What Can I Say? I’m Picky.

The first time I heard about the Kinsey scale, I thought: Oh. That’s what’s wrong with me.

It was in this Resident Assistant training seminar thing–must have been one on gender and sexuality sensitivity, I guess–but what I remember is the woman heading the thing drawing the scale up on the board and explaining Kinsey’s concept of the spectrum of sexuality and it was like bam! a frying pan to the head and then this moment of complete clarity, of certainty: Oh. Oh hey. That’s me!

Now where I fall on the scale, what’s my Kinsey number, I couldn’t tell you, then. Still can’t now, because for me, my location wasn’t the thing so much as my identification with the concept.

I never felt straight in the sense of (ugh) liking guys, only being attracted to men, though I certainly was, at least in the abstract. I loved James Bond (still do) in all his hypersexualized incarnations and swooned pretty hot heavy over Connery and Brosnan, in particular. But I also didn’t feel–how do I say this?–I wasn’t bothered by James’ affection for beautiful women. Even as a baby feminist, as someone who usually could recognize when women were being degraded or treated as less than human, Bond’s proclivities made complete sense to me. I didn’t feel objectified when I watched those films, though it took me years and years to figure out why.

See, I wanted to *be* Bond, and I wanted the beautiful women, too.

Granted, I’ve always gotten on better with men than women, just in the general sense; my best friends (for better or worse) have almost always been guys. A male colleague told me recently that I’m “aggressive” [a word I'd never have applied to myself] something he characterized as a positive quality–in the world of the classroom, at least, because outside of that? boy, does it make him nervous–so perhaps this has something to do with it. I’m either very quiet or intensely blunt, so perhaps there’s that, too.

What I mean is that I’m not good at subtlety. I don’t have a poker face. When I do speak, I generally tend to say what I mean.

Not that these are exclusively male qualities–they’re not–but one has to admit, I think, these are traits the dominant social discourse tends to align with men more so than women.

Or perhaps it’s that there’s part of me (shut up) that’s always liked women and didn’t know quite what to do with that, exactly, and so skittered away from all of them in kind.

[Reading this back, I'm struck by the connection my brain's made between my behavior and my ability to get along better with dudes as somehow associated with or related to my sexual preferences. Fascinating. I'm not sure what to make of that, so I'll leave this, my confusion, in.]

It’s worth noting, I think, that the small town in which I grew up was not terrible conducive to discussions of gender or sexuality outside of boy-meets-girl. Heteronormativity was the name of the game–still is, I suspect–to the point where it wasn’t even questioned by most of us; even in high school [even in our drama club, for gods' sake!] there was a basic assumption of straight.

That’s not to say that I was totally naive or black-boxed about these things. We did have PBS, after all, and I spent many late Saturday nights watching “In the Life” on MPT. I learned about Harvey Milk and Stonewall and your basic LGBT history, though I couldn’t have told you then what the fuck I found so compelling about that, exactly. But in college, that day in my RA training, all the pieces came together in that one brief sketch on a whiteboard: two poles, a spectrum, and somewhere within it, me.

But. Even then, even with that lightning sense of certain that I should always listen to when it comes, I had no idea WTF to do with that information, that sudden knowledge of oh shit, I’m different, but hey, at least it has a name, and so it sat for a long, long time.

So now, many (many) many years later, I’m finally in a place where I can argue about the crappy rhetorical properties of the term “bisexual” [ugh. just typing it gives me hives.] and why I don’t like calling myself that but I must also acknowledge there’s really no other word for “somewhere in the spectrum that’s not A or B” and we’re a species that needs words to understand concepts, a sign for each signifier, and until I or someone else creates a way of saying “I’m on the Kinsey scale” in the span of a single word, I’m pretty much stuck with you, bisexual, and I guess you’re stuck with me.

I know there are other terms floating about, but none of them, yet have granted me that moment of hailing, of Oh. Oh hey. That’s me!

And what can I say? I’m picky. And I’m content to wait until the right one comes along.

Sure to Bite Me in Mine

One of the great things about posting your writing online is that people will read it.

This is, of course, also a pain in the ass.

When people say nice things about my work–about my ability to write–then the digital broadcast of the stuff is all marshmallow fluff.

Some days I live and die by the kudos, you know, over on AO3.

Like so.

But when readers don’t like what I’ve written and take the time to make that known, man. Makes me feel like a need a shower, one in which to drown my laptop and save the universe from the crap tentacles of my pen.

Ultimately though, I have a co-dependent relationship with my readers: I need you. Badly. And I hope, once and a while, you might need me, if only for 2500 words or so.

Most my readers, y’all, I’ll never meet; most of you live only, thus, in my imagination. Once my stuff goes up, gets out of my hands and onto someone else’s server, the reader has the upper hand; any status to which I might have pretended as a creator is huff poof boom.

I shouldn’t need anybody’s approval in order to value what I write.

Ok. That’s what I’m supposed to say, anyway. Total bullshit.

Much of my anxiety lies, I think, in my life as a nascent academic, bred into me over decades of institutionalized education in which the “value” of my work (if I even thought of it as mine, for much of that time) lay in its ability to engender, to earn, the appropriately excellent response from the teacher for whom it was written.

Yeah, I know. Poor me.

Look, I’m particularly jittery right now for two reasons:

1. I’ve sent in two academic-type things to appropriate professional-y journals and am waiting with baited, fetid breath for the inevitable rejections; and
2. I haven’t finished a fic in weeks; thus, I haven’t gotten a fresh hit of reader response, or not. No noveau opportunity for people I don’t know to tell me how bloody brilliant I am. Or what a dolt.

Ugh.

A prof once told me that what’s worse than being criticized is having your work ignored, and I think there’s great truth in that. I am so very grateful and always Tigger bounce shine when readers give me feedback, positive or no, even when it stings; it’s a gift, the time they take to say yay or nay, and at its core, what I love about writing–the way a text written in one place and time and from a particular state of angst or love or fear can resonate for good or ill with someone that I’ll never meet, and that they send a message on to let me know that this so.

Yes, yes they do.

But the thing about a hit is that you’ve always got one eye out for the next, and I think part of me had (has?) this bizarre expectation that by virtue of not sucking at writing at least most of the time, the universe–or at least the fandoms or scholarly fields in which I roll–would celebrate me in some way that involved at least confetti. And maybe a parade.

Hee! I need to manage my expectations, nu?

This. Is. Ridiculous. I know, I know. But still: I let myself feel bad about it, when what I should do is write some goddamn more and put it out there and let the winds fall where they may.

At its best, at mine, I write for myself first. And if that was enough, I wouldn’t post this stuff where other people could see. My own insecurity, now–that’s the real pain in the ass, the one that’s sure to bite me in mine.

Please Don’t Go Girl

I’ve never been good at being a girl.

By that I mean, not by anyone else’s standards, I think.

This has always been a source of anxiety for my mom, at least as long as I can remember. When I was in high school, we had a fight–or she did; I was just a bystander–because I didn’t put on earrings before leaving the house. She was furious with me for reasons that she couldn’t articulate and that I could not understand. What difference did it make, I wondered? Who would even notice? But that, of course, wasn’t the point. The point was, my mom would know, would been painfully aware of the absence in my earlobes and thus be unable to function.

I don’t remember who won that one.

When I was in middle school, the boy band New Kids On The Block was the overwhelming teenage thing. We were middle school kids with one eye already on high school, on that great thundercloud that promised a kind of future that everyone was always telling us we should prepare for. Like adulthood was something that required waders and a hat. A flashlight with some extra batteries and we’d be all set. It was a worry in the future, one we were aware of but not consumed by.

We were just girls prone to sleepovers and lazy afternoons with bad movies. And, for a time, New Kids, too. But I didn’t care about them. I was no gender warrior, to be sure; I wasn’t consciously rejecting their kind of cool as some sort of feminist protest, I just–wasn’t interested.

Granted, this self-imposed limitation kept me out of some conversations among my friends, sure, and I couldn’t sing along to “Hangin’ Tough,” either. But my friends didn’t seem to care.

I don’t know that I ever fit in easily with them, anyway. At least that’s how I felt at the time. If I thought about this New Kids question at all, it fell into the well-established column of “how I am different,” so I paid the issue of Jordan and Jonathan and Joey and Donnie no extra mind.

But my mom, she was worried. She couldn’t understand why, if all my friends were into something, extolled its virtues in chorus kind, I did not. In her mind, I think, it was willful; I was stubborn, I was ostracizing myself. She thought this way, still does, I think, because that’s the way she operates, the only way she knows how to be.

So she mounted a sustained campaign, one designed to convert me into the teenage girl she knew I could be, if only I tried a little harder. If only I took some of the energy I devoted to reading or writing or whatever the hell it was I did that she chose not to understand and put it towards something worthwhile, then I could be fixed. Of this, she was sure.

While my friends’ mothers were rolling their eyes at the stupid New Kids phase, then, and resisting their daughters’ entreaties for more merchandise, more material proof of their undying devotion, my mom did the opposite: in the face of my not asking, not caring, she bought me New Kids tapes and a New Kids t-shirt and waited anxiously for my new self, my girl self, to be reborn.

An effort, I fear, all in vain.

I wonder what she wanted me to be, really.

A girl who liked pink, I think.

A girl who dated.

A girl who was at ease with her femininity in a way I don’t think my mom’s ever been.

For her, being a girl isn’t a social construct, a pattern of public behaviors that mark a particular gender, an easily recognizable version of “woman.” It’s who I was supposed to be, someone who got it, got girlhood, and thus (went my mom’s thinking) would reap the benefits that the world heaps on somebody who’s good at being a girl.

My father’s the feminist in the family, the one who always told me that I could be and do whatever I wanted to, that the only limitations were my will and my willingness to convert what’s in my head into action.

My mother–

She feels cowed by the world, by people she’s decided are smarter than she is, better in some undefinable way, and she deals with this anxiety by inexorably pushing everyone else away.

My dad’s the only one who’s refused to go. Loyal to a fault, he is.

I’ve done a lot to disappoint my mother, but I think this is the most fundamental of them all: I’ve never been good at being a girl.

And more to the point: I’ve never wanted to learn how.

I don’t know that she’ll ever forgive me for that.

Ourselves Alone: A Fanmix

A fanmix for Sherry Turkle’s alternately depressing and infuriating book, Alone Together.

Links below are to youtube. You can also check the mix out on Spotify–minus the very excellent Katamari Damarcy song.

1) Katamari Damarcy theme song
2) Turn It On Again genesis
3) Desire u2
4) Mr. Roboto styx
5) Touch It/Technologic daft punk
6) One Touch lcd soundsystem
7) Dreaming of You the coral
8) More Than A Feeling boston
9) Where Not to Look For Freedom the belle brigade
10) You Can’t Always Get What You Want rolling stones

I’m Almost a Trained Professional

My grad program wants to know: what are my goals for the coming year?

Damn straight. But I’ve gotta do a few other things first.

• Pass my comprehensive exams: 2 questions, 30 pages, 72 hours, coming up in early September. Hooah!

• Drink less. Curse in class more. Especially when we’re talking about mpreg.

• Write for an hour a day. Be it a fic or an academic essay, spend 60 minutes a day writing for myself.

• Try try try to stop comparing my writing to other people’s. It’s not the most awesome way to determine my work’s relative quality, though it’s awful tempting. How can something that brings me so much joy also be such a source of anxiety? Haven’t figured that out quite yet.

• Get an academic article published in a scholarly journal. Accept that I probably won’t get a job based on kudos I receive on Archive of Our Own.

…probably.

• Keep polishing my theoretical lens, one that combines fan studies, rhetoric, and (*sob*) performance studies.

• Take pleasure in my goddamn research without drowning in it, that self-centered joy.

• Spend as much time with people as I do with my laptop. Preferably with people I dig.

• Stop being a dick. Or at least: moderate my dickishness so as to avoid alienating everyone that I like in my life. Get less good at pushing people away.
  

• Give a presentation at a proper Rhetoric conference. Or, as my dissertation director put it, figure out how to sell myself/position myself/other oblique reference to prostitution in my chosen field. Because the whole job thing’s coming up faster than I can believe.

• Collaborate with a colleague on a fic or a more “academic” piece, because it’s so damn much fun.

• Remember that just because I can say something in a public, online space doesn’t mean that I have to. Or even that I should. Because some people don’t like being characters in my electronic life.

• Be nice to myself every once and a while. 

An Engine of Discursive Pleasure

This post is a metatextual exorcism: me trying to get the stupid out, as my directing teacher used to say, in re: my research project about the rhetorical tactics of the Overlord. It’s also an excuse for lots of pictures of Misha, so. If that turns you off, you know, I’d suggest you check for a pulse.

Ok, so. Here’s why it’s been hard for me to wax academic about Misha Collins:

It was easier for me to [gleefully] objectify the dude than it was to take him seriously.

Like, bro: I could write some smoking hot RPS about you without breaking a sweat, but put on a Random Acts video and I went all Crayola.

Fangirling over his body? Fine. Fangirling over what he actually did with that body in real life?

Oh hell no.

Encomium on the Overlord

Encomium on the Overlord: The Sophistic Fandom of Misha Collins
PDF download

So here it is: the freaking Misha paper I won’t shut up about. I presented this in March 2013 at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s national conference. And for all of my bitching, this thing was great fun-–eventually, finally–-to write and even more to deliver.

If you’ve ever been curious as to what the hell I do with Supernatural as a student of rhetoric: here’s exhibit A.

From his first appearance in the television show Supernatural, Misha Collins—and by extension Castiel, the fiercely loyal angel he portrays—has been a favorite among many fans. In the midst of the show’s uniquely intimate and occasionally contentious relationship with its fans, Collins has crafted a distinct fandom of his own: first via the performative Twitter antics of a persona called “the Overlord”—a grandiose troublemaker with his eye on world domination—and then through the creation of two distinct yet intertwined organizations: a non-profit called Random Acts, founded in 2010, and the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen [or GISHWHES], founded in 2011.

        

In this essay, I explore some of Collins’ engagements with his fans [his minions] through the lens of sophistic rhetoric—a form of discursive engagement both older and more playful than that of Plato or Socrates. Reading Collins’ rhetorical performances through a sophistic lens illuminates the productive potential of crafting fan engagement as a series of provocations, ones that invite Collins’ fans to, as rhetorician John Poulakos puts it, “abandon the shelter of their prudential heaven and opt for that which exists ‘by favor of human imagination and effort’” (45).

Ultimately, the sophistic fandom of Misha Collins offers his minions two ways of performing the possible, of translating the Overlord’s antithetical approach to stardom into a distinctly different way of being in the world, one that transforms kindness into an act of gleeful deviance.

To begin: a brief word about the sophists.