The love that dare not speak its name (Mary Sue, slash, and secrecy) (with a side of SGA)
Now that I'm back, I'm embarking on a long planned series of posts on SGA and BSG. This is the first, but it's actually much more general, and only gets around to SGA in a sort of post-script, about homosociality and secrecy in a famous little fic by hth_the_first. Long, and divided into parts- if you want to just read and respond to part I, that's totally fine.
I.
As some of you know, one of the things that interests me about fandom is the way in which it deals with interlocking questions about shame, fantasy, privacy vs. publicity, and the nature of the literary (or of stories) as a site where private fantasy and public discourse intersect. I have written that discussion of Mary Sues marks this boundary in a variety of ways, and that this is one of the reasons why being able to use the term "Mary Sue" correctly is such a sort of defining, entry-level skill for what ellen_fremedon has called "that part of fandom that thinks of itself as 'fandom.'"
[Aside: I also think it's interesting to consider this in terms of fan discourse about the illicitness or transgressiveness of fic, in conjunction with Henry Jenkins' observation that fans have moved from the margins to the center of popular culture and its self-representation.]
But I have a persistent, nagging question, for slash fans in particular, about what you might call the "facts." Freud says that the presence of a representation of the self is the mark of fantasy, but let's not take Freud's word for it. For me, it is: I'm not just talking about sexual fantasy, but fantasies about triumph or revenge or whatever. My default fantasy position is to have a more or less idealized avatar of myself in there somewhere.
But if there's one prior belief fandom has reinforced for me, it's that people are really really different from each other, and nowhere more than when it comes to sex. These questions, about self-insertion and fantasy and fic, come up from time to time around here. In one interesting form, there was the meme mctabby got circulating in HP fandom a while back, where HP writers brought out their early Mary Sues and shared them with the world- delightful! At other times, slash fans post about the fact that they have always fantasized about (male) characters with each other (something I've done also, as in my recent comment about Bruce Springsteen's "Backstreets.")
Anyway, I'm asking again: Slash fans, in particular, have you had fantasies about your favorite characters in which you included yourself- your own, privately held versions of Mary Sue, perhaps, with or without the party dress and the violet eyes? How many have reflected on "my dream date with Alan Rickman" or thought, "move over, Kirk, Spock's MINE," or just, "this is what I'd like to say to Krycek"?
I usually screen anonymous comments, but I'm turning that off for this post, in case anyone wants to get secretive- which I TOTALLY understand!
II.
Because that desire for privacy brings me to my second thought here: is the Mary Sue, the fantasied aggrandizement of the self, fandom's central shame? Is love of the self, and/or some version of love of the actor/character, fandom's love that dare not speak its name- and (how) does this relate to homoerotic fiction (as implied by the quote from Wilde)? Of course, sharing the actor/character lust is a huge part of fandom, but what are its limits, if any? Does fantasy remain secret within fandom, or does fandom provide a safe place for it when it isn't safe elsewhere, or both?
And what does slash do to (or with) fantasy? For me, I think that one of the functions of fan fiction is to preserve the otherness of the character who is an object of desire. It works hard to remind us of Snape or Kara as they "are" rather than as "I might want them to be (even though what they 'are' is what attracted me in the first place)." Fic keeps the characters real, and private fantasies unreal.
I'd speculate that Mary Sue fics may tend to soften or otherwise OOC the object of desire more than other kinds of fic, because of their ostentatious proximity to fantasies, although throughout fanfic you can find that oft-observed phenomenon where people seem to be drawn to a very flawed character and then soften that character in their stories (obviously we can read this in terms of the character both as the one we identify with and as desired other). I also think that one of the reasons I like to read good fanfic is that the writer works harder than my private fantasy would to keep the characters I like IC, to preserve those qualities that are other for me. And it's some element of otherness that drew me to them in the first place.
Personally, I think slash preserves otherness more reliably than het, partly because interactions between sameness and otherness pervade the genre at its most formal level: I'm refering here to what I've called "homotextual intercourse," where fic always relies on the "homo" (the same- same characters, same situations as the source and other fics) and slash also relies on the "hetero" (the different- the difference between a slashed version and the heteronormative source). Which shows how ideas of "different" and "the same" are mixed up when talking about sexual orientation (i.e. the "homo"- same- is what/who is different, queer).
III.
A further side note to this involves bringing Sedgwick back to the table, and in particular in relation to the military-based texts that are such popular vehicles for fic/slash right now. Sedgwick was used by the big founding academic writers on slash because of her emphasis on the homoerotic subtext in nominally heteronormative texts. But equally important to Sedgwick's theory is the role of secrecy in homophobia. The closet and the threat of "homosexual blackmail" provides the context for the subtext. For this reason, a female figure is usually essential to these texts, which may represent rivalry over a woman or heterosexual conquest as ways to mediate eroticized relationships between men.
{By the way, all of this is indebted to Foucault on the role of (alleged) secrecy in modern ideas of sexuality.}
[a little space for anyone who might want to read or skip the SGA part.]
You see this all the time in slashable texts, and its effects in slash itself- I'll use SGA as an example. I had an exchange with helenish yesterday (here) (squee, helenish talked to me!) about John Sheppard's "fantasized" apartment (she stressed the show's use of that word) in that episode where the aliens make them think they've all gone home. This apartment was full of chrome and leather and sports paraphenalia and hot (female) babes. Helen at first described it as "the gayest apartment ever," but that's not quite right- it's the most homosocial apartment ever. It's an apartment that, complete with babes, is designed to display a certain version of nominally heterosexual masculinity to other men, an apartment that must, in order to attract other "straight" men, insist that it is so not gay. "Look!" says the apartment. "My occupant loves football! Check out the babes! Don't you want to hang out here with John, guys?" (And have hot sex and cuddles? Thanks, Helen. :D)
This is a instance of a sort of rule of our culture: the straighter something is, the gayer it is. I think the military is sort of the ultimate example of this (no coincidence), though football & football fandom work, too. And that is one of the things that makes SGA such a terrific vehicle for slash- not just any slash, but warm, friendly, rather utopian slash- "all lube and balloons," as cesperanza once said. Because slash takes the ugliness of the secret, of the blackmail and intimidation that create the closet and enforce homophobia, and (in some versions, or in some way) makes the secret about the "straight" text public and celebrates its homoerotic subtext. (And, no, I'm not saying slash automatically does away with homophobia in its own discourse or anything like that.)
IV.
Look at the way secrecy functions in Hth's wonderful Handsome Johnny (the fic with Ford's teddy bear- short and I highly recommend.) This fic deals with a couple of questions that I'm a little obsessed with, including how everyone made the decision to go to Atlantis and how come the military personnel aren't in Iraq, and what it means that the show doesn't talk about Iraq (that's fodder for another post, comparing SGA and BSG as responses to the war.)
In this fic, Ford's sexual identity is central to his decision on both counts. He's gay, but he's "never come out of the closet to anyone who counted." In a central passage, he gets together regularly with both scientists and soldiers from the Atlantis project to watch sci fi movies and shows. The friendship and warmth at these gatherings bewitch him and become the deciding factor in his decision to go, and all of it revolves around the secret of his homosexuality:
It may be a top-secret military installation where R&D on alien technology takes place, but inside the walls, the place is remarkably free of secrets, more free than anywhere Aiden has ever lived. Maybe it’s just too much hard work to keep secrets from so many smart guys, so everybody gives up early. But to Aiden -- Lieutenant Ford -- it’s something special.
He finally caught on the night that they binged on all three Matrix movies and then had to watch the first one over again to get the taste of sequels out of their mouths, the night they didn’t quit until they were all exhausted and pliant and drunk on companionable easiness. He watched the Major cant himself into the doorframe, just as much posed to show off the curve of his narrow waist as he was drooping from lack of sleep, and he thought to himself this is not a secret. Dr. McKay stepped up close to him, his head tucked down defensively, and muttered in a rush can’t very well sleep in the hallway, can you?, and the Major half-smiled and said in a low, sleepy-sexy voice, dunno, I’m really bummed about the popcorn, I may need a little time to get over it, and Aiden thought they know I can hear them, they don’t care if I can hear them, and the feeling of their trust in him.... It’s not something that Aiden can compare to anything else. He’s never had that anywhere else.
And then the Doc slipped his arm through Aiden’s unexpectedly, the warm burr of his voice startling Aiden as he said, Best walk me to my door, lad, I don’t think we’re wanted here, and it was clear that he knew and he knew that Aiden knew and nobody cared, none of it mattered, everything here was just what it was.
The narration, and Ford, never come right out and say that the secret that matters most is being gay, or that the dream of a place where that could be open and public is what draws him, and that only makes it better, because it allows homosexuality and secrecy to be two separate things, constantly entwined in our cultural codes but not essentially related. Secrecy has broader implications for things like identity than what can be covered by the "gay or straight" binary. Secrecy and homoeroticism each open on to a vast spectrum of different ideas and stories, and the place where they meet has its own distinctive chemistry. But that place is also the place where ogling the bit of skin Major Sheppard shows as he flings a leg over the back of the couch doesn't have to be a secret.
And there's a lot further one can go- the eroticism of secresy, how things get defined and what role secresy plays in that ("everything was just what it was"), etc.
And it all brings me back to the beginning of the post- secret fantasies, sharing them and withholding/resisting them, and slash. How do they all relate?
ETA: Two things. One is, I wasn't wrong about the shame: ask people about their fantasies, and everyone thinks they're weird and different and probably wrong ("guilty," "pathetic").
The other is a further thought on "Handsome Johnny." cathexys was talking about the self-insertion of the observer, the things she's called conduit fics, and the idea that she puts herself in the position of the slash writer. And I said, that's the position of Ford in this fic. But Ford as slasher goes further here: this scene is a *fandom* scene. They get together to watch Babylon 5 and Blade Runner! A same sex group! And his secret fantasies aren't such a secret anymore, and he feels free- it's an idealized version of fandom, and Ford is the young slasher just falling in love with the scene.
I.
As some of you know, one of the things that interests me about fandom is the way in which it deals with interlocking questions about shame, fantasy, privacy vs. publicity, and the nature of the literary (or of stories) as a site where private fantasy and public discourse intersect. I have written that discussion of Mary Sues marks this boundary in a variety of ways, and that this is one of the reasons why being able to use the term "Mary Sue" correctly is such a sort of defining, entry-level skill for what ellen_fremedon has called "that part of fandom that thinks of itself as 'fandom.'"
[Aside: I also think it's interesting to consider this in terms of fan discourse about the illicitness or transgressiveness of fic, in conjunction with Henry Jenkins' observation that fans have moved from the margins to the center of popular culture and its self-representation.]
But I have a persistent, nagging question, for slash fans in particular, about what you might call the "facts." Freud says that the presence of a representation of the self is the mark of fantasy, but let's not take Freud's word for it. For me, it is: I'm not just talking about sexual fantasy, but fantasies about triumph or revenge or whatever. My default fantasy position is to have a more or less idealized avatar of myself in there somewhere.
But if there's one prior belief fandom has reinforced for me, it's that people are really really different from each other, and nowhere more than when it comes to sex. These questions, about self-insertion and fantasy and fic, come up from time to time around here. In one interesting form, there was the meme mctabby got circulating in HP fandom a while back, where HP writers brought out their early Mary Sues and shared them with the world- delightful! At other times, slash fans post about the fact that they have always fantasized about (male) characters with each other (something I've done also, as in my recent comment about Bruce Springsteen's "Backstreets.")
Anyway, I'm asking again: Slash fans, in particular, have you had fantasies about your favorite characters in which you included yourself- your own, privately held versions of Mary Sue, perhaps, with or without the party dress and the violet eyes? How many have reflected on "my dream date with Alan Rickman" or thought, "move over, Kirk, Spock's MINE," or just, "this is what I'd like to say to Krycek"?
I usually screen anonymous comments, but I'm turning that off for this post, in case anyone wants to get secretive- which I TOTALLY understand!
II.
Because that desire for privacy brings me to my second thought here: is the Mary Sue, the fantasied aggrandizement of the self, fandom's central shame? Is love of the self, and/or some version of love of the actor/character, fandom's love that dare not speak its name- and (how) does this relate to homoerotic fiction (as implied by the quote from Wilde)? Of course, sharing the actor/character lust is a huge part of fandom, but what are its limits, if any? Does fantasy remain secret within fandom, or does fandom provide a safe place for it when it isn't safe elsewhere, or both?
And what does slash do to (or with) fantasy? For me, I think that one of the functions of fan fiction is to preserve the otherness of the character who is an object of desire. It works hard to remind us of Snape or Kara as they "are" rather than as "I might want them to be (even though what they 'are' is what attracted me in the first place)." Fic keeps the characters real, and private fantasies unreal.
I'd speculate that Mary Sue fics may tend to soften or otherwise OOC the object of desire more than other kinds of fic, because of their ostentatious proximity to fantasies, although throughout fanfic you can find that oft-observed phenomenon where people seem to be drawn to a very flawed character and then soften that character in their stories (obviously we can read this in terms of the character both as the one we identify with and as desired other). I also think that one of the reasons I like to read good fanfic is that the writer works harder than my private fantasy would to keep the characters I like IC, to preserve those qualities that are other for me. And it's some element of otherness that drew me to them in the first place.
Personally, I think slash preserves otherness more reliably than het, partly because interactions between sameness and otherness pervade the genre at its most formal level: I'm refering here to what I've called "homotextual intercourse," where fic always relies on the "homo" (the same- same characters, same situations as the source and other fics) and slash also relies on the "hetero" (the different- the difference between a slashed version and the heteronormative source). Which shows how ideas of "different" and "the same" are mixed up when talking about sexual orientation (i.e. the "homo"- same- is what/who is different, queer).
III.
A further side note to this involves bringing Sedgwick back to the table, and in particular in relation to the military-based texts that are such popular vehicles for fic/slash right now. Sedgwick was used by the big founding academic writers on slash because of her emphasis on the homoerotic subtext in nominally heteronormative texts. But equally important to Sedgwick's theory is the role of secrecy in homophobia. The closet and the threat of "homosexual blackmail" provides the context for the subtext. For this reason, a female figure is usually essential to these texts, which may represent rivalry over a woman or heterosexual conquest as ways to mediate eroticized relationships between men.
{By the way, all of this is indebted to Foucault on the role of (alleged) secrecy in modern ideas of sexuality.}
[a little space for anyone who might want to read or skip the SGA part.]
You see this all the time in slashable texts, and its effects in slash itself- I'll use SGA as an example. I had an exchange with helenish yesterday (here) (squee, helenish talked to me!) about John Sheppard's "fantasized" apartment (she stressed the show's use of that word) in that episode where the aliens make them think they've all gone home. This apartment was full of chrome and leather and sports paraphenalia and hot (female) babes. Helen at first described it as "the gayest apartment ever," but that's not quite right- it's the most homosocial apartment ever. It's an apartment that, complete with babes, is designed to display a certain version of nominally heterosexual masculinity to other men, an apartment that must, in order to attract other "straight" men, insist that it is so not gay. "Look!" says the apartment. "My occupant loves football! Check out the babes! Don't you want to hang out here with John, guys?" (And have hot sex and cuddles? Thanks, Helen. :D)
This is a instance of a sort of rule of our culture: the straighter something is, the gayer it is. I think the military is sort of the ultimate example of this (no coincidence), though football & football fandom work, too. And that is one of the things that makes SGA such a terrific vehicle for slash- not just any slash, but warm, friendly, rather utopian slash- "all lube and balloons," as cesperanza once said. Because slash takes the ugliness of the secret, of the blackmail and intimidation that create the closet and enforce homophobia, and (in some versions, or in some way) makes the secret about the "straight" text public and celebrates its homoerotic subtext. (And, no, I'm not saying slash automatically does away with homophobia in its own discourse or anything like that.)
IV.
Look at the way secrecy functions in Hth's wonderful Handsome Johnny (the fic with Ford's teddy bear- short and I highly recommend.) This fic deals with a couple of questions that I'm a little obsessed with, including how everyone made the decision to go to Atlantis and how come the military personnel aren't in Iraq, and what it means that the show doesn't talk about Iraq (that's fodder for another post, comparing SGA and BSG as responses to the war.)
In this fic, Ford's sexual identity is central to his decision on both counts. He's gay, but he's "never come out of the closet to anyone who counted." In a central passage, he gets together regularly with both scientists and soldiers from the Atlantis project to watch sci fi movies and shows. The friendship and warmth at these gatherings bewitch him and become the deciding factor in his decision to go, and all of it revolves around the secret of his homosexuality:
It may be a top-secret military installation where R&D on alien technology takes place, but inside the walls, the place is remarkably free of secrets, more free than anywhere Aiden has ever lived. Maybe it’s just too much hard work to keep secrets from so many smart guys, so everybody gives up early. But to Aiden -- Lieutenant Ford -- it’s something special.
He finally caught on the night that they binged on all three Matrix movies and then had to watch the first one over again to get the taste of sequels out of their mouths, the night they didn’t quit until they were all exhausted and pliant and drunk on companionable easiness. He watched the Major cant himself into the doorframe, just as much posed to show off the curve of his narrow waist as he was drooping from lack of sleep, and he thought to himself this is not a secret. Dr. McKay stepped up close to him, his head tucked down defensively, and muttered in a rush can’t very well sleep in the hallway, can you?, and the Major half-smiled and said in a low, sleepy-sexy voice, dunno, I’m really bummed about the popcorn, I may need a little time to get over it, and Aiden thought they know I can hear them, they don’t care if I can hear them, and the feeling of their trust in him.... It’s not something that Aiden can compare to anything else. He’s never had that anywhere else.
And then the Doc slipped his arm through Aiden’s unexpectedly, the warm burr of his voice startling Aiden as he said, Best walk me to my door, lad, I don’t think we’re wanted here, and it was clear that he knew and he knew that Aiden knew and nobody cared, none of it mattered, everything here was just what it was.
The narration, and Ford, never come right out and say that the secret that matters most is being gay, or that the dream of a place where that could be open and public is what draws him, and that only makes it better, because it allows homosexuality and secrecy to be two separate things, constantly entwined in our cultural codes but not essentially related. Secrecy has broader implications for things like identity than what can be covered by the "gay or straight" binary. Secrecy and homoeroticism each open on to a vast spectrum of different ideas and stories, and the place where they meet has its own distinctive chemistry. But that place is also the place where ogling the bit of skin Major Sheppard shows as he flings a leg over the back of the couch doesn't have to be a secret.
And there's a lot further one can go- the eroticism of secresy, how things get defined and what role secresy plays in that ("everything was just what it was"), etc.
And it all brings me back to the beginning of the post- secret fantasies, sharing them and withholding/resisting them, and slash. How do they all relate?
ETA: Two things. One is, I wasn't wrong about the shame: ask people about their fantasies, and everyone thinks they're weird and different and probably wrong ("guilty," "pathetic").
The other is a further thought on "Handsome Johnny." cathexys was talking about the self-insertion of the observer, the things she's called conduit fics, and the idea that she puts herself in the position of the slash writer. And I said, that's the position of Ford in this fic. But Ford as slasher goes further here: this scene is a *fandom* scene. They get together to watch Babylon 5 and Blade Runner! A same sex group! And his secret fantasies aren't such a secret anymore, and he feels free- it's an idealized version of fandom, and Ford is the young slasher just falling in love with the scene.