The exploration of queer representation in Hannibal allows for a greater understanding of the conventions of gender and sexuality within the thriller genre. Highly-fictionalized thrillers such as Hannibal thrive on extreme relationships, but also rely heavily on non-traditional erotic relationships to further depict the extremes of personalities in its central characters. The cop-vs-serial killer subset of the thriller genre adds an element of intense, personal desire to what would otherwise be a genre categorized by rote sleuthing. So it is in Hannibal, where the main draw of the series (besides its stunning visuals) is the eroticly-charged cat-and-mouse game between FBI agent Will Graham and cunning killer Hannibal Lecter. Several characters of the series equate the furious obsession the two men share for each other to love. This suggestion troubles the relationship between the two men, indicating that their painful, self-destructive relationship is based simultaneously in love and hate. They are unable to pull away from each other, just as they are unable to completely become one. Instead, their relationship serves to complicate the viewer’s understanding of desire and the desire to kill.

HTo fully understand the complexity of Hannibal and Will’s relationship, we must return to one of the first incarnations of this relationship in the 2002 thriller Red Dragon.^[1] What is unique about the Silence of the Lambs trilogy is that no one film depicts Hannibal’s time before prison in great detail.^[2] Hannibal’s crimes are defined largely through rumor and his own description; Hannibal is the arbiter of his own mythos. However, there is a significant gap in the viewer’s understanding of the relationship between Hannibal and Will. This is deftly remedied in the opening scene of Red Dragon. Over the opening credits, Will Graham, here played by Edward Norton, comes to the shuddering realization that the mysterious killer is eating his victims — and that the killer is none other than his close confidante. At the crescendo of Will’s understanding, signified by the drawing of his gun, Hannibal sinks his knife into Will’s stomach. Despite the violence of the action, there is unmistakable tenderness as well. The stabbing mirrors a lover’s embrace; Hannibal rests his chin on Will’s shoulder, hushing him gently. In this scene, Hannibal gains no visible pleasure from hurting Will. Instead, he is careful, tender. “Remarkable boy,” he says. “I think I’ll eat your heart.” The reverent, intimate delivery of the line, coupled with the way Hannibal holds the fallen Will around the waist like a dance partner suggests a fond tenderness that goes beyond the bounds of homosocial friendship. Their intimacy serves to hint at a homoerotic bond that is only briefly touched upon in Red Dragon.

HThis highly-charged bond is given far more screen time and consideration in Hannibal. The two men are far closer in age, diminishing the mentor/pupil relationship present in Red Dragon^[3] and emphasizing a more equal footing. Furthermore, the first two seasons of Hannibal take place prior to the moment of understanding in Red Dragon that culminates in Will’s stabbing. The challenge of Hannibal then is to balance the painful anticipation of this “breakup” with the pleasure of watching the budding relationship between two fascinating, electric men. And a pleasure it is. Hannibal and Will have a powerful chemistry that obsesses the narrative. They share intense, longing looks, have little regard for each other’s personal space, and have many moments of strangely endearing domesticity. Hannibal is always cooking for Will, seeking to impress him with increasingly elaborate presentations. Food in Hannibal is always a matter of seduction and charm, a way for Hannibal to exert power over his guests (Will most frequently) while simultaneously providing them with nourishment and artistic pleasure.

The homoeroticism of food and eating crescendos in Hannibal’s second season, when Hannibal and Will share a meal of songbirds eaten whole. In an interview with Logo, director Bryan Fuller comments on this feast below:

We really want to explore the intimacy of these two men in an unexpected way without sexualizing them, but including a perception of sexuality that the cinema is actually portraying to the audience more than the characters are. There’s a scene at dinner where we were tackling in the edit bay because it was so transparently homoerotic. They were doing something that was not sex or anywhere near sex, but it was shot so suggestively that they may as well have been …

This scene lingers lovingly over open mouths, swallowing throats, and blissful expressions. In mood, framing, and aesthetic, it is a sexual scene. And yet, everyone’s clothes remain on. The evident homoeroticism of the scene is tempered by its modesty. There is power and seduction, but the lack of sexual acts and romantic physical gestures such as kissing leaves it clear that the relationship is not a traditionally romantic one.

For LGBT audiences, representation in film and television is an obstacle course of flirtation with canon. This battle with on-screen depictions of queer couples is often waylaid by a phenomenon known as queerbaiting. Queerbaiting teases the viewer with hints to a homosexual relationship in order to entice LGBTQ viewers, but this potential relationship ultimately remains unfulfilled. (Shows such as Supernatural are notorious for queerbaiting its fans.) Despite accusations of queerbaiting when it became apparent that central characters Will and Hannibal’s relationship would never be a physical one, queer fans nonetheless rejoiced at Hannibal. While Will and Hannibal would not explore a homosexual relationship on-screen, which frustrated some fans, many others were content in the highly-aesthetic, subtext-heavy portrayal of Hannibal and Will’s relationship.

Fans of this relationship, which is affectionately dubbed “Hannigram,” are quick to admit that the relationship between the two men is certainly an abusive one. For all of the intimacies between Will and Hannibal, their relationship is one built on manipulation, violence, and entrapment. However, for many, this is part of the attraction. The intensity and darkness is appealing, especially with two lead actors with significant fanbases. Many elements of “Hannigram” are aesthetic; there are large sects of fanworks dedicated to the sheer beauty of the show and its actors. However, the appeal of “Hannigram” is not wholly artistic. The cat-and-mouse element of their relationship, emphasized by a history of serial killer/cop films with similar relationships, is characterized by danger and seduction. In a show about the art of violence, “Hannigram” dances alongside the violence, rather than shying away from it. The honesty of the appeal of “Hannigram” in (largely female) fans allows for a deeper exploration of the intimacy of violence between Will and Hannibal.

This violence culminates in a stabbing, just as in Red Dragon. In Red Dragon, the stabbing is presented as a shock. In Hannibal, however, there is great anticipation for the moment. While this could be, in part, due to lingering audience familiarity with the source material, it is more likely a reading of the tone of the scene. Red Dragon amplified the shocking element, playing off of Will’s horrified revelation about Hannibal’s guilt. In Hannibal, however, we anticipate the betrayal. Will has spent the season desperately, obsessively working to prove Hannibal’s guilt. And yet, when the time comes to make the arrest, Will balks; he reveals the ploy to Hannibal. When he finds that Hannibal has not run but instead done grave violence to Jack and Alana, Will is heartbroken. “You were supposed to leave,” he says, his voice low and devastated. Hannibal responds by touching the side of Will’s, and stabs Will like an apology, like a betrayal.

The embrace that Will and Hannibal fall into speaks to the unsustainable nature of their relationship. They are so deeply caught up in each other’s obsession that they are desperately linked. They are fated to trap each other. While their romance departs from traditional depictions, Will and Hannibal are still star-crossed, their mutual erotic obsession only just beginning.

^[1] There is also an adaptation of Red Dragon even before Silence of the Lambs, a thriller titled Manhunter released in 1986. However, this did not enjoy the same popularity as the later Harris-based film trilogy.

^[2] A later film, Hannibal Rising (2007) attempts to remedy this, but it is considered separate from the trilogy.

^[3] This is not to say that mentor/pupil relationships lack homoeroticism. Rather, this particular relationship is strengthened by a different power dynamic.

Molly Cavanaugh received an MA in English Literature with a focus on Game Studies and New Media. She uses these fields to explore her additional interests of race, gender, sexuality, and LGBT representation. She has also studied Victorian literature, the Gothic, and 19th century American literature. Her teaching interests include film, graphic novels, and popular culture.

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As highlighted in last week’s post, one of the concerns with shows that revolve around queer romance is the risk of defining what queer love is supposed to look like. To that concern I would add a danger in queer representation that attempts to answer “what queer life is supposed to look like.” However, within a seemingly bland sitcom formula that would enact these dangerous representations, Please Like Me adds a twist. Josh’s gay coming of age story is constantly interrupted by his mother’s (Debra Lawrence) mental illness. It is her constant need of care that disrupts what would be a classic coming-out narrative. Through these disruptions, a better reflection of the realities of living as a queer individual is displayed.

In the very same episode, Josh has his first queer encounter with Tom’s coworker Geoffrey (Wade Briggs) and hears of his mother’s attempted suicide. The morning after an awkward and ultimately sexless night with Geoffrey, he checks his phone to find multiple voicemails from his frantic father. But the shot itself lacks the urgency of a reaction to a suicide attempt: the camera gradually zooms in on a banal scene of Josh brushing his teeth with his phone at his ear, signifying for the audience that rather than a surprise, these calls are routine.

 This event suddenly shifts the trajectory of the narrative, denying what should have been the “coming-out” moment between Josh and his best friend Tom. As Tom drives Josh to the hospital they casually talk about the previous night and Tom says, “Just so I know, we aren’t talking about your mum because you’re all like, emotionally stunted yeah? And we are just ignoring the fact that Geoffrey is a man?”  To which Josh answers, “Yup.” Tom’s casual introduction of the two events exemplifies how Josh’s mother’s suicide acts to disrupt and expose the fiction of the singular coming out “moment”. In life, there is no true “coming out” where individuals exclaim their queerness to the world popularized in shows like Glee.

In Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet, she demystifies this idea, highlighting how life institutes a plethora of closets to “come out” from, “every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not.” (68) By disrupting the show’s narrative from Josh’s gay storyline to Rose’s struggle with mental health, Please Like Me illustrates the reality behind life as an “out” queer person: the daily trials of “Do they know? Should I tell them? Do they even need to know?” In fact, Josh lives in sexual identity limbo for most of the first season. There is no actual moment in which he says, “I’m gay” (he makes a quip about how coming out is so 90’s) instead he is outed multiple times by the show’s other characters: Claire’s outing of him to the audience and Geoffrey’s outing of him to his father and mother on separate occasions; these multiple outings better represent life alongside Sedgewick’s theorizations and life as an out queer person.

Please Like Me also complicates the representation of queer life through scenarios between Josh and his lovers in heteronormative and hypermasculine spaces. These scenes show how interconnected these oppressive structures are in the mindset of queer individuals, how they influence behavior, even how they influence opinions. In the first season, Geoffrey buys tickets for him and Josh to watch a rugby match. Josh, reluctant to see any sports at first, is titillated by the aggressive catharsis in engaging with the highs and lows of a rugby match. The two bond over escalating insults towards the players’ poor performance that results in emasculation, eventually calling the players faggots. They are immediately asked to leave for “homophobic language” to which Geoffrey responds, “This is my boyfriend, we’re not being homophobic” and energetically kisses Josh.

The scene leaves us with no closure other than the irony of two gay people removed from a hypermasculine space for being homophobic. But it does bring up interesting questions: is it okay to scream faggot if you’re gay? Who gets to scream faggot? Or better yet, who gets to tell whom whether they can or can’t scream faggot?

This scene is much more complex when considering queer affection in hypermasculine spaces and unearths for viewers a unique complication: queer Public Displays of Affection (PDA). After getting booted from the game, Josh and Geoffrey start fighting over the kiss. The camera angles reveal the shame that each feels for the other: as they spar the shot switches between them, cutting the face off the other, signifying their inability to “meet the other’s eyes.” Josh is ashamed of being known as queer in public, whereas Geoffrey is ashamed and frustrated with Josh’s inability to express his feelings publicly.

This scene is surely familiar to many queer people and brings up deeper questions: Is Josh really ashamed to be seen kissing a man? Or does he generally not like PDA? Queer individuals constantly wrestle with this dilemma, one that is often confused and interconnected, asking a darker question: Can I truly dislike PDA without it being part of gay shame? The interconnection here marks heteronormative structures’ infiltration into the very conceptions of our own opinions on our queer intimacies. Please Like Me offers no resolution to these questions (because there aren’t any) and in its ambivalence better reflects the reality of queer experience.

Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.

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In a 1986 New York Times interview regarding My Beautiful Launderette (1985), director Stephen Frears notes, “It’s a completely ironic film, isn’t it? We wanted people to have a wonderful time, but to make the film provocative, turning everything on its head.” Indeed, the made-for-TV movie highlights a topsy-turvy–like ’80s Britain.

The film’s irony comes from the portrayal of a Pakistani immigrant family at the center of a Thatcher-era story of “rich get richer, poor get poorer.” In contrast to classic images of corporate greed or poor immigrants, My Beautiful Launderette stars immigrants as greedy and corrupt, while the poor are represented by the British working class. Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is an unemployed young man taking care of his alcoholic father, a leftist ex-journalist who acts as the foil to Omar’s uncle, Nasser Ali (Saeed Jaffrey), a successful businessman who is best exemplified by the advice he gives to Omar, “In this damn country which we hate and love you can get anything you want … you [only] have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.” Nasser and his family are decadent with their wealth: hosting lavish parties, and, at one moment, literally throwing money around.

Taking a job with his uncle, Omar’s own ’80s-inspired greed and ambition earns him a shot in the family business turning over one of his Uncle’s many properties, a destitute launderette in a poor neighborhood of London. Meanwhile, Omar’s childhood friend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), exemplifies the poor English working class as a homeless kid whose punk gang resorts to crime and squatting for survival. These two worlds merge at the site of the launderette, owned and exploited by Nasser, whose revenue comes from his English working-class patrons. Omar and Johnny’s queer relationship and Nasser and his British mistress Rachel’s (Shirley Anne Field) infidelity represent aberrations in the film’s familial structure: where business and wealth are insulated and grown within Nasser’s vast family, Johnny and Rachel stand on the outside. They are the “dirty laundry” kept secret from the successful family. Renamed “Powders” (how gay is that?), the launderette becomes the symbol of the film’s tensions: anti-immigrant sentiment, greed, gentrification, and economic inequality play out as lovers Omar and Johnny renovate and run the launderette together.

Highly acclaimed, the film moved to theaters in Britain and America, where it received an Oscar nomination for the best original screenplay (beaten by Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters). This ability to move from British television to American theatrical distribution reflects the film’s reach and makes it a prime subject for analysis on queer representation.

In terms of queer relationships, we arrive at Johnny and Omar’s intimacy quite late. The first time we see them together on screen is a serendipitous reunion (we learn later they were very close childhood friends). We enter their relationship not at its conception but in a revival; we encounter them without experiencing their romantic past. This positioning may seem trivial but it does important work: it muddles the spectacle of queer intimacy. With much LGBT media centered around dating and romance, a potentially damaging and myopic structure emerges around these representations: What does queer love look like? What is queer love supposed to look like?

By denying us identifications with the beginnings of Johnny and Omar’s intimacy, we must find other ways to love their relationship. This makes us focus on what their love does, rather than what it looks like. We watch the two literally build a business together. Yes, it is a business that does indeed make money for Omar’s corrupt uncle and feeds Omar’s greed. But it is also a business that allows Johnny to break out of his cycle of crime for survival, and one that allows Omar and Johnny’s love to blossom.

At the height of the film, the aberrant relationships challenge the divisive theme of anti-immigrant London, showing the intersectional and connective power behind “queer” love. On the opening day of the launderette, Omar is nervous. Johnny — seeming to want to help him relax — pulls Omar into the back to fool around. However, with Johnny sitting on his lap, Omar reveals that he knows Johnny participated in anti-immigrant marches, and how xenophobia took part in his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s suicide. While Omar confesses, Johnny is sympathetic, sitting close to Omar, undressing him and caressing his chest. Johnny apologizes as Omar starts to strip Johnny in turn. Their intimacy is mirrored by Rachel and Nasser entering the launderette together. Flirting and laughing, the two seem to be truly in love. As they marvel at the beauty of the renovated launderette, Rachel says to Nasser, “Dance with me … we are learning.” They begin to waltz across the launderette as Johnny and Omar share champagne and make out behind the two-way mirror.

These two couples, whose love is immoral in structures of monogamy and heteronormativity, are actually the only characters who suture a racially and economically divided London. They kiss and dance at the very site that will connect these two sides for the benefit of both.

Looking deeper, Johnny and Omar’s queer love is actually intertwined with challenging London’s racial and economic divisiveness. In another example, queer love acts as comic relief, aimed at the audience to subvert the tension between Johnny’s anti-immigrant punk gang and Omar’s greedy drug-dealing uncle Salim (Derrick Branche). Omar exits the launderette to pay Johnny for his work, sharing glares with Johnny’s gang who are loitering at the entrance. As Salim drives by to check on the business, we look through his side-mirror, his hand in the shot, as both he and the gang observe Johnny and Omar.

The tensions of the film build and center themselves as “all eyes” are on Omar and Johnny. But the tension calms, as the audience is privileged with a shot from the opposite viewpoint: Omar hugs Johnny for a job well done, and we see a close up of Johnny’s head next to Omar’s. Playfully, he sticks his tongue out and licks Omar’s neck, a recognition of their love that eases the tension from these encroaching forces.

Other cute, quirky, and hilarious moments mingle with the queer love of these two characters and recall a specific moment that encapsulates — for me — the beauty of this film: in Nasser’s house, Salim makes a snide comment to Omar when discussing the launderette, “You haven’t fucked your uncle’s launderette, you little fool?” Omar, smug, lifts his head from his chair to meet Salim’s eyes and responds, “In my small opinion, much good can come of fucking.”

Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.

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Recently, there has been an uptick in the amount of “gay-centric” media created by the mainstream film and television industry. Movies like Call Me by Your Name (2017), Moonlight (2016), Carol (2015), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), etc. mark a notable shift in LGBT narratives to being not only more mainstream—more desired—but actively produced for recognition among the Hollywood award circuit. In the wake of Moonlight’s win (or perhaps earlier with Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and the snubbed Brokeback Mountain (2005)), LGBT narratives were solidified in the slew of dramas that catch Oscar-esque attention; though notably, these narratives remain a majority gay, white, and male-centered. With multiple queer and gay narratives watchable in theaters, stream-able online, and available on network TV, there is an ostensible perception of a surplus.

With waxing LGBT representation, queer-identified people — long erased and caricatured in television and film or marginalized to the edges of the screen — finally find themselves at the center of these narratives, finally up for best-actress and actor as opposed to being ossified as the side-kick, the friend, the best supporting actress/actor. But even after the recognition of films like Moonlight, a brilliant tale of queer intimacy and intersectionality in Miami, my desire for queer media only increases. I begin to reject these new pristine studio-made representations of queer lives; I feel a guilty disappointment. They are simply not enough.

Unpacking these feelings unveils the larger and multi-tiered problem of popular queer representations in film and television — tiers that build on each other and consequently narrow the multiplicity of queer narratives. Part of this homogenized representation comes from the infrastructure of the American entertainment industry. Run mainly on viewership, products appealing to the lowest common denominator will always thrive in contrast to media that attempts to be unique. Even in the age of Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services where competition allows viewers to demand more creativity from television, “LGBT” shows and movies must constantly compete with straight media that statistically annihilates even the strongest queer fan base.

Beyond this economic obstacle, there is a problem with the very identifier of “Gay” as a genre in film and TV. Based solely on classification by the sexual binary, Gay TV as a genre becomes a sweeping conglomeration for any kind of media whose narrative crucially involves or revolves around a queer character. The trap of Gay TV then lies in being classified by a heteronormative industry, a label which itself invites a lens of tunnel vision, reducing shows to the characters’ sexual object choice rather than classifying the show as a drama, romance, comedy, game-show etc. This tunnel vision hails a specific audience that on the one hand is useful for those queer-identified people seeking representation but weakens the agency and reach with which some media have the potential to cause. Instead of exposure to these shows and movies, the algorithms of streaming services that recommend based on genre choices will never promote queer media to a wider audience, consequently stifling the ability of queer narratives to challenge heteronormative structures of intimacy, social formations, even story-telling.

The third tier, and the issue where I want to dwell, lies in my own conundrum when desiring queer representation. By scouring history for queer-leaning figures we create our own queer historiography, forge a lineage, and construct a model for future queer people. However, when binging queer photography, queer art exhibitions, queer film and TV I am also consuming in an attempt to connect: as if to say, “Ah! There I am, that’s me.” This desire may originate from the first moment one notices their asynchrony with heteronormative sexuality: the need to find oneself in a world full of images that represent a very specific type of person, relationship, body, family, etc. When I watch a gay TV show like Looking or a film like Call Me by Your Name, I am looking to recognize and connect with aspects of my queerness. In other words, when I consume these medias, I am trying to feel closer to the represented identity of “gay.”

But, the endeavor to identify with these narratives inevitably fails. No matter how close I want to connect to a character like Patrick (Johnathon Groff) in Looking, he is not me, and his queer experience is not my queer experience. Therefore, I wonder how we might envision alternative ways to consume LGBT representations that relocates this desire? Instead of focusing energy on how I might recognize parts of myself in these characters, it might be better to look for queerness in content, form, or style. How do certain aesthetic choices reflect queer experience and queer life in a heteronormative time and space?

This set of posts is deeply inspired by José Muñoz’s Disidentifications, in which he traces a cogent methodology of disidentifying with harmful or problematic representations and discourses in order to utilize aspects of these works for minoritarian subjects as a matter of survival and a method of resistance. These posts work alongside Muñoz within the process of identification attempting to reconfigure the moment of connection within these representations from the characters or works, to acts and techniques. For the next three weeks I will explore three different queer representations. Focusing on aesthetics, I hope to show how these films and TV connect with us by commenting on contemporary queer experience. Tune in next week for my thoughts on My Beautiful Launderette.

Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.

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They ask us to share a rough spot and a bright spot from our week. Rough spot, for the first time in a while, is a quick answer for me. Usually, it’s been a toss-up between any number of novel and horrifying developments, but this week it’s simple: The rough spot was turning on my phone and seeing the repeal of bathroom protection for Transgender students. I cried, staring at my phone, at the headline that one of the default news apps decided to plaster across my unlock screen. I cried for the teenagers who will face even more bullying in their school halls, I cried over the lives that will be lost because it’s not really about bathrooms but about basic humanity and decency, I cried over the level of ignorance and hate that would drive someone to make such a ruling about a group of marginalized young people who we should all be working to protect. When I shared my sadness, the faces in the room mirrored back what I imagine mine looks like now on a daily basis, weary sadness.

Finding a bright spot has become incredibly simple for me over the past few months. Did I get out of bed? Did I make it through the ten minutes of time I allot myself each morning to check out my social media and news apps to see what latest violence has been done against marginalized groups? Did I feed myself? Did I attend or teach class? Those actions are a bright spot each day, moments when I didn’t let despair sit on my chest like too-deep water. These moments of caring for myself, for my queer body in this hostile environment, are small, empowering moments of radical resistance in my day-to-day. I showed up. It’s my bright spot. There are nods and half-smiles in response.

As we circle the room, the concerns change: several foreign students are concerned about the attitudes toward LGBTQIA+ individuals in their home countries. What might it mean for them to be denied a job in the U.S. after completing their degree? Another student is struggling with a family member who purposefully misgenders them and says that they will always be their dead gender (I can’t help but hear the rhetoric surrounding the bathroom bill echoing through my head). Another student is concerned about the example of Gay-ness presented by Breitbart editor, Milo Yiannopoulus, the virulently hateful and, allegedly, pedophilic poster-child for acceptable Alt-Right Queerness. The concerns are different. The exhaustion is the same.

Each person in this room is exhausted, emotionally empty, rattled and just a few moments from tears. But why?

***

I’ve been trying to sort it out since late-December, reading the think-pieces and the status updates from my friends, attending rallies and marches and poster-making sessions. The sadness and tired hangs everywhere, but I still couldn’t figure it out. So I did what so many academics do, I compartmentalized it, allowed that part of my mind to fill up with pertinent data, waited for a late night “Ah-hah” moment when it finally clicked. It didn’t. I moved on, left it to simmer in some back part of my brain, focused on reading theorists, and grading essays, and getting out of bed in the morning. I left the sadness and its answer for a different day.

I started listening to musicals. I’ve been a bit behind the curve, so Hamilton was a new and heart-wrenching beauty in my life. I wept the first time I listened to the soundtrack. It was good to cry.

Next, my brother suggested I listen to the soundtrack for Fun Home. (He blessedly warned me that it might hit close to home in some ways. He was right.) I listened to Alison Bechdel’s coming-out story about her life again, this time accompanied by music instead of the panels of the graphic novel where I first encountered it. I remember watching a video of Bechdel creating one of those panels, taking Polaroid pictures of herself to use as reference. The time and effort that went into each panel was astonishing. The music from the play recreated that experience of her writing and drawing the graphic novel, that astonishment and awe. I was hooked.

After spending the majority of late-January and February listening to the soundtrack on repeat, a question popped into my head. What was it like for Bechdel to see her own life played out on stage in front of her? Luckily, Alyssa Abbott asked the same thing of Bechdel shortly after the show’s first performance in 2013 in an interview for The Atlantic (which can be found here. Two statements from Bechdel struck me as she described her experience of seeing the show: she described seeing her own life on stage as “very strange and surreal” and also described the experience of seeing the show with her brother’s and aunt—“There were no words. We just let it wash over us.” I couldn’t peg down why those statements struck me as particularly important, but I stored them away in the random bits of knowledge part of my brain that may one day make me a Jeopardy star.

***

Their importance came a week ago, when discussing a project for one of my classes involving the subject of the uncanny. Stephen King describes terror as “when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute.” This description has been used by Lucy Hunter, a contributing editor for Critic magazine out of the Otago University Students’ Association, in her article “Journey into “The Uncanny Valley”” (which you can visit here). When discussing experiences of the uncanny, Hunter describes the “Uncanny” as “the sensation of something being both strange and familiar. It helps explain the reason why some things scare us, while others just creep us out. The uncanny is not simply a matter of the mysterious, bizarre, or frightening: it involves a kind of duplicity (both in likeness and deception) within the familiar. A disturbance of the familiar.”

Finally, with this idea of the uncanny bouncing around in my head, it all clicked. Alison Bechdel’s statements about watching the play of her life had hit me because she described it as “very strange and surreal,” and experience that had to “wash over” her and her family. These were moments when the familiar elements of her life has been disturbed, replaced by the interpretation of the playwright and the actors and the musicians, a strong resemblance, but not the same. This was my every day experience looking at the headlines on my phone or the posts on my Facebook wall. The headlines identified me: “Millennials say ‘Not My President’,” “Trump Repeals Obama-Era Transgender Protections,” “Radical Left Professors Poison University Campuses.” These were terms I had used for myself, modes of constructing who I was, but they had replaced me in the narrative. These headlines had walked into my house, taken me out and left a replica in my place, an ill-informed idealist, a supposed predator, a target for hate and ire.

They came so quickly, these stories of horrific ignorance and self-centered greed, invading every moment of my life, from my Facebook wall, to my classroom discussions, to chats with colleagues and mentors in the halls. Me, who I had thought of myself as, was existing out there somewhere, an uncanny version for people to then assign back on to me with the same words I had used as a method of empowerment and self-realization. But these things that they said were not me. I may be an empathic idealist, but I pride myself in remaining informed, I am not a predator, I am kind and compassionate, I am not a rabid automaton of Leftist-rhetoric set on indoctrinating young minds in my classroom, I am a hard-working teacher who values pedagogy and the success and growth of my students. These headlines made a straw man of me, dressed it in my clothes, and trampled it to bits with their rhetoric, and I could not stand as my own witness. I could only offer my testimony in noxious comment sections and wait for the flame-war to ensue.

I was left to feel the weight of these events, so far outside my realm of immediate influence, wash over me with no time to process. Every event comes now in a rapid fire stream, so many executive orders, and bills before Congress, and life-shattering decisions tossed about like pawns in a game of Chess, meant for sacrifice and violence.

***

 The night at the LGBT Resource Center provided some very essential insight for me.

The media available to me for self-expression had been insufficient. Posts about my experiences on social media were met with affirmations from my colleagues and friends, who felt the same way, and virulent declarations of degradation from others; I should “grow up,” my life “sure must have been easy if this Presidential election is enough to break [me],” and “I sure hope you never have to face any real hardship in your life.”

My attempts to witness about the trauma of existing in this moment felt hollow. How do you provide testimony about a violence that exists not in blood spilled but in existence denied? Laverne Cox put it so much more pointedly than I had been able to when speaking about what the bathroom bill meant for transgender people on MSNBC: “When trans people can’t access public bathrooms we can’t go to school effectively, go to work effectively, access health-care facilities — it’s about us existing in public space,” she said. “And those who oppose trans people having access to the facilities consistent with how we identify know that all the things they claim don’t actually happen. It’s really about us not existing — about erasing trans people.”

I felt not only useless to witness for myself, but useless to help those who are without voice in this moment. Not all trauma is equivalent. I am in a place of privilege where my white skin, my social class, my vocation, my regional location, and even my ability to still pass as female in public spaces has granted me protections that are not available to so many others who exist in a far more marginalized space than myself. I want to make space for them, to open the floor and hold the haters at bay and let them scream out their truths about themselves, witnessing to their own trauma and terror in a country that has robbed them of their right to humanity and existence.

In this political moment, there has been both erasure and replacement of me as a non-binary, trans, millennial in the education field. And until that night at the LGBT Resource Center, I had had no way to witness about it in a way that felt real, to talk to others who had the same expressions on their faces that greeted me in the mirror before I plastered a smile on my face each morning. But in that room, it started to come together, the kernel of knowledge in the swirl of emotion and struggling thoughts. In that room, I could hold space for others, I could be the listening ear that is so essential for those testifying about their experiences. In that room, I could witness while others held space for me.

***

So what does it all mean? I’m living in a strange world where my life is related back to me and my value and identity determined by people in rooms hundreds of miles from me, and then blasted out over the media that permeates my life. It’s uncanny, and terrifying, and emotionally exhausting, yes, but I’ve got a framework for it now, a way of understanding where this feeling comes from, for me at least. And for me, as a scholar, having that framework to understand is usually my first step to finding a solution.

Hillarie ‘Rhyse’ Curtis is a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University where she studies (and occasionally writes about) queer narratives, masculinity, trauma, war, and fan fiction, among other things. 

The post Facebook and Uncanny Identity appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Incidentally, it also makes me one happy little student of sex and gender politics.

For scholars of gender and sex in a society like ours that has, for much of its history, depended on the institutions of marriage and family to generate a dominant source of individual and corporate identity, understanding the way these institutions work, their social effect, and the conditions under which they break down is essential. This goes doubly true for those who have been marginalized or harmed over and over by these deeply engrained institutions. If you were a film scholar with an interest in sex and gender politics, you’d likely spend time examining the visual representations of familial love, coded femininity, or censored scenes of illicit sexuality. Likewise, were you to take Victorian literature as your subject, you’d probably reading all of Foucault, historicizing sexual practices of the 19th century British subject, while close reading Dickens for signs of the emerging middle class family unit.

Rather, games are machines, encapsulated collections of rules that produce incredible pseudo-fictional experiences when activated by players. Games are adept at modeling the social and political systems in which we already live. This is as true of board games as video games, and it is why the resurgence of board games ought to excite anyone with even a passing interest in the operation of sex and gender in Western culture. Where films and books represent gender and sex ideologies by conventions of narration, image, and characterization, board games offer up for examination the very systems within which these ideologies circulate. This allows players to discover, interact with, and even enact models of those systems, opening institutions like marriage and the family up to a different and (dare I say it?) fun kind of analysis.

So, as both an indulgence of my nerdy enthusiasm for tabletop gaming and an instance of the capacity of board games to represent the dynamics of gender, sex, marriage, and the family, I offer below a few examples for your consideration.

Photo Credit to Board Game Point of View on boardgamegeek.com

Agricola

Agricola is an intimidating beast of a game to the uninitiated. It’s a quintessential example of the “Euro” style board game: relatively little direct player interaction, multiple paths to victory, heaps of victory points to be won, and copious wooden blocks. In this game, players take responsibility for small 17th century farmsteads, competing with each other to establish the most diverse, fruitful farm. On their turns, players place one of two “workers” from their farm board on one of the action spaces in the shared, central board. Being a 17th century farm, the labor is pre-industrial which means your “workers” are actually husband and wife. This is a case of pure abstraction in terms of representation; the agrarian couple are in fact nothing more than flat wooden discs. They have no visible gender difference, nor are they functionally different with respect to the kinds of actions each one can take. If they are a heterosexual couple as the game’s rulebook assures us they are, there are no representational markers to support such a case. However, as a game of Agricola plays out, two new action spaces open up, each called “Family Growth.” Here, players can assign one of their workers (presumably the wife) who then returns home to the farm bearing a third wooden disc – a child. The arrival of a new child is one of the most exciting events Agricola can offer players, not however because of the miracle of childbirth, but because it means that player now has one more worker that can be sent into the fields, giving them a tremendous competitive edge over her opponents. This wooden child seems to verify that yes, indeed, the first two workers were indeed man and wife, but after the child’s arrival, all three workers once again melt into interchangeability. These bodies are as abstracted, as ungendered as you might imagine – and yet the game’s mechanics testify to the sex that is nevertheless always at the core of a winning strategy. Agricola then offers players a family unit rooted in heterosexual marriage, but radically flattened of sexual difference by the demands of production. Agricola strips marriage and sex down to its most basic, agrarian, function: securing resources, staving off starvation, and producing enough surplus to overshadow your neighboring farms.

Photo Credit to Chun Yian on boardgamegeek.com

Village

Village is another game set in the pre-industrial past, as well as another example of a Euro game with an emphasis on the family unit. However, where Agricola explores the relationship between familial fertility and productivity, Village explores the relationship between family legacy, death, and cross generational ties. More mechanically complex than Agricola, Village makes use of some similar ideas: players have a homestead board from which they place family members onto a central action board and it’s possible for players to “have babies” in order to generate more workers. However, these workers are each labeled with a number, 1-4, indicating to which generation they belong. Players place their workers onto the various actionable spaces of the main board, and in many cases, leave them there, for the spaces are occupations that their workers hold until they die. Say you’re playing Village and you need to make a wagon to sell at market. You could pay a hefty price in various resources and gold or, if you have a worker at the wainwright location, you could simply spend a bit of time, the game’s third spendable commodity. As players spend time, however, workers from the older generations begin to die off. Workers, on the occasion of their deaths, are sent to graves that match their lifelong occupation and in this way are committed to the village’s book of records, memorialized forever after. However, should the limited number of places for a worker’s given occupation be filled up, they are sent unceremoniously into an unmarked grave, forgotten forever and, crucially, giving the player no points. Rather than incentivize the growing accumulation of labor as Agricola does, Village encourages players to look forward to the proper memorialization of death, for it is in this memorialization that the legacy of their family is secured against those of their opponents. Tellingly, the rulebook calls the score “Prestige Points.” It is expressly for the garnering of that prestige that the family unit exists in the world of Village.

And now for something completely different…

Consentacle

In a very sharp turn away from the pastoral, picturesque worlds of Agricola and Village, I’d like to introduce you to Consentacle, a game by designer, Naomi Clark that is, as of yet, still unpublished. Unlike the previous two games which you can order right off of Amazon, Consentacle was never intended to be a mass market game. This game takes as its subject the erotic encounter between a young, “Curious Human” and a rather expressive “Tentacled Alien.” Consentacle is all about the complex negotiation of sexual consent as players work together to generate Trust, gain Satisfaction, and hopefully, build Intimacy between their wildly disparate characters. Visually, the Curious Human and Tentacled Monster are as different as can be, though any potential sense of horror that you might expect is mitigated by a charming, Jet Set Radio Future, comic-y art style. Mechanically, this difference is reinforced by limiting communication between players as they work toward a common goal, encouraging a sort of blind, tentative play style. On their turns, players simultaneously play cards like “WINK,” “BITE,” “STROKE,” or “ENVELOP,” trying to create combinations that lead the Curious Human and Tentacled Alien into a memorable erotic encounter. I say memorable because the goal of the game isn’t solely to achieve Satisfaction but to transmute that Satisfaction into something more. Satisfaction is actually only the middle step along the road, a sort of exchange gate through which Trust must pass in order to become Intimacy. This alchemy whereby Satisfaction transforms Trust into Alchemy is the key to Consentacle’s representation of sex, not as an end to itself, nor as the component of some larger, marital or familial institution, but as a crucial form of relation that bridges the wide gulf between individuals. In a representational fiction that draws explicitly from an erotics of difference that is often figured as inherently violent (feel free to Google tentacle porn if you’ve missed the allusion), Consentacle removes the power inequities that seemed to be inherent in an encounter between ingénue and monster and replaces them with the erotic frisson of cooperative consent. In other words, sex is fun! And, when sex is properly fun, it is egalitarian, given over to a free exploration of difference, and the magical reagent that brings Intimacy where before there was only solitude.

Photo credit to Andrew Tullsen on boardgamegeek.com

…and then we held hands

I’ll wrap up with another cooperative game where players must cope with limited communication and blind play in order to achieve a relational end. In …and then we held hands, two players take on the roles of lovers who have reached a point of crisis in their relationship. The nature of this crisis is left to the imagination, but in order to resolve it, players must navigate their pawns across colored spaces on a board arranged in concentric circles. As players discard emotion cards from either their hand or their partner’s, they gradually try to move toward the center of these circles, achieving balance and resolving their relationship in the process. …and then we held hands, is a quiet, deeply abstracted game, unlike Consentacle, and yet an intensely evocative one. The emotions in the game are represented by one of four colors that make up the board’s spaces as well as the emotion cards in player’s hands. Discarding the emotion cards suggests the emergence of feeling in the course of discussion or argument between two lovers and, correspondingly, it affects the position of the player’s pawn. If players handle each other’s (and their own!) emotions appropriately, they slowly make progress toward each other – but should they ignore the feelings in play they risk running their pawn into an impossible corner, unable to move within the context of that relationship anymore. Again, like in Agricola, …and then we held hands, seems gender agnostic, though it also seems to invite players to approach the game as a couple, extra-diegetically. And indeed, the game has been discussed in various contexts online as a “couple’s game”. However, the absence of representational gender here suggests, like Consentacle, an egalitarian sort of cooperation, one that requires sympathy, the reading of body language, and careful consideration of your partner’s state of mind. Where Consentacle is all playful eroticism, however, …and then we held hands plays more like a meditative, couples’ therapy session. The mechanics here are simple and though abstracted, clearly linked to ideologies of egalitarian coupling. It is exactly that abstraction, however, that renders …and then we held hands so open to projection. This is a game, it seems, in which players are invited to invest their own relational crises and contemplate for thirty minutes how they can better cope with the complex roil of emotions that come with the sexual territory.

And that’s it for now! This was just a very cursory overview of how board games offer small windows on the way our society has conceived of sex, marriage, and gender. So much more could be said about each of these games and the many others that I don’t have room to mention. If we really are in the middle of a board game renaissance, I hope we can recognize their value as microcosms of our own social lives as gendered, sexual bodies.

Jordan Wood is a Ph.D student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games, sexuality, and queer theory. He lives with two cats and is terrible at side scrolling games. Go Bills.

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By the time you read this it will have been September for at least a few days. This means, undoubtedly, an endless stream of friends asking what we did this summer. I, having been well trained in the art of back-to-school vacation reporting, dutifully explain that I spent the whole summer preparing for my qualifying exams. This entails reading through 20 books on queer theory, 20 more books in game studies, watching 40 or so films related to LGBT history and queer representation, and playing through 40 or so video games. And yet, at the end of the summer I still wonder if in all of this reading, watching, and playing I’ve learned anything at all. I should probably try to see if knowledge has happened and then share that knowledge with some other people to see if they think it’s knowledge, too. Maybe a four week series of blogposts right at the end of the summer – a kind of Summer In Review of games, gender, sex, and film. Give it a catchy title. Sure.

PLAYING, WATCHING, WANTING: A SUMMER IN REVIEW. PART 1 – ICKY WITCHER

Let’s start by thinking about a guy provocatively named the Bloody Baron. Philip Strenger, a.k.a., the Bloody Baron, is a key character in the opening third of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015, Xbox One, PS4, PC), a sprawling role playing game by Polish game studio, CD Projket RED. This game is massive. Wild Hunt combines the expansive environment of Bethesda’s Skyrim with the deep characterization and romantic interludes of Bioware’s Mass Effect series, and throws in an entirely original trading card game, complete with factions and gold foil cards for good measure.

(Really, really sprawling)

However, it also introduces players to a terribly cruel world. Nobles squabble for control over their small corner of the world, always seeking to expand that corner by whatever means necessary, and Wild Hunt is unflinching in its depiction of how these squabbles disenfranchise the less well-off citizens of the Northern Kingdoms. The Bloody Baron, however, tells us the most about what we expect from our games, our games press, and the way sex and patriarchal oppression operate in video games.

Before we get to that, let’s backtrack.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched just before this summer started. It was hotly anticipated by nearly every gaming media outlet and was immediately met upon release with virtually universal critical and popular acclaim. CD Projekt RED had an enormous success on their hands and the adoration of millions of fans due to fan-friendly business practices like weekly installments of free downloadable content (DLC) and frequent, personal communication with a demographic known for being extraordinary fickle. This rabid affection explains at least some of the intense anger that fans launched at Arthur Gies’ review of The Witcher 3 for Polygon.com.

In this largely positive review, Gies still expressed reservations about the constant and often gruesome violence to which women are subjected in The Witcher 3. Gies calls “the world CD Projekt has created […] oppressively misogynist,” and, though he acknowledges that the game deals with this misogyny directly, Gies also points out that the game seems to, at least a little, relish the many opportunities to depict women in peril. As Gies puts it, the world of The Witcher 3 has many women characters who struggle mightily – and not always in vain – against a viciously oppressive society, but then the game “kills them, over and over.

As you might expect in a post-but-not-at-all-post #GamerGate world, a review score of 8 out of 10 for a beloved game is an outrage, doubly so since the score seemed to rest on the objections of an SJW (Social Justice Warrior for those not in the know). Gies had previously been pilloried for his similarly positive yet hesitant review of Bayonetta 2 (2014, Wii U) and the gaming masses seemed ready to put him to the stocks again for this second, even more egregious sin. Fans of The Witcher 3 took to their blogs, message boards, and online communities to criticize Gies and Polygon for their review. One fan’s response characterizes the overall backlash quite well:

“Polygon is nothing but jaded old journalists with absolutely no love for gaming anymore. I lost respect for them years ago.”

Another fan in the same thread had this to say:

“The world in The Witcher is supposed to be portrayed as brutal and unfair. Racism, sexism, and the works are all prevalent. It just looks so silly to throw that stuff around in a review. It’s Polygon trying to sound cerebral, and coming off more as pompous.”

Even more damning, Adrian Chmielarz, co-owner and creative director of small indie studio The Astronauts and developer of such cult hit games as Painkiller (2004) and Bulletstorm (2011) wrote a long, scathing blog post calling Gies’ piece, among other things, “poisonous to the industry,” and an example of toxic journalistic incompetence endemic to the game review industry.

If you’ve been at all familiar with the #GamerGate saga over the past year (and if you’re not, I recommend this article from Ars Technica for a taste), then these objections might sound familiar to you. They have that je ne sais quoi of reactionary masculinist discourse that seems to characterize so much of online reddit/chan/gaming culture right now.

However there is something in the fan response to Gies’ review that, despite its histrionic tone and defensive articulation, warrants attention.

(In the same way that this glitched polygon warrants attention)

Let us grant Gies’ criticism that the world of The Witcher 3 is ruthlessly misogynist (it is) and that the game itself seems to at least, in some way, revel in women’s suffering, all the while dressing its many prominent women characters in laughably sexy costumes (it does). For sure, there is plenty to feel icky about in The Witcher 3. The question that Gies does not get to though, and the question that I think his critics in some way articulate, is this: does the game itself feel icky about its content? Or, put another way, does Wild Hunt encourage players to maintain or develop a critical perspective on a patriarchal society that often mirrors our own?

The answer, I think, is a resounding “yes.” Mostly anyways. As players assume the mantle of the Witcher himself, Geralt of Rivia, they also take on a social role that places them as both an outsider to and beneficiary of Wild Hunt’s “oppressively misogynist” world. Along with this unique point of player identification, The Witcher 3 offers (via its fantasy narrative and iconography) a range of viscerally-realized metaphors that, at times, make the player’s role of killing the monsters of the Northern Kingdom seem uncannily like a crusade against the patriarchy.

Whether The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt makes players complicit in a virtual Malleus Maleficarum or waltzes them around in the boots of a strangely familiar white knight, it is the episode with the Bloody Baron – drunkard, wife-beater, war hero, contrite father – that best exposes the complexities of gender and sexuality at work here. The reactionaries against Gies’ review may not have had what I argue in mind, but if gaming is ever going to move out of its current atmosphere of division, exclusion, and prejudice, then we need to work harder than Gies’ review does at understanding how games go about their representational business. Next week, I’ll try to do just that with the story of Geralt of Rivia and the Bloody Baron of Novigrad.

Jordan Wood is a Ph.D student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games, sexuality, and queer theory. He lives with two cats and is terrible at side scrolling games. Go Bills.

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In most settings, this is definitely not the norm. Even though, as one blogger pointed out, the US is home to more asexuals (or, as some prefer to be called, aces) than it is to Muslims, breast-cancer survivors, and Yale graduates, asexuality is not on most people’s radars. Even those within the LGBT community are sometimes unaware of asexuality as an orientation — indeed, the “A” in LGBTQIA+ more often stands for “ally” than “ace.” Thus, Asexual Awareness Week (this year, October 26–November 1) occurs at the end of LGBT History Month. Today, I’m going to sketch out the ways the conversations I see happening inside the asexual community might shape the queer theory of the future.

Only a handful of scholars in the humanities are doing research on asexuality studies.¹ Nevertheless, the language of asexuality as it exists in the everyday praxis of aces has been invaluable to helping me reconsider the ways we think about desire and relationships in texts. Because asexuality — that is, the absence of sexual attraction — does not preclude the formation of other attractions, aces have developed a vocabulary set to describe those experiences. They distinguish between sexual, romantic, affective (“friendly”), and aesthetic attraction, and the different conditions under which these occur and the objects that these take. For instance, “homoromantic” describes someone who falls in love with those of their same sex or gender; a “demiromantic” is someone who falls in love only after a long friendship; an “aromantic” doesn’t fall in love, but might desire intense friendship.²

These desires are not new, and certainly aren’t limited to aces: John Henry Newman’s romantic friendships look very much like the intimate relationships of a homoromantic ace, but the chaste “seraphick love” that John Evelyn and Mary Godolphin shared in the seventeenth century could be conceived of as a queerplatonic relationship of two otherwise sexual people. What is new is the way these words examine phenomena whose existence and uniformity have been taken for granted.

Sometimes, the impulse to name certain desires can overwhelm the desires themselves, but what I think these concepts highlight is the plurality of ways in which people form attractions and desires, and that their objects need not be so neatly aligned. For instance, considering the ways in which Doyle’s John Watson might be simultaneously heterosexual (marrying and having a child by Mary Morstan) and homoromantic (in romantic love with Sherlock Holmes) helps us to grasp how a person can desire two objects in different, non-competing ways. In a way, asexuality has done for romance and sexuality what Judith Butler has done for gender and sex, by uncoupling one from the other (pun intended).

But the asexual community, of course, is not without its controversies. Some people don’t think that asexuality should be lumped into the LGBTQ+ “alphabet soup” because it’s technically not a sexual orientation but rather a not-sexual orientation. This, I think, ignores the great potential for intersectional solidarity, as homoromantic and trans* aces face oppressions that are very similar to those faced by their allosexual counterparts, and heteronormativity limits the experiences of sexual nonconformists indiscriminately.

Some have also criticized how white the movement is, with writers of color like Alok Vaid-Menon describing how to claim asexuality as an identity feels like a betrayal of their race. Some identity communities have long been de-sexualized as a means of discipline and disenfranchisement. Thus, self-describing as asexual plays into these enduring stereotypes, which certainly need dismantling. The asexuality leadership has been surprisingly self-reflexive about how race and gender authorizes (or fails to authorize) the perceived legitimacy of certain sexual orientations. At the same time, however, it’s no less important for us to question those structures that make sexuality compulsory, while we remain sex-positive.

I think the definition that we had to match at training put it best: “Each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently.” Just delete “asexual” and you’ll have described everyone. As queer studies develops, we’re thinking more plurally to account for the many and colorful ways that our experiences and identities intersect, shaping our selfhoods and our positions in our communities.

Notes

1. NWSA’s Asexuality Studies Interest Group and the conference panels it has coordinated has been my primary source for asexuality studies in the humanities.
2. The Huffington Post put together a handy simplified infographic to depict this.

Ashley O’Mara is a first-year PhD student and University Fellow in the English department. She studies Ignatian imagination and representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern poetry. In her free time, she writes creative nonfiction and reads BBC Sherlock fanfic “for research.”

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In fact, I’d like to suggest that some of the problems about LGBT historiography I discussed last week could be mitigated by our adopting a transformative fiction philosophy. Allow me to map the landscape of queer fanfic, using Sherlock as an example, before I argue that point.

Sherlock fans have been writing fanfic ever since Arthur Conan Doyle (or ACD, as fanfic writers call him) was still writing. Anne Jamison, an English and fan-culture scholar, has described the output of the Sherlock fandom over the past century as essentially transformative works. This includes not just unpublished fanfic but also myriad films, novels, and TV programs, because they all transform the canonical ACD stories, in form and content, with a fan’s devotion to “writing that continues, interrupts, reimagines, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have already written about.”²

The genealogy of fanfic for BBC’s Sherlock is particularly rich for my interest in transformative fiction, because it’s a nesting doll of referentiality. BBC Sherlock fic riffs on Moffat and Gatiss’s twenty-first century reincarnation of Sherlock, which itself riffs on ACD’s Victorian Sherlock and the many twentieth-century reincarnations which the program’s creators have declared canonized.³ Fic writer A.J. Hall, as Jamison points out, can make reference to BBC’s Sherlock, ACD’s Sherlock, and a 1950’s “fan-authored pastiche” Sherlock all in one fic⁴ — yet no one would mistake that fic for any of its source texts.

This is the difference between “canon” and what fans call “headcanon.” Canon is the Ur-text, a status to which fan writers make no claim of aspiring. There is a certain playful value attached to incorporating elements from canon (Sherlock’s affinity for bees shows up in many fics, as well as the TV program), but these nods exist within “headcanon” — a fan’s personal parallel world(s). “Headcanon” exists alongside “canon,” depending upon the source for basic inspiration (usually its characters) but freely recreating the source in a conscious departure from it.

Fans use these parallel worlds to explore what could have been or might be, especially as regards sexualities that have not found mainstream representation. There is no conclusive literary evidence that ACD conceived of his Sherlock and John as “homosexual”; their relationship presents as a romantic friendship, although those were going out of fashion when he was writing. Likewise, despite queerbaiting, Moffat insists that his Sherlock is not gay, let alone ace. In fanfic, however, literally any interpretation goes.

Myriad fanfic categorizing tags allow readers to find what version of Sherlock’s sexuality appeals to them: gay “Johnlock” and asexual!Sherlock/bisexual!John cover some of the more popular ones, in addition to “OT3s” (One True Threesomes) and a plethora of kinks (the usual varieties, along with furries, fauns, and male pregnancy). While these labels can flatten the contours of the actual uniquely queer praxis within individual works (in the same way that LGBT labels can elide sexual and gender complexities), word-of-mouth reviews of the ways in which a writer imagines two characters negotiating an unprecedented relationship reminds me to keep an open mind about my expectations when see a fic’s tags.

Although authors and readers both have pet theories about what Sherlock’s sexuality “really” is, the fan writer’s explicit self-distancing from “canon” means that a plurality of “headcanons” co-exist on the periphery of the source text. My friend can ship gay Johnlock, I can ship bisexual!John/straight!Mary/asexual!Sherlock, and fanfic satisfies both our preferences without (much) argument between us.

In this way, we might think of historical LGBT icons as personal role models without needing or intending to make claims about their “canonical” sexuality. In my parallel narrative, Joan of Arc is patron of trans* rights and John Henry Newman is patron of asexuality. Neither of these is true in historical reality, and I would never write an essay to “prove” it, but that’s my “headcanon,” and (if I may abuse a neologism) — I’m shipping it!

Next week: a coda in honor of Asexuality Awareness Week

Notes

1. Apologies for the Reichenfeels.
2. Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: BenBella, 2013), 17.
3. Ibid. 11.
4. Ibid. 9.

Ashley O’Mara is a first-year PhD student and University Fellow in the English department. She studies Ignatian imagination and representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern poetry. In her free time, she writes creative nonfiction and reads BBC Sherlock fanfic “for research.”

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John Henry Newman has been in my Twitter feed a lot lately. Apparently, when this Victorian cardinal wasn’t writing his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, the nineteenth century’s longest and driest autobiography (sorry, Newman), he wrote religious commentary that some people still find instructive. But it wasn’t all that long ago that Newman was in the news for very different reasons.

Just before his beatification in 2010, gay-rights activists protested the Vatican’s exhumation and relocation of Newman’s remains from the grave he shared with his dear friend, Ambrose St. John, to a chapel for public veneration. Claiming Newman as one of their own, protestors pointed his written command that his body join his friend’s in death: “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St. John’s grave and I give this as my last, my imperative will.”¹  To the protesters, the Vatican’s flouting of  this will was a deliberate erasure of what they perceived to be a same-sex relationship from public memory in order to “sanitize” Newman’s biography before sainthood.²

In response, the Vatican commissioned an article that, in reactionary fashion, proceeded to do just that. Ian Ker, a professor and priest, insisted that Newman and St. John’s relationship was purely platonic; that Newman had fought off heterosexual lust as a youth and remained committed to continent celibacy as a priest; and that had Newman been alive today, he would surely have submitted to the wishes of the Church, even if She wanted him reburied away from his dearest friend.³ Ker also would claim that none of Newman’s human remains had been discovered in the exhumation.⁴ With these four claims, Ker discredited the possibly homosexual nature of Newman’s relationship with St. John at the same time as he called into doubt the enduring existence of the relationship itself.

The public debate over Newman’s identity—saint or sinner, homosexual or celibate⁵—in 2010 echoes the public debate over Newman’s identity nearly 150 years earlier. In 1864 Newman responded to the criticism of Charles Kingsley, a popular author and adherent of “Muscular Christianity” who publicly accused Newman of displaying perversion in his converting from the Church of England to the Church of Rome—which, since the Reformation, had in England been popularly associated with sodomizing popes and the Whore of Babylon. Curiously, this exchange has today led to scholarly and non-scholarly speculation about Newman’s sexuality.

When I researched Newman for a class on Victorian life-writing, I was struck by how Newman constantly battled public misinterpretation of his life choices and writings during his lifetime. Hence, his publication of that autobiography—an attempt to definitively set the record straight on his supposed perversity. The way in which readers still endeavor today to read between the lines of his writing for evidence of sexual preference seems to me to unravel his endless work to prevent others from commandeering his self-narrative.

This potential for misinterpretation is a problem with declaring historical figures to be “lesbian/gay/bi/trans*.” To call George Washington Carver simply “gay” erases the whole history of slave castration in the American South. To call Joan of Arc simply “trans*” ignores the complexity of early notions of sartorial gender transmutability. Likewise, searching for Newman’s active (homo?)sexuality overwrites not only his stated longtime personal preference for celibacy but also the value of romantic friendship as a relationship that doesn’t have to be hetero–, homo–, or any kind of– sexual.⁷

To counter this tendency, queer-studies scholar Sharon Marcus advocates a reading process she terms “just reading” as a means of avoiding falling into the trap of “symptomatic reading”—that is, reading our modern versions of sexualities into earlier texts. For her, “‘just reading’ … attends to what texts make manifest on their surface.”⁸ The symptomatic readings of Newman’s supporters in 2010 looked for “symptoms” of homo– or heterosexuality in Newman’s life. A just reading would take Newman’s text at its word, perhaps with an eye to understanding what it meant for him, as a Catholic priest in nineteenth-century England, to be a celibate man in a romantic friendship. For this reason, “just reading” helps to do justice to the text, its author, and the full spectrum of queer possibilities across the centuries.

Next week: Queering LGBT history

Notes

1. 1. Ian Ker, “Oxford and Rome Again,” in John Henry Newman: A Biography, new edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 698.
   2. Robert Verkaik, “Plan to Exhume Cardinal is ‘Homophobic’,” Independent (London), August 25, 2008.
   3. Ian Ker, “Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Exhumation Objectors,” L’Osservatore Romano, September 3, 2008, weekly edition in English.
   4. Ibid., afterword to John Henry Newman: A Biography, new edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 747.
   5. This is their strange set of false dichotomies, not mine.
   6. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua & Six Sermons, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 137.
   7. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 3.

Images of John Henry Newman and Ambrose St. John’s grave marker found here: http://blog.cleveland.com/pdextra/2010/09/pope_to_beatify_cardinal_newma.html

Ashley O’Mara is a first-year PhD student and University Fellow in the English department. She studies Ignatian imagination and representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern poetry. In her free time, she writes creative nonfiction and reads BBC Sherlock fanfic “for research.”

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