Dove | @merelydovely (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
merelydovely) wrote2018-12-11 09:44 am
merelydovely) wrote2018-12-11 09:44 am
the reinvention of close reading: harry potter, gay subtext, and death of the author
Tumblr helpfully directed me toward this wonderful article in the Paris Review stuffed with a visceral nostalgia for the heady early days of Wolfstar, back when we still believed JK Rowling understood her own characters as well as her readers did.
I'm a few years younger than the article's author, so it took me a little bit longer to get on the "close read" bandwagon, but this article struck a chord with me all the same. It really did feel, for a while, like Sirius/Lupin was where things were heading, and like we were all geniuses for seeing the signs.
And it felt that way all too often, didn't it? A few short years later, I was up to my eyeballs in meta for House M.D., convinced with all the zeal of a convert that surely the show was setting us up for House and Wilson to be together. It just made sense.
And then another couple years down the road for me it was BBC Merlin with Merthur, and Teen Wolf with Sterek, and Sherlock with Johnlock, and I eventually stopped really believing there would ever be any follow-through, but I never stopped being mad that these shows were actively trying to get me to do the legwork to create queer romance where there was none.
I'm the kind of fan who likes to exhaustively ground their shipping in canon hints, but I feel like these days I no longer have sufficient emotional patience for doing proper close readings of modern shows. Like, I still appreciate them when I see them, but I'm overall significantly less effortful about unearthing queer subtext in places that by all right should have queer text. Now I'm more likely to just go with "I like them together so they're queer because I said so," instead of trying to justify my ship with well-cataloged canon proofs.
This might explain why I've found a fandom home in the Les Misérables fandom, which is still arguing about gay subtext in a book written in the 1860s. And we still give Victor Hugo grief for not making things explicitly gayer, since that kind of story wasn't unheard of even then.
What's your immediate reaction to the article? Do you have any memory of those pre-Potterdammerüng days? What do you feel is gained by doing close reads of media that are unlikely to bear fruit?
The summer of 2003 was the summer of noticing. It was the summer I sat alone for hours in my mother’s parked car, blasting Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” (track 17 on my favorite CD) and luxuriating in body-racking sobs of grief for Sirius Black, sorrow for Remus Lupin, and ecstatic rapture that I’d noticed. We took to the internet, those of us who had noticed, and compared notes. Often these notes took the form of fan fiction, which I read ravenously, hungry not so much for erotica as for the full novelistic experience Rowling had invited us to imagine—a boarding-school romance turned wartime tragedy, Maurice meets Atonement by way of Animorphs.
I'm a few years younger than the article's author, so it took me a little bit longer to get on the "close read" bandwagon, but this article struck a chord with me all the same. It really did feel, for a while, like Sirius/Lupin was where things were heading, and like we were all geniuses for seeing the signs.
And it felt that way all too often, didn't it? A few short years later, I was up to my eyeballs in meta for House M.D., convinced with all the zeal of a convert that surely the show was setting us up for House and Wilson to be together. It just made sense.
And then another couple years down the road for me it was BBC Merlin with Merthur, and Teen Wolf with Sterek, and Sherlock with Johnlock, and I eventually stopped really believing there would ever be any follow-through, but I never stopped being mad that these shows were actively trying to get me to do the legwork to create queer romance where there was none.
I'm the kind of fan who likes to exhaustively ground their shipping in canon hints, but I feel like these days I no longer have sufficient emotional patience for doing proper close readings of modern shows. Like, I still appreciate them when I see them, but I'm overall significantly less effortful about unearthing queer subtext in places that by all right should have queer text. Now I'm more likely to just go with "I like them together so they're queer because I said so," instead of trying to justify my ship with well-cataloged canon proofs.
This might explain why I've found a fandom home in the Les Misérables fandom, which is still arguing about gay subtext in a book written in the 1860s. And we still give Victor Hugo grief for not making things explicitly gayer, since that kind of story wasn't unheard of even then.
What's your immediate reaction to the article? Do you have any memory of those pre-Potterdammerüng days? What do you feel is gained by doing close reads of media that are unlikely to bear fruit?
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The equivalent decoding-systems of queer reading in academia, especially for premodern academia, rely on the fact that The Queer Truth has been Suppressed, and we must decode it (h/t Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, she calls this the hermeneutics of suspicion). That's intoxicating in its way, too. But by that point I was already fed up with the comparable feminist lit crit strategies (there's... i have no idea if you know of a poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but anyway, there's a foundational feminist essay on it that seems to assume the character of Morgan has an existence separate from the poem and has been suppressed BY the poem), so gravitated to more... pluralistic ways of thinking about reading. Reader response rather than authorial intent or societal suppression.
I did all that and a coupla theses alongside growing into adulthood in fandom, so the two concepts are deeply entwined for me in ways that get awkward at times. Inception fandom really epitomised what I like in a reading community - that fandom was high on symbolism and coding, but never really got into One True Canon-ism. By and large it treated the canon and the surplus of meaning generated by the canon as _something we could use to communicate with each other_. That's... very much what I see happening in Arthuriana in the long run (and why I literally did not speak to a friend for nine months after she tried to get me into an argument about The Real Morgan Le Fay, circa Merlin s2).
Anyway, um hi, you probably don't know me well enough to know that a. I WILL put citations in my fandom meta and b. everything is about Arthuriana to me
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Hermeneutics of suspicion! What a great expression! But I know from various tumblr posts that modern academics - many of whom are queer themselves - are getting a bit sick of this whole Academia Suppresses The Queer Truth line.
Wow, I really love that. That's exactly how I see it, I just hadn't heard it put that way quite yet.
It reminds me of the comparison David Duchovny famously made between the X-Files fandom and a small-town church, where he pointed out that the church became more about community than religion. So fandom can either be more dogmatic and concerned with the canon, or it can be more about coming together through the canon.
Oh god, I can just imagine.
*whistles* Getting to knooooow you, getting to feel freeeee and eeeeeeasy...
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That's actually the context of the term! Eve KS got sick of talking about repression and wanted to look for more forward-thinking and creative ways of queer reading. I'm not actually super fond of her late work, and sadly one of the ways it's been interpreted is as a hammer AGAINST talking about the, uh, sucky heteronormative wossnames of the past (in //, there's an article by Schultz called 'heterosexuality as a threat to medieval studies', which does take the logical stance that if homosexuality is a modern construct so is heterosexuality, but unfortunately does so by asserting that all these queer academics are just paranoid and they can't function without the bogeyman of heteronormativity). Tumblr wank is, as ever, just academic wank boiled down and five to twenty years late.
Wow, I really love that. That's exactly how I see it, I just hadn't heard it put that way quite yet.
:D:D I think i'm getting that from Henry Jenkins. And Farashasilver. And something someone wrote somewhere about medieval saints' cults.
So fandom can either be more dogmatic and concerned with the canon, or it can be more about coming together through the canon.
Right? Honestly I felt a huge disjunct open up between me and the fandom community around... around Age of Ultron, I think. I haven't enjoyed a sequel fandom since then. I've enjoyed sequels: but I have not enjoyed the bitter fighting amongst disappointed fans, the attacks of happy fans on the disappointed fans, the vitriolic denouncements of canon, et caetera et caetera.
I go into sequels hoping to feel feels, and to be given a bunch of new stuff I can use to communicate with people. I don't... go in hoping to see my ship validated? And if my fave character gets sidelined I deal with that by... writing more fic! Or finding ways to get from the current status of canon to my desired ship ending, finding new triads, etc.
I do have a suspicion that Tumblr as a platform made the negative / otp-ish responsess more visible to me. Back on LJ if I knew someone who, idek, mad stanned Kirk/McCoy and hated any canon that fed content to Kirk/Spock or Spock/Uhura shippers, they put their complaints under a cut and comiserated in their comment section with likeminded people, not in long reblog chains. We could stay good buddies because I also liked Kirk/McCoy, even though I didn't resent any alternatives! Whereas now I'm getting used to having to cull 50% of my tumblr friends from x fandom as the x-sequel comes out, because they will just harsh my squee.
*whistles* Getting to knooooow you, getting to feel freeeee and eeeeeeasy...
THE GLORIES OF LJ-STYLE SOCIAL MEDIA, TL;DR'ing like it's 2007!
My goodness, Duchovny got it!
But we'll always have queer(ed) readings.
Re: My goodness, Duchovny got it!
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Just a couple of hours ago I used Inception to justify my argument that fanfic depends upon a preagreed shared reality similar to gamespace, rather than necessarily needing to be deriviative works based off a specific text
(Basically, we all know that the painted lines on the court don’t actually stop anyone from doing anything but that doesn’t mean that, if we all agree on what game we’re playing, the effects of the lines can’t be real & we also all know that the characters are fictional and can therefore technically be and do anything, but that doesn’t stop us from collaboratively drawing our own set of court lines to play in)
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But I don't want to be so cynical. I want to be able to enjoy subtext between same-sex couples the same way I would with f/m couples - Josh and Donna didn't get together until season 7 of The West Wing. I want to be able to have shows where we have seven seasons of build up for a same-sex that don't feel insulting and then anticlimactic, if that makes sense.
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So possibly Yuri on Ice counts as well, because people genuinely thought it wasn't going to happen!
The only one I know off the top of my head for books is the PJO verse, which I haven't actually read.
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In terms of subtext turned text I don't have any specific recs off the top of my head, but I meant more that books are more ahead of the game in terms of representation generally. I need to get more on top of my reading though, so this is all just hearsay based on reports from my friends and family members who always have a book on the go.
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I agree, though...it's very frustrating, because theoretically I love will they-won't they, except that I've seen it enough times to know the answer 95% of the time: If it's interracial, they won't. If it's gay, they won't. If they're straight and white, they will, probably after he harasses her for three seasons. That's one of the few things I liked about Legend of Korra, and which it did better than its predecessor. We were all scared we were imagining things but nope! They followed through! Dislikable as the comics are, the first LoK opened up with a kiss between two women!
I was at a convention panel in May about queerbaiting and I asked "how do you tell the difference between slow-burn and queerbaiting?". The answer we agreed on? You don't. Queer couples don't get slowburn in canon, that's why we have fanfic. Ever since then I've been contemplating ways to open this theoretical show I have in my head with one of my characters already out so that people have some amount of trust for it. I really like subtext and slow-burn but I'm queer, so I can't have the reward at the end.
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Ain't that the truth. I think in order for genuine slow burn not to read as queerbaiting, you'd have to have had decades of normalization of queer relationships onscreen. The only reason I trust She-Ra and the Princesses of Power to not be queerbait is because I've read Noelle Stevenson's other work – specifically Nimona, where the supervillain and the golden hero are exes who get back together in the end of the comic. But it's a very shaky sort of trust, now that she's working with a big studio instead of on her own personal webcomic, no matter how queer-friendly the show seems otherwise!
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Perhaps there's a difference between books, where the control is more centred around the author, and tv shows, where it's spread amongst everyone in the studio and the network execs?
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The thing with Circle of Magic, I think, was that while Lark/Rosethorn being confirmed retroactively fit perfectly into the existing story, there wasn't really anything in the 8 books prior that read to me as "queerbaiting." Lark's love for Rosethorn was most obvious in Briar's Book during the Blue Pox epidemic, but even now I'm not sure I could read any of their behavior as notably romantic in nature. Maybe that was because I was like 13 or whatever when I read it the first time, but you know what I mean, right?
I think it's okay if kids want to just read stuff that's explicitly queer from start to finish. It's how I feel about not reading old dead white guy fiction or watching Louis C.K. standup. Yes, the stuff those people produced was high-quality and insightful and everything, but there's SO MUCH STUFF in the world. We don't have time to consume all of it. Maybe she just doesn't read Tammy's stuff until someone explicitly recommends it; much as I love the series, I think it's fine if she reads something else good in its place.
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It's certainly fine for any individual not to read any series for whatever reason, but I'm loathe to see it become a trend. In any case this was a startling moment for me because I suddenly felt very old.
Perhaps CoM wasn't the best example, but it was the one that came to mind because it fits so many of the things I hear people say they want from queer fiction. It's not About Being Gay, it's a genre series, etc.
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So I guess that while I do want the next generation of queer kids to know their history, I also don't want them to get the impression that there wasn't any explicitly queer stuff in history and all we have is subtext. There weren't very many queer YA books in the 90s, but they did exist!
I think you have a good point about CoM/TCO/TCR being What People Say They Want. Unfortunately, What People Say They Want and what they're actually willing to invest time and emotional energy in are often not the same...
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I think also my perspective is changed by being trans. For us, even today, it's either subtext, or About Being The Thing. Trying to find a good story about a trans man that's not centred on him being trans, much less genre fiction, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
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Close reading in the current fandom climate is, first, just a great way to engage with people over topics that have much lower stakes than our current IRL topics of conversation (politics). Second, as a writer, I believe close reading lets me know what people tend to look for (or trained to look for) in character interactions and to tailor scenes that are much more subtle on the surface, but to the astute reader can scream "THEY'RE GONNA FUCK."
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It reminds me of a point I once heard about the reason that women are more likely to see romantic or sexual intent in men's behavior onscreen: we're trained to be hypersensitive to the threat of romantic/sexual interest from men in real life, since that's often what's lurking between ostensibly platonic interaction. Male writers, meanwhile, are trained in the reverse: they're constantly interpreting genuinely platonic female behavior as romantic or sexual. So that affects the way male and female characters are written and subsequently interpreted.
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Wow, yes, excellent point. And probably goes a long way to explaining the pitch of the discourse surrounding these issues. We gravitate toward them because they're lower stakes, but they become a stand-in for higher-stakes topics.
Yes! What a great point! I might have to take this into further consideration in my own writing!
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As far as close reading, I find that I'm not particularly drawn to look for subtextual ships in a text. I could say it's because I don't feel hopeful about finding subtext that isn't queerbaiting (intentionally or otherwise), but I think it's more just that my approach to ships in fanfic is more about exploring what if Person A and Person B were involved than feeling passionately that they are or should be involved. Which is maybe in part because a lot of my fandoms are RPF, where authorial intention is less of a thing (though there are sometimes things that ride the line between fan service and queerbaiting).
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Interesting! As mentioned, I am definitely a "let's base this on canon if we can" kind of writer, but certainly as a reader I am much more open to being convinced by a skilled author that two characters are worth reading about. However, that does kind of link up with the conversation we were having on my post about the femslash gap where the characters that people choose to invent their own deep shipping headcanons for tend to fit a certain profile. If there's no real need to tie things to "canon," so to speak, people's own biases might come into play more, right? But it could also end up being more diverse than what we're offered by hidebound studios. Do you have a sense of whether RPF is more or less biased in its tastes than non-RPF?
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If I'm remembering correctly, the impulse to go for "what if" ships rather than ships explicitly supported by canon for me was about trying to make femslash pairings happen, when they were less likely to be supported by, for instance, media that doesn't pass the Bechdel test. I'm not sure it *worked*, but that was the intention.
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Same goes for Word of God. I don't have to dissect every single piece of it to make sure my understanding of canon is correct and cohesive (though my brain usually goes there anyway because I'm a cataloger by nature), but what are the new possibilities we can put into fanworks because of, say, a new interview? Since there's YOI talk up-thread, a recent-ish example of what I don't want was the idea that "The prequel movie will finally put everyone on the same page about the characters' pasts." No. Boring. Unblocking just for the pleasure of hitting block again. The movie is going to give a million new unanswered questions to play with, and we'll still be free to ignore any bits that don't serve our fun in any given context. I'm still probably going to get obsessive about "Okay, but if this real skater for sure exists in the YOI-verse, what does that mean for Worlds 2010?" but that is my kind of fun, and I'm never going to force it on anybody else.
Crap, this was supposed to be the short version. I guess it still counts as short-ish. (I! Missed! This! Real comment threads are the best.)
But the main thing I got from that article is that I could have written every word of it, from the gleeful affirmation I found in "The Case for R/S" to the uncontrollable sobbing over Sirius to the slow realization that JKR had no idea what this army of queer teens and 20-somethings had actually seen in her text... and she didn't care to hear about it. My experience had the twist that I was actually quite interested in Remus/Tonks too. That is, until it actually happened and was a pile of emotionally manipulative horrors instead of the awkward bi duo being bi and awkward together (which I still seek out in nostalgia fic binges because their What Might Have Been makes me almost as happy as Wolfstar itself does). I was very lonely at that stage in my life, and reading this makes me wish I could reach back in time to tell 16-year-old me that over fifteen years later she would find her experience was shared identically with other 16-ish-year-olds across the world. It was hard to understand that at the time because, ahem, many of us were lying about our ages to be in fandom c. 2003.
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Amen.
Yeah! I have a vague memory of Ship Manifestos, plus things like Ship Primers for people who were just getting into a ship. It really emphasizes the nature of not just fandom in general, but shipping in particular, as a community activity. So many ships essentially exist because of genuine outreach from proponents, and by the end, exist almost entirely independently of their respective canons.
Les Mis is a really fun fandom for this because so much of our shipping activity is based on minor characters (the student revolutionaries and anyone else their age) and set in a kind of collective modern AU. We're all drawing from the canon in some way, but it's pretty far removed from the bulk of our fanworks. To the point that you have to tag things "canon era" because the default is modern AUs.
Preach!
I know, right????
Sometimes I long for those days, rather than the youth-led discourse of "why are you old people and your Adult Content not expelling yourself from fandom, a young people thing for young people???" Back in my day, if you couldn't pass for 18+ based on your perceived maturity level and ability to walk away from content you didn't like, you didn't get to sit at the table with the cool kids!
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The two-teenagers-in-a-trench-coat approach to baby's first fandom has its problems if someone wants to do more than lurk—The meatspace half of this example is probably gonna sound ridiculous to anybody outside the US, but turning 18 in fandoms of the Olden Days could be like going to your regular fake ID bar for your 21st, and I remember somebody losing friends over it in Harry Potter fandom—but good god could some of these kids do with a few years of learning to interact with adults who aren't responsible for their well-being.
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I've likened it to people who write Batman fic in the Batman v Superman setting but pull their minor characters from DC Comics, or people who write BBC Sherlock fic but include Victor Trevor.
On two-teenagers-in-a-trench-coat: I turned 18 riiiight around the time I deleted my LJ and took a break from fandom, so I sidestepped having to take responsibility for my participation in 18+ stuff pretty neatly. I don't think I ever saw fallout like the fallout you describe – makes sense, though. A hard line to walk.
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I think there is a joy in a shared analysis (or even just a shared desire), even if it will never bear canon fruit. Indeed, if Harry Potter taught me anything, it was that I don't really need the close reading anyway. Just a feeling, a chemistry, a recognizable archetype - that's plenty. I've read so much fanfic that surpasses the original work's subtlety and writing quality that I no longer really hold source material as necessarily hierarchically superior. Good writing is good writing, good characterization is good characterization, and who really cares where it comes from. I'll always be grateful for canon works because they ignite shared fires in people, and I'll always love fanfiction because there's a shorthand that saves me reading buckets of exposition and makes me pre-invested. But the line by line assessment of who looked at who, when? R/S more or less cured me of that. Death of the author indeed.
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God, ain't that the truth.
Yeah, that's something I don't think I initially appreciated about fanfic, but when I started trying to advocate for the genre to outsiders it was way up there as a reason that fanfic is unique in the way it allows authors to play with shorter forms.