And he is! One of my favorite Tumblr posts on the subject I've seen is a side-by-side of Eddie taking his father to task for his bad parenting and Eddie doing the complete opposite of each of those things with Christopher. With the exception of telling Chris they're together and going to be okay when I think Chris just needed to know it was okay to be sad about his mom's death, I think he genuinely does a good job as a parent. He clearly adores his kid, he does his best to reach the appropriate balance between protecting Chris and letting him have his independence, and he really lets Chris have and express his emotions without trying to stifle him.
And I think he's a good father to a son, but I'm not sure he would be as good a parent to a daughter. The first place I started to really notice this is in "Eddie Begins" (3x15), where we see him at Christopher's birth. He is clearly overjoyed when he says, "We have a son," to Shannon. One of the things Eddie talks about his dad doing is telling him when he was 10 that it was time for him to be a man around the house, and he is clearly trying so hard not to teach his son the same stifling lessons about masculinity that he learned - see also the time he tells Frank, the only therapist in the show's LA, that he doesn't want Christopher to be like him - but it's still very tied up in masculinity. Eddie isn't parenting a child; he's parenting a son. I think the show also emphasizes this every time Eddie calls him "son" in direct address, which I expect they chose to do because they were translating "mijo" to English. I don't know enough about Spanish-speaking culture(s) to know if "mijo" has the same connotations, but to me "son" really emphasizes the gender, not just the relationship.
Eddie and Relationships; or, He's Not Gay, He's Just Sexist
Now that I have watched the show itself, I'm even more baffled by the fandom's strong, strong fanon that Eddie is gay. He is not. He is absolutely delighted to hook up with Shannon when they reunite. He gets flustered the moment he meets Ana because she's pretty. He's so pleased to see Marisol when they run into each other again at the hardware store. He canonically has the kind of sex with women that ends up with them the wrong way around on the bed (we see him that way with both Shannon and Marisol).
The show itself finally says in season 6 that Eddie doesn't know how to date because he's never really done it before, which I think is an important note about his romantic relationships. The only relationship he had before we met him was with Shannon, who he describes as the first girl he ever loved. They met when they were teenagers and got married right out of high school. (More or less; the show's timelines do not make any logical sense.) Eddie tells Bobby that he loved being married to Shannon, which is an interesting comment to make considering how much of their marriage they spent apart. I think part of what he needs to come to terms with is the fact that Shannon's death means he will never have a chance to be a good husband to her.
One of the ways we see Eddie grow over the series is that we see him learn to be emotionally intimate relationships, and one of the most fascinating things about it is that he only has those relationships with other men: Buck, Bobby, Frank, and his dad. There is so much fic where he hangs out with some combination of Maddie, Linda, and Karen that I was genuinely surprised by how little he ever talks to them or to other women. So much of the fic dealing with his parents is about his mom, and yet the emotional journey on the show is about his relationship with his dad. The times we do see him open up to women, he's not doing it to be open with them, he's doing it to help them, like his conversation with May or the time he talks a woman on a call through an exercise he tells her helped him when he had panic attacks. I'm guessing fandom puts the women into these stories because they want someone like them to have a place in Eddie's life in some way and/or because they think he's gay and being gay makes him like a woman, but that doesn't reflect the reality of the character.
I do think Eddie gets better. Fandom is pretty dismissive of Eddie's ability to have a relationship because he asks Marisol to move out just after she moves in, but I actually loved that conversation and thought it was very emotionally mature. Eddie is admitting he needs some time to process and Marisol is admitting she kept the fact she almost became a nun from him on purpose. They're open with each other, and they're both happy about her moving out and taking a step back.
But he doesn't have close women friends. And while the writers might not have done that on purpose (the show is so unserious that I don't know that I trust them to have done anything interesting on purpose), I do think it's part of the same masculinity, and its attendant sexism, he learned from his dad and is trying not to pass on to Chris.
It's very interesting to me that the fandom thinks he's gay, and yet doesn't seem to acknowledge the way his life is so full of men.
Old Fangirl Continues To Yell At Cloud
I find all of this so frustrating because there are some super interesting things here! You could look at Eddie's combination of being pretty, tendency toward emotional repression, love of drama, catty remarks, and emotionally intimate relationships with men and think that that's an interesting way to be a man. Or you could take the sexist and homophobic path and think that only a gay man could be like that.