For the Academic-y Types on my Flist...

[lefaym]

via Now and Rome:

DESIRING THE TEXT, TOUCHING THE PAST: TOWARDS AN EROTICS OF RECEPTION

A one-day conference co-organized by

Comments

[rm]

My brain is _almost_ coming up with something.

[lefaym]

I have to admit, I was thinking of you in particular when I posted this. :) I'm sure you'll come up with something brilliant -- perhaps even something about writing IHNIIHBT?

[rm]

God, _that_ hadn't even occurred to me.

Right now I'm sort of toying around with something about reactions to character deaths as a method of claiming desired bodies that don't technically exist. I'm thinking about reactions to the deaths of Ianto, Snape and Wash offhand.

But at the same time, I feel like there's some other idea in me that just hasn't surfaced at all yet, that's probably the more brilliant one.

Largely, I think -- I'm a fool if I don't find a topic here that feels personal. And all that other stuff is marginally so, but my god, I'm always on about the real lives of fake people... so I'm still looking.

[lefaym]

Okay, I love the character deaths idea. Actually my thoughts about what you could do with IHNIIHBT were along the same lines -- because IHNIIHBT is, ultimately, about accepting Ianto's death through the medium of an erotic narrative.

[rm]

True, maybe I need to wrap it all together. I mean "death fic" has always been a genre in fanfiction.

AND.... AND AND AND.... there's something to be said about the tonal quality (by and large, obviously I know not crazy people who on both sides of the death issue for all three of those characters) of ownership by the death deniers -- i.e., the who loves the character more debate.

[lefaym]

Yeah, the ownership thing is definitely very interesting, particularly insofar as it's tied up with the production of erotic fantexts. I know for me, I big part of the reason that I can't accept Ianto's death as a good thing for the show, is that I feel it limits MY potential to explore his character further (and most of my Ianto fic was about sex, so...)

And though I certainly don't personally buy into the "who loves him more" thing, the very presence of those discourses does seem to be an attempt to, not just claim part in communal fandom ownership, but to claim authority over the character, above and beyond other people in fandom.

[rm]

It certainly mimics the bad behavior I've seen at funerals, for, you know, actual people who have walked the actual earth. So I suppose it shouldn't surprise me, but I find it sort of exhausting to be around.

It's also a catch-22: a fan can't both prove their love/loyalty and their sanity regardless of their position on these issues. Which is super annoying to me.

[rm]

Also, not actually being an academic, how does one even address one's own participation in the subject on which one is writing? I mean sure, participatory sociology, but it's not like that was a research experiment.

[lefaym]

I've never written a paper about my own work before, but one of the conveners, Ika Willis, has done so. She wrote a paper about her own Snape/Harry fic, and I highly recommend checking it out:

Willis, Ika. "Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts." Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. McFarland & Co. Jefferson. 2006.

You can read the abstract, and a large part of the paper here, though some pages have been omitted for copyright reasons.

[rm]

Thank you. That's useful for all sorts of reasons.

[lefaym]

I'd love to know your thoughts on it when you've read it.