The Tradëscan Codex

In my profile, there is (and has been for years) at the very top, a quote from Roland Barthes about Parisian striptease: "Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked." It is given such a prominent place because I consider it in many ways to be my philosophy of ficwriting. I try to write in that same contradictory space in which Parisian striptease took place: presenting the female character for the reader’s desiring gaze without stripping them naked of their agency so that they become desexualized--for an object has no sex.

aris_tgd refers to "the dominant narrative of [. . .] fetish and [. . .] kink" as being the narrative "your bodies are thing which we are entitled to": having X as kink (in the original post, disability) means using X as an object of one's pleasure. This fantasy of entitlement exists in a similar contradiction: the woman's (or POC's or disabled person's or so on) agency undermines the entitlement by making access to their bodies their choice, while violent rape undermines it from the other direction (if one were truly entitled, force would not be necessarily). It is a truism that slash, of both the m/m and f/f varieties, is (among other things) a mechanism for exploring these types of power imbalances, often for the purposes of kink, without invoking the politics of heterosexuality.

Often, then, in fic as in society, the violence or implied threat of violence is shifted away, masked, sublimated. In the fics I cite in this post, my School of Lost Souls and wisdomeagle's Gather Paradise, this is the case. In my fic, Fred is entitled to River's body as part of a larger claim on River's body made by the Alliance, a claim whose logical endpoint we finally are shown in the movie Serenity and The R. Tam Sessions. In Ari's fic, the violence is similarly transferred to Wolfram & Hart, the demonic law firm which employs both Lilah Morgan and Fred Burkle, the two halves of the fic's pairing, at various points in the run of Angel. The characters in both fics do not have to resort to violence in order to assert their entitlement over the bodies of others, because all of the characters are already embedded in a system which systematically undermines their agency.

It is not coincidental that in both cases this nexus of power is aligned in opposition to the moral order of the canon universe; both the Alliance and Wolfram & Hart are the "bad guys." Both Ari's fic and my own thus become fics which not only depict sexual entitlement and enact a fantasy of sexual entitlement, they are also in some sense about sexual entitlement.

On the other hand, in my Narnia AU The iPhone of Queen Susuan the systemic nexus of power which affords the male protagoniost access to and control over his sister's body is aligned with the general moral order of the canon universe. Peter is entitled to Susan's body because their god has said so. Note that while I'm taking the dynamics to an extreme not seen in the canon text, I don't think I'm essentially changing them. Instead, I'm highlighting something that is already implicit in canon.

It would seem that imaginative resistance--the term philosophers of language use for the phenomenon wherein we find ourselves unwilling or even unable to imagine fictional worlds wherein the moral order is contrary to that which we believe holds in the actual world--would cause us to recognize Aslan as being evil in ordaining such an order, and Peter (and Lucy and Susan) as complicit for cooperating with it. (That would certainly be, say, Christopher Hitchens' analysis.) Insofar as this is the case, it seems that it should function as a satire.

And yet . . . it doesn't. It's not a fic about entitlement, simply a fic which depicts entitlement, enacts a fantasy of entitlement for the pleasure of the reader. It reads like an id fantasy of discipline and submission to discipline. There is, I think, a readerly construction of author's intent--the author-function--going on here: the reader intuits (and whether she is right or wrong is irrelevant so long as she follows the established conventions of her interpretative community) that the purpose of the fic is not to critique. This involves an examination of the plausible pscyhology of a community member: while it is not plausible to assume that Dean Swift really wanted to eat babies, it is much more plausible to assume that the idea of Peter spanking Susan might get an author hot. (Then again, maybe Jonny had a baby-eating kink. Who knows?) To say that a fic is "about" X is to say that we construct the author-function as havin depicted X for the precise purpose of making a statement about it; in "The iPhone of Queen Susan," this doesn't happen.

But as I've pointed out before, the real question is not whether the reader constructs the author as advocating (or at least not advocating against) a point of view. Insofar as this is what we are worried about as authors, we are shifting the focii of attention to ourselves and away from the suffering of the oppressed--we are more worried about looking sexist or racist or ablist than in acting sexist or racist or ablist. Instead, the question we must ask is: how is the story functioning within the community of its readership? Is it normalizing harmful behaviors, reinforcing damaging stereotypes, &c? The answers to these questions will rely as much on the character(s) of the readership(s) as on the content of the story. It is a matter of ethnography rather than literary criticism as such. The way Triumph of the Will or Birth of A Nation might function when shown to a contemporary sociology or history class is very different than how either film would have functioned in its original context, for example.

I've been accused in the past of being too trusting of fandom's ability to read fics critically in terms of sexual politics. It is a point well-taken: firstly, the generalizations I made about fandom's critical capacities two years ago aren't necessarily the same as I would make today; and secondly, obviously any of our understandings of "fandom" will be severely constrained, each of us having different and often strongly disparate experiences. Of course, neither is "fandom" synonymous with my readership, however. The question then becomes: how can I do my best to frame my stories in such a way trhat my own particular and unique readership receives them in the way which does the leat harm and the most good?

I think the advice that aris_tgd gives me in the comments to her post is probably the best solution:

I think that labeling these things as kink instead of as "how the world works" does help to change people's minds about the narrative. I mean, labeling "a man having sex with his wife even if she doesn't want to because that's what he's entitled to" as "spousal rape" instead of "how a marriage works" changes how we think about bodily autonomy and what marriage means. Labeling these as "constructed narratives for a particular kink" helps the reader realize that they are constructs.

ETA: It strikes me that it's probably important for me to point out that aris_tgd uses the term "label" instead of "warn" in the quote above. The distinction is important to me: what we're talking about is something an author uses to shape a reader's aesthetic experience, in the same we she uses the content of the story itself, not something which is imposed on the author regardless of what it may be she is trying to do. I'm thinking mainly in terms of AO3's tags, which a reader can also choose not to see if they don't want to be spoiled. (I have tags set not to display, for example.) I don't warn for story elements other than rape; I do, however, tag things in ways I consider to be accurate and appropriate, and I tend to be a maximalist rather than a minimalist in tagging (since even for someone who has tags set not to display, tags will still be a mechanism, via the sidebar, of finding new fic, so the more tags an author uses the more likely a reader will find her fic).

I'm glad we are having the authorial responsibility discussion (cf. metafandom), because "Isn't it contradictory to talk about a safe space for yourself, and then go on to render feminist criticisms of media (e.g., the Mary Jane statuette)?" is a not-stupid question that deserves to be mulled over and answered. Which is not to say that it is contradictory, because I don't believe it is, but being ignorant of the way that a contradiction could be seen to exist leaves our feminist arguments for what we are doing open to an objection that we could otherwise address.

I think that, in the large, the people who are "for" authorial responsibility (and I think that some of them really see everyone who disagree with them as against responsibility, rather than simply disagreeing on what that responsibility entails, using the same pseudologic that leads pro-lifers to assume that all pro-choicers love abortion and want to have as many as possible) are ignoring the differing effects that context can have on what authorial responsibility requires. Which is ironic, because their argument is really all about context.

No, I do not believe that works are written or read in a vacuum. Indeed, according to the flavor of literary theory to which I subscribe, in a vacuum the very act of reading would be impossible. But I don't support the writing of incest (for example) because I don't think that fictional texts have consequences. I support the writing of incest fanfiction because I am cognizant of the specific context within which these works exist and are meant to be read.

I mean, I believe that fictional texts have real-world consequences. I believe that fictional texts should be critiqued and judged by consequences they can reasonably be expected to have (Heinlein did not expect Manson, nor should he have). Radical feminist, here. It's pretty much a corner stone of my world-view; I believe it at least as deeply as I believe anything else. I believe that much of mainstream media supports a mainstream patriuarchal ideology and should be called on the fact. These are pretty much tenets of faith for me.

But I believe fandom, even (or especially?) its incest fics, resists that ideology on several levels. (While possibly being co-opted by it on other levels. I'm a radical feminist, I can problematize anything, including the problematizations. But sometimes we have to go for the surface good and leave deeper systemic issues for later. Women's suffrage is more important than gender-neutral language or nonsegregated bathrooms, although they're all necessary.) That incest fic? It's on the side of the angels.

The consequences of a HP fanfiction, written within the community of women for the community of women, are different than the consequences of having Lucius shagging Draco in a Warners Brothers blockbuster. Which is not to say that I'd automatically condemn having Lucius shag Draco in the WB movie, or automatically condone the fanfic. But the rubrics I used would be pretty radically different in how they were calibrated.

For one thing, (online LJ media fanfiction) fandom is a community in which a community of readers is also a community of writers (and vice versa), a fact I have yet to have seen mentioned but which I think is deeply significant. Our defining feature is that we are not passive consumers of texts. We are not going to be affected by a fictional text in the same way as Joe Average. We recognize the possibiliy of ambiguity of meaning and unreliable narrators, and God knows we know how to read "against the grain" (a grain which is itself, to my mind, socially constructed) to give a text the meaning we want to give it.

( I've said a lot of this before, actually ) I'm just not convinced that, using the hermeneutical conditions brought to bear by the fandom community onto texts produced by that community, that a text could be read to be in favor of certain things which the fandom community agrees is wrong, such as rape. (Obviously, not everyone in fandom uses the same hermeneutic conditions, but when we're assuaging the damage a text could do, we're talking about trends.) Which is not precisely analagous to the question of whether such texts could affect us negatively (i.e., make us more accepting of rape) without being read as explicitly pro-rape, I suppose. But when read under those conditions I have no reason to believe that those sorts of texts will produce such a negative effect, and none of the interlocutors have given me any reason to believe such.

When I criticize, say, the movie Underworld (which drives me crazy with the way feminity is presented within it) I am doing so recognizing that a) its audience is not fandom, and will not in general read it subversively, and b) its producers (who were men) do not have the feminist cred that fan authors get. Same would go for the Mary Jane statuette, or Powergirl's cleavage, or Supergirl's anorxia, or the way that Stephanie Brown gets remembered, or whatever. (I mean, I hang out in femslash fandom. There's a lot of objectification of women going on around here. It's not the same.) (And note that none of the things above are intrinsically problematic, since I don't believe texts speak with a moral voice of their own. I'm sure there are big-busted people and skinny people on Krypton. It's the pattern within its social context--particularly that these unrealistic specimens of womanhood are made by and for het males--which is troubling.)

Insofar as fandom's specific context has been recognized by these authorial responsibility interlocutors, it has mostly been to say that, no, fandom is not a unique special snowflake. Which, you know, is a strawman argument. For an example, take cofax7's (who is on my flist and whom I love) formulation of the following "unstated assumption":

2. That as a members of a mostly-female community we are entitled to privilege our desires over any other concern because we've been oppressed in the past with regards to our creativity and sexuality.

First off, I don't care in the least what happened in the past--the past is past. Fandom's identity as a community of women for women earns it special status not by virtue of the oppression women may have suffered in the past with regards to their creativity and sexuality but because of the oppression they continue to suffer to this day. I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy, dude.

That said, "we are entitled to privilege our desires over any other concern" is absurd. I won't say that no one has argued that, because I'm sure someone somewhere has, but I certainly don't think it is an "unstated assumption" monolithically behind the entirety (or even majority) of one of the sides in the debate. Saying one (I suddenly feel uncomfortable, as a het male, using the first-person plural in this context, because it isn't my, i.e. Alixtii O'Krul's, desire which should be privileged per se) is entitled to privilege one's desires over this specific concern does not mean that one feels that one is entitled to do so with regards to any possible concern. As I've said before, fandom's Get Out of Jail Free card only goes so far.

In particular, I trust fandom on racial issues about as far as I can throw it, although that's still more than I trust the mainstream media. The SGA wank aside, the most frequent meta discussion on race seems to be variants of "Why don't we talk about race more?" No one's saying "Why don't we talk about sex more?" (Okay, actually, they have. The mind boggles.) We talk about sex all the times, and as far as I'm concerned fandom's earned its cred as far as sexual politics go. Not so on race. It still has a long way before it earns its ghetto pass, so to speak.

Conclusion: Claiming fendom as a safe space for women's fantasies does not mean that one does not acknowledge that fiction has consequences. Also, you should totally go write for my Incest/Cross-Gen porn battle. Or sign up for the 'Cest-a-thon. Or, if that sort of thing squicks you, don't. Either way I'm good.

I've been thinking about the wank (you know the one) and it struck me as interesting the way in which in literary analysis intent is illegitimate, but in moral analysis it's much more important. Unless you're a consequentialist or a utilitarian or one of the handful of other positions which eschew intent in moral analysis, too, but we won't go there. In general, though, I think we are okay with people making mistakes (underestimating the cultural literacy of their audience, say) and not so much with people doing things that they know are wrong. Unless you're an error theorist, in which case everyone falls into the first case, but we won't go there either.

(The most damning facts about the accused parties in the recent cases is the way in which they are reported to have acted after producing the texts, the comments they made which interpretive conventions lead us to read as to having been made in their own voices and thus cause us to construct their intent in a certain way, as being having not made a good-faith effort. I say this without firsthand knowledge. A fact can be damning without being true.)

But then it occurred to me that when we perform moral analysis we perform the same sort of Foucauldian process in constructing intent as we do when reading a text. We don't have knowledge about the actual intent of a moral agent (even if they are ourselves!) anymore than we do of an author. Only instead of an "author-function," we'd get something along the lines of a "moral-agent-function." Which would be all well and good, but with ethics aren't we much more invested in finding out what really happened (i.e., with the moral-agent-function being equivalent with the moral agent) than we are with literary analysis. Which is (I think?) because literary analysis doesn't compel us to any action that's more significant than hitting the back button (or, at most, writing a review that can wreck a career) while moral judgments lead to categorical imperatives which can literally be a matter of life and death. (Murder or self-defense? A person's life hangs in the balance! Or, you know, flaming a plagiarizer.)

In the soi-disant "real world," while we can't circumvent the theoretical limits of intent (we can't subpoena a ding an sich) we can cut through some of the practical ones--and often do, especially in extreme cases. Also, the law has protections built into that assume that when "the real truth" is obscured from us (as it inevitably is) the defendent at least is given the benefit of the doubt. (Too often the protections are circumvented, but that's paranoia for another day. Note to self: why haven't you mailed that cheque to the ACLU?)

The result isn't necessarily any closer to the truth, but it assuages our fears. We get a truth that we can swallow. We don't need a truth that is Truth, just one that we can unite behind as a community . . . a shared reality, a shared lie, in which we all can believe.

[I think I need a tag for discussing intent issues. "Author-function"? "Authorial intent"? "Intentional fallacy"? I wish I could make polls.]

International Blog Against Racism Week is coming to a close. I like to think that every week is International Blog Against Sexism week in my journal, but race doesn't get mentioned all that often. I can't post with any particularly appropriate icons, for all the eight people who appear in my six icons are all white. While I think we are agreed that's deeply problematic, it is not as if going and getting an icon of a character I don't really like would solve anything. The issue is deeper, systemic, and blaming the individual never solves anything. (Not that I should be absolved of responsibility, either.) Changing my icons won't change anything; changing whatever made me not as interested in the non-white characters will, alongside an honest attempt to understand and appreciate the characters I might not "get."

(Honestly, this is how I see affirmative action most of the time. I don't oppose it anymore, because I think the restrictions on it by the Supreme Court are extremely fair, but I don't see it working particularly well, either.)

The closest character to a character of color whom I really loved is Kennedy, and she (and/or Iyari?) passed for white to me for the entire time I watched the show. I even sort of remember the "Really? Hmm" moment when I learned that Iyari Limon was Latina--and of course there are photo shoots of her that I've seen since which really accentuate it.(And there was a really great post about that and how problematic it is on my flist a couple days ago. Let me finish my thought and I'll hunt down the link.) Class issues intersect here--it was clearly established that Kennedy was at least upper-middle class, with a vacation house on Long Island, and there seems to be a weird (or not-so-weird, really, when one thinks about it) way that "upward" mobility requires a much greater enculturation in white culture (i.e., patriarchal hegemony) so that we would expect an upper-class Latina to pass for white better than a lower-class one.

Part of it is to whom I'm attracted; with the exception of the Mesektet/Dark Champions icon, all of my icons contain at least one character to whom I'm attracted. Why do I tend not to be attracted to people who are non-white (and when I do find such a person attractive, it is typically on "white" standards of beauty)? Well, "socialization" is the easy and obvious answer there, but I think the damage has been pretty much done by this point. Any suggestions as to how I can save future generations from this? (Of course, any evaluation of a person based on appearance is problematic from a feminist viewpoint, but it is not a practice from which we can very easily escape.)

Okay, so I wanted to use this time to revisit the question of whether texts can speak with moral voices, because that's part of what is at stake when we look at racism/sexism/classism in texts. There is nothing outside the text, so by definition every act of racism/sexism/classism is carried out via texts. And structural raceism/sexism/classism is built into the very language in which we create the texts, which presents those constructing the text with an interesting dilemma--we must work within the language so as to be communicative, but outside it so as to be liberatory. Twas brilig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

Sunnydale is a white, upper-middle-class community. Now there's some worldbuilding issues here, admittedly. We know that Sunnydale has people moving in and out a lot, and the property values are low, and I'm not an economics major so I don't know what it would take to keep up the upper-middle-class lifestyle that the residents of Sunnydale have. And it's been argued that geographically, there's no way a Californian suburb with that level of moving in and out could keep the level of racial homogeneity that it does. I don't know enough about California to speak to that issue. What I do know that here on the East Coast, there are plenty of towns just like Sunnydale.

To say that because Sunnydale is a white community that there is something oppressive with Buffy is ludicrous (and I'm not accusing anyone of making such an argument, just working through a train of thought.) Otherwise, only shows taking place in the Feminist Utopia would be proper, and I'm not sure that such a show would at all be entertaining. Instead, we must look at what function Sunnydale's whiteness performs. Insofar as Buffy is a subversive attack on the complacency of white middle class Americans, Sunnydale's whiteness is a suitably progressive source of satire. We know that the show called attention to the lack of diversity at least once, when Mr. Trick first entered Sunnydale.

If you're not convinced by this reading of Buffy I could go on, drawing on more details and whatnot. But as a result of various meta discussions, I'm not sure whether there is any correct reading. Buffy is a floating signifier, and as a result it says nothing and everything about race. A racist moving picture from the late 19th century might be the most powerful message against racism in the contemporary moment: it self-satirizes.

So what is a radical feminist to do, other than throw their hands up in despair? Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted? Well, this is where the switch from theory to praxis comes in. (Although the way we conceptualize praxis--which is, of course, another type of text--is ultimately dependent on theory.) In this world, are people of color empowered or disempowered by the Buffy text? This is an empirical question that cannot be answered by watching Buffy alone, and as such, I have no idea what the answer is. And while I think censorship is always an evil, and that people have a responsibility to their Muses, there is no responsibility to go out of our way to disseminate damaging (i.e. damaging in the specific here/now of a sociohistorical location) texts.

An it harm none, do what thou will.

(To recognize "harm" as such, of course, we need a theoretical apparatus already in place--in this case, my radical feminist convictions.)

This is why, as I've said before in this journal, there is no such thing as a feminist text, and the flipside of the argument is that there is no such thing as a racist text: because texts don't speak with a moral voice. They don't speak with any voice at all; they need to be interpreted.

So nemo_gravis replied to my previous post with a thoughtful and intelligent post on the way that morality functions in fictional worlds the same way it does in the actual world. (Okay, that paraphrase is pretty heavy in my philosopher-speak, but that was the main thrust of Nemo's argument.) I agree with Nemo insofar as talk of the "attraction" we feel towards evil characters was opened up to allow for more than just sexual desire, but thinking about things there helped me to clarify my ideas here.

The voice of a fic is not the author's, but that does not mean the fic does not speak with a moral voice. This voice is instead rooted in the dialogue between the reader and the text, a dialogue over which the author has little control but which nonetheless exists. Furthermore, there are parameters within the sociolinguistic context which provide (predictable) boundaries for that dialogue; this is what separates "good" readings from "bad" ones. I find it difficult, as someone skilled (not by any fancy education, although I have that too, but simply by living in the culture and speaking the language) in various relevant narrative conventions, and even with imaginative resistance and assuming that the same moral rules apply in the fictional world as in this one, to interpret Buffy as not endorsing the actions of Buffy (even when she's clearly wrong, like late season 7) or Giles, or Battlestar Galactica as not endorsing the actions of Roslin. The narrative conventions make it clear who is in the right and who is in the wrong. ( Spoilers for BtVS S7 ) Furthermore, I can see people finding this message communicated via the aesthetic work persuasive--( Alixtii being political some more )--even when a logical argument would not be able to accomplish this end. (Anyone remember the article "Also Sprach Faith" in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy?)

( So what? )

In addition to my feminist politics, I subscribe to feminist theologies, feminist metaphysics, feminist epistemologies, and so forth. I positively revel in what might be seen by intellectual conservatives as the oxymoronic nature of their backwards-seeming approach (putting political commitments before the search for "Truth"--whatever that is). But I hit a brick wall when I consider feminist aesthetics. Part of this is because, as I noted in my previous post, that when I put on my writer hat I become more of a Platonist/Moorean. Anyone who writes fiction so as to speak to the contingent aesthetic standards of a specific spatiotemporal location rather than enduring truths is, in my mind, at worst a propagandist and at best a hack. This is despite my philosophical conviction that said enduring truths don't actually exist--when engaged in aesthetic creation, we must believe in them. (I've nicknamed this phenomenon the "artist's antinomy"--which explains how a group as bright as the Bloomsbury authors could have fallen for Moore's quack metaphysics.) When I write, I have to write what I feel, not what I believe--even though what I feel is often deeply influenced by my socialization as a white het male in a patriarchal society.

(That aesthetics resists my radical feminism in this way implies to me that a retheorization of the way in which I concieve of the relations between these disciplines is necessary. Perhaps ethics and aesthetics are co-primitive? Still the quasi-foundationalism here is disturbing and in some senses deeply anti-feminist.)

But then, once I have produced a text, what am I to do with it? My own moral beliefs are irrelevant to an interpretation of the text; to take them into account would be to commit the intentional fallacy. But when I construct an author-function based solely on the fanfic, I find that his moral views are at places diametrically opposed to me; in "his" glorification of the will to power, "he" seems to be expressing the belief that it is acceptable to sacrifice freedom for liberty, that a betrayal of our principles is in some way justified when there are vampires at the gates. (But if vampires, then why not terrorists?) So, pursuant to the process of feminist criticism I described above, I speak out about the ways in which the texts perpetuate patriarchal modes of thought--the sort of feminist speaking out which I supppose I am doing now. But isn't there something vaguely hypocritical about denouncing the moral dynamics of a text which I have written? Am I hiding behind the intentional fallacy to ignore the fact that I am disseminating modes of thought which I find distasteful?

( Does my commitment to my art trump even my feminist commitments? )

The best solution is pragmatic, I suppose. (Isn't it always?) A radical feminist like me can problematize anything. The question that needs to be asked isn't what would be the ideal text in the feminist utopia but what is empowering to these people at this time on the ground? (Turning to praxis is always a good idea when one has become bogged down by theory.) Empirical questions like these tend to bore me (I am much more the abstract theorist), but I share with much of fandom the conviction that fandom as a community of women writing is empowering to them (laugh of the Medusa, anyone?)--and perhaps the segment of fandom with which I am involved, in which women write about women is even more so. (In any case, I write for an audience which is more predominately queer, and thus ius more radically disempowered by our patriarchal society even compared to an audience of heterosexual women.)

I can't control who will read my fic (unless I flock it, as I have done in a couple of instances), but I can have a pretty good sense of the sociolinguistic parameters within which it will be interpreted by the community for which it is written, and I know none of you, flist, are going to decided that the president's actions are acceptable because Dawn treats herself as above the law when she sends Slayers to kill vampires. (Indeed, the very fact that I as a het male were am women as objects of desire in the way I do would be somewhat problematic were it not for the fact that I do it as a member of this community and for this audience.) But what if that weren't the case, and the interpretative lens which I knew would be brought to my fic might engender disseminating disempowering modes of thought?

Well, I suppose that is a moral dilemma for another day.