Body swap  

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"It was all at once, just as you were talking about school and all that. You said you only wished---- Why of course; look here, it must be the stone that did it!"--Vice Versa (1882) by F. Anstey

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A body swap is a storytelling device seen in a variety of fiction, most often in TV shows and movies, in which two people (or beings) exchange minds and end up in each others' bodies. Alternatively, their minds may stay where they are as their bodies adjust.

There are two distinct types of body swapping. Switches caused by magic items such as amulets, heartfelt wishes or just strange quirks of the universe typically reverse after the subjects have expanded their world views, gained a new appreciation for each others' troubles by literally "walking in another's shoes" and/or caused sufficient amounts of farce. Notable examples include the books Vice Versa (1882) and the recent films It's a Boy Girl Thing and Freaky Friday.

Switches accomplished by technology, exempting gadgets advanced sufficiently to appear as magic, are the fare of mad scientists. Body-swapping devices are characterized by highly experimental status, straps, helmets with complicated cables that run to a central system and a tendency to direly malfunction before their effects can be reversed. Those without such means may resort to brain transplants. Such experiments can have overtones of horror; evil mad scientists seldom use willing test subjects.

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Shapeshifting between the sexes

A particularly noteworthy aspect of shapeshifting is where the person changes sex, from female to male, or vice versa. Fiction that makes use of such shape-shifting tends to invoke themes not normally found in other shapeshifting fiction.

It may be merely used as means of disguise: appearing as a woman allows a man to enter situations from which men are forbidden, and vice versa. Zeus disguised himself as Artemis in order to get close enough to Callisto that she could not escape when he turned himself into male form again, and raped her. More innocently, Vertumnus could not woo Pomona on his own; in the form of an old woman, he gained access to her orchard, where he persuaded her to marry him.

In Norse mythology, however, both Odin and Loki taunt each other with having taken the form of females in the Lokasenna. The ultimate proof of this was that they had given birth and had nursed their offspring. It is not known what myths, if any, lie behind the charges against Odin, but Loki had taken the form of a mare and was the mother of Sleipnir.

L. Frank Baum concluded The Marvelous Land of Oz with the revelation that the princess, Ozma, that the characters had been looking for had been turned into a boy while a baby and raised the boy Tip. Tip, one of the characters looking for Ozma, agreed to let himself be changed back into a girl but wished that he could be changed back into a boy if he did not like being a girl; Glinda decreed that he could be changed only into his proper form and, because as a sorceress, she disapproves of and does not perform shapeshifting magic, had it done by the evil witch Mombi, who knew how to do it.

In Greek mythology, Tiresias, who became the blind prophet who helps Jason and the Argonauts, was walking through a forest when he found two snakes in the act of love. He prodded them with a stick and he instantly changes into a woman. He lives as one for many years, marries, has children. Years later, he is walking through the same forest, and sees the same snakes doing the same thing. Again he pokes them with a stick, and he turns back into a man. Later in his life, he is asked by Zeus which of the two sexes enjoys sex more. Tiresias, speaking from experience, replies that it is woman, and Hera blinds him for telling her husband of the greatest secret of women. Zeus, unable to undo what his wife has done, gives the now blind Tiresias the gift of foresight. Other versions say that it was Zeus who was angered by Tiresias for saying that men did not get the most out of sex and that it was Hera who gave him the gift of foresight to comfort him.

Rumiko Takahashi's manga Ranma 1/2 features at least two characters that transform from male to female. One is the title character, Ranma Saotome, and another is a powerful antagonist, Herb, from late in the series. Takahashi's work seems to be a parody of several things including overdramatic teenage romances and martial arts films, but it is most definitely a satire of Japanese gender roles. The two characters cursed with changing gender are both chauvinistic and macho in many ways, and both have little to no understanding of sex or sexuality. Many of the main female characters, while not physically transforming, have personality traits that are more traditionally male than female. Similarly, several male characters have female outlooks or behavior patterns. It is likely that Ranma's physical transformation in this case is used to soften the expectations of the reader for the gender bending nature of the characters, Ranma being the most extreme case.

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Appearances in fiction and drama

Since the Vice Versa novel was published in 1882, body swaps have been a popular theme in various media:

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See also

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Body swaps have been a common storytelling device in fiction media. Books such as Vice Versa (1882) and Freaky Friday (1972) have inspired a number of adaptation films as well as television shows, some of which have used derivatives of Freaky Friday for its episode titles. In 2013, Disney Channel held a Freaky Freakend with seven shows that featured body-swapping episodes.

The list focuses mainly on exchanges between two beings, thus it forgoes similar phenomena of body hopping, spirit possession, transmigration, avatars and even brain transplants, unless the target being's mind is conversely placed in the source's body. It also excludes age transformations as with the movie Big or 17 Again that are sometimes considered body swaps by the media, and role swaps between twins, clones, look-alikes, dopplegangers and multiple personalities.

In "Lejana" (The Distances) by Julio Cortázar, a woman and a beggar hug and swap bodies.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Body swap" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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