Dissertation Blog #3: Queering Fandom

I recently had a relatively epiphanic week with regard to my dissertation. As I spend more time inhabiting diss-space, such weeks (and the blog posts they generate) may get more frequent, as I suspect that this is a common stage in dissertating, when things suddenly become clear in batches.

First, as already blogged, those Sassen readings helped me realize it may not be so useful to think in terms of the nation.

To explain the second epiphany, I have to back up some distance. It all started because my department is somewhat anarchic. This suits most of us very well, because it gives us a lot of freedom, but it does contribute to a feeling of isolation. Particularly as students complete coursework, we all sort of lose touch with each other, to greater or lesser degree.

(Though, the way a speaker at a departmental reunion this weekend spoke about her cohort as an intellectual sounding-board to this day suggests there are ways around this.)

Consequently, when some university administrator types reviewed us, they said we needed more cohesion. The department administrators looked around at other graduate programs and decided the way to do that was to start a graduate student organization, and they tasked the representatives from each cohort with this. And so, as the unlucky soul elected to represent the 4^th years, I found myself in a pub co-hosting a grad student meetup a couple of weeks ago.

This is a long story, but it was necessary to explain how I found myself seated at a table with a bunch of first and second years, who sought out my advice as a more advanced student—and particularly, one familiar with queer theory. Ultimately, it was the question "How is LGBT studies different from queer theory?" that resulted in me understanding my dissertation in a whole new way.

I said, "It's like the difference between ethnic studies and critical race studies"—and got a blank look. I tried again "No, okay, here's a better example: the difference between women's studies and gender studies." That landed more, and I went on to explain how I saw the distinctions between these categories.

Later, it hit me. That's the move I am making in fan studies. The queer studies or critical race studies or gender studies move. (Or, since I just taught Robert McRuer, the disability studies to crip theory move.)

That is, fan studies has, to this point, been operating in a women's studies or ethnic studies or disability studies or LGBT studies mode. It has said, "There are people called fans, who have a particular experience—to some extent, an oppressed experience—and we should document what it's like to be this sort of person."

This work has been and continues to be important, for fans as much as for any of the other categories of people that are researched in this way. This work absolutely should and must be done, because there are, in fact, groups of people out there that we don't know very much about yet and we should know about them if we're going to better our sense of what's going on in the world. I am, emphatically, not disputing that.

But that's not the work that I want to do in my dissertation. I'm out to queer fandom.

Now, I'm not queering fan studies in the way Julie Levin Russo does (Seriously! Can't blog without Julie!) in her insistence that it's important to focus on queer female fandom in Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities.

Perhaps most vitally, like I insisted in my academic telephone piece, I'm not saying all fans are queer in the sense of having same-sex sex or queer in the sense of sexually oppressed, because either of those contentions would be patently absurd, although some fans surely are queer in one or both of those ways. And actually I think it's sometimes productive to think of fandom as a sexual orientation. See my Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom

What I'm doing, instead, is making the move queer theory makes (and critical race theory and gender theory and crip theory all make) to not just take fans as self-evident but rigorously interrogate the process by which this category is produced.

I don't want to look at fans out in the world as just existing, as if they just sprang up, fully-formed, not shaped in their practice by the social sense of what a fan is, as if the ability of anyone to even identify a fan or fannish behavior isn't shaped by the social sense of what a fan is. Because, no matter what Lady GaGa says, neither fans nor queers are "born this way."

Instead, I want to know: What are the processes by which we come to understand that there is such a thing as a fan? And what do we then understand that thing to be? What are the consequences of that construction process and constructed outcome for the norms of media audiencing in the Internet era?

This is a pretty different set of concerns from much of fan studies to this point, but I'm convinced that it's an approach that's vital. Just as looking at gender and race and sexuality and ability as categories has enriched work that looks at women and racial minority people and gays and the disabled, I think that queering fandom can really provide a stronger theoretical base for the LGBT-style work.

Now if only I could coin a catchy name.

The Academic Game of Telephone

You remember the game of Telephone from your childhood: kids whisper a message from ear to ear along a group of people, and when it gets to the end of the chain the last person says it out loud, hilariously garbled.

I had not, until this academic year as I'm starting to be less of an apprentice and more of an academic-proper, appreciated how much being in my line of work is quite a lot like being permanently engaged in Telephone.

I first saw it when I went to the Association of Internet Researchers conference this October. As any good Internet or media conference does in this day and age, AoIR had a hashtag (#ir12) and extensive livetweeting. And, I'll admit that when I followed that stream, I paid particularly close attention to the tweets about my presentation—don't pretend y'all don't do that too.

The result was that, for the first time, I got to see my meaning escape my control as it happened. For someone who operates from somewhere in the Active Audience realm and is very committed to the idea that the author does not decide her own meaning, this shouldn't have surprised me, but it was decidedly uncomfortable to have it happen to my own statements.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to record the tweets in their entirety as they happened, but fortunately Fabio Giglietto of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo put together a Storify collection for the conference that features some of the discussion about my talk. It went something like this:

After my clarification, which was retweeted by @drst (whose real identity I know but she seems to not have it attached to her account), this reply came back:

This was, of course, a joking response, but it shows why it is that my statement, reduced to "fans are livestock" rather than "livestock is a useful metaphor," was odd to people who got it second hand. Fans aren't really livestock in a lot of senses—nutritional uses being one of them—but when it got retold the way it did people potentially got the idea that I'd said something far wackier than in fact I did.

Something similar happened after my article, Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures in November, though I didn't see it until I Googled myself on a lark in January.

In TWC's Symposium blog, Lisa Schmidt wrote an entirely appreciative post responding to my piece (called it "a really wonderful essay" and everything) in which—as in the AoIR example—she picked up on one of my points and did something with it that I didn't intend.

Schmidt said: "The pressure of 'normal' is intense and maddening, which is why Stanfill’s section on fandom as a kind of queerness or sexual deviance resonated so powerfully for me. Supposedly fandom is becoming increasingly accepted by the mainstream yet, in many contexts, it remains a dirty little secret. It is a kind of closet, even for some who are in long-term relationships with persons of the opposite sex."

Okay—so far that's fine—"sexual deviance" isn't that deviant from what I was trying to say, "closet" is right. But then things take a turn for the dead author: "More than ever, I feel that fandom, even when not explicitly having anything to do with anything sexual, is queer."

This was the alarm-bells or record-scratch moment, because I was actually very careful NOT to say that fans were queer. In earlier drafts I had said so, but by this point I felt like it didn't really capture what I was after. Instead, the terminology I was using was "nonheteronormative."

The real trouble for my ability to control what people think I've said comes when people responded to Schmidt, for though she says "Of course, this is not really the point of Stanfill’s article," this still becomes what is picked up on in the comments to her post.

User Havoc replied:

I feel like making everything queer dilutes the problems that actual queer folk can go through. Fans don’t need laws changed to be married to fans of the opposite gender, so long as they meet the gender binary. I feel that to list all fans as queer is appropriative of actual queer identity.

Yes, let’s avoid the idea of whiteness as the norm for fans (and elsewhere). But let’s also try not to appropriate one group’s struggles and make them universal to fandom, because LGBTQ struggles aren’t fandom struggles (unless they’re intersectional and both a fan and LGBTQ), and it’s not fair to those who identify as LGBTQ.

And Dana Sterling added: "I tend to agree with havoc about feeling like using queerness in this way in regard to fandom borders on appropriative."

It was these responses that really distressed me. First, there was the suggestion that sexuality is only "LGBTQ" people's problem (the phrase "unless they're intersectional," the identification of struggles as the essential property of "actual queer folk"). Then there was the reduction of sexuality-based inequality to the denial of state-sanctioned marriage. Moreover, I am heartily sick of reducing queerness to pain.

However, the biggest source of frustration for me was largely because all of these positions I find so problematic are actually incompatible with what the article is trying to do.

Queer, as an analytical apparatus, doesn't actually describe the way fans work in culture, and so I didn't use it. It also carried the danger of exactly the interpretation of fandom-as-oppressed-sexual-minority that these retellings and responses produced, something I would never want to argue because it's patently absurd—though not because I'm worried about "appropriating" any oppression supposedly endemic to queers.

I suppose I'm going to have to get used to this—I'm going to continue to publish, and I really want to be that bigshot academic everybody talks about. Unlike the Twitter example, I can't always go rushing in to correct those misperceptions as they occur. So I guess we'll have to add "telephone distortion" to the occupational hazards of being an academic like eyestrain, carpal tunnel, and atrophy of the social life.

The Day the Internet Surprised Me, or RPF and Rage

When I posted about Chaz Bono a while back, I said I don't read the comments to online news stories, but now that I've said it I must confess I totally do. I've realized it's more accurate to say that I don't read the comments unless I am prepared to cope with the absolute worst of humanity.

A second confession: I have a Google Alert set for Lea Michele. So, when the PR folks (his? hers? I don't know) announced that she and her boyfriend had broken up a few weeks ago, and it echoed through the gossipsphere, I got a lot of emails. And, I was a) curious what the response would be and b) prepared to see people being awful . . . so I took a look.

And the Internet surprised me.

Well, at first it didn't. I went to the comments fully expecting to see a deluge of suggestions of who Ms. Michele should hook up with next—which were definitely there.

I also assumed that the Real Person Fiction (RPF) shippers would be there, pouncing on the opportunity to say that she would either soon be dating one of her castmates or secretly has been the whole time. And indeed, the story went up at 6:42 and at 6:50 someone commented "MONCHELE LIVES!! " followed at 6:51 by "Achele is end game" and 6:54 by " Achele* fixed it for ya **" A decoder ring: "Monchele" refers to Michele paired with her Glee costar Cory Monteith; the "Achele" portmanteau indicates a romantic relationship between Michele and Dianna Agron (who, as avid P3 readers may recall, likes girls, but not in a sexual way).

I was, particularly, expecting the Achele shippers to be out in force, because they're a vocal bunch. (Confession 3: I also happen to think they make a pretty compelling argument. Not that the relationship between the two is necessarily "real," but I can see how it could be. I know that social norms for friendships between women allow some latitude in terms of acceptable levels of physical affection, but those girls are SNUGGLY. One of MANY videos, if you're curious.) And, indeed, Achele was a pretty substantial presence in the comments.

I was prepared for the response to the Achele shippers to be somewhere between dismissive and ugly: A commenter named Emily said, "If I read one more comment about 'achele' I'm gonna flip Dianna and Lea aren't gay Dianna has a boyfriend, respect people's sexualities please."

This kind of thing is pretty standard in how we make sense of sexuality. It's got "straight until proven gay." It's got a complete lack of recognition that sexuality exists beyond a 100% hetero/100% homo binary, that Agron and Michele could have boyfriends today and girlfriends tomorrow, and that one needn't "be gay" to date someone of the same sex. So, the greatest hits are all there.

But then the Internet surprised me.

Allison: "@Emily The Mo[n]chele/Lark comments are JUST as insulting...Lea has NEVER said anything about her sexuality for one thing, so if you complain about Achele complain about the other ships, because yes, your comment's exclusive nature to only Achele is homophobic" (Ship, short for "relationship," refers to advocating a particular coupling within a fan object, either of characters or actors)

Wow. Okay, some random person commenting on a gossip story the internet—a place usually chock full of venom, hysteria, and general inanity—has calmly and rationally pointed out that being offended at the suggestion that an actor might be in a same-sex relationship is homophobic. Maybe this is just my academic snobbery (of which I'll admit I've got plenty), but I don't usually expect that kind of sophistication in online comments. And who knows, maybe Allison is actually an academic herself and my snobbery needn't be challenged.

Commenter Nicola replied, "@Allison Insinuating that Dianna and Lea are gay are just as insulting as saying that gay people should go straight." And she had a relatively complex and valid point too, though I may be putting words into her mouth in my interpretation of it.

That is, to enforce an ideal sexuality on another person isn't okay no matter what direction it goes. One ought not to police other people's behavior and insist that they belong to a particular category that they haven't chosen to join regardless of what category that is, as I argued with Marcus Bachmann.

Now, the thing did go off the rails after that.

Allison shot back, "@nicola...when exactly did I insinuate they had to be gay? I didn't, my point is we have NO idea if they're gay, straight or bi...It's not fair to exclusively bash Achele just because it's two girls. It's not okay to ship Lark or Monchele any more than it is to ship Achele. "

And I think it's absolutely right to resist default straightness. I also think it's right to resist the erasure of the middle of the Kinsey scale—we're not all zeroes and sixes.

But, as a queer theorist, a fan studies scholar, and a fan, I'm uneasy about throwing out the RPF shipping with the bathwater, which Allison does by saying that no shipping is okay. That is, I would argue that it's perfectly acceptable to interpret people's behavior selectively and subversively for one's own pleasure, whether that person is a fictional character or a real human.

However, one should not then impose that interpretation on the body of that actual person and demand that they comply with it, which is where I draw the line with some of the more enthusiastic and dogmatic Achele shippers.

But that's because one shouldn't impose and demand in general, not because it's somehow wrong to imagine what kind of sex other people have.

Or, rather, not because it's wrong to admit we all routinely imagine what kind of sex other people have, or would have if they did. Sometimes in great detail. (If you're curious, check out http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Glee%20RPF/works -- but read the tags carefully. You’ve been warned!)

Chaz Bono, (In)Sanity, and the Gender System

Ordinarily, I have a "don't read the comments" policy. People are, generally speaking, impressively hateful and cruel online because the relative anonymity means that there are few repercussions—I'm sure we've all been on the receiving end of this.

But with the controversy around Chaz Bono being cast in Dancing with the Stars, I'm finding myself unable to help looking at the comments—much like one can't look away from a horrific car crash. And, even if I had not been reading the comments, when there's this much controversy the same sort of extreme viewpoints tend to end up in the articles themselves as "telling both sides of the story."

Predictably, it's awful up one side and down the other. People are going around refusing to respect Bono's self-definition and using his birth name "Chastity" and the pronoun "her" and insisting that "His/Her chromosomes haven’t changes [sic] since birth and never will" (which, as my Fausto-Sterling-savvy Gender in the Media students can now tell you, doesn't actually mean as much as people think). And, of course, they're hysterically screeching about the Bible. The thread at the ABC blog has all of these strategies in play.

And in relation to those people I take Bono's side. I think it's ludicrous to argue that casting him somehow makes DWTS not safe for children because it'll make them turn out trans or gay or serial killers or whatever it is they're arguing. I absolutely think they're wrong to treat being trans as some sort of mental illness—comparing it to being an elective amputee, really?

I have to fight my knee-jerk response to think that these are bad people—or, as Chaz's mother Cher put it, "stupid bigots"—and instead think of them as just lacking knowledge. But I still feel superior to them and their bible-thumping, same-sex-sexuality-hating ways. (That's not me collapsing gender identity and sexual object choice; they're the ones saying "it is CLEARLY stated in the Bible,,, [sic] men are not to lay down with other men, same for women.")

But beyond that moment of support, things get tricky. I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that being inclined toward certain behavior or having certain feelings means your body needs to look a certain way. I think that ultimately this rigid correlation between body and behavior is something we have to resist rather than try to shape our bodies to fit into.

But of course, that behavior = body sentiment is exactly what we all hear all the time, though usually as body = behavior. "You're a girl (body) so you should act like it (behavior)." The idea that your body is your destiny is so completely ingrained in us that we can't think anything else. My students argued this about athletics even after reading and hearing that bodies are socially constructed.

So the arguments that Bono is going to destroy gender, or whatever, are totally off base. Transitioning, when done as a complete "I really am this other category on the inside and I need to fully move into that category" process, is actually very much about obeying and supporting gender rules. Changing the shape of one's body requires a pretty serious commitment to playing along.

This isn't to paint transfolk as dupes, by any means. The ways in which bodies get shaped in these processes are the product of medical institutions deciding what counted as transitioning. This matters because being able to count as transitioned is what makes you able to be able to change your state identity documents. In order to work in a mainstream, above-board kind of job, one has to have those documents, and unless you happen to have a particularly progressive employer they have to match the way you look when you walk in the door (and with the USA PATRIOT Act's insistence that terrorists might have fake documents that don't "match" their gender it may not matter what your boss thinks). I get that this is all very real and at times a matter of survival.

I also get that it can be a site of resistance, since transpeople routinely bend or break the rules. When the law says that in order to transition one has to have to have surgery to reassign their sex, that statute is intended to refer to genital surgery that will more or less render them both sterile and unable to experience sexual pleasure. But with a sympathetic doctor, someone can get a letter certifying that surgery to change sex has occurred without saying exactly what—that it was top surgery and not bottom surgery, say. There are ways to work the system, and people do.

Experiencing a high degree of mismatch between oneself and the social norm is a bad situation, and people like Chaz Bono are making the best of it.

But here again, like with 9/11 or with gay marriage, I see it on two levels simultaneously, and considering individual people as opposed to large-scale structures produces a dramatically different response. I almost wish I had less appreciation for subtlety and could be more dogmatic. It'd be easier.

That is, though I completely appreciate why people find it necessary to comply with the medico-legal framework to get access to the resources they need, I ultimately don't think it's a good idea to go appealing to the state for validation for one's body image any more than for one's sex life.

We all have a set of really narrow options of what bodies are supposed to look like and what it's appropriate to do with them, options that don't conform to the configurations people actually come in (however it is that you think we come to have a gender and a sexuality and a body that's a particular shape).

And we all have to work and struggle and cram ourselves into boxes—some more than others, of course—to find a place that's comfortable within that. Chaz Bono got a bad deal out of the boxes of the gender system. Or, we all get a bad deal out of the gender system, but Bono and other transfolk more than most.

These are real pressures with real consequences, but I simply cannot feel that the solution is to accept the boxes.

We have to expose the boxes as artificial, as constraining, as sometimes deadly. We have to work to dismantle the ways that the boxes hold the power they do over who gets jobs and how people get medical care and all kinds of other services and resources and opportunities.

We have to work toward some different way to configure people, such that you can feel however you want on the inside and look however you want on the outside, with no demand that those fall into a set of patterns, much less a rigid equation.

But, in the meantime, Bono's decision to get his body surgically altered to move him into a different category than the one into which he was born doesn't make him crazy, no matter what the fever pitch of think-of-the-children might say. Instead, the system is crazy. And even though I wouldn't choose the same way of coping with it, trying to make it work for you is a perfectly sane thing.

The Marcus Bachmann Gay Rumors: It’s the Principle of the Thing

I’ll admit it; I’m kind of fascinated by Michele Bachmann. It’s gotten to the point that those close to me are tired of hearing about all the crazy stuff she does.

Every time there’s a headline about some new cringeworthy gaffe she’s made or outlandish position she’s taken, my schadenfreude sense gets all tingly. I totally eat it up and click through and give the news outlet the eyeballs on their page that bring ad dollars that they were hoping to get by focusing on the most outlandish facets of the news in the first place.

But reading the story “Jon Stewart (with help from Jerry Seinfeld) mocks Marcus Bachmann's gay therapy... as he 'seems so gay,'” the usual glee I take in the absurdity of the Right vanished.

My first thought was: We’re not doing this. I don’t want to play this game. This is something they do. I like living on the moral high ground, and I want to stay there, thank you very much. No matter how odious the other side may be, no matter how appealing it is to think of giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Of course, as Michelle Cottle at the Daily Beast pointed out, this is

about more than critics lobbing generic bombs at a fiercely conservative presidential combatant. Michele Bachmann has long been one of the most aggressive anti-gay-marriage crusaders in politics, while Marcus runs a Christian-based therapy clinic accused of dabbling in “reparative therapy,” a controversial counseling technique premised on the notion that you can "pray away the gay.”

And there is something compelling about the turnabout here. If people like the Bachmanns didn’t insist that being gay was so horrifying, it wouldn’t be a big deal if he is. So it’s his own fault, too bad, so sad.

Also, the idea that someone is “profoundly antigay” out of gay panic makes a certain amount of sense. The idea that this is a form of protesting too much (and Shakespeare’s original opposite meaning be damned) is well-established. Popular culture has explored it: look at Karofsky bullying Kurt in Glee (or, I know I’m hung up on it, but seriously, Quinn’s mistreatment of Rachel. See skywarrior108’s The Truth About Quinn Fabray.)

But if Karofsky kissed Kurt and Quinn drew a picture of Rachel with hearts around it, where’s the smoking gun with Marcus Bachmann?

It’s his apparently “effeminate manner and ‘center-square gay’ voice” (Cottle). That’s right, they’re reading his sexuality off from his gender. The same way gender non-conforming people have been persecuted as sexual deviants with surprising consistency across time and space (though clearly not everywhere or everywhen).

Seriously? Sexuality doesn’t follow immediately from gender any more than either of them follow immediately from sex. If Marcus Bachmann is swishy, it doesn’t mean he likes men. The same people trying to call him out now have surely defended tough and supposedly “manly” women like Hillary Clinton against accusations of lesbianism, so how is this different?.

Judith Butler, in her 1993 book Bodies that Matter points out that “homophobia often operates through the attribution of a damaged, failed, or otherwise abject gender to homosexuals” (p. 238). People like Dan Savage and Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan would probably reject the idea that they’re homophobic (though at least a few queer theorists would disagree about Sullivan), but reading “failed” gender as a sign of homosexuality is the same thing.

That’s because it is based in the (heterosexist) idea that if you like someone of the “same” sex, it means you’re really sort of the “opposite sex” on the inside, because there can only really be cross-sex attraction. This argument is objectionable because it makes heterosexuality central and homosexuality a failed imitation.

Meghan Daum of the LA Times adds an interesting spin to this: “from the looks of things, it isn't acting gay that Bachmann deplores; it's gay acts. And there's no evidence he's broken his own rules about the latter.” Though problematic in assuming that there’s such a thing as “acting gay,” Daum’s piece usefully preserves the ways in which behaving a certain gendered way is distinct from having particular kinds of sex.

So even if Mr. Bachmann does really want to engage in gay sex—which we have no evidence of—the evidence that we do have points to him not actually doing it. Thus, “even if there were truth to the innuendo, how do you pin hypocrisy on someone who practices what he preaches?” (Daum).

The New York Times had a really interesting article about homosexuality, religion, and therapy recently that talked about the ways that both one’s sexuality and one’s religion tend to be integral parts of one’s identity. Gays assume you can just chuck your religion, and churches assume you can just chuck your gayness, but when people genuinely find both important to them, therapists are finding, the solution is exactly like Daum suggests Bachmann’s practice might be—you can have your desires or your gay identity, but maintain your religious identity by not acting on them. Food for thought, at least.

Self-loathing and unconfessed same-sex desire makes for gorgeously angsty and potentially hot fan fiction in which authors can really explore what it must be like to really want to have gay sex but be unable to reconcile it with your faith or your self-image (it’s a staple of the Quinn character in Rachel/Quinn fiction in the Glee fandom, and some of it is really beautifully done). But we don’t get to play with real people that way.

Okay, we do in Real Person Fiction (RPF). So if it’s really that important to these people, they can write a character study of a fictionalized Marcus Bachmann wracked with same-sex desire and crying himself to sleep at night. They can explore the darkness and pain of that place if it helps them reconcile the things that don’t make sense about his behavior, just like people do with other figures and characters.

But that isn’t news. It’s fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with asking these kinds of “what if?” questions, but it belongs on FanFiction.net or Archive of our Own or whatever political figure fan fiction LiveJournal community.

Because frankly, harassing someone on the basis of sex they do or don’t have, or sex they do or don’t want to have, isn’t okay, no matter who’s doing it.

Hey all, I might miss next week because I’m moving this weekend and then my mother-in-law (out-law?) will be here. But I’ll try.