By the way, be sure to click through to the actual YouTube page and revel in the brilliance of the comments. My personal favorite, from
maskedmosher: “dude looks looks like a lady – arosmith.” Wow. That’s a thinker, huh?

This is a great article, and what’s really interesting is how totally “in denial” the Oz fandom (there’s a HUGE fandom that predates “fandom” as we know it–there’s conventions, magazines, and a couple publishing houses dedicated to publishing NOTHING but books set in the Oz universe) is about the subversive elements of their books. I started a Livejournal community in like 2002 for the discussion and appreciation of queerness in Oz (Scarecrow/Tin Man, Dorothy/Ozma, etc.) and I got so many hateful comments and flame e-mails that I finally just shut it down.

I disagree about the misogyny, incidentally. There are a lot of really strong, admirable female characters in the Oz books, and he seems to have always made a point of having a few female heroes (including Dorothy herself) who aren’t really “pretty” but are still smart, sweet, clever, etc. Which is really remarkable for that time period in children’s lit.

The scene really resonated with me when I was a kid – partly because I started to wonder if I was secretly a boy that had been transformed into a girl, and mostly because I thought that it was utterly awesome that the boy had to become a girl in order to rule the country. I ended up gobbling up every Oz book I could get my hands on – including the later ones not written by Baum.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized how deeply subversive the Oz books were, especially for books written in the late 19th/early 20th century – and how much of an outlier the original Wizard of Oz is compared to the later 13 books, which depict a communist fairy paradise ruled by women, and where male rule is inevitably inept, evil or powerless – and swiftly overthrown by women.

Cat C. – to a degree, some of that “metrosexual” tendency does appear in the Neill illustrations of the later Oz books, where Ozma is always shown in a dress that hangs straight down or flares out behind her, concealing any potential cleavage or other “feminine” qualities. Since Neill does draw other more “feminine” women characters, this may be either a deliberate nod to the “Tip” factor (although I don’t remember Tip getting mentioned much in later books) or merely an attempt to follow Baum’s verbal descriptions of Ozma as a girl, and presumably, a pre-puberty girl. She’s never given a hint of romance in any of the books – although that’s true for most of the characters, and one of the reasons I liked the books when I was a kid was that they didn’t have any of that “stupid kissy stuff.” So that also could just be Baum understanding his nine year old audience.

I think it’s interesting that it’s such a complete transformation, by which I mean that Ozma is as much of a “girly girl” as Tip was a “boy’s boy” – solidly at the two ends of the spectrum. I wonder if the book had been written now if Ozma would have come out with some tomboyish tendencies reminiscent of Tip, or if Tip would have originally retained some of the feminine aspects of Ozma. I wonder if Baum would have felt the need to present Tip/Ozma as such gender absolutes given that today it’s mostly acceptable to be a “tomboy” or a “metrosexual” or some variation in between. It would have been interesting to see kind of a mesh between the characters when Ozma is transformed back.