acafen – Page 10 – Letters from Titan

it’s almost spring trash day

It’s almost, marginally, spring here. It’s nice. I’ve been pretty much stuck in the house though, dealing with various illnesses, desperately trying to finish various articles for various books, and adjusting to this home office thing, which has its pluses and minuses, and the wrinkles of which I really want to sort out before Patty comes home in about a month. Home. Patty. Good. She’s really awesome, you know.

Astounding actually. She just called me. She’s in Mumbai. She’s not supposed to be in Mumbai. She’s supposed to be in Baroda, having taken an overnight train from Delhi last night. Since the ticket indicated a boarding time and end time, 8:30am, she assumed that time was when she’d arrive in Baroda. Nope, train stopped at Baroda in the middle of the night and she woke up in Mumbai. But, friends from her dig have family there, she’s been well taken care of, and she’ll get on a train to Baroda tomorrow.

If it were me, I’d freak out. But she’s good.

Now, on to stuff….

First thanks for being so totally awesome and engaged with the big post about and the link to the mourning work yesterday. I spend a lot of time having certitude about this stuff and being shameless about this stuff, but it’s also deeply scary, vulnerable space for me, on intellectual and professional levels as well as personal ones.

Next, speaking of Bristol-related stuff, Ika Willis has a great post about the horror of hate speech delivered in a reasonable tone, and that thing where queer people are expected to do hard, unpleasant work that should be unnecessary, for free, to spice up someone else’s “conversation” about hate (now with correct URL, sorry about that). No thanks.

In the department of things that make me uncomfortable, things that also remind me of home (even if I was an interloper, even if I am 10 years older than everyone in this article, even if the name makes me shudder): New York’s newest list of 400 to be on, the Native Society. Mostly this reminds me that I need to decide whether I am going to the Hewitt reunion this year or not (although I certainly won’t make Patty suffer through it again; she can rescue me after).

I’ve decided that to go with my suits and other anachronistic habits, I want some letterpress business cards. Recommendations, anyone?

Today’s crowdfunding link is about bread. Really. Bread. I can’t eat bread, because I have celiac disease, but if I could eat bread, I would eat this bread, so folks — get some bread! (Seriously, once Patty is home I may order some for her).

Can we talk about Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull? Because that is some masterful design work (both makeup and costume). It’s also dark. Powerfully so, in that troublesome way where the bad guys always have the best outfits (see: Jack’s coat = awesome; John Hart’s coat = AWESOME). I’m fascinated, both in fact and fiction, about the marketing of evil, both as evil (as happens with villains in fiction) and as the supposedly right thing that’s actually horrific beyond previous imagining (which is generally the insidious way it goes down in non-fictional life). Fascinating stuff on the screen, even more fascinating, I suspect, when it comes to the reception it’s getting and is going to get (I had a long, enjoyable email thread with Christian yesterday about Bad Things That Will Happen in Fandom Regarding This Character and Why We Should Write a Torchwood Battles the Red Skull Fanfic immediately). Who are the bad guys that keep you awake at night, not because they are too terrifying (and they are), but because they are too fascinating for your comfort?

Finally, there’s this awesome search string that keeps sending people to this journal: “In what ways can we look at fiction as history?” I’m sure there’s some actual scholarship on it out there, but once I crawl out from under all these deadlines, I’m going to take a stab at my own take on it, because I adore the question so much.

On that note, I need to go finish some stuff so Kali and I can get back to our book, which is all about the uncomfortably human lives of some mostly awful (and evil) people, and Erica and I can get back to our musical, which is about some people that aren’t awful at all, but get vilified for the work they do and the concerns with which their lives and bodies provide them.

On the tangible realities of absence

On July 10, 2010, I presented a paper, “Tangible Reality of Absence: Fan Communities and the Mourning of Fictional Characters,” (which you can now retrieve to read in its entirety at that link) at an academic conference in Bristol in the UK. It’s something of which I’m quite proud; it’s also something that was quite difficult, and was, and remains, complex in ways I could not have anticipated going into it.

I didn’t really think of myself as an independent scholar before Bristol. Sure, I had a (not scholarly) pop culture book out and had presented some papers on the academic tracks at Harry Potter cons, but that was just me enjoying some attention for thinking and talking about stuff I really dig. I didn’t know what to call it or what it said about me or how to integrate it with the fact that I am a fan and I’ve never really understood why I should be ashamed of that.

Submitting a paper to the conference, Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception, felt like something of a moral imperative to me when I read the CFP, which circulated fast and furiously around LiveJournal for its inclusiveness of fan studies and desire. But for me, the magic phrase was, “Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters,” because that was me.

That was me in fourth grade when I spent all my time daydreaming about having tea with Alexander the Great. And it was me every time I’ve had to go on a trip alone, and there was no one there but characters I’d loved and made friends with to hold my hand when the plane took off. And these anecdotes, although largely unspecific and chosen for their romanticism, aren’t just stories to me. Maybe it’s because I’m an actor, because I’m trained to pretend, but I know the feel of all those different hands that have soothed me as we’ve hurtled down the runway.

Because I live in the world with my partner and my friends and my colleagues, I know to say these experiences aren’t real. But because I’ve experienced them, I also know to say they aren’t not real either. And until I read that CFP, I didn’t know that I was really allowed to talk about that, not the love, not the connection, but the embodiment of it that has been with me my whole life, as a type of magic and as a form of ghosts and as an instrument of shame.

What to write about became clear pretty fast. Ianto Jones had just died on Torchwood and everyone I knew kept asking why every once in a while they felt like they had to pop into the bathroom at work just to have a good cry, weeks and months after the fact. I knew I couldn’t answer that question, but I thought maybe I could answer why it was happening about this character and why it always seemed to happen about certain types of characters and yet not others; it wasn’t the degree of fannish love that seemed to generate this mourning, but something else. I’d seen it with Severus Snape, too. I’d heard about ways “the ecstasy of grief” had consumed various Whedon fandoms. And thought I knew, like everyone thinks they know, that people once wore black armbands to mourn the death of Sherlock Holmes.

So I submitted an abstract, got a yes, and then began this completely ridiculous journey that I couldn’t possibly have expected at the time, one that involved being a receptacle for other people’s grief, a great deal of defending fannish love, too much anger (on my part and a lot of other people’s), several trips to the UK, and a tattoo. It’s a story I’ve intended to tell since I first started working on this project, but I’m still not sure it’s one I know how.

I first went to the UK in April 2010 with Patty. She was speaking at a conference in London and had business in Cardiff. I would visit the Ianto memorial site while she did that, because it seemed reasonable that I see the thing that was going to account for a full third of the paper. That experience didn’t really turn out how I expected, and then we got stuck in London besides, due to the volcanic ash event. There was a point where I was in tears of frustration, sitting on the Internet, tweeting: “I am stuck in the UK due to a volcano with a non-working vortex manipulator. Doctor stuck in the US. And Ianto’s dead.” It was, frankly, completely hilarious, but the whole situation was also super strange. It’s funnier if you’re a Doctor Who fan.

By the time I touched down in the UK a few months later for the Bristol conference (presenting the paper, I might note, one year and one day after the episode of Torchwood in which Ianto died was aired), I’d already survived a heated panel on character death responses, that was both wonderful and awful, at Gallifrey One. I’d discovered that the act of morning for Ianto which I personally was the most emotionally responsive to was committed by someone with whom I had argued in a mutually ungracious fashion on- and off-line. I’d watched both creators I admire and people I’m friends with endure ongoing harassment and threats over this thing. And I was holding, somewhat unexpectedly, a hell of a lot of secrets.

These secrets were told to me along the route of this project by people of all genders, ages and sexual orientations. It happened more often in person, confessions over drinks, than online, but it happened a lot. It included fans, people who hadn’t thought to characterize themselves as fans, and professional creators who in some cases had at least distant ties to the property in question. It included people I knew well and people who were essentially strangers to me.

The secrets fell into two clear and simple categories. The first, “When Ianto died, it felt like I’d been the one that had been killed off.” The second, “It felt like I’d lost my lover.” And lest you think I am in any way outside of this experience, let me be clear in that my response was only ever two things: “I know,” and “Me too.”

That’s not really something I’ve wanted to admit, but not because of the stigma associated with fannishness in the general world, or the stigma associated with this type of transgressive, embodied fannishness amongst fandom itself (see the paper for a discussion of Snape’s Wives), nor even because acafen are suspect enough for the love we bring to the table of our scholarship. Rather, it was an experience I’d had that was agonizing and private, and lacking beautiful words for it, I did not wish instead to offer words that were merely adequate, or worse, inadequate. That overall feeling, while now a gentle and passing regret as if for a joy I once had, remains.

It’s not something I think I have much else to say on, but the reason I’m saying it at all is important. One of the themes that emerged out of the Bristol conference was that of exile and secrets. It was very powerful to me as a human being and as a scholar and as a fan. It was very powerful to me as a queer person. And when I got back to my hotel that night, I posted to LiveJournal and asked people to keep fewer secrets about their experiences of the world. Which is why I think I owe this conversation this particular, arguably absurdist, truth, regardless of what it makes you think of me.

Long before Russell T. Davies killed off Ianto, I did. Well, Kali and I did in a 200,000+ word fanfiction epic, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. I’m sure you can Google and find it on the Internet with great ease. I’ll warn you that it’s chock full of porn, has a very narrow doorway and will absolutely, positively make you cry. But, because it’s important to me not to value original work differently from transformative work, because I believe they are two deeply distinct exercises, I want you to know that I’m really damn proud of this story and that I reread it sometimes, in part because we learned a lot of stuff, some of it about life, while writing it.

One of the things I think we learned, looking back, is that death is often about despair, but it can also be about hope. This isn’t about heaven or any codified spirituality, but rather, about a way of facing the world, a world that, necessarily, eventually, leaves us all behind. And I suspect that mourning is one way we attempt, as humans, to try to reinject hope into that experience of despair.

The last two words of the story come in a sign off to a letter. They are, Be grand. Kali and I, on principle, will rarely say who wrote what part of our stories and often we can’t remember ourselves, but this was mine, something I’d written jokingly about halfway through the project, that then became our focus and our target point. When Ianto died months later on Children of Earth, I told her I was going to get those two final words of our story tattooed on me and that it would cause fandom drama and that I didn’t care, because it wasn’t about Ianto, it was about me.

So when I landed in the UK for the Bristol conference, on July 8, having (in a case of the worst timing ever) spent the previous day in the emergency room with a kidney stone, I thought maybe it was time to get that tattoo. It was about so many other things by then — being in the UK, becoming a scholar, and the very way that I’ve really always chosen to live my life, the costs be damned — that, combined with the source narrative anniversary and the conference, made it seem like the timing was perfect. It was perfect. But the truth was, I also wasn’t sure.

I looked up Into You, one of the most well-regarded and difficult to get an appointment at tattoo shops in London. I knew it could sometimes take months to get an appointment there, but I decided that if they could squeeze me in, in some fluke during my 36 non-consecutive hours in London, I would get the tattoo.

It turns they’d had a cancellation and they could. So I took the tube to Angel and put a 40 quid deposit on the work that day, fresh off the plane. I left for Bristol the next morning, did the conference the day after, and then returned to London the day after that. The next day, with just hours before my flight, I had the words Be grand carved into my back in black ink, before boarding a flight from Heathrow to JFK. Some days, I hate that I can’t see it without a mirror, but it remains fundamental to this narrative and important to me that people see it when I am going.

Later that year, at the opening night party of the 2010 New York Musical Theater Festival, a stranger asked me if the tattoo was a command to others or a reminder to myself. I was there on a fluke, one related to another strange and risky international pilgrimage from another time in my life, and I smiled, knew the world was right, and simply said, Yes.

Other than giving a related presentation specifically on illustrated media (comics, manga, anime, etc.) at the 3rd Annual Comics & Popular Arts Conference at Dragon*Con in September 2010, I’ve taken a bit of time off from working on the death and mourning stuff since Bristol. I needed the break. It was hard. I didn’t realize how much it meant I was holding, but my desire to continue and broaden this work is immense.

Since the initial paper, which you should really go up to the first link in this thing and read if you haven’t because this post is kind of a box set with that, I’ve stumbled on some more criteria that seem to inspire this mourning response to the loss of fictional characters. I’ve also become acutely interested in people’s personal stories about the intersection of grief and fiction — mourning acts they engaged in secret and as children; mourning for fiction happening, or not happening, contemporaneously with non-fictional loss, etc. There’s so much here on both a scholarly level and on a level that speaks to personal essay and anthology about these very strange, supposedly secret, embodied and emotional experiences of love and loss.

So I don’t know where all this goes next, although I’ve clearly got some ideas. And I don’t know when it goes there, because I do have my own joyful and grand life to be living. But I know that it does. I’ve got two words carved into my back that say so, and everything’s already happened anyway.

Be grand.

Following up

I am under the weather and under the deadline gun today, but I wanted to post two quick links clarifying the record on various things.

First, Christian posted a long explanation of the “If you meet Ianto Jones on the road, kill him” buttons. That search string directs a lot of people to this journal, but those interested in that, should visit him. I loved this essay like burning and it let me roll around in a lot of fictional joy and grief. Christian has also cross-posted this at his Livejournal, where a lot of great discussion has ensued.

Second, in what may be the last addendum to the “Buffy bullying incident at Gally,” I just got a comment providing more information on What Really Happened. Which is to say, not a minor (sorry about that; I look really young for my age too, and I know that while people tell you it’s flattering, it can also be annoying, so my apologies!) and not, apparently and thankfully, someone who wound up upset by what happened. All of which underscores that fact that when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me; but also that stuff that isn’t meant to hurt can hurt people, even people on the periphery of the situation, like myself. It’s given me, and I hope all of us, a lot to think about. The comment is fantastic both as a followup and in terms of considering some other fannish phenomena. If you’ve been following this story, I urge you to click on the link.

today’s acafen problems

These may amuse you, because even as I grapple with them, they are amusing me:

1. I realize that Jones is a ridiculously common surname, especially in the UK and especially in Wales. But generally when I’m writing academic articles, I mention the character’s whole name the first time I refer to them, and then refer to them by their last name throughout the rest of the article. Which is all well and good, until you’re writing an article about the Whoniverse that necessarily must mention both Harriet Jones and Ianto Jones and may mention Martha Jones, and I don’t really want to go traipsing about in scholarship being all familiar with these folks and calling them by their given names, but the constant use of their full names is remarkably awkward (although probably what I’m stuck with — I simply cannot refer to even a fictional prime minister by her first name). Meanwhile, on Twitter someone tells me that in Wales it is common to deal with the problem of Joneses by referring to them with reference to what they do. So, Jones the companion? Jones the … whatever it is we think Ianto does at Torchwood? Jones the PM? Somehow, that gets even more awkward in terms of construction, despite being infinitely more hilarious.

2. The Face of Boe presents a similar problem. Do I reference him continually as the Face of Boe, or do I, after the first mention, shorten that? And if so, do I shorten it to the Face or Boe? If I shorten it, I’m leaning towards the Face. That said, on Twitter, this provoked amusing levels of varied opinion and raised the issue of appropriate pronouns for the thing/person/tentacle monster/Face/Jack. Help me, Internets, help me!

3. Apparently, according to the Sherlock commentary tracks, everyone does this, but I keep writing (in a different article than the DW one mentioned above) “Sherlock and Watson” when I meant to write “Holmes and Watson.” This is an entirely aggravating up-hill battle that I shouldn’t even need to be having.

I have these sorts of problems a lot, and recently felt sort of embarrassed that on some of the HPA stuff I’ve been doing about gender and bullying I keep referring to Snape as Severus, as if he’s an old friend. But of course, for me, fictional characters are old friends, even if that’s inappropriate to disclose in most scholarly settings (of which the HPA isn’t one).

I even tried to determine if I get the most antsy about first name/last name issues around characters about whom I’ve done transformative work (fanfiction, for those of us who aren’t being delicate about it), but that really doesn’t seem to be it either (although, it’s surely the case regarding both Snape and Ianto Jones). I suppose that it’s just, as it often is in my writing, mostly about cadence.

For the other folks out there doing scholarly work, what weird problems do you have of this ilk? Because it surely can’t just be me. And I need some amusement while I stare at the 50 pages I need to write in the next few days while also moving my office.

the activism trap

Being an activist can really suck. Let me show you how.

I’m engaged with anti-bullying efforts for a bunch of reasons. This includes the fact that I was severely bullied as a kid, as a teen, during university, and periodically as an adult on the wonder that is the Internet; that I find working on anti-bullying initiatives healing; and that I believe my way with words and openness can help the cause.

But at core, the reason I want to stop bullying is so that people who are awesome have the space to do awesome stuff. It’s hard to make art, do research, be an awesome friend, teach kids, help animals, strive for political reform, provide awesome customer service or do whatever it is you do if you’re being bullied and recovering from being bullied. The best reason to support anti-bullying is so that more people have the space to be the most awesome versions of themselves they can be.

The thing is, when I spend all my time talking about stopping bullying or anti-gay harassment or sexism or transphobia or whatever thing I feel its critical to speak out about (and feel capable of speaking out about — there are lots of issues I support where it’s probably better for me to let other people speak while I keep learning), I don’t have time to do my awesome stuff. And then it’s a little bit like the bullies have won, because they’ve forced me to abandon my agenda and will for the purpose of responding to their actions and arguments.

This really sucks. And it’s emblematic of something I think most activists face at various times. From feminist advocacy to fighting poverty to stopping racism — when you have to be an activist all the time, it’s easy to lose the benefits you’re supposed to enjoy from that activism helping to make the world better. Balance is key, but, in a cruel world, pretty hard to come by.

Which is why I really want to stop talking about the Buffy thing (here, have a summary from someone who was there and isn’t me), because I feel that particular activism trap closing in around me. But, that said, there are a few remaining things I do want to address.

First, thank you for keeping it civil. While a few comments here have made me angry or upset, and while I disagree with some opinions I’ve seen expressed, no one really crossed the line in discourse here. That’s awesome, and I totally appreciate it.

Next, about that argument where you say, “Well, I want to take this person at her word, but she sounds awfully emotional, and therefore I can’t.” — That argument is a misogynistic rhetorical device that often gets pulled out against women who are upset and not against men who are angry. It’s happened in various branches of this discussion (which is now happening across Whedonesque, several blogs, and Livejournal). It’s an effective rhetorical device due to the way we treat women in this world, but it’s not actually good argumentation. It’s also angry-making. Please knock it off.

Additionally, I am really trying to avoid making a post about the whole “toughen up” thing and why it’s so problematic, as, again, I don’t want to get sucked into the negative self-impact activism trap I described in the opening of this post. However, it’s important to me that you understand the following things: First, there is no universal standard of appropriate emotional feeling; just as the Goblin King asks Sarah in Labyrinth what her basis of comparison is when she declares, “It’s not fair,” I would ask you what yours is when you say someone is over-sensitive. Second, it is my sensitivity that allows me to do what I do for a living — writing stories, examining pop-culture, performing, and eroding the artificial boundaries we’ve set up between scholarship and sentimentality. (A theoretical excess of) feeling, just like anything else, can be a tool, an advantage, and a weapon; it’s certainly one of mine. Trying to stamp it out or devalue it, isn’t just nasty, it’s illogical.

Finally, stop with the “free speech” and “censorship” noises. I’m a trained journalist. I give to the ACLU, and I am, like Rachel Maddow, an absolutist about free speech in the legal sense. Wanting to have as little government regulation of speech as possible is not, however, inconsistent with wanting people not to be egregious to each other; encouraging people to be civil in public; telling people to knock it off when I’m offended; and using the tools I have available to me to manage speech in the online venues that I host. Arguments to the contrary are disingenuous, and beyond this statement, I will not engage them.

What would I love to see going forward? I’d love to see more discussion, in general. Just hearing all these viewpoints (which are not split into two camps, but run a wide gamut) is, I think, valuable to everyone. I’d also like to see, as Chip from Two-minute Time Lord and I discussed late one night at this year’s Gally, con panels that have historically been about fans behaving badly branch out into discussions of how we can make things better.

I would also like to see discussion from activists of all stripes talk on how we can work hard, avoid burnout, and reap the benefits of the change we are trying to create in the world while continuing to be activists. It’s hard stuff, and we’re all still learning.

Now I’m going back to explaining why Sarah Jane Smith’s status as a journalist proves that the Doctor is real.

Buffy bullying incident follow-up: gender and character bashing

I’m on my flight back to New York (pro tip: American Airlines may have in-flight Internet, but it doesn’t have power outlets in coach), and thought I’d take time that’s unlikely to be productive in any other way to respond and follow up on the Buffy singalong situation of the other day.

First, I don’t care if you like Dawn or not. No, really. I’m pretty ambivalent about her myself. And, I recognize that being late to the fandom (that’s one of the things my essay in Whedonistas is about) means that I experienced the show differently — I wasn’t waiting a week between episodes, and I wasn’t in that discussion hothouse that happens when shows are aired for the first time.

I’m actually totally okay with the fact that many, possibly even most, of the commenters on my first post about this got (and gosh, there sure were a lot of you — this blog had previously gotten about 1,000 hits on its busiest day; thanks to Whedonesque it was over 5,500) side-tracked on how they feel about Dawn. I actually often like digressive conversations, and it was interesting.

However, my post really, really wasn’t about Dawn, and it felt like a lot of people missed that. It was about someone who may well have fit the legal definition of a child being bullied by a room full of adults because she stuck up for a character based both around her own affection for that character and the wishes of the show’s creator. This wasn’t, despite the fact that I am someone who often feels the need to defend the honor and memory of characters, about bullying Dawn. This was about bullying a fan, in the room, who was at a power disadvantage to those doing that bullying.

Character hate and character bashing can be weird. We get it a lot in Doctor Who and Torchwood fandom too, where, I suspect, the most common targets are Rose (DW) and Gwen (TW).

What’s character bashing? Lots of things qualify, but I can think of two easy, obvious and common examples: when fans, for no narrative reason, hold characters to a higher standard than other characters with comparable storytelling purposes; and when characters are portrayed in transformative work (e.g., fanfiction) in a way that exaggerates their perceived negative qualities in a way that’s aggressive, punishing, shaming and non-satirical (i.e., a character who has an extramarital affair appears in fanfiction as sleeping with a different person every night, being abusive to their spouse, and being relentlessly mocked for their sexual behavior by their colleagues in a story with A- and B- plots related to none of these things. It’s just the bullying of a fictional character as filler).

Character bashing is one of those things I really don’t get, and I don’t really study it, and so hesitate to make any sweeping conclusions about it. Certainly, there’s got to be a certain level of catharsis in getting out one’s irritation about a character that drives you mad (I, certainly, am not above shouting at the TV when I find Connor particularly irritating on Angel — I loathe that character, and often resented having to watch him, even as his presence was necessary to facilitate what’s one of my favorite arcs in all of television).

But one thing I have noticed is the way in which gender tends to be central to character bashing and the way in which character bashing often seems to provide a framework for bullying (i.e., of other fans who disagree), or, somewhat more subtly, a surrogate target for bullying.

Now, you’d think I could get behind at least the surrogate target thing. That at least prevents real people from getting bullied, right? Wrong. When people are shouting out things like “I hope you get raped” at group screening events (something I’ve now heard happens at some OMWF screenings, but at least did not happen at the one I reported on), that has an impact on real people. As does when female characters are vilified for being sexual, flawed, attractive, popular and/or successful. Or, when male characters are aggressively and relentlessly ridiculed for their performance (or rather non-performance) of masculinity.

So did gender come into play with what happened at the OMWF singalong at Gallifrey One? You bet. And it was as vivid and fascinating as it was awful.

The people yelling “Shut up, Dawn!” which is what started the whole thing, seemed to be mostly women. Women showing disdain for a young female character for speaking. And what was Dawn saying? Oh, just the truth that revealed the awful crap that Willow was doing to Tara at that point in the narrative. So what was that about? Willow/Tara love? Hatred of a snitch? Contempt for Dawn indirectly calling Willow out on her bad and arguably bullying behavior? Or just resentment for another pretty girl the audience is supposed to have some modicum of sympathy for?

Meanwhile, the people who then started yelling, by insisting both the upset fan and Michelle Trachtenberg “toughen up,” at the girl who spoke up about the anti-Dawn outbursts, seemed to be mostly men.

At this point, a few people yelled out trying to get everyone to knock it off. Which is when the hostility at the young fan escalated (and again, let me remind you — very possibly underage and expressing the wishes of the show creator), and I shouted, “Stop bullying other fans.” That worked (to my relief and surprise), and to me seems to indicate that people knew they were behaving badly.

Which is why when I went up to the fan after the screening and saw her surrounded by several people (somewhere in the 6 – 10 range), I assumed they were there to offer her support or apologies. Nope, they (and again, here, mostly men) were explaining to her why they were correct both in silencing Dawn and in telling this fan that Dawn deserved this and that she is required to “toughen up.”

What was perhaps most remarkable here is that the fan continued at this point, not to defend herself, but to defend Dawn. This is stories mattering in action. There have been so many times in my life where I protected fictional people when I didn’t yet feel ready to openly protect myself. I don’t know this fan, or her internal framework, but I was moved by what seemed like an honorable defense of joy from the moment this mess started.

So let’s recap:

– Women bashed a female character for telling the truth;
– Men then enforced the ability of those women to do that and while mocking a young fan who may have been legally a child;
– Afterward, instead of going to see if the kid was all right (because this is our con, our fandom, our community — Gally is a small con (this is the first year it broke 2,000 people) with a legendarily family atmosphere), people went up to her to reinforce their perception that she and her feelings were wrong and used their status (age and gender) to do so.

After this experience, I think we perhaps need fewer OMWF singalongs and more group showings of “The Pack.”

And if you’re the fan whose defense of Dawn ultimately necessitated this post and the previous one on this subject? I’m so sorry. I’ve been the subject of big discussions on the Internet because I’ve had the audacity to stick up for people or express my opinion. It sucks, and it’s stressful, and the last thing I EVER wanted to do here is contribute to your bad day. Because I didn’t get to watch Buffy until I was 38, it didn’t really get a chance to change my life or make me brave. But among other things, I’m a woman who fights, and I am so glad this show and the community that should exist around it means so much to you. I hope this hasn’t put you off either Buffy fandom or the Whoniverse. Despite what happened on Saturday night, I promise you, most of us do believe that intellect and romance should trump brute force and cynicism.

Thank you for helping fight that fight.

ETA 2/23/2010: A few final thoughts about the discussion this has engendered.

tell me that you’ll wait for me

Every year, without fail, my favorite thing about Gallifrey One is the closing ceremonies. I know that’s a little strange, but I have an innately melancholy nature, and I’m also very cognisant of the degree to which it is often the case that it is only in loss that it is acceptable to speak of love.

Doctor Who is about a lot of things. It’s about the wonder of the universe. It’s about ordinary people getting to be heroes, sometimes at extraordinary cost. And it’s about love, often in ways that are remarkable; Doctor Who often decouples romanticism from sexuality and tends not to privilege any particular type of relationship (familial, friend, business, romantic, sexual) over any other.

All those things make the Whoniverse deeply appealing, not just for the narrative of the the Other reasons much SF/F is often popular, but specifically because it’s often a direct acknowledgment of the complexities of family, longing, and ambition that many other properties simply don’t address (Buffy and Harry Potter, for example, may both be choose your family properties but they are less successful at focusing on interpersonal narratives more often ignored).

But Doctor Who is also about melancholy. It’s about loss. It’s about the wonder of the universe being wonderous because you won’t have it forever. One day, you’ll die. Or the Doctor will leave you behind. One day, all that you’ll have left is longing. And memory. But, just as Doctor Who doesn’t inherently privilege one type of interpersonal relationship over another, it also doesn’t inherently privilege one experiential relationship over another. The moment in which you remember the time you saved the universe is just as important on Doctor Who as the moment in which you saved the universe. That moment in which you long? In which you regret? In which you cry in fondness for a love or adventure or friendship or person that once was, is as valuable as the moment you first discovered all those things.

All Times Are Now, my writing partner and I say. Part of that is about our world-building philosophy and the ways in which we like to tell stories — events echo not just forwards, but also backwards, in time. But part of that is also a sort of emotional worldview that tells us a moment of absence can be just as keenly beautiful as a moment of possession. In fact, they are, quite often, nearly the same thing.

I do a lot of creative and scholarly work about mourning. Often, that feels like the most beautiful thing in the world to me. Sometimes, though, it’s just miserable, or a burden of responsibility for holding other people’s stories I am inadequate in the face of.

Doctor Who often provokes me in me the most wonder when Sarah Jane Smith speaks of the life she once had, when Jack Harkness looks for guidance from the man who once abandoned him, and when Amy Pond tells the Doctor just how long she waited for him.

Some stories aren’t exactly real, no matter what the philosophy of my creative work is, and no matter how hard I try to will them into being. I may still check the backs of wardrobes for portals to Narnia, but it is likely I will never quite believe hard enough to find my way into the snowy forests of the White Witch. The Doctor will, I know I am supposed to know, never come for me.

And yet, the Whoniverse tells me that that’s okay. That my life is no smaller for its terrestrialness, for all the things I’ll never get to do, for all the moments that have passed, and for all the things I’ve lost. Which is why I love the closing ceremonies at Gally. Love. Because more than any other moment at the event, they embody exactly what Doctor Who is about.

leaving on a jet plane

Since I’m getting on a plane for Los Angeles tomorrow and have way too many things to do, not just between now and then, but between now and the end of the month, I thought I’d get a little bit of administrativa out of the way while it’s in my head.

First, please don’t forget about tonight’s Livestream from The Harry Potter Alliance on stopping teen bullying, preventing teen suicide and raising awareness about various gender identity topics as relates to learning how to make things better for LGBTQ kids.

Next, it’s Gallifrey One!

Let’s start with the official stuff: Please come check out the Whedonistas launch on Saturday at 3pm, followed by an autograph session at 4:30pm.

On the unofficial front: I’m basically not cosplaying this year (the exception being briefly for a friend’s Inception photo shoot; if you should see me dressed like Arthur, please don’t mistake me for Ianto, because I don’t know what my response will be, but I suspect neither of us will enjoy it). There are myriad reasons for this, mostly odd, personal and complicated. I don’t ultimately know if it’s going to be a decision I’m happy with, but it is what it is.

Next, my recall of names and faces is poor. While I can think of a good couple of dozen people I will recall by name and face at the con, I can’t promise it will be you. Please don’t take this personally, please do remind me of who you are. I hate that I’m like this, but it seems to be a somewhat immutable fact.

I should also tell you that I am deep into writing two academic articles that are due at the end of this month. I may well be writing them in the lobby at the Marriott, because background noise is good for my soul. Stopping by and saying hi is fine (and good and awesome), but if I stick my head back into my computer, this is why.

If you see me Wednesday night when I get to the hotel, I will only have two priorities: putting my crap down and getting to In-and-Out Burger before it closes. Wait ’til I have burgers until you say more than hello. I am not even kidding.

If we haven’t met before, I look forward to meeting you.

Almost finally, on the subject of an entirely different con, after much hemming and hawing, Patty and I have decided that we’re taking a year off from Dragon*Con so that I can take her to San Francisco, something that’s been on our to do list since we first met. I just got the vacation time approved today, so now seemed like the time to share. I haven’t been in about four years, and it’s a place I really do adore visiting (although I’ve never particularly felt like I could live there). I know we know a lot of people out there and so we’ll make a plan for group socializing for one night when it gets closer, but I think otherwise we’re not going to do the running around and seeing people from the Internet thing, because if we were, we’d just go to Dragon*Con.

And last, but not least, because it’s always fun to end a post on a note about the end of the world, here, have an article about New York’s legal guide for handling the apocalypse.

talking about bullying and gender identity

The Harry Potter Alliance is an organization that uses parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights. Their goal is to make civic engagement exciting by channeling the entertainment-saturated facets of our culture toward mobilization for deep and lasting social change.

A lot of the issues the HPA is engaged in are near and dear to my heart. These include fighting bullying and advocating for the rights of LGBTQ people.

Recently, after a discussion that involved gender identity concerns on a Harry Potter mailing list went a bit awry, the HPA and I wound up in contact about issues of bullying and how they impact people who are gender non-conforming.

As part of their current campaign to stop bullying against LGBTQ kids and to highlight how that bullying can lead to the acceptance of human rights abuses like those against queer people in Uganda, I’ll be participating both in their blog (with one piece going live soon, and another after I get back from Los Angeles) and in a Livestream event they’ll be holding tomorrow night, February 15 at 8:30pm. You can participate by visiting the Livestream channel at http://www.livestream.com/imaginebetter. The agenda items include youth bullying, depression, suicide and awareness of transgender issues.

I may be a Slytherin, but that doesn’t mean I’m on Voldemort’s side. For me, it’s about being ruthless and ambitious, and, having seen the dark, choosing the light.

Please take a chance to check out the HPA, and I hope you’ll join us on the Livestream. I’ll update this post with links to my blog entries there as they are posted.

Thank you!

reporting for an audience of one

I was 17-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell. It was my senior year of high school, a year, during which, I had hoped to study abroad, largely to escape the bullying and awkwardness I felt at school and the secrets I was beginning to understand the need to keep at home. But, when I had broached the subject with my parents the year before, it was a subject that had gotten squashed quickly.

My mother, who is Jewish, was uncomfortable with my desire to study in Germany or Austria, places that fascinated me because of her own love of their art — I grew up looking at women painted by Gustav Klimpt and Egon Shiele, women who looked like me and seemed like home.

In truth, looking back on it all, it may just have been the first thing that it sprung to her mind to say; my parents’ objections were probably more likely about money or my being off somewhere far away from their rules. But with my mother’s reaction being what it was, I didn’t ask a second time. Like all things I longed for, I merely stared at it from afar, lingering on travel ads in the newspapers I was raised to read daily as civic duty, hoping my desire would be obvious and, somehow, magical.

So I didn’t study abroad, and a month after my seventeenth birthday I wasn’t in Germany. I watched the Berlin Wall fall from our dining room table during that surprising week where I was allowed to have the television on during dinner. And each night, as I watched those events, I thought of two things: David Bowie’s “Heroes” (a song which kept me going in high school and that is deeply and complicatedly enmeshed with Berlin Wall mythology) and how I could just get up at 4am, take the can of cash I was hoarding out of the bottom of my closet, steal my mother’s credit card, grab my passport out of the second drawer on the left of her roll-top desk, take a cab to the airport, and run away, to Berlin, so I could be there as the Wall kept coming down.

But I had no nerve. And while I don’t know if it would have worked, I have always regretted that I never tried. 21 years later, I have still never been to Berlin.

Patty is too young to have particularly strong feelings or recollections about the fall of the Berlin Wall. She did not grow up afraid of nuclear war. In terms of scale, her Berlin Wall moment was, probably, sadly, 9/11. And here is this moment in Egypt, and she’s in India, doing what she loves, living without television and without radio she can understand. The news she gets comes on her mobile phone, from me, from friends, from the calls the other people on the dig get.

My academic degree is in journalism, a profession I selected for a host of foolish reasons: needing a respectable job-possible major to get parental assistance (and permission, I was 17) to go to college and wanting to be a war reporter because of fictions (V, the original version) I had loved as a young teen.

I was never a war reporter, but I did work for the AP for a few years in their Computer Assisted Reporting unit back in the mid-90s. When I write non-fiction now it’s scholarship, criticism, analysis, personal essays, or, in the hey-it’s-a-paycheck category, light lifestyle pieces for various online media.

But when I call Patty tomorrow, it’s my job to be a reporter, even if I’m just reporting all the news I watch both because it is my nature and because it is a requirement of my analysis work. I’ve been doing it since the beginning, starting with the Giffords shooting and then since the time I paged her in the middle of the night about Tunisia and Yemen and the beginnings of Egypt. The page didn’t go through right, and she, puzzled as to why I was frantically texting her about Yemen, called me on her lunch break, and I ran everything out as fast as I could.

Since then, it’s been hard to keep up the excitement and intensity and confusion and fear and hope of what’s been going on in Egypt. I’m just one person, without video or images to show her, without direct information, and with a great deal of fatigue from how much these events have upended my own working life. But it’s so important to me that I do a good job, that when she plays Where Were You When games she’ll have more for this than “I was in India, so I sort of missed it.”

I’m a news junkie. Maddeningly so. It’s not just work. It’s a compulsion. Sometimes, she has to tell me to change the damn channel because I’m about to watch the same episode of Rachel Maddow twice in the same evening. She puts up with this with a great deal of amusement, and she’s certainly into current events herself, just in a way that’s a bit less odd. So I hope I’m doing okay. That I’ll do well tomorrow. That she’ll be able to say in response to this entry in the Where Were You When game, “I was in India, and my girlfriend had to tell me about it on this crappy mobile I bought, and we kept getting disconnected and it was like two tin cans on a string and it seemed so strange.”

To me, who has the news on all the time, often on multiple screens and channels, it doesn’t seem like enough. But it sure does seem like something, like paying a debt for the way I once did, and still do, dream of Berlin.