you ate the summer cannibals

[lotesse]

One of the biggest and most valuable things I've learned through fannish engagement is just how complex identification actually is; because we're operating outside of the cultural paradigm that assumes identification based on likeness - she's a girl I'm a girl therefore she's automatically my identity character - you can see how much potential variance there is in degrees and types of identification. We talk a lot in fandom about the "do I want to be them or have them?" question. Because there's the identification of "you are the person I want to be," and the "you are everything I hate about myself" identification, and the weird hurt/comfort-y one where you recognize your own pain or strangeness in a character and go about trying to fix it for them in a sideways attempt to bring it right for yourself. Sometimes loving a BSO is like loving a partner, but a lot of the time I find that it's more about loving myself. Or - this is maybe more right - about loving myself the way I would love a partner.

I was reading Slings & Arrows fic a moment ago, and just thinking about how passionately I loved Geoffrey Tennant, and how much he was the person that I wanted my Ex to be able to become, the person he was, in reality, never ever going to be. I - well, he was dark-haired and scruffy and creative and mentally disordered, so I can see where I was going with it. If he'd be Geoffrey, be that creative and powerful and effective, I thought, I could be Ellen, I could have my creativity elevated by and expressed through my partnership. I'm big on power-couple fantasies, and it wasn't a problem for me to chill in the supporting role.

But then I had this weirdly intense and transgressive-feeling thought: that of the two of us, I had really been the most like Geoffrey. I was the one overflowing with creative and intellectual energy. He - he was fucking Claire, pretty much.

Is my tendency to classify Geoffrey Tennant as a love-object, rather than an identity-object, a way of shrinking from a claim of identification with power that I subconsciously find too presumptuous?

When I'm loving Geoffrey Tennant, is that truly me loving on an expression of my own most powerful potential self?

During an energy-reading a few weeks ago the reader said that I was a creative genius. I felt so awkward. I spent years sitting next to my Ex with our writing machines, and he was failing to finish his third draft, but I was finishing better and better fanworks, taking on more ambitious projects, writing solidly and consistently - but he was the writer in our relationship, no question about it, that was what we both said and believed. Why did he get to call himself a writer, and not me? His (unfinished) works had been read by classmates in workshops and that was about it; during the same period of our lives together I was getting positive feedback from the source author on my yuletide story. And he asserted his "creative genius" all the time - so why did I feel so awkward over the same claim applied to myself? Why was I so much more invested in establishing his genius than my own?

I think there's something to the way that female-driven fandom tends to love on heroes rather than inhabit them that's really about gender and the (in)accessibility of power-claims. Not all of it, but something.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Here's hoping that this is the year that you get to claim your power.

I am cheering for you.

[staranise]

Oh oh oh boy do I ever feel this. I don't know what else to say right now, but YES.

Long rambling comment about Geoffrey Tennant as a messenger of the gods

[legionseagle]

I've just fallen really hard for Slings and Arrows (you know the early stage of a new fandom; inhaled the box set for the first time, read all the fic (except most of the Geoffrey/Darren, which I find wildly implausible - sometimes people can detest each other and it not be UST though I'll buy an ill-advised fling at University now turned epically sour), now doing the slow re-watch, repeating particular favourite episodes more than once...)

And it seems to me that Geoffrey is a sort of liminal figure in any event; a messenger of the gods, definitely* - he's descended into the underworld (one of the things I adore is that while he does use his madness he only uses it like he uses everything, the automatic "use that", it's a barrier to his creativity in general not some mystic source of his talent), he speaks to the dead and brings messages back to the living, he leads others on to be better than they can be, he battles the forces of darkness (OK, Richard and corporate sponsorship, mainly).


But where I'm coming from with this is that while I think there are issues (probably heavily influenced if not wholly created by institutionalised and internalised sexism) about what characters people feel "allowed" to identify with, it does seem to me that Geoffrey Tennant's role is not to expect other people to turn into Geoffrey Tennant (look how he directs Jack with respect to "To be or not to be" - "You have to know which it is. You don't have to tell me, but you have to know") but to become their own sort of creative genius in the best and most fulfilled way they can be.

Which sounds pretty much what you're describing, at least from where I'm sitting.

*Or perhaps an actual God trapped in human form? Dionysus in The Frogs has a lot in common with aspects of Geoffrey, but he's got much in common also with many incarnations of Hermes, particularly as Hermes is portrayed in the poems of Stevie Smith - trickster, two-faced, moving easily between the Underworld and the world of the living

[boxofdelights]

I would love to watch you claim your power.

[stewardess]

Not sure if this will help, but: when I was four, I told people I was married to Mighty Mouse. Years later, I realized I had watered it down, because I had believed I WAS Mighty Mouse. But even at age four I knew there would be a bad reaction if I claimed power -- while all around me little boys ran around saying "I'm Batman!" or "I'm Superman!" I have vowed never again to be small so someone else can feel big.