A Vindication of the Rights of Shippers (The "Good Parts" Version)

[eilowyn]

I've been reading a bunch of French post-structuralists the past couple weeks, and I think I understand the problem with fandom: we over-identify with our favorites (be it ship, character, show, narrative device, whatevs), so when someone insults that ship/character/show/narrative device, we take it as a personal blow. De Certeau* (the guy I've

Comments

[kwritten]

I think you should read the Duplessis article that I gave links to a few weeks ago in my large theory post. Here's the info and a bib entry I wrote about it a while back. She's talking about narrative subjectivity in 19thC literature and I just find it a bit interesting how similar your points are.
(and shouldn't we be past a 19thC paradigm of subjectivity by now???)

Duplessis, Rachel Blau. “Breaking the Sentence, Breaking the Sequence.” Essentials of the Theory of Fiction 3rd Edition. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Print. 221-238.

Duplessis looks in her argument at a feminist revisions of Freudian psychological development of women-particularly focusing on the oedipal conflict in women which results in the definition of femininity to be easily thrown off track, which results in a constant struggle between what is feminine and what is not. Within Duplessis’ argument is a detailed close reading of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, to provide support to her larger argument. Duplessis’ argument goes on to link that the marginalization and liminal position that women face psychologically to have true sociological implications: as women are both a part of the dominant hegemony by shoring it up, and also marginalized by the dominant hegemony. Duplessis asserts that “the learning of the rules of gender may need a good deal of extrafamilial reinforcement, especialy where the girl is concerned” (228). In other words, the education of gender (for gender is a learned behavior) is derived from culture, “including literary products like narrative” (228). However, though gender can be learned, female identity according to Duplessis, “is a movement between deep identification with dominant values and deep alienation from them” (229). In this sense, women have a “double consciousness” not unlike other marginalized groups, in that they both participate in the dominant hegemony, but are not true parts of it. Since women are “constantly reaffirmed as outsiders” by their society, and also through an internalization of the system within and without which they operate, “women’s loyalties to dominance remain ambiguous” since they are not “in control of the processes by which” they gain subjectivity and definition (231). Duplessis argues that the romantic plot of the 19th century reinforces this liminal position by reestablishing women as both outside and inside the power structure, in which “the female hero becomes a heroine and in which the conclusion of a valid love plot is the loss of any momentum of quest” (225). In other words, in order to become feminine involves such an amount of repression and sacrifice that the quest is itself a dead end: marriage. Within marriage, the repression of self has reached its climax and the 19th century heroine becomes both difference and sameness.

[gillo]

That looks like a very useful article. Adding it to my list for when I write about Thackeray. (And, actually, it might be useful for the early modern witchcraft I'm working on at the moment.)

[kwritten]

Duplessis is always relevant. Glad to help!