Murder Husbands and Spirit Grabbing
Mar. 1st, 2019 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mysterydissertationIt's been awhile since I've posted! Work is still progressing--just had a busy few weeks, including a great conference last weekend at UCLA with folks who attended last summer's Dickens Universe conference. My paper was titled "Murder Husbands and Spirit Grabbing: Navigating Consent through Form.” I wanted to share a little bit about it here. (Many thanks to all those who offered feedback for revisions and at the Q&A!)
My paper pairs two texts—one Victorian, one contemporary—to explore how written representations of intimate bodily practices help construct and critique the concept of consent. I argue that a work of erotic fanfiction, “Blackbird,” by Emungere, and a collection of nineteenth-century descriptions of Spiritualist séances employ BDSM and spirit channeling, respectively, to show how shifting meanings around what “counts” as sexual complicates the practice of consent. While these texts do advocate for consent, they also represent it as simultaneously inadequate and overreaching, neither preventing all harm nor accommodating all desires. They do so not to undermine efforts to fight sexual coercion, but to make space for certain desires and practices that fit uncomfortably within models of agency and liberal subjectivity. I also argue, however, that these texts critique liberal subjectivity while maintaining a link to it via the conceptual anchor of whiteness.
My next task is to expand this paper into a dissertation chapter. I have about a billion things to say about “Blackbird” and the way it extends Hannibal’s exploration of erotics and consent by resituating the violence of the show within a BDSM context that can almost, but not fully, manage the men’s intense desires to consume and intimately destroy each other. I’ve also been writing about Spiritualism for years now and I feel like the questions I’ve been asking about Spiritualism and consent, bodily agency, gender, age, sexuality, and the erotics of constraint are finally swirling into more crystallized forms. I’ve gotten really interested in spirit grabbing—when skeptics would seize hold of a materialized spirit without warning, supposedly putting the medium in grave danger of a kind of physiological/metaphysical damage. I’m thinking about the way that the conventions of the seance set up a rudimentary practice of consent to address this risk.
The considerations of this work are making me rethink some of what’s happening in the mystery novel around violence, sex, and form. I want to bring out these specific constellations of ideas more strongly there. I don’t know if that means rethinking what happens to bodies in the novel or simply rethinking how I describe them. I do think I want to include more sex than I’ve planned; when I write fic, sex is one of the places where I work out so much about intimacy and selfhood and how feelings and desires and fears get navigated in relation to other people. I want to do that in the novel, too, especially since sex is also a key location of analysis in the dissertation. (Just have to figure out how to balance porn with plot lol).
no subject
Date: 2019-04-02 10:56 pm (UTC)I was just thinking about your project and stopped by to see if you had posted anything recently. how was working the paper into a chapter?
I've been thinking a lot about how I want to digitally catalogue my diss research, bc tumblr is in many ways still the best tool for what I need to do w/ images, but I'm not sure if I'm as comfortable/will feel like posting longer form prose there as I start to dig into things. what are your thoughts a few months into this about how the platforms have been functioning for you?
no subject
Date: 2019-04-13 08:30 pm (UTC)Still working on the chapter, quite slowly; I realized I had to read a bunch of stuff about race and cannibalism before I could start writing lol. But I think it'll be okay? I have a lot to say; I just have to figure out the structure.
Ugh. I miss Tumblr pretty badly. I just don't feel like I can do this project there, given the NSFW policy. Honestly, I think it would have worked pretty well there; I didn't usually do long text posts on my fandom account but I know people who did and it seemed to work for them. Though that's not as accessible to academics, or as professional-seeming. I've been considering something like a WordPress; Dreamwidth isn't good for images and there aren't all that many people on here. Of course, I'd have to actually post things regularly. :P
How are you?? How's your work going? Do you have a particular goal for digitally categorizing your research? I'm still trying to figure out what I want from putting stuff online now I'm off Tumblr.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-28 08:56 am (UTC)I have some pretty specific goals for digitally categorizing my research. I work on the production and dissemination of images, primarily on pottery, so for my diss I want to, over the course of my research, build searchable cachets of images that I'm working on, and just that I've seen in general/have registered an impact with me. I've been pondering this for ages, and this goes along with the fandom/professional digital differentiation we talked about initially, plus I've really been trying to figure out what to do about my frustration with Tumblr.
I think I've come to some conclusions tho. It's almost 5am and I'm feeling chatty so imma just delve in, haha. My Tumblr is pretty consistently tagged so visually it's an incredible resource for me of what I've been looking at for the past 8 years and I don't want to lose that. However as I've realized that my research is starting to enter digital realms, in terms of analysis, I have wanted to kind of but not entirely separate my personal/fandom internet life from the artistic and academic work, which through college and grad school have been completely entangled by existing primarily on just the 1 Tumblr page.
I've decided that I just needed to pony up for a domain and used UC's squarespace 50% off discount to start building myself a website that can be a visual portfolio but also contain text based stuff. people weren't really interacting with my work a ton on Tumblr anyway, so I will probs feel better about it once it lives somewhere else, and I can continue to post pictures of nudity in greek art on my Tumblr and appeal all of the flags, which is petty but feels noble in a silly way.
I'm going to a program in July that will hopefully teach me image meta data stuff and other digital tools idk much about rn, so I'm excited for that knowledge to help me with this!
no subject
Date: 2019-05-13 02:35 am (UTC)One of the things I'm going to be doing is taking these 'architectural detail' photos in the places I'm living, in order to think about how artists interact with the physical spaces around them/how that impacts their representations of physical spaces. But I also wanted something that would allow me to talk about the other random shit I'll be seeing and thinking about. So I decided to just build myself a website to function kind of as a portfolio, kind of as a blog, and mainly as a platform to organize and effectively tag images so that I can sort them and interact with them in different ways as my research evolves.
I used to post a decent amount of longer-form prose about my research on Tumblr but I didn't really love the experience, and wasn't getting the response(s) I necessarily wanted, which is tough on a platform that's more explicitly set up for fostering and encouraging interaction, so I am hoping that untangling this type of work and posting it on its own website will alleviate some of that cognitive dissonance and allow me to see more clearly the types of work things I'm looking at and thinking about, removed from all the pictures of Harry Styles haha.