Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Cat’s out of the bag on Garfield’s gender
Internet war rages over satirist’s claim cartoon cat isn’t male
GARFIELD is lazy; Garfield is a cat; Garfield likes lasagna.
Is there really much more to say about Garfield? The character is not complicated. Since the comic debuted in 1978, Garfield’s core qualities have shifted less than the mostly immobile cat himself.
But this is 2017 – a time of internet wars, social conundrums and claims to competing evidence about Garfield’s gender identity.
Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week after a 60 hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat – male one minute; not the next.
“He may have been a boy in 1981 but he’s not now,” one editor argued.
The debate has spilled into the broader internet, where a Heat Street writer complained of “cultural marxists” bent on “turning one of pop culture’s most iconic men into a gender fluid abomination”.
It all started with a comment Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, made two years ago in an interview: “Garfield is very universal. By virtue of being a cat, really, he’s not really male or female or any particular race or nationality, young or old.”
The remark caused no fuss until last week, when satirist Virgil Texas dug up the quote and used it to make a bold move: “FACT: Garfield has no gender. This. Is. Canon. I have updated the Garfield Wikipedia entry to reflect this fact.”
Texas said he came across Davis’s old quote while watching a five-hour, live-action, dark interpretation of Garfield (yes, really). He invented a Wikipedia editor (anyone can do it) named David “The Milk” Milkberg last week, and changed Garfield’s gender from “male” to “none”.
Almost instantly, Garfield fans clawed in. A Wikipedia editor had reverted Garfield’s gender to male in less than an hour. A minute later, someone in the Philippines made Garfield genderless again.
And so on. Behind the scenes, Wikipedia users debated how to resolve the raging “edit war”.
“Every character (including Garfield himself !) constantly refers to Garfield unambiguously as male and always using male pronouns,” one editor wrote, listing nearly three dozen comic strips across nearly four decades to prove the point. But another editor argued that only one of those examples “looks at self-identification”.
Threads of competing evidence spiralled through Twitter. Some took the whole thing as a joke, others chided or philosophised.
Garfield’s gender swopped 20 times over two days (during which his religion was briefly listed as Shia Muslim for some reason) before an administrator stepped in.
Garfield was finally, officially listed as male on Wikipedia And the page was locked for a few weeks.
“Garfield is male,” Davis said on Tuesday. “He has a girlfriend, Arlene.” Presented with this, the satirist deferred to the creator. “He’s in charge of the canon,” Texas said. “I’m just curious how it squares with his prior statement.”
But Wikipedia has moved on. “Forget about his gender and alleged Muslim faith,” a user wrote on Monday. “Need we really list Arlene under the ‘spouse’ category?” – Washington Post