throbbing light machine

Some links about Pamela Paul's NYT editorial concern-trolling about trans issues, that act as strong summations of the case for trans liberation, celebration, affirmation & joy:

Erin In The Morning, Debunked: Misleading NYT Anti-Trans Article By Pamela Paul Relies On Pseudoscience, bringing the science to back trans empowerment in medical and lifestyle decisions

At Wonkette, from Crip Dyke, How Many Forests Did The New York Times Cut Down To Print Pamela Paul's 'Poor Deluded Trans People' Term Paper?, with the tagline "They simply can't stop." The comments are solid as well, as often on Yr Wonkette.

On a different topic, I've been inspired by the attitude in the meta How to be a dirtbag fic writer by tumblr user dragonmuse; I like the gung-ho attitude, and the refusal to get tied up in perfectionism, and the dodging of traps of self-importance and self-consciousness.

I've been reading a lot of discussion and meta about internet platform migration this week, and it's got me thinking about voice, participation, internet persona, and personal authority. Some sort of keyword cluster like that.

Was it LiveJournal culture, or was it me? Somehow, sitting down to write lots of long opinionated stuff felt normal in 2007. I'd watch an episode of tv and then read and write about just that 40 minutes for hours. And it felt normal to use an authoritative persona, to state my thoughts, feelings, and responses, with the assumption of a generally interested audience. Of course we were all going to sit around and discuss the new ep for a week or two!

Now, the way I do internet time is different. Tumblr gives my brain a long string of pretty pictures, deep thoughts, bits of poetry, and fannish gifsets, and sometimes I mutter thoughts or feelings in the tags. If something heavy is going on, I might admit it ... or might not. And I mainline entire seasons without writing extensively about my response. And fandoms come and go so much faster than they used to, or so it seems, back in the Stargate-and-X-Files days.

Yes, one still blogs, sometimes, about books, or a particularly impactful bit of media, or political events. But I notice that, on the whole, I'm a lot quieter on the internet nowadays when it comes to speaking my own thoughts in my own voice. Is that, at least in part, down to no longer being a college student, opinionated and with lots of time for argumentation? Probably, but some of it also feels like a hollowing-out of self-representation.

What about alla y'all? Do you find that you do internet fandom differently? Do you think it's the platforms, or you, that's the biggest factor in changes or continuities?

Late-night hypothesis (i had a hard day i'm not thinking about it): might the weird misdirectedness of "sj shipping" and whatnot be a possible aftereffect of the hardcore fannish embrace of the death of the author?

Instead of accepting all fannish responses while questioning the motives/credentials of directors, movie studios, and various financiers, we seem to be ignoring the latter classes of being almost entirely to instead police fannish response.

I am pretty sure that a substantial chunk of this is "women can be easily made to feel badly about libidinal desires," but also think it's interesting that, after having gloriously launched myself into the arms of Barthes during the Harry Potter years, I now find myself endlessly wanting to remind fellow fen about who gets paid for these stories, who has control, and who exactly doesn't (hint: it's us).

It's easier for me to project my trauma, insecurity, anxiety, and pain onto male characters. It's too - hot - to do it with female self-avatars. I haven't been able to casually re-watch the last season of Shameless before now, because the way I identify with Fiona is so intense and cathartic that I sort of don't want to touch it. Sometimes the nerve is too sensitive. Rose Campbell makes me just sob and sob and sob. Writing about Ekaterin Vorsoisson is like looking into the mirror and forcing myself to tell the truth about what I see. In some ways, these are the important identifications: they're the ones that are really keeping me going, the bedrock of story-stuff that I know will always be there for me to fall back on when I need support. They're the loci where I'm working through my shit; and I keep swearing to myself that, if nothing else, I will work through my shit. But it's fucking painful. With male self-avatars, it's a lot easier, a lot lighter, and pretty painless.

I think it's so much easier and so much more painless for me to work through trauma via male self-avatars for two reasons. One is that I've been culturally conditioned to love, forgive, and excuse men. In my real life, this has caused problems for me; through the transformative effects of fiction, it can give me a way to love, forgive, and excuse myself with greater ease and confidence.

The other reason has to do with distance; there's a line that I've always remembered but haven't ever been able to google down, from someone's meta about slash from way back in the early millennium, about how slash is a retreat from a figural female body "soaked through in semiotic ink." My own body is, for me, tremendously overdetermined; it all means too much. My selfhood has come to feel similarly; I keep touching off painful epiphanies and moments of unwanted self-knowledge, and it's a lot. Boy characters with whom I can identify - Will Stanton, Benton Fraser, Luke Skywalker and Miles Vorkosigan and Bellamy Blake and Daniel Jackson - let me sidle up to my damage without the incendiary risk. There's a representational veil that protects me, so that I can indulge in h/c or grovelfic or praisekink or whatever soothing stuff my id wants without self-protective sensitized pulling-back.

There is a way, now, more than ten years out from it all, that I'm beginning to see the Lord of the Rings movies as a deep and appalling travesty, misrepresentation and missed chance - or, worse, maybe not so much that last thing. But the chances they took weren't the ones I would have wished them to, not in the service of fidelity to the ethos of the source text and not in the service of bending the long arc of the universe toward justice.

In 2001, with the United States coopting Tolkien's rhetoric of dark and light and moral war to justify casually stupid militarism - at the start of what is now the longest war the United States has ever fought, one of the longest wars of the modern era - they took Tolkien's peacenik epic and retold it to emphasize and valorize violence. And admittedly Peej isn't American, but a lot of the project, including a lot of the money, came from either the US or Great Britain, who were allied with the US at the time in the famous "Coalition of the Willing." So I'm not sure the films' Kiwitude can excuse them from this one.

They "empowered" characters by giving them more violence to do, as in the case of Arwen. They recut and rebalanced Tolkien's multiple interwoven narratives to give more heft to Aragorn's military prowess and to minimize the intensity of Frodo's long slow sad story of grinding pain and unendurable pressure, endurance beyond hope. They erased both the story of the scouring of the Shire, which brings home the aftermath of war and shows its price on a more intimate scale, and the story of Frodo's shellshock, which he never really recovers from - the price on the internal scale, the price to the soul. They bring war back home with them. Merry argues for its necessity; Frodo stays "shocked and sad."

Tolkien:

‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.’

‘So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

Jackson:

Sam But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo ... and it's worth fighting for.

... I'm not at all sure that those two passages are from the same story. Not deep down where it counts. For one thing the relationship between the characters totally reverses, from Tolkien's naive Sam who hopes beyond reason and worldweary Frodo who always knew just how much he was losing to Jackson's butch assertive Sam and passive unthinking blank slate Frodo, who is merciful to Gollum because Gandalf told him to be more than out of any considered personal conviction. But also - there's a difference between book!Frodo's "give them up" and movie!Sam's "worth fighting for," although battle is certainly one of Tolkien's recognized modes of self-sacrifice. But the one emphasizes the omnipresence of the cost of war while the other doesn't mention it - apparently once you figure out that there's "some good in this world" you become the equal to any task, no matter how impossible, and of course as the films demonstrate the wages of fighting is glory: the only one who visibly pays is Frodo, and even in his case going to the Grey Havens seems kind of like a trip to Disneyland. Eowyn's choice to ride to battle loses a lot of its unhealthy/suicidal undertones, and her choice to turn away from violence in the Houses of the Healing is omitted. Both Merry's and Pippin's battle traumas are skimmed over; the psychological aspects of Merry's hurt after the Pelennor is disappeared altogether. Back in the Shire, before he sails, Frodo seems physically pained rather than shellshocked; and I'm using that word rather than PTSD for a reason, because Middle Earth came into being while Tolkien was resting in a field hospital after the Battle of the Somme and is fundamentally bound to World War I because of it.

And just as I am filled with rage and bitterness that Dubya is in art galleries rather than in chains at his own trial in the Hague, so too I find myself unwilling to happily accept the place that the Lord of the Rings has come to inhabit in sff pop culture since the films came out: elegant but somehow George-Lucas-esque pieces, real pretty and with some totally cool bits, some strong female characters and some stirring speeches about hope and change, and underneath it all an incoherent attraction to violence, callousness, hierarchy. A New Hope ends with that bizarre visual Nazi reference, The Return of the King with some pretty frank and unreconstructed monarchalism. Not to mention the pervasive racism of the orcs, the nastiness of the Haradrim, the general failure to imagine a diverse world. That last is, yes, also a failing of Tolkien's, and certainly you can find nastinesses he's said, but the business with the orcs at least isn't a failing of the text's.

schemingreader, Writing Fan Fiction: Doing Something or Doing Nothing?: Fandom is weird. It's a great way to meet new people and to reconnect with old friends. There's no better way to meet a lot of goofy intellectual oddballs of the type you want to hang out with all the time. The way you meet them is, you sit in a room by yourself and type while imagining fictional scenarios. Then you sit in a room by yourself and read stories. Then you sit in a room by yourself and type responses and read other people's responses.

Of course, you type "ha ha ha" or "lol" or "I <3 u" a lot.

In essence, it's a way to fall in love with a lot of people who are far away and whom you might meet once or twice if you're really lucky. It's somehow both social and isolating, at the same time.

just a tiny bit of meta, because it's summer and I'm apparently incapable of writing longform, so I'll just link: so thingswithwings made this amazing vid, posted with this accompanying meta, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about manpain since.

Because I am, arguably, a Manpain Queen. Pain makes me happy - in fiction, that is, ahem. My problem with mainpain - and it is a problem, don't get me wrong - is that it actually minimizes the amount of pain available. What if Sha're was taken by the Goa'uld and we got three seasons of Daniel angsting over it AND of Sha're dealing with possession/strugging to hold on to her own subjectivity/becoming increasingly radicalized and badass as she saw more of the world and its cruelties? Instead, manpain structures limit us to half the tasty suffering and weemo.

It's not that I want white dudely protags to hurt less. It's that it'd be cool if we had a more catholic camera in regard to pain in media, that was willing to explore ladypain and pocpain and trans*pain and other such interesting and possibly very moving sorts of things. Not restriction, but rather broadening of narrative focus. And the attendant increase in the gross volume of narrative pain for me to splash around contentedly in!

(I've been trying all morning to think of source texts that actually do this. Um, The Scarlet Pimpernel? possibly Tamora Pierce's books, though she still has issues with chromatic masses and white privileged protags, but the gender stuff is better most of the time. hrm.)

1. Because I value the emotional freedom fandom has taught me to value my id and the contents thereof.

I love the awareness of my id I've been building in fandom. I look back at my baby fic, and the thing that strikes me most isn't how badly written it is - and it is! - but how tragically unaware that little girl was of what she wanted. My baby stories dance around my id, and sometimes they just miss it altogether, because I had no idea what I was doing. No one had ever talked to me before about the erotic pleasure of (nonsexual as well as sexual) stories. I just knew that some bits of books made me really happy, and I was trying to figure out how to replicate that feeling.

I'm happier for having a name to put to my id. It means I spend less time chasing it, and more time experiencing pleasure. My feminism values women's pleasure pretty highly.

2. Because I love all of your ids, and I love knowing and seeing them.

Even if they're not my own. You read anyone's work for long enough, and you'll end up knowing quite a bit about her. cesare gave the example of narrative emphasis on advanced degrees in a porn story, and that's pretty much exactly what I mean. We're writing to please ourselves here, and if you cross fandoms with somebody you're going to see her reapplying tropes and being attracted to similar stories and yeah, that's going to give you some information about her.

But when I think about the phrase "my id is showing," I think of prowriters who don't know how to approach or harness their ids. There's something very uncomfortable about reading someone's book and both seeing their kinks and knowing that they didn't mean for you to see their kinks. Um. Lots of dudely sff gives me this feeling: Orson Scott Card, (occasionally) Frank Herbert, Stephen Lawhead. It's awkward, because you can tell that they're not doing it on purpose, their ids are just creeping out and they can't get them back in the box. They're not doing anything with that id pleasure, just flailing. In contrast, writers like Tamora Pierce or Baroness Orczy, heck like, Tolkien, who knew how to use the id if ever anyone did - the ones who know what they want and tie the power of their ids to some pretty masterful purposes - I love seeing their ids. Not a problem. Their ids work for my benefit.

And I love seeing fandom's collective ids in particular, because of that thing mentioned above re: women's pleasure. You guys, I think our id vortices are so cool. I think it's so cool that we have language for all this stuff that critical communities don't - woobie? that's our word. Literature's jam-packet with 'em, but academia hasn't been over-arsed to name the phenomenon. I love that we have structures and spaces that let us really get to know our pleasure buttons, and that uncritically celebrate our happy feelings. And, y'know, that whole thing where "good" writing is totally a narrative kink anyway. So.

If your id is showing, it might not gel with my id. I might scroll down or backbutton out. But unless your id is talking about, idk, Indian princesses - Sherlock Holmes kinkmeme, I'm looking at you - I'm not going to have a problem with that. If your kinks are really obvious in your writing, I'm actually pretty likely to think it's cute, and to grin when I see them pop up. I don't feel the need to police either your id or my own.

3. Because I just can't see us resisting all the baggage about ids and good writing bouncing around our culture. telesilla's already been burned. It's inevitably going to be more panopticon than we want it to be, I think.

Okay, there's a line where that sort of thing goes from fun into badficland, but still. It's the girly men that I'm looking for. I fetishize and get off on their youth, their physical smallness, their visible and invisible innocence. Their tendency to use words instead of fists. Their ability to speak the language of emotional need. Their understanding of c retaking, and their own need for the same.

Their receptive sexuality, which basically gives you girl-pov hetsex with two guys.

I know that, objectively speaking, Daniel Jackson is a tall, strong man some five to ten years my senior who can more than take care of himself. But for some reason, I want to read about the side of him that's needful, young, sweet, vulnerable. This is one of those things that has more to do with identification than with sexual preference – so it's not that I'm irl attracted to femmy guys, so much as it's the fact that I'm a cis, femmy woman myself.

( I think that what I'm really looking for in slash is some foothold for my gender )

I keep feeling like I'm not the fan everybody's looking for, at least wrt the warnings debate. Because while I'm fortunate enough to not have any real-life triggers, I also prefer my fic plastered with warnings and spoilers of every sort.

I do this with all narrative, actually, because I don't like suspense, and I find the first reading/viewing/hearing of a piece to be the least interesting. I connect much harder to characters once I know where they're going - and often I love sequences in hindsight that bored me the first time around, because I've since fallen in love with the people in them.

I also have fairly ironclad characterizations and interpretive patterns - so what ratcreature's been talking about with the deeper issues relating to the Blair Sandburg haircut warnings definitely applies to me. I often have a very inflexible vision of canon - I'll read exceptionally good fic that falls outside it, but I'll put up with a lot more mediocrity when my preferred tropes are active. So my Daniel Jackson needs to be a gentle civilian geekboy, and my Jim Kirk is really damn smart and personally withdrawing, and my Frodo Baggins is unquestionably an adult as opposed to a teenager, and my Faith Lehane is something more than an evil bitch, and my Edward Elric is weird about his little brother.

Most fics that deviate from those characterizations get closed out of - they have to be really, really good for me to keep reading. And I like it when it's fairly obvious from the outset what character facets particular writers subscribe to, because I hate it when I read far enough in to get invested in the plot before I find out that an author's characterizations are just too different from my own for her story to work for me. And when warnings, descriptors, summaries, and author's notes give me such information right upfront, well, the happier I am.

I realized, in talking with my beta about my (almost finished I swear!) big postquest LotR fic, that the direction of the ending is not actually obvious in the narrative climax. And I thought about trying to hide the outcome, to keep any eventual readers in suspense. But then I realized that I would absolutely hate it if such a thing were done to me - particularly, in this case, because the question at hand involves the Grey Havens, which are traumatic enough that I need to have fair warning going in if they're going to happen as read. If I read through a whole novella thinking that there was hope only to have it snatched away from me - or vice versa - I remember, about two years ago, reading Middlemarch for the first time having only previously done Eliot's depressing stuff. I was sure until the end that everybody was going to die horribly, and I was shocked when they didn't. And I was less involved in Dorothea/Will than I might have been otherwise, because I was bracing myself all the time for a blow that never fell.

At any rate. As a rule, I don't click through to stories that don't have posted summaries, warnings, and indicators as to length. I want specific data before I commit! Am I really that unusual?

eta: just to make clear, I'm not making a political argument, or one of social responsibility, though I think those are important. I'm arguing from the practical - if your story doesn't have information tags all over it, why would I click that link? I'm arguing that information tags are good for fanwriters and fanreaders, as advertisements.