the throbbing light machine

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.