Wenlock and Mandeville, genderqueer icons of the Games
(Intro: I wrote this over 3 years ago in August 2012, when the London Olympics were in full flow. Since then, conversations around genderqueer identities have exploded and it seemed like a good time to dust this off and haul it over from my old, now-defunct site. Much has changed — amongst other things, synchronised swimming is now mixed gender — but rather than update, I thought I’d stick the original essay here and see where others might go with it).
Wenlock and Mandeville are the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic mascots. Designed by agency Iris, they drew mockery on their unveiling 2 years ago and were likened to Teletubbies, Mickey Eye, Kang and Kodos, and of course Cameron and Clegg. I love them* — I love their unsettling big one eye, their general enthusiasm for anything sporty, how they work at any scale, and the way that Wenlock in particular has been photobombing all of the winning athletes. I really love what they do with gender.
Both of the mascots are — at first glance — genderless and sexless. Their origin story describes how they were made from the last drops of steel from a girder in the Olympic stadium, and they have shiny metal bodies with no apparent sex characteristics or any visual indicators which might mark them out as male or female. But of course, anything around gender is never that simple. Things which are coded as neutral often default into ‘male’, so ‘female’ has to be signified through ‘add-ons’ of ‘mutant’, ‘drag queen’ or ‘fetish’**; and so it is with the mascots. Wenlock and Mandeville are variously described as both ‘it’ and ‘he’; in my colouring book, for example, I am encouraged to colour ‘him’ in. So far, so gender normative? Except that because Wenlock and Mandeville love sport so much, they want to be the best at each of the events in the Games — and that means that they have to do really interesting things to cope with how gender plays out in the settings of the Games themselves.
Gender in the Olympic Games, as with professional sport more widely, is heavily policed to specific norms of acceptability. Bodies are policed by the authorities, as seen in the very nasty treatment of Caster Semenya, but also by the public too — female athletes such as Zoe Smith get called out for having ‘masculine’ athletic bodies (I am not even linking to that Telegraph article by a wailing male writer squeaking about how nasty it is that ‘girls’ — not athletes — are doing things like judo when they should be doing soft delicate pursuits like knitting kittens). Men and women are only allowed to compete together in one category, equestrian, where gender equality extends to the horses too (mares, stallions, geldings). Many other sports are equal-but-separate — 100m sprint, 10km marathons — where athletes do the same event but in gender categories. Others are different-but-equal, such as the wrestling where women wrestle freestyle and men go Greco-Roman. For all of these sports, an agendered-but-sometimes-coded-as-male mascot such as our little boxer Wenlock can be used to illustrate something which is being done by everyone.
And then there are the single sex events. This year — the first year when every competing country sent male and female athletes — there were only two Olympic sports which are women-only: synchronised swimming and rhythmic gymnastics. Both are heavily dolled up with feminine artifice — sparkly leotards, spangly lycra, ribbons, and lots of make-up. Both have to be illustrated by Wenlock. To be honest, I’d be just as happy if the picture above was of a male-ID’d Wenlock happily cross-dressing in a sequinned pink swimming costume, because who says that little boys shouldn’t be allowed to wear pretty things? But I (would like to) think that it’s more complicated than that — synchro is women-only so in order to ‘take part’ Wenlock must ‘be’ female; and yet is also male, and also neither and both and something else again. There’s a word for that.
Genderqueer mascots that can choose to perform one or neither or all genders according to the sports they want to play is something that makes me SO happy. There are other examples of this fluidity in how they dress — in their police gear, Wenlock takes the male uniform and Mandeville takes the female; the ‘Shopping Mandeville‘ statue is kitted out in a pearl necklace and shopping bags clearly marked ‘Perfume’ and ‘Shoes’; and, of course, the ‘Make Your Own Mascot‘ tool in which you can dress them both up in fabulous combinations of pigtails, top hats, little purple skirts and boxing gloves that wouldn’t be out of place at Club Wotever.
I don’t think I can credit Iris with having intentionally planned Wenlock and Mandeville in this way — given the apparent ‘design by committee’ nature of their incarnation, I suspect the agency didn’t realise or care about the implications of creating genderless-but-male mascots who participated in an event where the categories of ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ are rigidly defined. But I will reclaim Wenlock and Mandeville here as genderqueer icons, mascots who by their very existence in a place where gender norms are so heavily policed and enforced show that actually gender is just as fluid as the big pools of water that Michael Phelps et al splash about in. Hopefully LOCOG will get the message.
*I really love them, despite the horribleness of their ‘design concept’. I currently own a Wenlock keyring, a 30cm plush Wenlock, a mascot colouring book (with stickers), a Wenlock tea-towel, and Wenlock and Mandeville Christmas tree ornaments — these were nearly all gifts, but I received them with delight. I am hoping to pick up more schwag when I go to the Olympic stadium on Thursday for the synchronised swimming (and also get a hug from GinormoWenlock if I see them); and if anyone has one of the massive gold Wenlocks which the medallists get given and would like to pass it this way then I will love you forever.
** Alison Bechdel’s taxonomy, taken from ‘The Indelible Alison Bechdel‘, p17.
