Thanks and Self-Reflection
You guys! YOU GUYS! Thank you so much for all the congrats over the McNair program! I honestly got a little teary-eyed reading the comments, and I made that face beauty queens make when they're being crowned where they're about to cry but don't want to mess up their mascara, and their waving their hand at their face as if that will make them stop tearing up. You know that face? Well, I made it, and a sweet old lady in Starbucks came over to ask if I was okay, and all I could say was I just love my friends! So thank you for everything. I really, really appreciated all the love!
Still on crazy busy finals schedule, but it should all be done by the 17th, so there's only a week of craziness left. And I'm spending all my homework time making fanmixes. This does not bode well.
I came to a realization today. For a while, I've been struggling with the concept of "the author is dead" in literary analysis. I got into a (one-sided) argument with a confession on the Buffy Confessions Tumblr, where someone said something to the effect that Joss is a terrible person for preferring the Spike/Buffy relationship over the Buffy/Angel relationship because season 6 Spuffy is so incredibly unhealthy and therefore Joss cannot be a good feminist. Well, aside from the fact that I can think of innumerable other things in BtVS that are just as if not more questionable than the season 6 storyline trajectory, but that's another post. What annoyed me was the people responding to the confession with "this isn't true; Joss says Spuffy is funnier but he totally prefers Bangel," etc.
Now, I've learned to take everything Joss says with a grain of salt, but there are times when he is sincere. And I've always had a problem with separating Joss from his work; in trying to see the text for itself instead of with the knowledge I have of the man who is the guiding force behind the text. I can do it. I can look at the show, see Buffy's storyline of being wide open, being hurt (forever blaming Angel here), closing herself off, and finally opening herself up to love again in the back end of season 7 (minus a stupid kiss in the last two episodes that doesn't fit in this trajectory, but don't get me started on that. You know how bad I will get). I can see this self-contained story, and appreciate it. Yay me.
But then I begin to question the text. Why is Sunnydale so . . . white? Why are there so many literal and metaphorical dubious consent moments in the text? Wherefore art thou, Seeing Red? I look at the flaws in the text, and I get curious. What do I know about the background of the text that can explain why these flaws exist? And this is where I get hung up. I just can't leave the text alone; I have to question it. And my realization today is that I'm interrogating the text through the eyes of cultural theory, where context is everything, rather than literary theory, where text is all there is. My mind gets stuck on "what Joss was thinking" - is there so few people of color because Joss' feminism originates with his second-wave mother? What is he trying to say with issues of dubious consent? And what in God's green earth was he thinking when he gave the go ahead for Seeing Red, one of the clumsiest treatments of rape I've ever seen, and I used to read bodice rippers like it was my vocation - plenty of clumsy consent there.
I see the text with "the social, economic, and political systems in which the text was created" (to paraphrase my textbook), in mind. That is why it's so difficult for me to let the text speak for itself, because I've been trained to see the text as a product of a specific culture, not just something to be studied as is.
Here's another example: You can look at the comics as a contained text to be examined by itself, or you could look at it as something that was created at the height of the Edward and Bella Twilight phenomenon, and Buffy and Angel's glowhypnol'd lovey dovey-ness takes on new meaning. Maybe Joss is critiquing those tru wuv expectations by using his tru wuv pairing to destroy the world? Maybe he's commenting on the whole chaste vampire thing by having Buffy and Angel go at it like badly-drawn monkeys? You have to be aware of the change in the nature of vampire narratives that happened with Twilight, and I think Joss' Twilight can't be read without thinking of it in that context.
So, to paraphrase a post by pocochina, if you see the text through "the author is dead" lenses, bully for you. It's difficult for me to do that, because I take the environment in which the text was created, what the creator has said about the text, and what the text has meant to the culture at large in mind when I analyze the text. Pocochina called this, in its extreme case where only what the creator says is important, the "Word of God" approach, from something on tvtropes.com. I don't see Joss as a God who should not be questioned, but he is one authority on the text that I can seek out to try and find meaning in a text. And even though I always thought I took the literary approach to text, I think I'm okay with my cultural theory approach. It is, after all, the approach most used in fandom studies, so it's probably a good thing that I see text that way.
Still on crazy busy finals schedule, but it should all be done by the 17th, so there's only a week of craziness left. And I'm spending all my homework time making fanmixes. This does not bode well.
I came to a realization today. For a while, I've been struggling with the concept of "the author is dead" in literary analysis. I got into a (one-sided) argument with a confession on the Buffy Confessions Tumblr, where someone said something to the effect that Joss is a terrible person for preferring the Spike/Buffy relationship over the Buffy/Angel relationship because season 6 Spuffy is so incredibly unhealthy and therefore Joss cannot be a good feminist. Well, aside from the fact that I can think of innumerable other things in BtVS that are just as if not more questionable than the season 6 storyline trajectory, but that's another post. What annoyed me was the people responding to the confession with "this isn't true; Joss says Spuffy is funnier but he totally prefers Bangel," etc.
Now, I've learned to take everything Joss says with a grain of salt, but there are times when he is sincere. And I've always had a problem with separating Joss from his work; in trying to see the text for itself instead of with the knowledge I have of the man who is the guiding force behind the text. I can do it. I can look at the show, see Buffy's storyline of being wide open, being hurt (forever blaming Angel here), closing herself off, and finally opening herself up to love again in the back end of season 7 (minus a stupid kiss in the last two episodes that doesn't fit in this trajectory, but don't get me started on that. You know how bad I will get). I can see this self-contained story, and appreciate it. Yay me.
But then I begin to question the text. Why is Sunnydale so . . . white? Why are there so many literal and metaphorical dubious consent moments in the text? Wherefore art thou, Seeing Red? I look at the flaws in the text, and I get curious. What do I know about the background of the text that can explain why these flaws exist? And this is where I get hung up. I just can't leave the text alone; I have to question it. And my realization today is that I'm interrogating the text through the eyes of cultural theory, where context is everything, rather than literary theory, where text is all there is. My mind gets stuck on "what Joss was thinking" - is there so few people of color because Joss' feminism originates with his second-wave mother? What is he trying to say with issues of dubious consent? And what in God's green earth was he thinking when he gave the go ahead for Seeing Red, one of the clumsiest treatments of rape I've ever seen, and I used to read bodice rippers like it was my vocation - plenty of clumsy consent there.
I see the text with "the social, economic, and political systems in which the text was created" (to paraphrase my textbook), in mind. That is why it's so difficult for me to let the text speak for itself, because I've been trained to see the text as a product of a specific culture, not just something to be studied as is.
Here's another example: You can look at the comics as a contained text to be examined by itself, or you could look at it as something that was created at the height of the Edward and Bella Twilight phenomenon, and Buffy and Angel's glowhypnol'd lovey dovey-ness takes on new meaning. Maybe Joss is critiquing those tru wuv expectations by using his tru wuv pairing to destroy the world? Maybe he's commenting on the whole chaste vampire thing by having Buffy and Angel go at it like badly-drawn monkeys? You have to be aware of the change in the nature of vampire narratives that happened with Twilight, and I think Joss' Twilight can't be read without thinking of it in that context.
So, to paraphrase a post by pocochina, if you see the text through "the author is dead" lenses, bully for you. It's difficult for me to do that, because I take the environment in which the text was created, what the creator has said about the text, and what the text has meant to the culture at large in mind when I analyze the text. Pocochina called this, in its extreme case where only what the creator says is important, the "Word of God" approach, from something on tvtropes.com. I don't see Joss as a God who should not be questioned, but he is one authority on the text that I can seek out to try and find meaning in a text. And even though I always thought I took the literary approach to text, I think I'm okay with my cultural theory approach. It is, after all, the approach most used in fandom studies, so it's probably a good thing that I see text that way.