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lotesseMeta's been converging on my brain lately. This was jumpstarted by the conversation over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cathexys' place here, but there are bits of both the conversations on gayness/sexualization and critical/celebratory vidding that are going on in fandom floating around in my brain.
One of the things I really want to figure out, both in my fannish life and in any academic career I may ever have, is how to negotiate the nonsexual pleasures of text. And okay, already here I’m going to start definitioning, because there are no good words for anything and language is such a damn blunt instrument. By nonsexual I mean pleasure not derived from any sort of intercourse—not the arousal achieved by watching characters have sex, or through character’s pretty, or anything involving either intra- or extra-textual fucking. Not wanting the characters to fuck each other, and not wanting, as a reader, to fuck them yourselves.
But still libidinous pleasure. Because reading turns me on sometimes. You can call it gut-clenching, but I suspect it has more to do with orgasm than anything else …. I don’t know how this works in a male body, but in my own girl body gut-clenching is what happens at the point of orgasm, the contraction of pelvic muscles around the uterus. When I read certain passages in the last parts of RotK, for example, in the most h/c bits of the Frodo/Sam arc where they’re falling apart and holding each other in the night, my breath physically shortens, comes faster. Lots of times, I have physiological responses to what Tolkien called eucatastrophe.
Sometimes I just love my characters so much that I can’t breathe.
And we’ve got a physical response to pleasure, here, and a desire for more—I know I’m not the only fangirl who reads certain sentences five or six times in a row because the emotional punch/libidinal stimulus only increases with each repetition. This, in my mind, is the definition of fannish pleasure. That’s what I come here to talk about, because other people don’t seem to grok what I’m talking about. We have no critical language for nonsexual libidinal narrative pleasure.
This is where I actually do have some sympathy with the whole “you’re sexualizing everything” complaint. Because a lot of the time it’s not the sex I’m getting off on, it’s the intimacy, or the fantasy of extreme love, or the embodiment of suffering, or something that I still don’t think I really have a name for. It’s not “oh my god they’re fucking,” it’s “oh my god they love each other so much and they can’t tell where the one begins and the other ends.” And that sort of emotionality isn’t necessarily a prelude to sex, not necessarily foreplay, but I think that’s the only language we have for it. Fandom uses and transforms the structures available for the communication of literary libidinal pleasure, but I feel like there are other ones out there that we haven’t properly described.
It frustrates me, because I’m writing on Jane Eyre for class right now, and what I really want to talk about is the intense pleasure I get from the reunion scene at the end, when the blind Rochester finally recognizes Jane. It’s not solely romantic, because they get together long before this point, and while I enjoy that scene I don’t get the same charge from it. I feel like the only way I have of talking about that incredible moment, one of my favorite things ever, is through this veiled, metaphorical sexual discourse. But it’s intensely clumsy, because that Jane/Rochester scene also has a literally sexual charge, one that coexists with whatever the nameless other thing is, and talking about that nameless pleasure in sexual language elides and tangles it up with the literally sexual in a way that I’m really not happy with.
This is true with regard to irl interactions also: we only have access to the language of sex, thus everything is sexualized and only the sexual has value. My parter, who has OCD, gets very insecure sometimes about sex because it's the only way he knows to value our relationship. When he's obsessing, the only way he has of measuring our relationship is by the frequency of sex, and he overlooks all the other important parts of what our relationship is about. When he's obsessing, it doesn't matter if we're having fun, or thinking good thoughts together, or talking, or snuggling, as long as we're not having sex. I think the two issues are maybe connected. I don't think we have very good paradigms for pleasure, and I think it can actually really mess us up.
My stories make my heart hurt, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, and it’s intensely pleasurable even though it has nothing to do with sex in any real way. We use the language of the sexual, but I don’t know that it’s really applicable. Thing is, I don't know how else to talk about it. We seem to have managed in fandom, because we all feel the same way. But I have no idea how to tell my classmates, or my academic advisers, or my mother, about the thing that I love in my stories.
cathexys' place here, but there are bits of both the conversations on gayness/sexualization and critical/celebratory vidding that are going on in fandom floating around in my brain.One of the things I really want to figure out, both in my fannish life and in any academic career I may ever have, is how to negotiate the nonsexual pleasures of text. And okay, already here I’m going to start definitioning, because there are no good words for anything and language is such a damn blunt instrument. By nonsexual I mean pleasure not derived from any sort of intercourse—not the arousal achieved by watching characters have sex, or through character’s pretty, or anything involving either intra- or extra-textual fucking. Not wanting the characters to fuck each other, and not wanting, as a reader, to fuck them yourselves.
But still libidinous pleasure. Because reading turns me on sometimes. You can call it gut-clenching, but I suspect it has more to do with orgasm than anything else …. I don’t know how this works in a male body, but in my own girl body gut-clenching is what happens at the point of orgasm, the contraction of pelvic muscles around the uterus. When I read certain passages in the last parts of RotK, for example, in the most h/c bits of the Frodo/Sam arc where they’re falling apart and holding each other in the night, my breath physically shortens, comes faster. Lots of times, I have physiological responses to what Tolkien called eucatastrophe.
Sometimes I just love my characters so much that I can’t breathe.
And we’ve got a physical response to pleasure, here, and a desire for more—I know I’m not the only fangirl who reads certain sentences five or six times in a row because the emotional punch/libidinal stimulus only increases with each repetition. This, in my mind, is the definition of fannish pleasure. That’s what I come here to talk about, because other people don’t seem to grok what I’m talking about. We have no critical language for nonsexual libidinal narrative pleasure.
This is where I actually do have some sympathy with the whole “you’re sexualizing everything” complaint. Because a lot of the time it’s not the sex I’m getting off on, it’s the intimacy, or the fantasy of extreme love, or the embodiment of suffering, or something that I still don’t think I really have a name for. It’s not “oh my god they’re fucking,” it’s “oh my god they love each other so much and they can’t tell where the one begins and the other ends.” And that sort of emotionality isn’t necessarily a prelude to sex, not necessarily foreplay, but I think that’s the only language we have for it. Fandom uses and transforms the structures available for the communication of literary libidinal pleasure, but I feel like there are other ones out there that we haven’t properly described.
It frustrates me, because I’m writing on Jane Eyre for class right now, and what I really want to talk about is the intense pleasure I get from the reunion scene at the end, when the blind Rochester finally recognizes Jane. It’s not solely romantic, because they get together long before this point, and while I enjoy that scene I don’t get the same charge from it. I feel like the only way I have of talking about that incredible moment, one of my favorite things ever, is through this veiled, metaphorical sexual discourse. But it’s intensely clumsy, because that Jane/Rochester scene also has a literally sexual charge, one that coexists with whatever the nameless other thing is, and talking about that nameless pleasure in sexual language elides and tangles it up with the literally sexual in a way that I’m really not happy with.
This is true with regard to irl interactions also: we only have access to the language of sex, thus everything is sexualized and only the sexual has value. My parter, who has OCD, gets very insecure sometimes about sex because it's the only way he knows to value our relationship. When he's obsessing, the only way he has of measuring our relationship is by the frequency of sex, and he overlooks all the other important parts of what our relationship is about. When he's obsessing, it doesn't matter if we're having fun, or thinking good thoughts together, or talking, or snuggling, as long as we're not having sex. I think the two issues are maybe connected. I don't think we have very good paradigms for pleasure, and I think it can actually really mess us up.
My stories make my heart hurt, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, and it’s intensely pleasurable even though it has nothing to do with sex in any real way. We use the language of the sexual, but I don’t know that it’s really applicable. Thing is, I don't know how else to talk about it. We seem to have managed in fandom, because we all feel the same way. But I have no idea how to tell my classmates, or my academic advisers, or my mother, about the thing that I love in my stories.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 03:42 am (UTC)ITA with regard to the issues of Puritanism, though, and that's another rough spot for me. Because, of course, sometimes it is about the sex. I like my fannish porn as much as the next girl, and like the inverted gaze of fandom, and love love love the feeling of freely suspended sexuality that we get going. So, not trying to jaw down on the legitimately sexual. It's just that I feel like there's also something else, next to the sexual, like it but not at the same time, and I'd like it to get more recognition.
Lately I've found myself in several pairings where I want everything that you get in shipfic without the sex. Buffy/Giles, for one. I totally want the stories about the epic love of Buffy and Giles, overthetop melodrama and all, but not so much with the sex. Sometimes, also, Winchesters, though not always. It's funny: for all that smarm was weird as hell and politically ambiguous at best, I almost feel like the concept was on to something. When it wasn't getting buried by it's own sexual repression and homophobia, that is.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 03:47 am (UTC)