welcome to the mystery!

note: this was originally posted on tumblr, shortly before tumblr imploded. in advance of the no-NSFW changes on Dec. 17, which is pushing a lot of fandom and queer folks out, I decided I'd transfer my project to dreamwidth, at least for the time being.

Hi, it’s my dissertation!

Okay so: I’m working on my PhD and I’m writing a novel at the same time. The novel is about a dysfunctional English department and MYSTERY and MURDER and QUEER DETECTIVES. In the novel, a PhD student named Lu goes missing while she’s working on her dissertation about sex and ghosts and Victorian women and fanfiction.

For my dissertation, I’m writing HER dissertation. The project, overall, is: novel, dissertation, fanfiction supposedly written by Lu, and this blog. Also, a tumblr supposedly run by Lu. [ETA: not sure if that's going to keep happening--I'll post updates here.] My plan is to update this blog with posts about the process, excerpts from the novel and scholarly writing, and related source materials. I’m hoping to interact with all sorts of interested folks here and to share at least some of my work with the communities it engages with, both scholarly and fannish. More info can be found in the About section!

Navigating multiple identities and modes of discourse online, especially in the intersections of fandom and academia, is so weird and difficult, and as I go I’ll be trying to work out what’s best for me and for the communities I’m part of. let me know, especially fan/tumblr folks, if you have thoughts about this. <3

If you’re interested in queer stuff, murder mysteries, academia, Victorian ghosts, critical theory, fic, fan studies, grad school, and/or experimental writing, follow this blog or send me an ask! I can’t follow back because this is a side blog, just fyi, but I will definitely engage with comments etc. THANKS YOU ARE GREAT.

love, miranda

The Witch Elm and how to write a good mystery

[originally posted on tumblr.]

I am obsessed with Tana French. I recently finished The Witch Elm, her latest mystery novel. As I read, I covered it in sticky notes, trying to figure out how French constructed it–what phrases and sentences piqued my interest? When did I feel the stakes getting higher? When did I suspect whom? What thematic questions and patterns of language was I noticing weaving it all together? I decided I wanted to write a little bit about what reading The Witch Elm reminded and revealed to me about what I love and want to emulate in my own mystery novel. These are those reminders:

1. Early on, introduce the idea that something is going to get really messed up, but do it by dropping hints that connect a vague looming catastrophe with a location, person, or event, not by starting off with an excerpt from later in the novel (as some mysteries do). It takes The Witch Elm FOREVER to get to the murder mystery, but very early on, the novel trains readers to think of Ivy House, the eventual location of the murder, as a place associated with tragedy and nostalgia. In the second paragraph of chapter one, the narrator says, I don’t think anyone could convince me, even now, that I was anything other than lucky to have the Ivy House. It’s that little aside–even now–that feels prophetic and mysterious and doom-laden and makes me want to read more.

2. Use the mystery genre to address thematic questions that it is ideally suited to consider. French is always asking big unanswerable questions in her mysteries–about memory, or home, or family, or madness–and she knows how the genre’s most basic elements (like violent acts, defamiliarizing the familiar, and not really knowing the people we think we know) work really really well to investigate these hugely complex and urgent questions. She also weaves issues of class, colonialism, heteronormativity, and the like so deeply into the mystery plots that if you tried to take them out, they would completely fray apart. In The Witch Elm, she’s asking questions about privilege and power by getting into the mind of a man who’s a classic “nice guy”: white, straight, oblivious, well-meaning. His encounters with violence and murder throw his confident, privileged sense of self into chaos. There are no easy answers about how much he learns and why he does what he does and what we think and feel about him in the end. The mystery plot wraps up, but, as always, French leaves us with the sense of larger questions unresolved. As in all her novels, the world never goes back to being a safe, knowable place.

3. Be interesting. Bizarre scenarios. Puzzling clues. Plenty of reveals. Lots of atmosphere. Let a skull fall out of the hole in a tree. Let the protagonist have to rethink his entire adolescence. Don’t get too hung up on being “realistic”–but do make sure the mystery plot comes together in cohesive and satisfying ways. French gets away with a lot of weird stuff because she makes it work, plot-wise (and because her prose is so ridiculously good).

4. Make us care about the characters. But let them do terrible things. We care about them more, not less, if they hurt us. Sometimes I hesitate to make characters I like do things that might make readers not like them anymore. But the mystery genre requires it–and these things raise the stakes, give us character insights, and break our hearts in satisfying ways. I want to avoid spoilers for French’s novel here, so I’ll just say that I was compelled, not simply repelled, by the characters who do bad things, because they are complex and fascinating and because, in complicated difficult ways, sometimes I found that I was still on their side.

5. Include those long, detail-rich descriptions of places and memories and people and feelings that you really want to write. Jasmine creepers swinging dizzily outside the window, back and forth. A watercolor off-kilter on the wall, swallows in a heart-stopping nosedive. Crazy slants of light across the table. Sensory descriptions can create atmosphere, add to the sense of urgency, guide readers to feel certain ways. They’re not boring–and they don’t just hold up the action. Don’t sacrifice prose style, description, reflection, or character building for the mystery plot.

thoughts on my project: sex & form

This was originally posted on the the tumblr of Lu Fairchild, the fictional character from my novel, with this comment: Here’s Lu, the fictional character whose dissertation I’m writing, thinking about that dissertation. Lu & I just finished a draft of a conference paper entitled “Murder Husbands and Spirit Grabbing: Navigating Consent Through Sex and Form” for the Dickens Universe Conference at UCLA in February. I’m excited to share more of these thoughts there!

I finished a draft of my conference paper on Hannibal fic & Victorian spiritualism! I feel like I’m moving closer to understanding what my project is and why it matters. like, it’s not a project “about” fic & Victorian literature. it’s a project about sex & form: about describing how sex takes on meaning and erotic charge via its formal properties. so, for example, in fic, anal fingering often takes on a particularly heavy burden of meaning-making, and that has everything to do with the fact that anal fingering is about penetrating into and stretching open a tight space that holds messy, vulnerable, even shameful contents. the form of that sex act is made to carry a particular emotional resonance and to do a particular kind of narrative work. not because it “naturally” does this, but because of how it’s represented in written and visual texts. sex in Hannibal fic, meanwhile, often echoes the show’s investment in much more radical transformations of the body: knifeplay, choking, biting, sex acts that are less about penetration into a closed space and more about consumption, transformation, and the blurring together of separate individuals.

and this MATTERS because of purity culture and the cultural renegotiation of consent and all those arguments about what is “good” representation and “good” fic. so, okay, look at the 80s and 90s, the debates about BDSM and porn and sex work. those were in part debates about what meaning sex acts carry. is penis-in-vagina sex always violent, as radical feminists argued, because it’s formally about breaching a closed space, like a battering ram breaching a gate? or do we need to conceptualize even acts like rape differently, like Sharon Marcus argues in “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words,” so that we think of penises as fragile and we stop thinking of women as fortresses always vulnerable to attack? (this is a very cis-centric way of thinking gender, of course; that’s partly why we need new queer work on sex that considers and centers trans and nonbinary folks.) how does representation of sex–particularly, I think, the representation of the forms of sex–affect and reflect how we think through gender, sexuality, race, ability? not in a simple, transparent, direct way (i.e. good representation leads to good politics/“good” sex) but in a way that helps us understand why seemingly marginal sexual practices like BDSM or queer or non-monogamous sex are in fact vital and central to the way we make sex “mean.” and this matters so much right now because of purity culture, because of arguments against representations of “bad” sex, because of the wider cultural focus on rape and power dynamics, because of MeToo. at times like these, “marginal” forms of sex are the most likely to get thrown under the bus by both the right and the left. so at times like these, we need writing and scholarship that turns to sex–as in, the ways in which people have sex–to interrogate, once more, the way sex and representations of sex are at the heart of sexual and gender politics. and we need to think well beyond genitally centered straight cis sex when we think about sex and form and politics.

and why the Victorians? partly because they are such a touchstone in pop culture and scholarship around questions of sex, censorship, morality, and bodily autonomy. partly because it’s in that period that a lot of our current conceptualizations of bodies, gender, psychological interiority, agency, etc. come into being. but it’s mostly because we need to think about sex and form in all the periods and genres we study. it matters. it matters to us, right now, a lot.

Thoughts on Tumblr's anti-NSFW policy

[originally posted on Lu Fairchild's tumblr.]

"On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even the threat of potential encounters, with an ‘otherness’ of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfold as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up."
- Lee Edelman, No Future

Edelman’s 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive posits that the protection of an imagined Child (not a real, specific child, but a concept of “the child”) is figured as the goal of any “good” politics. This imaginary Child is “immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege.” It must be protected from sex, especially queer sex; it “condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities.”

This is to say: Tumblr’s use of “adult content” to signify “sexually explicit content” is not a politically neutral choice. In this formula, adult = sex and child = no sex. And since queers are so strongly identified (culturally, not “naturally”) with sex, especially sex that doesn’t produce children, queers are particularly vulnerable to accusations of being Bad For Children–and to a policy like Tumblr’s.