Breaking Tarot Gender Norms

I like the court cards to be classical, gender-binary archetypes. If a female card comes up in a position about my feelings or about me, this is much more likely to challenge my perceptions about gender than any gender-neutral card.

It's a bit like Yin and Yang. Everyone has male and female parts and Tarot can help us to recognize our "other side".
To me that seems much more important than to feel immediately represented in a deck.

Farzon said:

I like the court cards to be classical, gender-binary archetypes. If a female card comes up in a position about my feelings or about me, this is much more likely to challenge my perceptions about gender than any gender-neutral card.

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I get what you mean. I was talking more about non-traditional representations not necessarily gender neutral.

I'm also not so much interested in "challenging perceptions about gender" as much as considering alternatives to traditional artistic depictions.

JMI_Tarot said:

I get what you mean. I was talking more about non-traditional representations not necessarily gender neutral.

I'm also not so much interested in "challenging perceptions about gender" as much as considering alternatives to traditional artistic depictions.

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Well, then I guess it couldn't be easier. I think there's a Manga-themed deck that switches all male Majors to female and vice versa.

And look at all the decks that have female Knights out there... the Bohemian Gothic has little Girls for the Pages, the Starchild Tarot features mostly female Knights, the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn is completely queer... the possibilities are endless.

There is a wonderful and interesting collection of articles on Beth blog "little red tarot" about queering the tarot. Each article goes about a card (not only majors) and write about it from a queer perspective. It might get your interest.

Farzon said:

I like the court cards to be classical, gender-binary archetypes. If a female card comes up in a position about my feelings or about me, this is much more likely to challenge my perceptions about gender than any gender-neutral card.

It's a bit like Yin and Yang. Everyone has male and female parts and Tarot can help us to recognize our "other side".
To me that seems much more important than to feel immediately represented in a deck.

Click to expand...

I'm a conventionally married male with no aspirations to ever be otherwise, but I found it interesting, while doing my rendering of all of Aleister Crowley's commentary on the court cards into a simple keyword table, that his "moral qualities" for the Queen of Cups are a far better match for my personality than the Knight (King) of Cups I had been using for my significator since I first started reading with the Thoth deck. It doesn't give me any "gender anxiety" to see that since I also believe personality is a blended proposition (or perhaps temperament is a better word, since I was reading that developing a personality is a socially adaptive response mechanism while temperament is innate).