Murder Husbands and Spirit Grabbing

[mysterydissertation]

It'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).

Comments

[musingsofmaura]

I'm good! I've got a bunch of goals for digitally categorizing my research, some of which are going to be methodologically important for the diss, and others are for aesthetic or like, future pedagogy purposes.

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.