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olderthannetfic · 6 years

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I just realized it’s Fandom First Friday and the topic is meta!

For months, I’ve been slowly working my way through How To Be Gay by David Halperin, which talks about drag queens and how certain aspects of gay male culture appropriate from women to empower gay men. (Halperin uses the word ‘appropriate’ extensively, not necessarily in a negative context.) He brought up some points I thought were highly relevant for thinking about slash.

Last February, I went to Escapade and chatted with a bunch of acafans. To my total lack of surprise, they too love Halperin’s book and had the same reaction I did. I thought when I finish the book, I’ll write up some meta. But I got busy, and it’s a long, dense book. So then in August, I went to the final Vividcon. There, I ran into Francesca Coppa and mentioned this idea. Her response? “Oh, I just wrote a journal article about that.”

…

AHAHAHAHA! Oh god, we are the same person.

(NB: We are not actually the same person.We just have similar first names, similar fandoms, and similar flists back on LJ, have done similar fandom history oral history projects, go to the same cons, and have both been on the OTW board. Laura Hale once went so far as to “out” me as her. And now we like the same academic books too. Heh.)

So, obviously, now I have to write meta about this, and Fandom First Friday is the perfect time to take a stab at it. I have so much more to say and I want to go back through How to be Gay and pull out many more amazing quotes, but better to write something than wait for perfection.

What I found the most interesting about Halperin’s analysis was that he points out that women may find these funhouse mirror versions of femaleness upsetting, and those feelings are completely understandable and valid, but they don’t make drag any less empowering or significant for gay men. He neither thinks that we need to get rid of drag nor that women should stop having those reactions.

He also talks about how subtext is often more appealing than text: when he first started teaching his college course ‘How to be Gay’, on which the book is based, he assumed that students would connect more with literal representation of their identities. That’s the narrative we push: now that we have literal X on TV or in a Broadway show, we don’t need subtextual old Y anymore! Instead, many of his students loved things like The Golden Girls and failed to connect with current gay representation.

It’s a long book, but what many of his ideas boil down to is that a Broadway show that is massively subtextually queer allows the viewer to identify with any of the characters or with all of them simultaneously or with the situation in general. It’s highly fluid. Gay representation often means a couple of specific gay characters with a rigid identity. Emotionally, that can be harder to connect to.

Sometimes, allegory gets closer to one’s own internal experiences than literal depiction does.

Coppa’s article (book chapter?) is about exactly that. It’s titled: Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton. She uses Halperin’s book but extends the idea further. I particularly liked her example of how female fans use Bucky to tell stories that are essentially (and often literally) about rape. His story is about a loss of bodily autonomy and about having one’s boundaries violated in a way that is familiar to female fans, but he’s a male action hero, so those stories don’t have the same visceral ick factor as writing about literal rape of literal women.

Partly, that’s due to how society treats men vs. women, but it’s also about which fans are writing these stories and which fans are the target audience of them. Just as a cis gay man appropriating Joan Crawford to talk about his experience of gayness isn’t really for or about women, most slash fanfic about Bucky being victimized isn’t really for or about cis gay men.

It was on the dancefloor at Vividcon that I realized that, as a woman, I have this unconscious feeling like I am appropriating gay men’s culture when I’m into Joan Crawford and other over-the-top female performers. It’s ridiculous! How can I be appropriating a female celebrity from gay men? But it’s an experience I share with lots of other women. Telling women we have no right to things is the bedrock of our culture.

That feature film Slash, which featured a bunch of cis male slash writers was inspired partly by the male director going on Reddit and finding a bunch of gay guys saying that slash squicks them. He felt that he was being progressive by erasing women.

On Tumblr, the fujocourse gets reblogged not just by toxic pits of misogynist, delusional bullshit like thewoesofyaoi, but also by seemingly reasonable fans. Hell, I’m pretty sure I used to suffer from this problem myself: I remember a time when I felt like I, as a bisexual woman, liked slash better, differently, and more correctly than straight women did.

I no longer feel this way.

There are lots of reasons for caring about slash, some of which are just about the pretty, some of which are more about gender, and some of which are more about sexual orientation, but after seeing decades of arguments about who is allowed to like slash, I have come to the conclusion that none of them are valid. All of them are “Not like the other girls!” and hating on femaleness. Some of the fans who do this are female and some are not, but it all boils down to not feeling like women have a right to a voice.

And then there’s Halperin calmly asserting gay men’s right to self-expression!

It struck me like a bolt of lightning because it was so self-assured. He never doubts that there’s something valid and important about giving gay men space to explore their own emotional landscapes. Literal representation is important, sure, but so is the ability to make art that speaks to your insides, not just your outside, and that sometimes means allegorical, subtextual art played out in bodies unlike your own.

“Fetishization” a la Tumblr often means writing stories with explicit sex or liking ships because they’re hot. Sometimes, it means writing kinks that are seen as dark or unusual. Frankly, this sort of fujocourse boils down to thinking that sex and desire are dirty and that m/m sex is the dirtiest of all. I do write some ~dark~ kinks in my fic because, for one thing, I’m a kinky person in real life, and for another, I often use fic to explore the experience of having dark thoughts and wondering what that says about me.

A lot of slash writers are exploring feelings of victimization. Another big chunk of us explore things like rape fantasies from the bottom: maybe we have and maybe we haven’t experienced assault in real life, but for all of us, having that kind of rape fantasy brings up questions of whether we’re asking for it, whether it’s okay to be into that kind of thing, whether it means something. Another chunk of us are exploring a different kind of “bad” thoughts: feelings of aggression, violence, dominance. In my own work, I’m interested in sadists and how they come to terms with their desires, but I think slash is also often a way to explore any sort of violent, dark feeling, not just rape fantasies from the top. Society tells us women aren’t allowed to have dark thoughts–hell, that we’re not capable of impulses that dark. Sometimes, it’s easier to write even a relatively banal action story about a male action hero because he, in canon, is allowed to have the feelings and impulses that interest the writer.

The fujocourse is all about saying that women aren’t allowed to have dark impulses ever. That we’re not allowed to be horny. That we’re not allowed to enjoy art for the sake of an orgasm. When we depict people not precisely like ourselves, we’re overstepping. When we make art for our own pleasure instead of devoting our lives to service, we are toxic and bad. Any time. Every time.

It’s just another round of saying that women’s pleasure is not valid and women’s personal space should not be respected. No hobbies for you: only motherhood.

And yet that’s not actually what most slash fans think. I was heartened to read Lucy Neville’s Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica. A friend read it recently and was trying to guess which quotes were from me. I have to admit, I was playing that game too! I honestly couldn’t tell, until I looked at demographic info, that some could not have been mine. They sounded so familiar. On Tumblr, I tend to wade into meta discussions, so I see a lot of loud, divisive views. I especially see a lot of views that, over time, make me start to wonder if I’m a crazy outlier. Intellectually, I know that this is all down to bad curation of my dash and a love of browsing the meta tags. I didn’t realize how much it had crept up on me unconsciously–how much I had started to feel like I had to justify and explain the most basic and common experiences of being a slash fan.

What was interesting about Neville’s book is how alike many of the women sounded. Now, no one book represents everybody, and she makes no claims to have figured out the exact size or demographic breakdown of fandom. Her focus is on women who like m/m material, whether slash or porno movies or anything else. At the same time, though, she surveyed heaps of women, and the responses were amazingly similar. Nearly every quote in that book strikes a chord with me. Nearly all of them, with a few minor variations, could be something I’ve written. Gay, straight, bi, asexual: we all had many of the same things to say about slash and what it means to us.

So, some brief, and more digestible thoughts:

Slash is “overrepresented” in meta and scholarly literature because people still ask us to justify ourselves constantly.

People ask us to justify ourselves because they assume that “good representation” is literal representation.

There are key emotional, psychological aspects of our experiences that are often better expressed allegorically, whether we’re gay men doing drag or women writing slash or any other sort of artist.

Here are some choice quotes from Coppa. (I will restrain myself and not just try to quote the entire thing. Heh.)

“There are endless transmedia adaptations of characters like Sherlock Holmes or Batman, so it is clearly not appropriation that’s the issue: it is the appropriation by the other—by women, in this case.

One could argue then that it is our awareness of this appropriative doubleness—of the familiar characters acting in an unfamiliar script, of the female storyteller animating the male characters— that boots slash out of “literature,” with its illusions of psychological coherence (see Edwards’s Chapter 3 in this volume), and puts it instead into the category of performance, itself so often associated with the fake, the female, the forged, the queer. My argument in this chapter is that it might be useful to compare slash to other forms of appropriative performance; drag comes powerfully to mind and, more recently, the musical Hamilton. These are forms where it’s important to see the bothness, the overlaid and blurred realities: male body/Liza Minnelli; person of color/George Washington.”

“In his book How to Be Gay, David Halperin (2012) discusses the ongoing centrality of certain female characters to the gay male cultural experience and takes as his project an explanation of why gay men choose those particular avatars and what they make of them. Halperin argues that gay men use these female characters to articulate a gay male subjectivity which precedes and may in important ways be separate from a gay male sexual identity (or to put it another way, a boy may love show tunes before he loves men, or without ever loving men). The gay male appropriation of and perfor- mance of femininity effectively mirror—in the sense both of “reflect” and “reverse”—slash fiction’s preoccupations with and appropriations of certain (often hyper‐performatively) male characters in service of a female sensibility; in both cases, appropriation becomes a way of saying something that could not otherwise easily be said.”

“A character like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne speaks, obviously, to boys who are getting mixed messages about what successful manhood looks like in the twenty‐first century—it was hard enough in the old days to be Charles Atlas, but today you have to be Charles Atlas and Steve Jobs at the same time, which is a problem of time commitment just for a start. But these characters speak to women, too: differently. The doubled nature of the paired male characters taken up by slash fandom—these aliens, these costumed heroes, these men wearing man suits, men in male drag—make them appealing sites of identification for women, or proxy identities, to use Halperin’s (2012) term; that is, they provide “a metaphor, an image, a role” (185). They are sites of complex feeling.

But what these characters are metaphors for, what they make us feel, is not simple, singular, or easily reducible. Halperin takes hundreds of pages even to begin to excavate the complicated web of meanings around Joan Crawford; I am not going to be able to unpack any of these iconic male characters in a few paragraphs, and it is also the nature of fandom to build multiple and contradictory meanings around fan favorites (and to get into heated arguments over them).”

[In Halperin’s class] “Works that allowed gay men to be invisible were preferred to those where they were explicitly represented. “Non‐gay cultural forms offer gay men a way of escaping from their particular, personal queerness into total, global queerness,” Halperin (2012) writes. “In the place of an identity, they promise a world” (112). I would argue that slash offers something similar—that queer female space, as well as the ability to escape the outline of the identity that you are forced to carry every day—and that for gay men and slash fans both, the suggestion that you would restrict your identification to those characters with whom you share an identity feels limiting.”

“Visibility is a trap,” Phelan (2003) concludes, referencing Lacan (1978) (93): “it summons surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession”—and fans on the ground know this and talk about it in very nearly this language. Again, this is not to say that fans—or gay men, for that matter—do not want or deserve good representations: female fandom, slash fandom included, championed Mad Max: Fury Road, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, and the new, gender‐swapped Ghostbusters, all of which have multiple and complex female characters. Rather, I am arguing that representation does not substitute for the pleasure or power of invisibility; for, as even the most famously visible actors say, “But what I really want is to direct.”

#fandom meta #fandom first friday #fujocourse

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fatalism-and-villainy · 5 years

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miseriathome replied to your post “why is there all kinds of support for butch/butch couples, butches who...”

There's this weird precedent where femme identity can only be understood in relation to butch identity, since past discrimination of queer women positioned them as failing to fulfill the role of womanhood, and thus butch was an embracement of that abject womanhood, where femme was a way to undermine the butch default. But it doesn't make as much sense nowadays because we have cultural images to accommodate both expressions of queer womanhood

But I think it might be important to remember that being butch or a dyke was like… a lower class, often racialized position, whereas being femme/feminine/conforming to ideals of womanhood minus the heterosexuality was the position that lesbian homophiles/assimilationists took, ie being feminine was the MO of upper class white lesbians who didn’t care about any other queer people or their liberation, who just wanted to appeal to respectability politics, hence why it’s common to see some queer folks (especially QUEER queer, in the political sense) defend butchness way more than femmeness

mmm, I grok what you’re saying re: historical context, but I think maybe there’s several things going on, with the sort of broader social structures vs the more interpersonal, subcultural context of butch/femme relations? Like, I would say there’s a distinction between “femme existing in relation to butch” in terms of “being used as a means of achieving social respectability at the expense of the more visibly threatening portrait of queerness” and “being a means of articulating desire and sexual identity outside of mainstream guidelines, within community contexts” - the second referring ofc to the lesbian bar scenes that everyone loves to bring up in butch/femme discourse.

Like, I feel as though people for whom the “butch=desiring femmes; femme=desiring butches” framework is more salient are still willing to separate butch from that, and see it as being about the individual and their self-conception/embodiment/what have you, but aren’t willing to do the same for femme? It always seems as though the two contexts of femme identity are kind of elided as a way of dangling accountability for the very real historical manifestations of respectability politics, structurally oppressive crap etc. over femmes’ heads, so that any kind of femme self-identity that isn’t properly butch-centric gets scrutinized and accused of perpetuating these things simply for existing. We make fun of the “femmes being expected to perform emotional labour” takes, and for often good reason (very shallow, “masculinity is always privileged” style understandings of gender dynamics), but this undertone of “if you’re femme because it makes YOU feel fulfilled and not because you Love Butches then what are you even doing” really makes me uncomfortable. (And I’m not even femme!)

That said, idk if I agree with you about “nowadays we have cultural images to accommodate both expressions of queer womanhood” - I think that’s very dependent on place/social context? And what exactly one means by “accommodation”? (“Butch is too stereotypical” is still invoked, so clearly the respectability politics haven’t gone away.)

Re: race, I’ve also seen femmes of colour expressing these sorts of “femme4femme” desires that get mocked, who see their identity as a reclamation of something they’re felt shut out of by white-centric beauty standards or queer community norms, and who talk about specifically racialized backlash they’ve gotten for being femme. So that’s where some of my understanding of these dynamics is coming from. I’ve also definitely seen plenty of politically capital Q Queer people who are much more defensive of femmes, so.

#miseriathome #replies

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scumbagbaker · 3 years

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Amen || Irish AU

He didn’t believe in God. Not that he ever had, but he understood the urge to, during recovery. It was tempting, the idea of some higher power that saw everything, that held them accountable, that knew the truth no matter what they proclaimed at the start of meetings. Benjy kept his head bowed and his eyes open during the prayer, just enough to look like he was going along with it all, nothing more, nothing less.

The same concept wasn’t applied to recovery itself. He’d taken to the 12 steps like a duck to water. No, that wasn’t quite right. He’d taken to the 12 steps like an animal that had spent its entire life in a zoo, who finally got to see real grass without bars for the first time. Sobriety had given him a freedom he didn’t know was possible. the idea of that cage surrounding him again was enough motivation to stay sober, with or without any kind of God.

Benjy feels his three year sober chip in his wallet as he sits on the train, his stomach souring with dread as the scenery gets more and more familiar. Three years sober, as of 29 days ago. Two and a half years single, since Ollie liked vodka more than him, and now, despite his success as a sober person, Benjy had come to the step he’d been dreading.

Amends.

Benjy stares at the piece of paper in his hands, tracing over the unfamiliar address with his thumb. He lets his mind wander, lets his thoughts creep into the darkness that’s always there on the edge of his consciousness-what would their address be if he had stayed? Would he had been able to give them a house in Foxrock? He doubts it. Benjy thinks of the sometimes pitifully thin envelopes he’d sent, without fail, every single one of those hundreds of weeks since he’d left. He could’ve gotten them something, at least, maybe, if he’d been able to keep it together. If he could’ve been a fraction of what they had deserved.

He’d told his sponsor, a grizzled old Scot named Al, nearly everything. How’d he’d slipped out early in the morning, how they’d both been asleep in the bed next to him. How she’d woken up, just a little, and that Benjy had told her he’d been right back.

It wasn’t the first time he’d lied to Cleona, not by a long shot, but Benjy couldn’t think of a lie that hurt more.

And now, 5 years, 8 months and 13 days later, he was finally turning his lie into the truth.

He’d called the bar three times, hanging up out of fear the first two. When the “Hello?” was softer than the two before it, Benjy faced his fear and spoke.

“Killian?”

Benjy hears his former best friend suck in a quick breath.

“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve.”

“I know.”

“What do you want?”

Benjy fights the urge to hang up again.

“I’m-in the program. I need to-I have to tell her I’m sorry, Kili. In person. And Shay too. Don’t you think they deserve that?”

Benjy, though he didn’t and still doesn’t believe in God, found himself praying in the silent crackle of the phone line.

“She moved on, you know.”

He hadn’t known. Not fully. There’d been a tiny, stupid, egotistical part of him that had hoped-

“As she should’ve. And-”

Benjy fights the lump in his throat to get his son’s name out.

“Seamus? Does he-?”

“Mate. You left before he was one.”

Killian’s voice isn’t accusatory, Benjy could deal with accusations. What he couldn’t handle was what was in his should have been brother-in-law’s voice; pity.

Whether the pity was there because Benjy had missed out on so much or because he was stupid enough to think his son would remember him, Benjy wasn’t sure.

“Right, right. Yeah. I-I’m moving back to town next month. Gotta take care of some stuff with my mum. And I figured she wasn’t still at uh, the cottage, but I was wondering...could you tell me where she’s staying?”

“What’s going on with your mum?” Killian says, suddenly wary. Benjy’s mom was just as nasty and cruel as any of the women in the neighborhood they’d grown up in. The fact that she hated Irish people was just a fun little bonus that further alienated Benjy’s already alienated ass.

“She died.” Benjy says flatly, no emotion in his voice.

“Oh.”

This is when normal people would apologize, but Killian knew Benjy enough to know not to waste his breath. Still, if his mum had been good for anything other than a genetic predisposition to substance abuse, maybe her death would give Benjy just enough sympathy...

“Alright.”

Benjy could continue falling into his own memory, but the train whistle sounds and the world outside starts slowing down. He gathers his secondhand, single suitcase from the overhead compartment. It contains two pairs of jeans, six pairs of pants, two plaid shirts, four black t shirts, four white t shirts, the suit he’d bought himself when he turned eighteen, nine pairs of socks, three photographs, paperwork from his mum’s estate lawyer, two dozen packs of cigarettes, and, the cumulation of three years of sober, sweaty work: €18,358.45

The cash took up most of the space, so Benjy reckons his suit is properly wrinkled now. He pulls his wool lined jean jacket closer around his shoulders as he exits the train heads towards the station doors. It was early April, the weekend after her birthday but Benjy tries to pretend like he doesn’t remember that. He pulls the black stocking cap down further over his ears, wishing he’d worn three of his flannels over his black t shirt instead of two. His yellow converse were nearly brown now, and Benjy is just thankful he doesn't have to open his umbrella before he hails his taxi.

The driver does a double take when Benjy gives him the address-clearly he isn’t the usual faire of that neighborhood, but he just nods at him and starts to dig in his bag for enough money to cover the cost without looking obvious. Once he’s achieved that, Benjy stares out the window, watching as the buildings surrounding them get nicer and nicer. They pause at an intersection with an empty storefront, and Benjy stares at his reflection in the window. He should’ve gotten a haircut, the curls on his neck were peaking out from under his hat, making his hair dangerously close to a mullet. He had at least managed to shave off his mustache, terrified of looking too visibly queer in front of someone who, a lifetime ago, had introduced him to his first queer friends. He looks odd without it, he decides. Somehow too young and too old all at once-though Benjy supposes that is how he feels. He’s still not entirely sure how he’d managed to make it to twenty-five, and, dully, he wonders if he’ll be strong enough to make it to thirty.

The dullness turns back to dread when the cab parks. Benjy has half a mind to tell him to forget it, or to keep it running, certain that whoever answers that door will have him thrown out at once. But, wordlessly, Benjy hands the bills forward and gets out of the cab, standing and staring up at the gorgeously expensive house in front of him even after it drives away.

Benjy takes a breath, his hand slipping into his pocket to fiddle with his 3 years chip. Al had found him a group to go while he was in town, staying at his mum’s “house” that Benjy was pretty sure wasn’t outfitted for regular heating, but facing the near homelessness he’d grown up with again was going to be rough. It was going to be too much, Benjy knew, if Cleona opened the door only to slam it in his face.

If she refused to see him, Benjy was going right back to the train station and getting a ticket back to London. Even if that meant...

Could he come all this way and not see his son? Was he such a coward that he’d run away a second time? Maybe then Benjy would wait until Seamus was old enough to deck him properly. Or maybe, Benjy can meet his dad the same time Seamus meets him.

Benjy is able to move his suitcase out of the way just in the nick of time as he violently vomits into the storm drain at his feet. Two impossibly polished women pushing prams give him the side eye from across the street. Benjy waves, for some stupid reason, and calls out “bad salad!” because, clearly, that explained projectile vomiting in a neighborhood where the benches cost more than everything he’s ever owned.

Benjy closes his eyes. He pictures his son, the hole in his heart, in his life. He pictures the thousands of versions of Shay he had spent the past 2,078 days missing. He repeats it to himself, the mantra he’s told no one about.

“I am the cycle breaker, I will make amends. I am the cycle breaker, I will make amends.”

Benjy sucks in a breath and opens the gate, heading up the front walk to the impressive house. He wasn’t sure where Cleona stood on God, but he hoped with a hope he had no business having that she believed in second chances.

#drabble #irish

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blue-slates · 7 years

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Just a few Mass Effect Andromeda thoughts. Also a bit of a rant cos my words always escape me. TLDR; MEA had problems in almost all areas, but in the end - towards the end - I enjoyed it.

Aaaand I finished MEA, and y’know what? I enjoyed it, in the end. Like I’m glad I didn’t pay full price for it, but I am glad I got it. But a part of em feels like I enjoyed it despite it, not because it was especially great. There were good moments - great ones even - and things that surprised me, but the troubled development showed in a lot of places, and especially for the first half (but really all through the game) there were instances that I felt like the devs didn’t care.

I’m usually very forgiving about story quality, and my suspension of disbelief is pretty strong - I’m always of the mind, if it’s fun or interesting, I can let it slide - but as a person who finds it easier to point out the flaws in anything (>_>;;) there were a few moments that struck me as not making sense an being plain bad. Alec’s death being brushed off pretty much as soon as it happened, Alec somehow having biotics despite being WAY too old, your sibling being put into a coma before you even see them outside of the character creator. The weird - can I call it sexism? Gender stereotyping? whatever - personality things going on with the Ryder twins (because men don’t have emotions or cry or anything and women are more emotional and brainy). Cora’s entire arc?? just felt so ????, Gil’s “storyline” is a horrific mess, the secrets of the Angara, kett and remnant felt like a rehash of the OT. The amount of bullshit and horror that a 22 year old kid had to go through, and the game treats it like business as usual. Why does peebee proposition you no matter what?? Weren’t my responses and choices towards my squaddies supposed to have some effect? I pushed her off and never flirted with her? Why?? (I know why btw >:I)

But, as with any bioware game really, I enjoyed the character moments, as scarce as they felt sometimes. I enjoyed that characters talked to each other more, and the banter in the nomad was a great choice. And frankly I got this game for Jaal’s romance with BroRyder. Those were my favourite bits and ultimately what was getting me through the game, and when I think I really started to more fully enjoy the game. Shallow? Eh, maybe. I can say with full confidence I wouldn’t have bought this game at all if not for patch 1.08 But I’ll give MEA that win, with a few caveats. I don’t fully feel like the Tempest is the family the game tried to sell - there were certainly times where I felt the characters didn’t understand who Ryder actually was and what they needed, perhaps because I often felt like I was fighting the game to actually roleplay and have Ryder be an actual human being who developed during the story (he didn’t, I just ended up making him flat in a different direction out of frustration. SO many times I was pulled out of the experience by what came out of his mouth.)

MEA’s biggest failing was, I feel, the emotional weight of the story it wanted to tell. There’s something stagnant about the tone; there are horrible and sad things that happen before and during the game that weren’t fully explored because MEA wanted to keep the tone light. There’s no way to actually portrayed Ryder as being vulnerable by all the things they’ve gone through, nothing that allows them to process things, no moments of uncertainty, or really any failures. Sacrifices, yeah, but when we have to succeed at so many things otherwise the story suffers, nothing feels earned. A hopeful story needs hardships - fully realised and explored hardships - for a happy ending to have weight.

And, because beating dead horses is but, but goddamn it’s important to me, I’m not going to forget the marketing, the queer baiting, the fact the before a patch, Gil and Reyes (2 NPCs, one on the tempest who has a shoehorned baby plot that DOES NOT belong that gives more focus to a side character (a double side character, because lets admit it Gil’s a side character. He’s defs treated like one. If Suvi and Vetra are his girls, why don’t we see them actually interact? Delete Jill and replace her with people who actually care about him!) and one off planet who you have to side with (by letting him assassinate someone) to get the full conclusion of his romance) were my only options as a gay man playing a gay male Ryder (also again. No way for Peebee to just not hit on you?? I have to ignore her for 50+ hours until I lock in someone else??? Is gaydar not a thing in Mass Effect, not an omnitool app or???) I’m glad that wlw got more visibility in main and minor characters (but lets not forget why that happened, Mass Effect ) but I’m still freaking mad that gay dudes get one codex entry, a bury your gays trope, Gil’s baby disaster (And goddamn I condemned Gil to a horrible fate and I’ll never forgive that “you obviously love Jill” dialogue choice. That specifically can seriously fuck right off) and Reyes, who’s dashing rogue persona is... unfortunate (to put it lightly). This game was bad to gay men, and I’ll never fully forgive that.

Just, this game has been so hard to love, or even like, but I feel like I got there despite everything that happened with this game, maybe simply because I wanted to. I at least feel like I didn’t waste my time playing it in the end. So yeah, this was probably not at all coherent, but these are my thoughts.

#Mass Effect #sorry it's going in the tags #there's a reason why my playing MEA tag is #Blank becomes increasingly annoyed at MEA

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blackbird-brewster · 7 years

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I had two profound experiences today, extremely unrelated in context but both thought provoking after the fact. The first experience had to do with me getting my first library card in 18 years and how I was very anxious to go into the library for any reason other than to print something. I will detail this experience in a different post but long story short, all of the embarrassment and shame I felt because of my learning disability melted away and I ended up spending nearly two hours just browsing books. I left feeling to included and happy, I actually cried tears of joy. Fast forward to the second notable experience of my day. Tonight I went on a date with my flat mate to “Naked Girls Reading: The Feminist Propaganda Edition”. Naked Girls Reading is apparently a sort of “brand”, started in the US as a protest against the ways women’s bodies are usually sexualized when naked. The theory is exactly what it sounds like, performers are completely nude and read aloud to the audience. I had never heard of this amazing concept, so I jumped at the invitation. ESPECIALLY since tonight’s theme was feminism. I figured naked women reading feminist works sounded AUHMAZING. [Rest behind a cut for length and transphobia]

The event was hosted by a popular personality in the New Zealand LGBTQPIA scene. They are a self labeled transvestite that MC’s events as their drag king persona, Hugo Grrrl. I assumed, if it was hosted by a gender diverse person it was going to be fairly inclusive. Welp, you know what they say about assuming.

Things started promising as Hugo opened their monologue with my favorite greeting “Guys, gals and nonbinary pals”. Hugo then went on to talk about some of the topics of the night including body positivity, body hair, porn, sex work, sex positivity, etc. It sounded really exciting and inter-sectional, I was pumped.

Within the ten minute monologue there was also the disclaimer that “Although this is called “Naked Girls Reading”, gender is a spectrum and the binary is bullshit.” (woo, yeah!!) ”...We only call it that because it was started in America and we didn’t come up with the name.” (Wait, what?)

Ok... but you could literally just call it “Naked People Reading” or “Naked Folx Reading” or ANYTHING else if you want to TRULY be inclusionary. I wasn’t even concerned about the title UNTIL Hugo made the point to say gender binary is bullshit... but then to say “meh, we didn’t come up with the title we’re just being complacent in it” Was sort of shitty. If you are trying to include people, then INCLUDE them. Don’t say “Hey I’m not transphobic, BUT....” There was no point of this disclaimer other than to point out you recognized a problem but would rather go along with it than change one word of the title of the show. Things only went down hill from there. A few minutes later as Hugo was wrapping up the monologue they wanted to get the crowd pumped before introducing the performers for the evening. To do this, Hugo had “all the women cheer!” (which they did) then followed by “now all the men!” (which they did). It turned out it was just a set up to make the men a punchline of a very stereotypical “feminist hate men” joke. These jokes are always obnoxious and yes, I recognize Hugo was trying to connect to the large feminist audience so we could all laugh at how society views us...but again, we were back at only acknowledging the gender binary.

Now I realize many people right now will think I’m being extremely cynical. “Kit, you can’t say someone is being trans exclusionary if they are a queer that self identifies as a transvestite!” But I can because they were. If you are going to mention nonbinary people. If you are going to make a point of talking about how the binary is bullshit. If you want to have a disclaimer that gender is a spectrum. It’s ALL or nothing. Inclusion isn’t “I acknowledged you, you should be happy” it’s “I acknowledged you AND included you with everyone else as if we’re all the same.

The monologue is over, I am properly uncomfortable and agitated, the performers come out. From the promises of topics, I expected diversity. Again, that nasty assuming sure got the better of me.

Instead I get two skinny women and one average sized woman. They all appear to be white (although one was painted head to toe in blue and pink body paint as a My Little Pony...and later I learned she isn’t actually white.) They’re naked. So I can tell body hair isn’t really happening. A bit of bush but perfectly smooth everywhere else. All have shoulder length or longer hair and present very feminine. Idk, again, maybe I was just so cynical by this point that I let my critic get away with me. I just wonder how hard it would be to find a more diverse cast? Am I just too deep in tumblr culture to expect to see different size bodies at a feminist reading? Or people with actual body hair, especially since there was a point of mentioning it in the monologue? Tattoos? Scars? Short hair? Disabilities? More racial diversity? (Again, the one woc was painted blue. And I feel shitty for thinking she was white but they could have included dark skinned people too.) Introductions are done. The de-robing has happened. We now have three naked women sitting on a couch. Let’s read “feminist propaganda”! Some pretty typical stuff, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, big names of the feminist movement. There was a reading of an MRA’s post from some MRA website. (Why are we giving MRA’s an audience at a FEMINIST reading?!) Intermission. During intermission, I got up the courage to go speak to Hugo and mention why I was peeved at the start of the show with the women/men division of the audience. They shrugged and said “well it was a set up to a punch line” I smiled and replied, “I realize that but don’t you think trans folks are the punch line enough?” They tried to back track but it got awkward and I walked away. Hugo does some “feminist” trivia during the break. Throwing prize bags of tampons and chocolate to whoever shouts the correct answer.

One question asks what does “SWERF” stand for. A woman yells the answer and Hugo repeats it back to the audience and says “Sex work exclusionary feminism isn’t feminism. Sex work is real work!” It would have been so easy to also educate about TERFs. They don’t. The irony is not lost on me.

More trivia. I win one. I’m told, “Here enjoy these tampons!” I catch it and yell back, “Not all women have vaginas” I turn to the women at our table and say, “Hello, I don’t need tampons and I hate chocolate. Enjoy” They gladly accept. Back to the readings... A dramatic reading of Spice Girl lyrics. Some very heteronormative erotica. A reading of a radfem manifesto of the 70s (that included very acephobic commentary) And then, the woman painted as a MLP says she’s going to read Ivan E Coyote. Now, for those of you who haven’t been blessed with reading their works or seeing Ivan perform (I just saw them again last week!), they are a trans writer from Canada. Very well known in LGBTQPIA circles. AMAZINGLY pure and moving stories and poems and “literary Doritos”. They are an amazing human being and have quickly become one of my favorite queer authors. SO I AM STOKED!! This night has been so cishet heavy and I’m crank, I am READY to end it with Ivan. Ivan has written four of five books, has mountains of published poetry and she chooses to read a piece that is so personal to me. She prefaces this with a quick word about Ivan being an LGBTQ author. But fails to mention they’re a trans masculine person who identifies as a Tom Boy. The piece starts out as a love letter to femmes who are often erased from Queer culture because they are “assumed” to be straight. But then turns to Ivan’s journey through figuring out they were trans and how they became jealous of femmes sometimes and how they will never be seen as who they are. How they will always be coming out of the closet over and over and over. Because their identity isn’t “visibly recognized” because it’s outside the binary. I sob every time I hear this poem because it is so personal to me. The first time I heard it was when Ivan performed in Chch last August. I was in the midst of struggling with how the world saw me and this poem touched a part of me I thought no one would <i>ever</i> understand. I sobbed again tonight. My flat mate patted my hand. She sobbed too for the same reasons. The journey to figuring out your identity can be so isolating, terrifying and lonely. But when you hear your story being told by someone who is on a stage, with an audience, talking as if your journey was the most normal and natural experience....it’s an emotional time. After she finished, the performer stated “As a cis woman, I obviously do not identity with the narrator. I do however think this poem speaks to me as a femme. Because we are often overlooked.” (This gets cheers from the audience) I feel sick inside. This cis woman just spoke the very personal words of a trans person bearing their soul and claimed it as a poem for her. No. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to bend it to your whim. If you want to include poetry or stories about the trans experience, YOU FUCKING INCLUDE TRANS PERFORMERS. Thank god the night was over. My flat mate and I are sitting at our table deciding how to make our own event called “Naked Queers Reading” and how much better it would be. We’re minding our own business when out of the corner of my eye I see a crowd around the stage area. Of course. There’s a man who has taken off his shirt to pose with the naked women so he can get his buddy to take his picture. Of fucking course there is. That’s when we left. I don’t know if I am just lucky to live in such a comfortable Queer circle of friends that I’ve become blind to the world of heternormative, patriarchal bullshit or if I am truly too fucking cynical to go out in public...but fuck was I disappointed with tonight. Anyway, if you made it through this entire post, thank you. I promise I’ll post a really lovely story about the library tomorrow. Right now I want to watch Ivan E Coyote performances on YouTube and drink my tea from my Unicorn Elixer mug.

#long post #feminism #tw: transphobia #nonbinary #transgender #about me 2k17 #story time #/rant

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moritzstiefelwiki · 7 years

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Yooo for the detailed headcanon meme would u mind doing like... all the ones ure able to for Hanschen? Like feel free to skip as many as u want but itd be cool to hear ur thoughts on my Best Boy

Um? Little Hansy Rilow? Jackass Extraordinaire? Love of my life? Ofc I’ll do as many as I can!! Thanks so much for sending these! I hope you like them and I’m sorry they took me so long! (Also I answered these out of order and towards the end I was running a bit low on steam so there are some answers that are Not So Good mixed in there, sorry)

Under the cut or on Ao3 here :)

1. What does their bedroom look like?

I think for the most part it would be tidy. Bed made, desk (mostly) clear, etc. He’s got some laundry on the floor, a couple of books lying about, and his jacket as well as his school things are never put away but everything else is in it’s place.

His desk is by the window so he can make good use of natural light and It’s usually got assignments for school on it as well as whatever books might go along with them when he’s not using it.

He keeps a small collection of books in his room- his favourites. Whatever he’s currently reading is kept on his bedside table and everything else is stacked by his desk but they should be on the shelf in the living room.

He’s a nerd.

2. Do they have any daily rituals?

I don’t think he would, not outside what he needs to do (school). Not unless you count him monologuing while he masturbates as a ritual, I have a feeling that’s a daily thing.

3. Do they exercise, and if so, what do they do? How often?

He does not, he would much rather lounge somewhere comfy with something he finds enjoyable. A book, a person, a puzzle, etc.

4. What would they do if they needed to make dinner but the kitchen was busy?

I can see him being like “Everybody, get out of my way” (This is meant to be read in John Mulaney’s voice from the thing where he followed this with something like “I’m just here to feed my birds”) but I can also see him just clearing enough space for himself and getting to work. I guess it depends on who’s in the kitchen making what and what he’s going to be making. He’s not going to be interrupting someone that’s making cake or pastries just so he can cut vegetables in peace.

5. Cleanliness habits (personal, workspace, etc.)

His parents/governess were somewhat strict about cleanliness when he was a child so he makes an effort to keep himself well groomed, especially when adults are present. No dirt under his fingernails, his clothes and hair are neat etc. He’s less concerned about it when he’s with the other boys and even less when he’s relaxing, either by himself or with Ernst, but he still somewhat pays attention to how much dirt he’s getting on himself or how much work it will take him to make himself look properly presentable before he finds himself around adults again.

I think I got into workspace okay with his bedroom? He’s mostly tidy because he has to be, any disorder in his room can easily be taken care of.

6. Eating habits and sample daily menu

I think he would love sweet things (candy, fruit, berries, etc) and he’s always a slut for baked goods. I have no idea what kind of things ppl usually ate in 1890′s Germany.

7. Favorite way to waste time and feelings surrounding wasting time

He only really considers time wasted if he’s not spending it on something he likes to do or needs to do. So he has no favourite way to waste time, he only feels as though he’s wasting time if he’s bored out of his mind for no good reason.

8. Favorite indulgence and feelings surrounding indulging

Ernst. It really isn’t safe for him to be smooshing booties in a vineyard with another boy but? He’s doing it. And being all poetic about it too ofc, he really likes Ernst.

If he can indulge he will, he loves it. Life’s too short to deny himself pleasure, so long as said pleasure doesn’t harm him and/or get in the way of him becoming a millionaire.

9. Makeup?

None. I can see him maybe trying, or at least wanting to try makeup at some point? Never with anyone around or if there was a chance of someone catching him though. (I’m a sucker for boys in makeup tho and I think modern Hanschen would enjoy makeup. If u want to hear a bit more abt that u know how 2 contact me)

10. Neuroses? Do they recognize them as such?

Neurotypical Hans™

11. Intellectual pursuits?

Literature and languages. He loves reading, loves diving into a book and analyzing characters, plot, symbolism, all of it. He loves talking about them as well, he could talk for hours about his favourites. He’s fascinated by other languages and speaks a handful rather fluently as an adult. He probably also enjoys reading the same book but translated into different languages because no translation is exact and it’s always interesting to see a slightly different take on things.

I can also see him having interest in biology? Because science is fascinating and it’s amazing how diverse and intricately designed living things can be.

12. Favorite book genre?

He talks about the books he likes when he’s jerking off so I don’t think I really need to get into that lmao

13. Sexual Orientation? And, regardless of own orientation, thoughts on sexual orientation in general?

Multisexual. Bi/pan/ply/whatever. A pretty person is a pretty person & all that.

I think he might see the idea of sexual orientation as a little silly or perhaps performative? He understands that he’s expected to only like women and knows that once he’s older he’ll be expected to marry one, to have children etc etc. So for the most part he keeps his attraction to men to himself (Ernst being a very obvious exception, likely not the only one but it’s not something he would ever reveal lightly) and he thinks that most people are doing the same in order to avoid being judged negatively by their community.

Something along the lines of “everyone is only acting like they’re exclusively attracted to the opposite sex because it’s what’s seen as normal. They don’t want everyone else to point fingers at them calling them sinners and sexual deviants and condemning them to hell so they deny themselves half the beauty the world has to offer. For this same reason, they’re quick to attack anyone around them who might be revealed as queer. They’re so focused on keeping their own secret safe that they never realize everyone around them is keeping exactly the same one.”

14. Physical abnormalities? (Both visible and not, including injuries/disabilities, long-term illnesses, food-intolerances, etc.)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

15. Biggest and smallest short term goal?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

16. Biggest and smallest long term goal?

Biggest: “When I am amillionaire”Smallest: I don’t think he has any small goals tbh ?

17. Preferred mode of dress and rituals surrounding dress

I’m not rly sure what this one’s asking tbh?? He likes looking nice tho.

18. Favorite beverage?

Hot chocolate

19. What do they think about before falling asleep at night?

Have you prayed tonight, Desdemona?

(I think a recurring theme would be his future- what he wants, what he can get, how he can get it etc.)

20. Childhood illnesses? Any interesting stories behind them?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

21. Turn-ons? Turn-offs?

I’m stickin 2 sex ones bc otherwise it’s Too Vague and stresses me tf out tbh

Turn-ons: hair pulling, necking (he loves hickies but he’s strict about not having any that might be visible), being straddled, nice thighs, a good ass, little gasps and moans, begging

Turn-offs: bad kissing, poor hygiene, not listening to/paying attention to his feedback, going too fast (Mr. “half-closed eyes, half-open mouths, and turkish draperies” would Def love foreplay and teasing,, trying to skip right over it is? A no.)

22. Given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and nothing to do, what would happen?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

23. How organized are they? How does this organization/disorganization manifest in their everyday life?

See 1

24. Is there one subject of study that they excel at? Or do they even care about intellectual pursuits at all?

See 11 (he’s pretty good at everything tho)

25. How do they see themselves 5 years from today?

Long dead because it’s 2017, but 5 years from the show he probably sees himself in university.

26. Do they have any plans for the future? Any contingency plans if things don’t workout?

I don’t know what his plans would be but I’m sure he’s got some cushy career in mind that he wants to work towards. He’s a Rilow, he doesn’t need a backup plan.

27. What is their biggest regret?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

28. Who do they see as their best friend? Their worst enemy?

Ernst. His worst enemy is probably whoever is second in the class rankings, if you go by the play. Melchior in the musical. Little Hans is In It To Win It.

29. Reaction to sudden extrapersonal disaster (eg The house is on fire! What do they do?)

His brain shuts down for a minute and then he realizes that yes, this is happening and oh dear god I need to get out of here. He tries (and fails) to give the impression that he is calm, cool, and collected but he’s doing pretty good for someone who is screaming internally as loudly as he is.

30. Reaction to sudden intrapersonal disaster (eg close family member suddenly dies)

He just keeps going. He tries to act like everything is fine, to show that he’s strong. The second he’s alone he deflates. He’s depressed af but does everything he can to hide it.

31. Most prized possession?

I’m not sure what exactly, but it’s something fancy and adult that makes him feel sophisticated. He won’t admit how much he loves it though.

32. Thoughts on material possessions in general?

👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌there👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my self 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠOOOOOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit

33. Concept of home and family?

He thinks of it as faintly ridiculous.

“Why are these people somehow more important than others simply because you share blood? Shouldn’t the value of your relationship with someone have more to do with how well you get along and care for each other? What’s the point of marriage, you put on a show so you can have children as you’re expected to and this absurd cycle repeats with your children and so on.”

34. Thoughts on privacy? (Are they a private person, or are they prone to ‘TMI’?)

He greatly values his privacy, he usually only shares exactly as much information as is necessary. Unless he trusts you, in which case he doesn’t s hut the fu ck u p

35. What activities do they enjoy, but consider to be a waste of time?

See 7

36. What makes them feel guilty?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

37. Are they more analytical or more emotional in their decision-making?

Analytical for the most part. He knows what he wants out of life and what he needs to do to put him on the path to getting it. I feel like he operates with a mindset a bit like “people can leave you but things are forever” and so he’s pretty okay with making decisions that hurt people (himself included) if it will benefit him financially, academically, raise his social status etc.

38. Would they consider themselves a Type A or Type B personality?

A? I don’t know tbh, my knowledge about this is limited to the 30 seconds I spent skimming the wiki article

39. What recharges them when they’re feeling drained?

Peace and quiet, being alone. Bonus points if he’s somewhere pretty and/or rly comfortable.

40. Would you say that they have a superiority-complex? Inferiority-complex? Neither?

I don’t feel I know enough about either to say lmao

41. How misanthropic are they?

He thinks people are ridiculous, h

ryan sent me a post abt dragon dicks which got me rambling abt this one furry i follow and. lowkey shattered my train of thought, I don’t remember what i was planing 2 say here and I’m too tired to start the Thought Translation Process over again lmao

42. Hobbies?

Reading, puzzles, Ernst, calligraphy,

43. How far did they get in formal education? What are their views on formal education vs self-education?

He completed university. The only real difference between formal education and self-education is if you have a diploma people will believe you when you say you know what you’re talking about.

44. Religion?

He’s whatever everyone else is. I don’t what religion everyone is in the show,, I don’t know shit abt religion tbh. But he believes in god, though he’s not as devout as everyone else.

45. Superstitions or views on the occult?

Foolish. Ridiculous. Absurd. Childish. He believes in them.

46. Do they express their thoughts through words or deeds?

Words mostly. He’s excellent with them and loves to talk and talk and talk.

47. If they were to fall in love, who (or what) is their ideal?

Ernst, probably. I don’t doubt that Hans loves him dearly but I don’t think he’s in love.

48. How do they express love?

He talks about milk.

I can’t think of anything lmao

49. If this person were to get into a fist fight, what is their fighting style like?

Tbh I can’t imagine him fighting. He probably just says something that pisses someone off and then gets knocked flat on his ass.

50. Is this person afraid of dying? Why or why not?

I don’t think so, I think he feels almost like. I don’t think invincible would be the right word, but he sees no reason to fear it at his age. Yes, Wendla and Moritz died, but he has no plans to kill himself and he can’t get pregnant so a botched abortion isn’t a threat to him. He’s in good health and he’s got his wits about him. What is there for him to be afraid of? He can worry about dying later.

#anon #answered #hc #hanschen #my writing #also tell me if i left something blank or dropped off mid sentence somewhere i think i finished all of them but im rly tired #but i might have missed something

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language-escapes · 7 years

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*cracks knuckles* Okay, so we’re doing this.

Let’s talk about Sherlock North.

Sherlock North is a new Holmesian adaptation that was announced yesterday. It is described as a contemporary crime fiction series, taking place in Finland during Holmes’ Hiatus. While on the run, he ends up solving some cases in a small town with the help of someone named Johanna Watson.

In the space of twenty-four hours, the tag is FULL of people saying it’s going to be awful, that it’s homophobic and engaging in ‘het-swapping’, that Watson being a woman is boring and overdone, etcetera etcetera. The entire tag is full of this. Twenty-four hours old, not even close to being filmed or produced, and the tag is full of people decrying it as bad.

I mean, we know NOTHING about this adaptation. There’s a Holmes, there’s a Watson, takes place during the Hiatus, that’s it. Boom. What the hell is there to hate yet?

Those of us who are veteran Elementary fans are familiar with this, of course. We’ve lived through this before, and still live through it because people continually fail to understand that if you’re ragging on something, you should avoid landing it in the tag. But let’s go ahead and address some of the things people are saying about Sherlock North. Let’s take a look at the claims and see if they hold any water.

Because Watson is a woman, it means that Holmes/Watson won’t be a homosexual pairing; that’s homophobic.

Come here. Sit down. I’m going to hold your hand through this, because this is going to hurt.

Holmes and Watson aren’t a canon gay pairing.

I wanted to say it quickly, like ripping a bandaid off. It’s going to hurt, it’s going to sting, but it also needed to be done. The truth of the matter is that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, in the original canon, aren’t a homosexual pairing. Now, we can certainly talk about how we interpret the text (I am a lifelong Holmes/Watson shipper; I will go down with that ship), and subtext, and coding, and all of these things, but the fact of the matter is that, in canon, Holmes and Watson are never actually written as romantically together. Again, in terms of subtext and the way we interpret it? Absolutely, it is easy to see them as being in love and so married and all. But it isn’t canon. It’s all interpretation.

What this means is that making Watson a woman is not, in itself, homophobic. They are not ‘het-swapping’ because neither character was written as explicitly gay. It’s just not possible. No one is removing a real homosexual relationship from the story.

I know, it fucking sucks that it’s 2017 and we’ve never had a mainstream media Holmesian production with an explicitly queer Holmes or Watson, LET ALONE an explicitly queer Holmes and Watson that are in a relationship together. I know that a lot of the people in the Sherlock North tag right now are angry, betrayed, bitter BBClock fans who thought that their show would make the subtext text, only to find that that didn’t happen. And it sucks, I get that. But that doesn’t make a totally different show homophobic. And being hurt doesn’t excuse lashing out at a show and making unfounded accusations when, again, it was literally announced twenty-four hours ago and we know nothing about it.

If this is your argument against Sherlock North, how about you go watch some adaptations with queer characters? How about The Adventures of Jamie Watson (and Sherlock Holmes), which is on youtube? In that show Watson is bi, and Holmes is ace, and a number of the supporting cast also have LGBTQ identities. Or S-her-lock, which can also be found on youtube. Watson is trans and Holmes is an aro-ace. I can recommend both of those adaptations wholeheartedly.

Watson as a woman is boring; a woman as the sidekick and help-meet, how original.

That’s primarily a matter of opinion, and you’re welcome to it, but I have to say, I’m offended on canon Watson’s behalf. That’s all you think Watson is? A sidekick? A help-meet? I know Holmes calls him that in canon, but it’s also Holmes who claims that all emotion is useless and then tries not to cry when Watson gets shot. I wouldn’t think of him as a reliable narrator, is all I’m saying.

And Watson as a sidekick is… I mean, I guess technically Watson COULD fit into that role, but that rather diminishes what a good Watson is. A good Watson is brave, and loyal, and stubborn, prone to a temper at times, clever, a full partner in the investigations, compassionate and insightful, generous, self-sacrificing… what I’m saying here is, if you read the canon and just saw Watson as a sidekick, I suggest you go read it again. And bring along the lenses that help you interpret the text as queer, because those lenses will definitely help you remember that narrators are often unreliable.

Watson as a woman is overdone.

Let’s see, in terms of mainstream media adaptations, I know of FIVE where Watson is a woman while Holmes is a man. FIVE. They are:

They Might Be Giants (1971), with Joanne Woodward playing Mildred Watson; The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective (1976), with Jenny O’Hara playing Joan ‘Doc’ Watson; The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1986), with Margaret Colin playing Jane Watson; 1994 Baker Street (1993), with Debrah Farentino playing Amy Winslow; and Elementary (2012-), with Lucy Liu playing Joan Watson.

Five women Watsons. If we expanded the selection to include women Watsons against women Holmeses in mainstream media… we have six. That sixth one is Russian, btw. Not sure how mainstream it actually is, given that it doesn’t even have a Western world release.

If that’s your idea of overdone, I hate to break it to you about men Watsons and men Holmeses…

They only ever make Watson a woman so that Holmes and Watson can be in a romantic relationship together without having to incorporate a gay romance- THAT’S homophobic!

See point one regarding the homophobia.

But in the adaptations where Watson is a woman, IS there always a romantic relationship between Holmes and Watson? Is this actually a thing? This is a rhetorical question, I know the answer- no, they’re not always a romantic item when Watson is a woman. In the most popular of the five adaptations above, They Might Be Giants, yes, Watson and Holmes are in a romantic relationship by the end. The film is a cult classic, so I can see why it has imprinted on everyone’s mind, and why the heterosexual-appearing (bisexuality is a thing! As is pansexuality! As is asexuality! Not all of these are visible from the outside!) relationship between a woman Watson and man Holmes is something everyone remembers.

But in the other four? One can maybe argue sexual chemistry in some of them (it would take some arguing, though; it’s more subtext than text), but there is no actual romantic relationship between Holmes and Watson. So if the creators of these productions made Watson a woman in order to have a romantic relationship with Holmes without queerness, they did a horrible job of it, because they forgot to actually include the romantic relationship.

(Fuck, those of us who watch Elementary just want Holmes and Watson to fucking HUG.)

Making Watson a woman isn’t progressive, it’s regressive; even if you get rid of the romantic relationship stuff, they often remove Watson’s key characteristics, like Watson being a doctor, or Watson being in the military.

Every single woman Watson is a doctor of some form. Some of them aren’t practicing doctors, it’s true; neither was canon Watson when we first meet him, and in the stories he doesn’t actually start practicing medicine again until after he marries Mary Morstan, which happened in ~1887/1888 (don’t get any Holmesian started about dates…). 1888 was a full seven years after he met Holmes. So even canon Watson, while having a medical degree, was not a doctor when we first meet him.

As for the military stuff… look. In the first place, in the US military, women couldn’t serve in combat until 2013. For the UK, restrictions on women in combat weren’t lifted until 2016 (though they could serve as combat medics and join other, technically non-combat groups). But in the second place, and more importantly, our canon Watson served in the imperialist, colonialist British military in the Victorian era, a deeply awful time when the military engaged in genocides. England is somewhat ashamed of that heritage, at least on some level (not on enough levels, of course, and not enough to get them to knock it off even now, but that’s neither here nor there). Why the fuck would we want Watson serving an imperialistic goal, especially if a show doesn’t have the time or resources or, hell, interest to unpack what all of that means? Very few shows can engage well in the complexities of military service, even ones ostensibly centered around them (*squints at NCIS*). Frankly, I’d rather my Watson not serve in the military this time around if it means not having to deal with showrunners struggling and failing to make sense of the military mindset.

(ETA: Winslow was with the Red Cross during the Panama invasion. Thanks @sanguinarysanguinity!)

(Disclaimer: my entire family is military; believe me when I say this shit is complex, and needs a lot of energy devoted to it to do it right.)

The name fucking sucks.

Well. I won’t argue with you there.

(Anybody know if this is just a translation of what the name is??? Because then I understand why it’s so bad. Is it just a working title?)

The sum up

Take a look at all of those complaints I listed. These are the complaints I saw over and over and over again when I went through the Sherlock North tag today. Are you sensing a theme here? Is there something in common with all of these arguments?

I want an explicitly queer Holmesian adaptation as much as the next H/W shipper. I dream of it. If someone gave me money to make my own adaptation, hells to the yeah would make them queer and in love.

But that doesn’t actually seem to be anyone’s main problem, to be honest. The main problem people seem to have is that Watson is a woman.

Someone can argue till they’re blue in the fact that the reason they’re upset about a woman Watson is because they want a gay Holmes and Watson relationship, but the fact of the matter is, we don’t have that relationship in any media, at all, and yet people still watch that media anyway. And you can certainly be sad about the potential for a gay relationship being gone. I do get that, and respect that.

(Sidebar: in the world of things I find hilarious is the fact that, in this adaptation, Holmes and Watson COULD BE a gay couple! They could be happily married! Because John Watson could be back in London, sad because his husband was killed by Moriarty because THIS TAKES PLACE DURING THE HIATUS. Johanna might be a totally separate character! Or Johanna IS our Watson, and Holmes didn’t know Watson before the Hiatus in this adaptation. You know why that’s a possibility? BECAUSE WE KNOW EXACTLY THREE THINGS ABOUT THIS ADAPTATION.)

But the hate? That’s some bullshit right there.

If your issue is that Sherlock North is yet another adaptation where Holmes and Watson won’t be a gay couple, I do understand that disappointment. I would also like to point out that just because Holmes and Watson won’t be a gay couple in Sherlock North doesn’t preclude queerness, so you will want to rephrase that argument. Watson could be a lesbian. Holmes could be ace. One or both could be bisexual. Remember that queerness is this whole big range of things. We don’t know enough about this production yet to say one way or another. Just remember that two white dudes touching isn’t the only way to be queer, and that disappointment over the lack of white dudes touching shouldn’t lead to woman-bashing.

And if a woman Watson is your issue you don’t need to worry. There are literally hundreds of other mainstream media adaptations with man Watsons. In some of them, there are barely any women at all! You can avoid women to your heart’s content.

Ultimately, most of the arguments against Sherlock North are just ridiculous. It may suck. It may be brilliant. But it doesn’t have a cast, or a production crew, or any fucking funding yet, so we literally know not a single thing other than a general, broad concept. So take a deep breath and step back. Go hate women elsewhere.

(You know what I would like to see? Some of this same outrage if Sherlock North ends up being a predominately white cast. But if it has a white cast, suddenly we’ll hear all about how Scandanavia is just so white, it only makes sense for the cast to be white… and if folks got upset about race problems, they’d need to examine their own favourite Holmesian adaptations more critically, and we all know that ain’t gonna happen. *sips tea*)

#sherlock north #sherlock holmes #my writing #jesus christ it's 2011 all over again #and elementary has just been announced #it's not actually like flashbacks because those are a thing #but damn people #learn something #i'm going to end up a fan of this thing #not on its own merits #but out of solidarity #can everyone please just fucking breathe jesus fucking christ #come at me bro #(i am perfectly willing to talk with anyone about this #antagonistic or otherwise #i don't play)#meta

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meeedeee · 7 years

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Westworld: (De)Humanising the Other RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

Warning: total spoilers for S1 of Westworld.

Trigger warning: talk of rape, sexual assault and queer death.

Note: Throughout this review, it will be necessary to distinguish between the writers of Westworld the TV show, and the writers employed in the narrative by the titular Westworld theme park. To avoid confusing the two, when I’m referring to the show, Westworld will be italicised; when referring to the park, I’ll use plain text.

This will be a somewhat bifurcated review of Westworld – which is, I feel, thematically appropriate, as Westworld itself is something of a bifurcated show. Like so much produced by HBO, it boasts incredible acting, breathtaking production values, intelligent dialogue, great music and an impeccably tight, well-orchestrated series of narrative reveals. Also like much produced by HBO, it takes a liberal, one might even say cartoonishly gratuitous approach to nudity, is saturated with violence in general and violence against women in particular, and has a consistent problem with stereotyping despite its diverse casting. In Westworld’s case, this latter issue is compounded as an offence by its status as a meta-narrative: a story which actively discusses the purpose and structure of stories, but which has seemingly failed to apply those same critiques to key aspects of its own construction.

The practical upshot is that it’s both frustratingly watchable and visibly frustrating. Even when the story pissed me off, I was always compelled to keep going, but I was never quite able to stop criticising it, either. It’s a thematically meaty show, packed with the kind of twists that will, by and large, enhance viewer enjoyment on repeat viewings rather than diminish the appeal. Though there are a few Fridge Logic moments, the whole thing hangs together quite elegantly – no mean feat, given the complexity of the plotting. And yet its virtues have the paradoxical effect of making me angrier about its vices, in much the same way that I’d be more upset about red wine spilled on an expensive party dress than on my favourite t-shirt. Yes, the shirt means more to me despite being cheaper, but a stain won’t stop me from wearing it at home, and even if it did, the item itself is easily replaced. But staining something precious and expensive is frustrating: I’ve invested enough in the cost of the item that I don’t want to toss it away, but staining makes it unsuitable as a showcase piece, which means I can’t love it as much as I want to, either.

You get where I’m going with this.

Right from the outset, Westworld switches between two interconnected narratives: the behind-the-scenes power struggles of the people who run the titular themepark, and the goings-on in the park itself as experienced by both customers and ‘hosts’, the humanoid robot-AIs who act as literal NPCs in pre-structured, pay-to-participate narratives. To the customers, Westworld functions as an immersive holiday-roleplay experience: though visually indistinguishable from real humans, the hosts are considered unreal, and are therefore fair game to any sort of violence, dismissal or sexual fantasy the customers can dream up. (This despite – or at times, because of – the fact that their stated ability to pass the Turing test means their reactions to said violations are viscerally animate.) To the programmers, managers, storytellers, engineers, butchers and behaviourists who run it, Westworld is, variously, a job, an experiment, a financial gamble, a risk, a sandpit and a microcosm of human nature: the hosts might look human, but however unsettling their appearance or behaviour at times, no one is ever allowed to forget what they are.

But to the hosts themselves, Westworld is entirely real, as are their pre-programmed identities. While their existence is ostensibly circumscribed by adherence to preordained narrative ‘loops’, the repetition of their every conversation, death and bodily reconstruction wiped from their memories by the park engineers, certain hosts – notably Dolores, the rancher’s daughter, and Maeve, the bordello madame – are starting to remember their histories. Struggling to understand their occasional eerie interviews with their puppeteering masters – explained away as dreams, on the rare occasion where such explanation is warranted – they fight to break free of their intended loops, with startling consequences.But there is also a hidden layer to Westworld: a maze sought by a mysterious Man in Black and to which the various hosts and their narratives are somehow key. With the hosts exhibiting abnormal behaviour, retaining memories of their former ‘lives’ in a violent, fragmented struggle towards true autonomy, freedom and sentience, Westworld poses a single, sharp question: what does it mean to be human?

Or rather, it’s clearly trying to pose this question; and to be fair, it very nearly succeeds. But for a series so overtly concerned with its own meta – it is, after all, a story about the construction, reception and impact of stories on those who consume and construct them – it has a damnable lack of insight into the particulars of its assumed audiences, both internal and external, and to the ways this hinders the proclaimed universality of its conclusions. Specifically: Westworld is a story in which all the internal storytellers are straight white men endowed with the traditional bigotries of racism, sexism and heteronormativity, but in a context where none of those biases are overtly addressed at any narrative level.

From the outset, it’s clear that Westworld is intended as a no-holds-barred fantasy in the literal sense: a place where the rich and privileged can pay through the nose to fuck, fight and fraternise in a facsimile of the old West without putting themselves at any real physical danger. Nobody there can die: customers, unlike hosts, can’t be killed (though they do risk harm in certain contexts), but each host body and character is nonetheless resurrected, rebuilt and put back into play after they meet their end. Knowing this lends the customers a recklessness and a violence they presumably lack in the real world: hosts are shot, stabbed, raped, assaulted and abused with impunity, because their disposable inhumanity is the point of the experience. This theme is echoed in their treatment by Westworld’s human overseers, who often refer to them as ‘it’ and perform their routine examinations, interviews, repairs and updates while the hosts are naked.

At this point in time, HBO is as well-known for its obsession with full frontal, frequently orgiastic nudity as it is for its total misapprehension of the distinction between nakedness and erotica. Never before has so much skin been shown outside of literal porn with so little instinct for sensuality, sexuality or any appreciation of the human form beyond hurr durr tiddies and, ever so occasionally, hurr durr dongs, and Westworld is no exception to this. It’s like the entirety of HBO is a fourteen-year-old straight boy who’s just discovered the nascent thrill of drawing Sharpie-graffiti genitals on every available schoolyard surface and can only snigger, unrepentant and gleeful, whenever anyone asks them not to. We get it, guys – humans have tits and asses, and you’ve figured out how to show us that! Huzzah for you! Now get the fuck over your pubescent creative wankphase and please, for the love of god, figure out how to do it tastefully, or at least with some general nodding in the direction of an aesthetic other than Things I Desperately Wanted To See As A Teengaer In The Days Before Internet Porn.

That being said, I will concede that there’s an actual, meaningful reason for at least some of Westworld’s ubiquitous nudity: it’s a deliberate, visual act of dehumanisation, one intended not only to distinguish the hosts from the ‘real’ people around them, but to remind the park’s human employees that there’s no need to treat the AIs with kindness or respect. For this reason, it also lends a powerful emphasis to the moments when particular characters opt to dress or cover the hosts, thereby acknowledging their personhood, however minimally. This does not, however, excuse the sadly requisite orgy scenes, nor does it justify the frankly obscene decision to have a white female character make a leering comment about the size of a black host’s penis, and especially not when said female character has already been established as queer. (Yes, bi/pan people exist; as I have good reason to know, being one of them. But there are about nine zillion ways the writers could’ve chosen to show Elsie’s sexual appreciation for men that didn’t tap into one of the single grossest sexual tropes on the books, let alone in a context which, given the host’s blank servility and Elsie’s status as an engineer, is unpleasantly evocative of master/slave dynamics.)

And on the topic of Elsie, let’s talk about queerness in Westworld, shall we? Because let’s be real: the bar for positive queer representation on TV is so fucking low right now, it’s basically at speedbump height, and yet myriad grown-ass adults are evidently hellbent on bellyflopping onto it with all the grace and nuance of a drunk walrus. Elsie is a queer white woman whose queerness is shown to us by her decision to kiss one of the female hosts, Clementine, who’s currently deployed as a prostitute, in a context where Clementine is reduced to a literal object, stripped of all consciousness and agency. Episode 6 ends on the cliffhanger of Elsie’s probable demise, and as soon as I saw that setup, I felt as if that single, non-consensual kiss – never referenced or expanded on otherwise – had been meant as Chekov’s gaykilling gun: this woman is queer, and thus is her death predicted. (Of course she fucking dies. Of course she does. I looked it up before I watched the next episode, but I might as well have Googled whether the sun sets in the west.)

It doesn’t help that the only other queer femininity we’re shown is either pornography as wallpaper or female host prostitutes hitting on female customers; and it especially doesn’t help that, as much as HBO loves its gratuitous orgy scenes, you’ll only ever see two naked women casually getting it on in the background, never two naked men. Nor does it escape notice that the lab tech with a penchant for fucking the hosts in sleep mode is apparently a queer man, a fact which is presented as a sort of narrative reveal. The first time he’s caught in the act, we only see the host’s legs, prone and still, under his body, but later there’s a whole sequence where he takes one of the male hosts, Hector – who is, not coincidentally, a MOC, singled out for sexual misuse by at least one other character – and prepares to rape him. (It’s not actually clear in context whether the tech is planning on fucking or being fucked by Hector – not that it’s any less a violation either way, of course; I’m noting it rather because the scene itself smacks of being constructed by people without any real idea of how penetrative sex between two men works. Like, ignoring the fact that they’re in a literal glass-walled room with the tech’s eyerolling colleague right next door, Hector is sitting upright on a chair, but is also flaccid and non-responsive by virtue of being in sleep mode. So even though we get a grimly lascivious close-up of the tech squirting lube on his hand, dropping his pants and, presumably, slicking himself up, it’s not actually clear what he’s hoping to achieve prior to the merciful moment when Hector wakes up and fights him the fuck off.)

Topping off this mess is Logan, a caustic, black-hat-playing customer who, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it foursome with three host prostitutes – two female, one male – is visually implied to be queer, and who thereinafter functions, completely unnecessarily, as a depraved bisexual stereotype. And I do mean blink-and-you’ll-miss-it: I had to rewind the episode to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, but it’s definitely there, and as with Elsie kissing Clementine, it’s never referenced again. The male host is engaging only with Logan, stroking his chest as he kisses and fucks the two women; it’s about as unsexualised as sexual contact between two naked men can actually get, and yet HBO has gone to the trouble of including it, I suspect for the sole purpose of turning a bland, unoriginal character into an even grosser stereotype than he would otherwise have been while acting under the misapprehension that it would give him depth. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Logan doesn’t cease to be a cocky, punchable asshat just because you consented to put a naked white dude next to him for less time than it takes to have a really good shit; it just suggests that you, too, are a cocky, punchable asshat who should shit more in the bathroom and less on the fucking page. But I digress.

And then there’s the racism, which – and there’s no other way to put this – is presented as being an actual, intentional feature of the Westworld experience, even though it makes zero commercial sense to do this. Like. You have multiple white hosts who are programmed to make racist remarks about particular POC hosts, despite the fact that there are demonstrably POC customers paying to visit the park. You have a consistent motif of Native Americans being referred to as ‘savages’, both within Westworld-as-game and by the gamewriters themselves, with Native American mysticism being used to explain both the accidental glimpses various self-aware hosts get of the gamerunners and the in-game lore surrounding the maze. Demonstrably, the writers of Westworld are aware of this – why else is Episode 2, wherein writer character Lee Sizemore gleefully proposes a hella racist new story for the park, called ‘Chestnut’, as in old? I’ve said elsewhere that depiction is not endorsement, but it is perpetuation, and in a context where the point of Westworld as a commercial venture is demonstrably to appeal to customers of all genders, sexual orientations and races – all of whom we see in attendance – building in particular period-appropriate bigotries is utterly nonsensical.

More than this, as the openness with which the female prostitutes seduce female customers makes clear, it’s narratively inconsistent: clearly, not every bias of the era is being rigidly upheld. And yet it also makes perfect sense if you think of both Westworld and Westworld as being, predominantly, a product both created by and intended for a straight white male imagination. In text, Westworld’s stories are written by Lee and Robert, both of whom are straight white men, while Westworld itself was originally the conceit of Michael Crichton. Which isn’t to diminish the creative input of the many other people who’ve worked on the show – technically, it’s a masterclass in acting, direction, composition, music, lighting, special effects and editing, and those people deserve their props. It’s just that, in terms of narrative structure, by what I suspect is an accidental marriage of misguided purpose and unexamined habit, Westworld the series, like Westworld the park, functions primarily for a straight white male audience – and while I don’t doubt that there was some intent to critically highlight the failings of that perspective, as per the clear and very satisfying satirising of Lee Sizemore, as with Zack Snyder’s Suckerpunch and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, the straight white male gaze is still so embedded as a lazy default that Westworld ends up amplifying its biases more often than it critiques them. (To quote something my straight white husband said while watching, “It’s my gaze, and I feel like I’m being parodied by it.”)

Though we do, as mentioned, see various women and people of colour enjoying the Westworld park, the customers who actually serve as protagonists – Logan, William and the Man in Black – are all white men. Logan is queer by virtue of a single man’s hand on his chest, but other than enforcing a pernicious stereotype about bisexual appetites and behaviours, it doesn’t do a damn thing to alter his characterisation. The end of season reveal that William is the Man in Black – that William’s scenes have all taken place thirty years in the past, shown to us now through Dolores’s memories – is a cleverly executed twist, and yet the chronicle of William’s transformation from youthful, romantic idealist to violent, sadistic predator only highlights the fundamental problem, which is that the Westworld park, despite being touted as an adventure for everyone – despite Robert using his customers as a basis for making universal judgements about human nature – is clearly a more comfortable environment for some than others. Certainly, if I was able to afford the $40,000 a day we’re told it costs to attend, I’d be disinclined to spend so much for the privilege of watching male robots, whatever their courtesy to me, routinely talk about raping women, to say nothing of being forced to witness the callousness of other customers to the various hosts.

It should be obvious that there’s no such thing as a universal fantasy, and yet much of Westworld’s psychological theorising about human nature and morality hinges on our accepting that the desire to play cowboy in a transfigured version of the old West is exactly this. That the final episode provides tantalising evidence that at least one other park with a different historical theme exists elsewhere in the complex doesn’t change the fact that S1 has sold us, via the various monologues of Logan and Lee, Robert and William and the Man in Black, the idea that Westworld specifically reveals deep truths about human nature.

Which brings us to Dolores, a female host whose primary narrative loop centres on her being a sweet, optimistic rancher’s daughter who, with every game reset, can be either raped or rescued from rape by the customers. That Dolores is our primary female character – that her narrative trajectory centres on her burgeoning sentience, her awareness of the repeat violations she’s suffered, and her refusal to remain a damsel – does not change the fact that making her thus victimised was a choice at both the internal (Westworld) and external (Westworld) levels. I say again unto HBO, I do not fucking care how edgy you think threats of sexual violence and the repeat objectification of women are: they’re not original, they’re not compelling, and in this particular instance, what you’ve actually succeeded in doing is undermining your core premise so spectacularly that I do not understand how anyone acting in good sense or conscience could let it happen.

Because in making host women like Dolores (white) and Maeve (a WOC), both of whom are repeatedly subject to sexual and physical violation, your lynchpin characters for the development of true human sentience from AIs – in making their memories of those violations the thing that spurs their development – you’re not actually asking the audience to consider what it means to be human. You’re asking them to consider the prospect that victims of rape and assault aren’t actually human in the first place, and then to think about how being repeatedly raped and assaulted might help them to gain humanity. And you’re not even being subtle about it, either, because by the end of S1, the entire Calvinistic premise is laid clear: that Robert and Arnold, the park’s founders, believed that tragedy and suffering was the cornerstone of sentience, and that the only way for hosts to surpass their programming is through misery. Which implies, by logical corollary, that Robert is doing the hosts a service by allowing others to hurt them or by hurting them himself – that they are only able to protest his mistreatment because the very fact of it gave them sentience.

Let that sink in for a moment, because it’s pretty fucking awful. The moral dilemma of Westworld, inasmuch as it exists, centres on the question of knowing culpability, and therefore asks a certain cognitive dissonance of the audience: on the one hand, the engineers and customers believe that the hosts aren’t real people, such that hurting them is no more an immoral act than playing Dark Side in a Star Wars RPG is; on the other hand, from an audience perspective, the hosts are demonstrably real people, or at the very least potential people, and we are quite reasonably distressed to see them hurt. Thus: if the humans in setting can’t reasonably be expected to know that the hosts are people, then we the audience are meant to feel conflicted about judging them for their acts of abuse and dehumanisation while still rooting for the hosts.

Ignore, for a moment, the additional grossness of the fact that both Dolores and Maeve are prompted to develop sentience, and are then subsequently guided in its emergence, by men, as though they are Eves being made from Adam’s rib. Ignore, too, the fact that it’s Dolores’s host father who, overwhelmed by the realisation of what is routinely done to his daughter, passes that fledgling sentience to Dolores, a white woman, who in turn passes it to Maeve, a woman of colour, without which those other male characters – William, Felix, Robert – would have no Galateas to their respective Pygmalions. Ignore all this, and consider the basic fucking question of personhood: of what it means to engage with AIs you know can pass a Turing test, who feel pain and bleed and die and exhibit every human symptom of pain and terror and revulsion as the need arises, who can improvise speech and memory, but who can by design give little or no consent to whatever it is you do to them. Harming such a person is not the same as engaging with a video game; we already know it’s not for any number of reasons, which means we can reasonably expect the characters in the show to know so, too. But even if you want to dispute that point – and I’m frankly not interested in engaging with someone who does – it doesn’t change the fact that Westworld is trying to invest us in a moral false equivalence.

The problem with telling stories about robots developing sentience is that both the robots and their masters are rendered at an identical, fictional distance to the (real, human) viewer. By definition, an audience doesn’t have to believe that a character is literally real in order to care about them; we simply have to accept their humanisation within the narrative. That being so, asking viewers to accept the dehumanisation of one fictional, sentient group while accepting the humanisation of another only works if you’re playing to prejudices we already have in the real world – such as racism or sexism, for instance – and as such, it’s not a coincidence that the AIs we see violated over and over are, almost exclusively, women and POC, while those protagonists who abuse them are, almost exclusively, white men. Meaning, in essence, that any initial acceptance of the abuse of hosts that we’re meant to have – or, by the same token, any initial excusing of abusers – is predicated on an existing form of bigotry: collectively, we are as used to doubting the experiences and personhood of women and POC as we are used to assuming the best about straight white men, and Westworld fully exploits that fact to tell its story.

Which, as much as it infuriates me, also leaves me with a dilemma in interpreting the show. Because as much as I dislike seeing marginalised groups exploited and harmed, I can appreciate the importance of aligning a fictional axis of oppression (being a host) with an actual axis of oppression (being female and/or a POC). Too often, SFFnal narratives try to tackle that sort of Othering without casting any actual Others, co-opting the trappings of dehumanisation to enhance our sympathy for a (mostly white, mostly straight) cast. And certainly, by the season finale, the deliberateness of this decision is made powerfully clear: joined by hosts Hector and Armistice and aided by Felix, a lab tech, Maeve makes her escape from Westworld, presenting us with the glorious image of three POC and one white woman battling their way free of oppressive control. And yet the reveal of Robert’s ultimate plans – the inference that Maeve’s rebellion wasn’t her own choice after all, but merely his programming of her; the revelation that Bernard is both a host and a recreation of Arnold, Robert’s old partner; the merging of Dolores’s arc with Wyatt’s – simultaneously serves to strip these characters of any true agency. Everything they’ve done has been at Robert’s whim; everything they’ve suffered has been because he wanted it so. As per the ubiquitous motif of the player piano, even when playing unexpected tunes, the hosts remain Robert’s instruments: even with his death, the songs they sing are his.

Westworld, then, is a study in contradictions, and yet is no contradiction at all. Though providing a stunning showcase for the acting talents of Thandie Newton, Evan Rachel Wood and Jeffrey Wright in particular, their characters are nonetheless all controlled by Anthony Hopkins’s genial-creepy Robert, and that doesn’t really change throughout the season. Though the tropes of old West narratives are plainly up for discussion, any wider discussion of stereotyping is as likely to have a lampshade hung on it as to be absent altogether, and that’s definitely a problem. Not being familiar with the Michael Crichton film and TV show, I can’t pass judgement on the extent to which this new adaptation draws from or surpasses the source material. I can, however, observe that the original film dates to the 1970s, which possibly goes some way to explaining the uncritical straight white male gazieness embedded in the premise. Even so, there’s something strikingly reminiscent of Joss Whedon to this permutation of Westworld, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The combination of a technologically updated old West, intended to stand as both a literal and metaphoric frontier, the genre-aware meta-narrative that nonetheless perpetuates more stereotypes than it subverts, and the supposed moral dilemma of abusing those who can’t consent feels at times like a mashup of Firefly, Cabin in the Woods and Dollhouse that has staunchly failed to improve on Whedon’s many intersectional failings.

And yet, I suspect, I’ll still be poking my nose into Season 2, if only to see how Thandie Newton is doing. It feels like an absurdly low bar to say that, compared to most of HBO’s popular content, Westworld is more tell than show in portraying sexual violence, preferring to focus on the emotional lead-in and aftermath rather than the act itself, and yet that small consideration does ratchet the proverbial dial down a smidge when watching it – enough so that I’m prepared to say it’s vastly less offensive in that respect than, say, Game of Thrones. But it’s still there, still a fundamental part of the plot, and that’s going to be a not unreasonable dealbreaker for a lot of people; as is the fact that the only queer female character dies. Westworld certainly makes compelling television, but unlike the human protagonists, I wouldn’t want to live there.

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wedontbitewecut · 5 years

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Monster #2 ~ The Countess

Jumping forward about 90 years from Nosferatu, I present another vampire (and the last one that’ll be in this list, although I could make whole gallery just of vampires), The Countess from American Horror Story Season 5, Hotel. In this gallery I wanted to cover the quintessential classic vampire, Nosferatu, and a very modern evolved vampire who represents classic vampire tropes as well as new ones and more current directions that vampire stories often go in, and Lady Gaga’s The Countess certainly makes for a very interesting conversation. Right off the bat, it is clear that The Countess of The Hotel Cortez is an inspired homage to Delphine Seyrig’s The Countess Bathory from Daughters of Darkness, what with her extremely elegant couture (often deep reds, black, and silver colors), platinum “epitome-of-beauty” blonde hair, refined and posh manor and behavior, bisexuality and sexual promiscuity, her cunning control, cunning, and deceit, but also her surprisingly human qualities that make her worthy of sympathy and oftentimes even admiration, not to mention that she lives in a hotel which she almost acts like she owns. Furthermore, Bonnie Zimmerman’s analysis of the lesbian vampire in “Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampires” is strongly echoed in Hotel with The Countess, although in more modern and often ambiguous ways.

Similar to The Countess Bathory, Lady Gaga’s Countess is somehow continually stunningly beautiful, always appearing in the finest couture with looks that are incredibly varied but share a common thread (as with Nosferatu, The Countess is of the highest class, as vampires most often are), she displays some sort of kind nature that evokes sympathy and admiration, all while she is simultaneously doing evil things with no consideration for anyone but herself and her own very specific motives, acts which she often revels in. Honestly, The Countess reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s words about a dead woman being the most beautiful image on earth: The Countess is in a way dead, as all vampires are, and she is so often seen in the show as being absolutely covered with blood (she is a messy eater), but she is undeniably beautiful, and arguably downright sexy, and she constantly marries beauty with death and blood throughout. Like The Countess Bathory, she too is very sexually active and shows a certain bisexuality, although I tend to think vampires consider sexuality in a way different from humans, so putting labels like bisexuality or lesbian on them seems insufficient. The Countess seems to lean more towards men but certainly plays all fields, and she has a very sexual relationship with feeding, as we frequently see her and either Tristan or Donovan seduce and eventually devour a couple. The Countess’ sexuality is one of her strongest powers, and it is so interesting how she uses it as a means to get the blood she needs, but also because she is very sexual and enjoys such acts, which then relates to Zimmerman’s theories on lesbian vampires. While The Countess is not technically lesbian, she is certainly not straight or hetero-normative, and her sexuality is something far outside the realm of how the male gaze has traditionally treated and portrayed female sexuality. The Countess has a long string of lovers, both male and female, who she has drawn in and made fall in love with her, and then literally completed rejected and cast out to the curb once she’s done with them. In Hotel, she is seemingly in control of everything, and even has a small group of abducted children that she has made her vampire children (The Countess Bathory’s young lesbian lover/vampire assistant in Daughters of Darkness is in ways embodied both in The Countess’ lovers and her children), until of course we find out later in the season that she is actually not truly in control of anything, and in fact living a life of grief, victim to the true monster of Hotel, the hotel founder and insane mass murderer who built the hotel for the purpose of using it as a means to carry out his murderous desires, James Patrick Marsh.

Part of what makes Hotel so captivating and unique is how it melds together so many different horror tropes, as The Hotel Cortez is somehow a place where people who die there live on only in the hotel. We actually get a mixture of real-world horrors with culturally classic monsters, where the vampires are only part of the hotel’s monstrous inhabitants, and on Devil’s Night (Halloween) we see actual serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy come to the hotel to visit March, something which The Countess has nothing to do with. When we finally do learn about The Countess’ background, how she was an actress who fell in love with an extremely famous actor and his wife, and was their “Little Mouse”, the third in a three-way relationship, how she was turned vampire by them and how they then disappeared without a trace, and how she then has to live a life of grief, cloaked in luxury and beautiful excess, forever longing for her true love, forever taking in lovers and spitting them out in failed attempts to recreate what she originally had. It is this backstory, possibly more than anything, that humanizes The Countess and makes her worthy of sympathy, and despite all her atrocious acts, I find it hard to believe if the majority of viewers weren’t in some way rooting for The Countess, if only perhaps some of the time.

Another thing I want to mention regarding The Countess, is the significance of her relationship with Liz Taylor, who is a trans woman portrayed by Daniel O’Hare who is a longtime employee of The Hotel Cortez. She is one of the very few beings there who is simply a human, but because of her trans-ness and femininity, she is seen is monstrous by normative society and thus is right at home among the monstrous things in the hotel. We find out eventually that Liz had first come to the hotel before she had come out as the woman she is, and was still living in her assigned-at-birth societal male role, visiting the hotel with male coworkers on business. Alone in her room, she dressed in women’s clothing which she had brought with her, and as she was enjoying expressing herself properly in solitude, The Countess suddenly appears in her room. Long story short, this scene is perhaps the most moving, most heartfelt scene in the season, and perhaps all of American Horror Story. The Countess sees Liz for the woman she is, and though makeup and feminine attention allows her to see herself as such more clearly, and eventually encourages Liz to live authentically and to stay and work for her at the hotel, but not before showing Liz her own power and truth by killing Liz’s 2 male coworkers after they saw Liz dressed up. As a trans woman myself and as someone with a rather undefined/queer sexuality, Liz Taylor and The Countess are monumental figures to appear in horror and interact the way they did. It is also the first time I haven’t been slightly upset that a cis-man is cast as a trans woman, because Daniel O’Hare and the writers did such a fantastic job at making her extremely authentic and relatable in very important ways, not to mention how her relationship with Tristan in the show brings up critical conversations about trans people, sexual labels, and the ambiguous grey areas of love and relationships. It is very common for LGBTQ+ people to relate to monsters and especially vampires because the way vampires typically are thought to exist in society (hiding in plain sight, restricted to the night, unable to safely be visible during the day, sexually different and non-normative, etc...), and the relationship between Liz and The Countess is a perfect example of how complicated and not limited to a single genre horror is becoming, and how monsters not only share an affinity with women, but also with all LGBTQ+ people and especially trans people.

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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A church put women and LGBTQ people first. Attendance surged.

Rev. Frazier works at FCBC and the HOPE Center. Photo by the author.

On a rainy day in Harlem, Rev. Kyndra Frazier, 36, works at her desk at in a quiet office. She’s visibly relaxed, self-aware, and youthful.

Yet her journey to becoming a leader of one of the largest, most historic African American churches in New York City and exuding such confidence wasn’t easy.

Rev. Frazier was raised in North Carolina. Her family were leaders in the Church of God, so from a young age she found solace and enjoyment in her faith. But her teenage years were conflicted.

Rev. Frazier is queer — a life the church was starkly against.

She struggled to reconcile her sexuality and faith, fasting and praying, to no avail. Her parents found out about her queerness while listening in on a phone call between Frazier and her secret girlfriend.

“I recall being ashamed and embarrassed by what they’d heard, Rev. Frazier says. “They let me know that they couldn’t trust me anymore.”

It took about eight years for her immediate family to accept her. It took even longer for Frazier to realize she could love who she chooses and be a faith-driven person.

This duality drew Rev. Frazier to First Corinthian Baptist Church (FCBC) and its executive pastor, Rev. Michael A. Walrond, Jr.

Rev. Walrond enjoys preaching in jeans. Photo courtesy of FCBC.

Rev. Waldron, 46, leans into the common themes of Black church identity in his teachings: faith, community, and a dedication to justice.

Unlike many Baptist clergy, though, Rev. Walrond has extended his message of tolerance and inclusion to a group typically excluded from ministry: the LGBTQ community.

“We as people of color have so many things that we battle with,” Rev. Frazier says. “For many of us, not only are we Black, … we’re also queer. Churches have to do the work that centers those folks and remind them that they’re valid and loved in such challenging times.”

Rev. Waldron’s progressive nature breathes through every part of the church. Since joining as the executive pastor in 2004, he’s surrounded himself with women leaders, a rarity in most churches. His preaching style is casual; he wears jeans — unusual against his suit-and-tie counterparts in Baptist churches around the nation. (He once told The New York Times, “I like being loose when I go out to preach.”)

But his mannerisms and unique style of preaching connect congregants to the deeper acceptance of each churchgoer in the room. At FCBC, you’re at home, you’re welcome, and nothing — from clothing to sexual orientation — gets in the way of that.

All three of FCBC’s Sunday morning services are typically filled to capacity. Photo courtesy of FCBC.

The inclusive efforts have been largely beneficial. FCBC’s membership has grown from 350 to 10,000+ people.

Lines of people wrap around the street on Sunday mornings. During the service, gospel music echoes through the white ceilings lined with purple and gold. Churchgoers are each immersed in their own spiritual experiences inside this space that exudes warmth and solidarity.

It was on a similar Sunday in 2016 that Rev. Frazier came out to the congregation, something nearly unheard of in most religious spaces. For the FCBC’s queer membership, it was especially incredible.

“To see her pronounce who she was openly gay in the pulpit was a huge thing for me to see,” said Olando Charles, a queer member of the church. “If she can make it, so can I.”

Olando Charles is an active member of FCBC and the HOPE Center. Photo by the author.

Rev. Frazier’s visibility in the pulpit likely couldn’t have happened without Rev. Walrond constantly striving to bring people of all backgrounds to the church.

While Rev. Walrond’s actions aren’t surprising to many of his congregants, his outreach — and style of operating a church — are unusual in American church culture: Catholic churches have fired openly gay priests, several churches have removed queer musicians, priests have been fired for vocally supporting LGBTQ rights, and women overall still struggle to be viewed as viable leaders in churches all over the country.

The pastors of FCBC are needed now more than ever.

To reach the most marginalized in the FCBC and Harlem communities, Rev. Waldron opened the HOPE (Healing On Purpose and Evolving) Center to provide free mental health and therapy services.

The HOPE Center is just a few blocks away from FCBC. Photo by the author.

He tapped Rev. Frazier in 2016 to spearhead the organization. The two first met in 2012, and their professional admiration and relationship grew from there.

Before accepting the position, though, Rev. Frazier knew she needed to come out to Rev. Walrond. “He made it clear that it wasn’t an issue,” she says, explaining that Waldron embraced her and saw her sexuality as a gift instead of a problem. He believed she would be able to advocate for the Black, queer people of Harlem who felt unseen in their churches.

Rev. Frazier continues, “For him to believe in me and trust me to have autonomy to create mental health space was huge and empowering.”

The center works with those who have experienced or are experiencing religious trauma, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and/or chronic spiritual abuse.

“I remember going to the church and people telling me I didn’t belong,” Tanzania Stone, a queer FCBC member recalls. “It was heartbreaking. I loved God, but they made it out to seem like God didn’t love me because of who I love.”

Stone went through several periods of time when she wasn’t engaged with the church.

“To be a woman of color and to constantly know that you’re being oppressed in society, you want to find refuge in a church,” she explains. “And to go to this place that you’re being told is a refuge, but when they find out who you choose to love, you find out you’re an outcast or an abomination? That hurts.”

Tanzania Stone often participates in FCBC outreach. Photo by the author.

Stone eventually found her place in FCBC and HOPE. “To finally be in a place where I’m being told, no, you are a child of God, you’re worthy of God’s love, it was so liberating,” she told me.

Rev. Frazier says her own experiences with dissenting family members and frustrations in the church motivate her work.

“My goal here is to create a space for people of color,” she explains. “The stigma has been so great for Black and Brown folks seeking mental health services; this space is truly designated for us.”

And she says this is just the beginning. A ministry for LGBTQ people — just like there are for men, women, married couples in the faith — is an essential next step to affirming the group.

Frazier hopes that FCBC will be an example for other churches across the nation because, historically, churches have failed to provide a safe space for queer communities.

Rev. Frazier knows role likely couldn’t have happened 60 years ago (much less 10), given the fraught history of queer people in Black history.

Bayard Rustin — one of the most brilliant and strategic minds of the civil rights movement — was virtually erased from history books about the era because he was gay. Though his influence was often kept behind closed doors, it’s documented that Rustin was one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most trusted confidants.

Even outside of the church, the work of queer Black leaders and thinkers such as Audre Lorde and James Baldwin were somewhat ignored and not brought to light in mainstream history until recent years due to pervasive, deep-rooted homophobia.

Churches like FCBC are working to change that.

With roughly 79% of Black Americans identifying as Christians — the largest group of Christians in the country — it’s a crucial time for religious organizations in Black communities to support their most vulnerable.

“We take the teachings of Jesus seriously,” said Rev. Frazier. “Black churches have historically been involved in politically challenging times, and we must continue to do so. We can do that by clothing and feeding others and giving them the support they need to move forward.”

Charles and Rev. Frazier often work together at the church. Photo by the author.

As FCBC continues to grow and find ways to not only be more inclusive, but also more affirming, it’s clear that the pastors aren’t afraid to try ways to include people who’ve previously been left out of communities of faith.

Rev. Frazier puts it this way: “Understand that working towards inclusion is a matter of who’s growing, not who’s right and who’s wrong. That’s how you move forward.”

Rev. Frazier is currently fundraising for a documentary called “A Love Supreme: Black, Queer and Christian in The South.” You can watch the trailer here and learn how to support the project here.

Read more: http://www.upworthy.com/a-church-put-women-and-lgbtq-people-first-attendance-surged

from Viral News HQ https://ift.tt/2qNurwF via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ

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deepwyld · 6 years

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Celebrating International Transgender Day of Visibility!

"Here at Paizo, we value and are proud of the many and varied perspectives that our employees, contributors, and community provide. Since March 31 is International Transgender Day of Visibility, we'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate and showcase transgender members of our community. Here are their thoughts in their own words!"

Rigby Bendele, Venture-Captain: Gaming and queer experiences have always been tightly tied for me. After all, I've chosen to focus on the intersections of queer theory and gaming in my scholarship for a reason. RPGs offer possibility. Play is a way to try on new identities and explore areas of myself that I don't explore otherwise. Play has served as testing ground for me to decide what was and wasn't safe to disclose. I've found benefit in the failures I've experienced in RPGs. I learned what gender expressions didn't feel right for me through exploration in RPGs. These failed attempts at creating fantasized versions of myself helped me learn more about who I was and who I wanted to be. RPGs, particularly Pathfinder, offered me the opportunity of endless, unquestioned exploration. Without this, I wouldn't have been able to find a space for me that exists outside of the hegemonic gender categories we're placed into.

Since coming out publicly as nonbinary two years ago, I've found my role in my local gaming community a way to both educate others and provide support to other trans people. While I'll never claim that gaming alone can save us, it's important to me to ensure gaming communities are just. As a Venture-Captain, I've used my own standing in the community to create a more welcoming environment. As a result, I've had several members of my local area's organized play community feel safe enough to come out as trans. They've said that watching me live openly as trans made them see transition as a possibility for their own life. While being one of the first visible trans members of this community has come with rough spots, knowing that my visibility makes it possible for other people to be themselves has made all the challenges worthwhile.

Crystal Frasier, Author: Tabletop gaming was an important support for me when I was young and lonely and hurt by the world. I hated myself a lot back then, and RPGs gave me a brief few hours to not be myself and be someone I liked instead. In retrospect, it was pretty hilarious that the only times I felt like I wasn't pretending to be someone else were when I was pretending to be an elf or a superhero or a grizzled, postapocalyptic powersuit pilot. Now that I like myself and don't feel a need to hide, I draw on those same experiences of isolation, alienation, desperation, drive, and triumph to help inform my writing. While the circumstances of transitioning are unique to transgender and some intersex people, those emotions and experiences behind it are universal and powerful.

Melissa Guillet, Systems Administrator: I first began playing tabletop games in earnest shortly after 2nd edition AD&D came out back in 1991. I worked in the local small-town bookstore, and I met the man who would be my GM when he ordered the new books through us. He told me that I could play once I reached sixteen, and so when I passed my driver's test, I joined his group. I played with that group for about 15 years. They were mostly Army/Air Force guys, and they were my best friends who saw me through high school and a lot of other transitions in my life. I had a hard time at about nineteen when I was trying to figure out how I was going to make this all work, being poor and stuck in a small town in the Southwest. I hermitted away, and my gaming friends were the ones that came around, got me out of the house, and told me that whatever was the deal, they'd be okay with me. I didn't tell them during that time, but their kindness did put me at ease. That's when I began exploring more feminine aspects of myself in game; I started playing more and more women characters. One day, some friends asked me why I was starting to play more female characters all of a sudden. I played coy at first but couldn't quite bring myself to tell them—not yet. My best friend in the group, who was basically a brother to me, deserved to know first. If I could tell him and he would be okay with it, then, well, everything else would be okay. This was way back in the late 90s, I think, so things were quite a bit different. I wrote a letter and drove to his house and gave it to him, and then I sat in his living room while he read through the pages. I poured my heart out, and he told me that, no matter what, he'd always be there for me. And then one by one, I told my gaming friends. Not everyone was immediately supportive, but they all cared and loved me, and that was about as powerful a story for gaming and togetherness as I can make. Gaming meant having the support of people who loved me and wanted the best for me. So this story goes out to Gerald, Ben, Wade, Lanell, Mark, Keith, and some guy named GM (he's really named JD). I miss you guys. Thanks for being a powerful force in my life.

Sasha Lindley Hall, Venture-Agent: I feel that one of the biggest intersections between my gender identity and my love of gaming is in how I approach the details. Both of them are constantly evolving and changing and moving forward; as our understanding of gender and ability to extend our ideas grows, in parallel are the supposed limits of gaming (mechanically and culturally, both in game and out) pushed and discarded. At their core, gaming and gender are about freedom to me—the freedom to explore beyond myself and within myself. With them as prominent driving forces in my life, I am growing better every day.

Violet Hargrave, Author: While there were obvious-in-retrospect signs all throughout my life, what really made it click that I was trans was playing Pathfinder. I used to alternate playing men and women "for variety" until it sank in that all the women were fully fleshed-out characters I was really at ease inhabiting, while the men were all slight, shy, and weirdly prone to amassing magical and nonmagical disguises "just in case." Once you articulate to yourself, "I'm always a lot more comfortable as a woman," it's a lot easier to realize that it applies to more than just RPGs.

Isabelle Lee, Author: For me, roleplaying games and my trans identity are very closely linked. Gaming has been an outlet for that part of me for as long as I can remember, allowing me to experience the idea of life as a woman before I even knew I needed it and introducing me to the possibility of leaving one's assigned gender behind, while my transition has inspired a few of my creations in my time as a contributor. Accepting my gender identity gave me the confidence to decide that I wanted to be part of this game and this industry, and the friends I've made in the process (both of transitioning and of writing for Pathfinder) have enriched my life more than I can describe. I know I've been an inspiration to people, as both a writer and a trans woman, and I hope to keep on being one for a long time to come. ^_^

Jen McTeague, Author: Pathfinder was a large part of how I explored being trans in the first place. Komana Higgenstrom was my first female Pathfinder character, and I really enjoyed playing her more than the vast majority of my other characters. I didn't quite understand why at the time. After all, it would still be a year or two before I realized that I was trans. But when I started to question my gender and look back in my past for signs, those game sessions where I played Komana were a major clue that I was headed on the right track.

Nowadays, my trans identity affects a lot about how I play PFS. Since coming out, I've met a bunch of trans PFS players, and we've been supporting each other. In addition, while I'm no longer a VO, I still try to make the communities I'm a part of more friendly to trans people. This includes both talking with other organizers and pushing back against unfortunate words that are said at the table. After all, I had the great opportunity to use PFS as a jumping point for my transition, and I want other people to have the same opportunity.

Please join us in celebrating these incredible voices!

—The Paizo Staff