mysterydissertation

 

 

I am angry about losing Tumblr, and confused about what to do now.

Clarification: I don’t have to lose Tumblr. Although I have occasionally reblogged fan art depicting sexual situations, my blogs—my fandom one, my aesthetic one, and the two associated with the Mystery Dissertation Project—have not been flagged as “explicit.” Under Tumblr’s official new guidelines regarding what they term as “adult content” (essentially, photos of naked people or genitals and any images depicting sex acts), I could stay on Tumblr without changing much of what I post. I also seem to have escaped the less-than-discerning algorithms for determining what might be “adult content,” which are buggy and/or overreaching and/or queerphobic and which on the whole manage to come off as, if you’ll forgive a little personification, both extraordinarily incompetent AND puritanically paranoid. 

But.

The consequences of, and ideology behind, Tumblr’s policy makes me extremely angry, and I don’t know what to do now. I know it’s not cool to say this, but I actually like using Tumblr. I talk to other fans and fic writers on Tumblr; I view and share gifsets, art, and fic; I enjoy the soothing scrolling through attractive photographs of fog and architecture. I like being able to see and like a bunch of stuff quickly. And I have just started to gain followers for my Mystery Dissertation Project blogs—I was hoping they would be a really productive space in which to talk with other fans and scholars. But using Tumblr now, especially as part of a project that is about the very issues around the “no adult content” policy—and that is very much about sex, even if it’s about written rather than visual material—feels shitty. I don’t want to support Tumblr anymore, and I know that using the site, even to post of its own policies, means revenue for them.

Here’s the thing. Tumblr’s policy may be economically motivated (the app being taken off the Apple store, etc.) but it is still ideologically terrible. And it may not be very surprising (I wasn’t around for LiveJournal’s Strikethrough and general decline, but I certainly know about it), but it still is harmful to queer people and sex workers and women and nonbinary folks. And the language around “adult content” is just…disappointingly, disturbingly familiar. 

As I've argued before (alongside an irritatingly relevant quote from Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive) Tumblr’s formula is:

adult = sex
child = no sex

Hence the euphemism of “adult content” for “sexually explicit images.” Or, like, “images we have decided are sexual, so obviously naked people, but like, you know, also partly naked if there are boobs, but oh god someone’s going to make a stink about gender because apparently that’s what happens on our website now, okay, we’ll go with ‘female-presenting nipples,’ phew, dodged a bullet, oh shit what about breastfeeding, fuck, what about trans people, oh my god how did our site GET LIKE THIS oh and somebody on the PR team said we should make an exception for ““art””” which is, like, Greek statues maybe? okay great send tweet”

There are many, many problems here. Many people have written brilliant, insightful things about them. For me, the main issue has to do with how the “adult” in “adult” content functions rhetorically. It seems clear that however motivated it is by market decisions, profit, PR, etc., and however secondary or tertiary any of the Tumblr staff’s ideological motivations might be, the new policy is a move that is part and parcel of what is often described as “purity culture,” a largely online phenomenon, particularly in fan spaces, around trying to make sure that the sex depicted in all sorts of media is equitable, safe, power-free, “good representation”: it should set a good example for “real life” sex. To that end, purity culture operates at its simplest level with a basic formula:

adult = sex
child = no sex

Two questions that seem obvious to a queer feminist scholar, particularly one with a focus on the nineteenth century: (1) what is a child and (2) what is sex?

Those who subscribe to the tenets of purity culture often argue that the answers to these questions are obvious and if you don’t think so, you are Bad. A child is a minor. What’s a minor? Someone who is underage. What’s underage? Under the age of consent, of course. What’s the age of consent? 18. But what about in places where it’s younger? Well, but, you’re still not really an adult if you’re under 18, even if you’re technically over the age of consent. Okay, but why is this character, who is 18, not okay to pair with this character, who is middle aged? Because a big age gap also creates a harmful power imbalance. But what about the history of legislating different ages of consent for straight sex and gay sex? What about the changing definitions of “child” and “adult” over the last several centuries? What about “children” who make and/or consume sexually explicit material themselves? What about the culture we live in makes you think it’s even possible to eliminate all power relations from sex?

And what the fuck counts as sex, anyway?

Add to that the issues Tumblr’s new policy brings up by including non-photographic visual depictions of sex, and we get another age-old pair of questions: (3) what’s the difference between art and pornography? and, maybe more importantly, what’s the relationship between representation and “real life”?

As we think about the relationship between age, sex, and power, we must note that most of what purity culture discourse centers around are fictional, often fan-made, representations of sex. And most of purity culture assumes a direct, transparent relationship between representation and real life. So we are left asking questions like, What are the politics of “bad sex”? and Should all depictions of sex and all sexual fantasies be “good” and “healthy” and “safe”? It’s the sex wars all over again!

Which means we need to go back to that scholarship from the 80s and 90s while considering the massive shifts that have happened around digital media and conversations about consent, abuse, feminism, racism, and gender. We need to ask: what is a contemporary queer feminist—and antiracist—way of dealing with sex, violence, power, consent, age? I put and antiracist in italics as a reminder to myself. Scholars of color have long been writing about the intersections of sex and race and yet many of us continue to, as Rukmini Pande says, “footnote” race in our work. I’ve been footnoting it so far in my own scholarship, and I know that, and I need to do better. And I need to do better as a fan, too. White fans, generally speaking, have done a pretty bad job of talking about race and racism, let alone acknowledging that race is central to the questions of queerness and gender in which we are so invested. (Let alone acknowledging that “talking about race” also means talking about whiteness—we don’t get a pass when the characters are white.) 

As my professors and colleagues at UCR have taught me, the histories of sex and power are histories of race. Now, let me be clear that I am an American who studies mostly nineteenth-century British literature, so my perspective is a specific one. Primarily, I’m thinking about histories of slavery, of colonization, of sex work, of racial and cultural stereotyping. It is impossible to tell these stories without talking about how race and sex relate. My perspective is also limited: I am a white woman, and white women occupy a weird and fucked-up position in relation to sex and race in the U.S. Our (hetero)sexuality has been held up as something in need of protection from men of color (who are also presumed straight), which has done a lot to deprive white women of their agency, sexual and otherwise, but has also done a lot to demonize men of color and render women and queers of color invisible and/or disposable within white patriarchal hegemonic culture. And white women often hold fast to this patriarchal culture because we have, at least, a foothold in it. We think maybe it really can protect us. Maybe it really will work for us, someday, as well as it works for white men.


(Spoiler: it will not. It never has. Just ask Eleanor Guthrie.)

From listening to fans of color, and from reading many of the debates around race in fandom, it’s clear that fandom, and Tumblr specifically, is often an uneasy place for fans of color. But it’s also a place where blogs like diversehighfantasy and medievalpoc have flourished. The exodus of people—fans and non-fans—who post about intersections of race, sex, gender, and sexuality means losing yet another space in which to do so. It also means losing a space in which characters of color can be explored and discussed and depicted doing all the things fans like to depict characters doing.

I’ll admit that I don’t have as good of a grasp as I would like to have on how the racial politics of the Tumblr situation intersect with the sexual politics. (I’ve just requested that my campus library order Pande’s new book, Squee from the Margins: Race and Fandom and I’m excited to read the chapter on kinkmemes—request it from your library if you can!) But it does seem very clear that purity culture and Tumblr’s new policy are aligned with the same ideologies and practices that marginalize queer folks, people of color, and queer folks of color above all. They run on the same sort of logic—and on the same economic motivations—that permeate campaigns to “clean up” cities, streets, media, minds. (Time to revisit Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue). The language of Tumblr’s announcement resonates with these movements: “better, more positive”; “safe”; making “more people feel comfortable.” These words make my skin crawl. Used in this context, they are words with long, disturbing histories.

Purity culture is also engaged with the move to make Tumblr and other sites more “positive,” more “kid-friendly.” The basic goal of purity culture online is to fight against abuse, to fight against misogyny and homophobia, to rectify the harmful kinds of power imbalances that hurt women and LGBT folks and people of color and actual real-life children. It makes sense that purity culture is happening around the same time as MeToo; both are attempts to navigate the urgent ongoing cultural conversation about sexual consent. But what purity culture ends up doing is quarantining sex, regulating sex, by setting up hard-and-fast rules about what’s okay and what isn’t.

And I get where purity culture is coming from: it’s easier to draw clean lines in the sand. Acknowledging the complexity and specificity and thorniness and ambiguity of sex and power leads so easily—so easily—to those Gotcha! moments from shitty men, from rape apologists and far right commentators and exploiters and abusers. (See, you really DID want it all along.) But if we don’t confront sex in all its messy complexities, it means that some of the most vulnerable people, those whose sexual practices are kinky, non-monogamous, not white-middle-class-approved-for-all-audiences, get thrown under the bus.

Let's not do that.

My current reading list:

Samuel R. Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
Rukmini Pande, Squee from the Margins: Race and Fandom

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.