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mysterydissertation) wrote2018-12-06 10:17 am
mysterydissertation) wrote2018-12-06 10:17 am
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.
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.