Fictional prostitution I

In amongst the very fun discussion about kick arse women on TV which has been happening over at Hoyden About Town, the wonderful su suggested that I might be interested in an article which takes its place in the world of Whedon-verse fan-academia. Given that I spent a sizeable proportion of thesis-writing time refusing to allow myself to engage in Whedonverse academia, I was rather cheery to be able to read it. “Tis Pity She’s a Whore”, by Dee Amy-Chin (Feminist Media Studies 6(2), 175-189) is a good article in lots of ways. It sets itself a task, and it works it through: is Inara, from Joss Whedon’s Firefly really a feminist depiction of prostitution, as some have thought? Few articles really succeed in doing this, so it’s nice in that regard. I should say from the get-go that Amy-Chin reckons Whedon fails at feminist prostitution. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, perhaps surprisingly, I disagree with a number of her claims. Part of this, again perhaps unsurprisingly, is because I stand by what I said about Buffy all that time ago: first, that it is a text like any other, with multiple meanings at work at any given time; second, that what makes a text feminist is not that it depicts a feminist utopia. So I’m just going to run through a few of Amy-Chin’s more memorable points and point out my responses. (When I say memorable, I kinda mean ‘I’m doing this off the top of my head coz I’m feeling rool lazy and elsewise this post will not get written. So correct me if I’m wrong, won’t you please?’)

She claims that the way that Inara is filmed reproduces her as an object under the male gaze. Her focus (I think she’s borrowing someone else’s work, from memory) is on one of our first encounters with Inara. After having been used by Mal to make a preacher uncomfortable, and been called a ‘whore’ yet again by him, she is knelt on the floor and bathing herself with a sponge. In some ways, and Amy-Chin notes this, the scene can be understood as voyeuristic. Inara’s attention is turned in on itself, and displays no awareness of the viewer. This is where Amy-Chin suggests the male gaze is permitted to take hold: Inara doesn’t glance back. But what’s interesting to me is that Amy-Chin simply by-passes what for me were the really interesting elements of the way that Inara is filmed in the pilot episode: the shots are paused. I’m not sure if you all remember what I’m talking about here, but as she squeezes the sponge out over the container of water, there’s a split-second pause, where the water hangs in the air, suspended. There’s a shot, too, of water dripping down her back, of her graceful movement, and this too pauses. This echoes earlier, where she is ’servicing’ a client, and the shots stutter again, pausing as she glances away when he asks about her home (indeed, it’s unclear in this earlier part whether she actually is looking away, or if it’s a physical rendering of her internal reaction to his question). Now the question is, is this stuttered temporality significant? To me, yes. The action pauses, giving space for reflection. The reflection may be Inara’s, but for me at least, it was also mine. It asks you to dwell with her at that moment; not in simple observation of her body, but in a wondering about what is especially significant here. It offers breaks in what could be otherwise a simple voyeuristic gaze. Inara might not gaze back at the gazer, but a sense of intimacy is engendered because the shot is no longer about how hot she is (although she totes is ).

But the real bulk of Amy-Chin’s argument engages with existing feminist writings about prostitution. She explores, briefly, positive theorisations of prostitution that have been offered by a range of feminists. From my recollection, the main elements of these are: that the woman (we’ll let the gender thing slip in this context, but I do know there are boyz who do this too, k?) ought to be able to choose whether or not she engages in prostitution, that prostitution ought not to be a matter of stigma, that she should be able to maintain the distinction between public and private, and that the focus of health testing should fall on clients, not on prostitutes themselves. This last one I won’t look at, really, except to note that Inara does undergo a health check, and there’s nothing that really suggests she checks out her clients for their health record.

It’s pretty clear throughout the series that Inara chooses her clients, and has a great deal of control over who she services, under what circumstances. The Guild is mostly what makes this possible: when a client turns nasty, she tells him that he won’t be able to get a Companion to contract with him ever again, as he will have a black mark against his name. So far, so feminist, it would seem, right? Well, if we’re being entirely fair, we should point out that whilst she has the capacity to respond to bad behaviour on the part of her clients, she is nonetheless subject to it. Which leads us to the next issue that needs addressing: the question of stigma.

It’s certainly true that the stigma remains attached to prostitution in the universe of Firefly. Mal continually displays his disapproval of her way of making money, to which Inara’s rejoinder is that at least her way of making money is legal, unlike his. He refuses to name her as Companion, the name in the Firefly universe for a woman who has undergone training, is a member of the Companions’ Guild, and sexually services her clients. Instead, he refers to her habitually a ‘whore’, even when she grumps at him about it.

Shepherd Book appears uncomfortable with her and her choice of profession, although it is to her that he turns at the end of the first episode when he has a crisis of faith. This produces the rather lovely image (Amy-Chin argues it’s not so great because it draws on a history of prosititutes providing spiritual support) of Inara’s hand resting on Book’s head in benediction. I personally like the inversion; it challenges the Christian disapproval of prostitutes. Indeed, we can even read this as speaking back to the stories of Mary Magdalene: maybe she wasn’t grateful to Jesus for ‘allowing’ her to escape her ’sins’, but he was grateful to her… (this is all quite aside from the question of whether Magdalene was actually a prostitute at all; probably not seems the current scholarly understanding, but she was powerful in the early Church (and had a Gospel all of her very own) and so her influence had to be diminished: whoredom, clearly the key!). This is interesting because it’s fairly clear that a recognisable form of Christianity has persisted into the future Firefly depicts; and oh, thank all that’s holy (sarcasm, mes amis), it’s evangelical.

Now, see, Amy-Chin thinks that this stigma, clearly still at play in this universe, means that Whedon isn’t depicting feminist prostitution. To me this isn’t the case at all. I am a little (just a teensy bit) bit over the idea that the only way for something to be making an activist point (feminist, anti-racist, anti-transphobic, whatevs) in a TV show is by showing the perfected version of the world. It supposes that, in order to be feminist, a show should depict how the world would be if it were… what? equal? different-but-with-respect? Whatever. The point being, Amy-Chin thinks that Whedon is failing to do something feminist with the Inara character because she is stigmatised, because the world is not ideal. Personally, I think that a world not-yet-perfected allows us to see the continuity between that future and here, but also allows us to imagine another way that prostitution could be done. One in which to some at least, the prostitute may be conceived of as a respectable woman, in which her work is not thought to be an inherent violation and derogation. Indeed, in one episode it is her status that allows her to intervene in the acts of government officials, a situation that is especially tricky for the crew of the Serenity (and which as a result keeps coming up). A world in which the prostitute is given sufficient control and support of her own work that she can choose her clients and respond when they do not give her the respect she deserves. But a world which still has a perhaps exacerbated version of the dissonant understanding of sex work we currently live with. A world, though, through which we are encouraged to work it out…

More to come…

(PS I have not edited this properly, so apologies for that…)

 

Play the Game

As long long promised:

A small tidbit you might not know about me: I am a gamer. Occasionally, yes, I want to be Angelina Jolie in Hackers, but I’m a tad more sincere in my adoration of computer games. I am regularly found critiquing the shit out of the industry, which seems to have massive problems with a) girls, b) plots and storylines, c) trusting their audience, d) grasping that realism is really not necessarily all that. And a few other bits and pieces. A friend I’ll call Boy Sovereign and I on a regular basis discuss the possibility of making computer games. He claims he’d code them; I claim I’d write them with proper storyline. He then looks at me dubiously.

As a present to myself post-PhD, I played Bioshock. It’s a Take-Two Interactive First Person Shooter (FPS), and it provoked a serious buzz amongst the gamer communities when it was released (which was a while back now; I took a long time to write the PhD, ‘kay?). At least part of this was because it was, allegedly, grounded in, like, intellectual shit. Ayn Rand’s intellectual shit, to be precise (okay, yes, that’s just my way of getting in a snide and empty dig at Rand…). In this respect, it looks like it’s treating its audience with some respect, expecting that they can handle sophisticated theory (if you can call Rand that).

The game is set up, in fact, as a critique of a utopia of Randian proportions: you enter this utopia as it has stopped being a utopia, so the story goes. Rapture, which is the name of this city, is built underwater. This works well, of course, as a technique for delimiting gameplay, as most FPS have to do. Your movement through the city is enabled by a kind of public transport system, and of course you can only make your way from one area to another through long glass tunnels (with all kinds of sealife moseying about on the other side). I have to say that whilst I understand the need to give people a track through the game, I think that the Half Life series does this a lot better, feeling only minimally containing, for the most part, even as you can trust to the game to not let you go off on annoying, unnecessary tangents. (Oblivion, I found, was a bit this way: I haven’t finished it because Oblivion gates kept opening every mile or so, and after a while it gets a bit boring trying to close them. I’m told that there’s a particular task that needs to be accomplished to stop them from popping up, but for this here girl-o’-thoroughness, that’s not a very successful technique.)

Anyway, so there’s this underwater utopia, run by this guy Andrew Ryan. The physical setting is gorgeously art deco, which I kinda loved. His philosophies are advertised around the place, and announced at regular intervals over a kind of PA system (apparently the massive freedom of libertarianism doesn’t include freedom from fucking advertising). This utopia has gone to shit, mostly because a mob leader challenged Ryan for the city. It’s also, though, because everyone was partaking in gene splicing (which you do, too, throughout the game, letting you shoot electricity, ice or fire from your fingers, amongst other things). This splicing has made the people of Rapture into the major bad guys you encounter: splicers. There’s a variety of splicers running around to make your life hell. Amusingly, many talk away to themselves as if they were still a part of Jazz Era upperclass life, with gossip, scandal and disapproval peppering these conversations, all in an aristocratic accent. There’s also doctors, who call out to nurses to ‘help me find this patient’ (that’d be you!). But whilst I appreciate this continuation of the setting, the splicers themselves are pretty boring. They just… kill. They’re just grumpy. It feels like they should bring more to the game than simply being impediments that stop you getting where you wanna go, which is how they wound up feeling. I know this sounds strange, given that the Combine soldiers in Half Life 2 aren’t exactly the most exciting of enemies—they’re just your basic military—but I found the splicers just annoying as the game got going. I actually suspect that this has more to do with the storyline of HL, but we’ll get to that.

These aren’t your only bad guys: there’s also the Big Daddies, who run around apparently looking after the Little Sisters. The Big Daddies are all armoured up to the nines, and they’re ‘looking after’ the Little Sisters because they can produce ‘Adam’ out of dead bodies, which in the convoluted reimagining of the technologised human body in Rapture, is necessary to the processes of gene splicing (while ‘Eve’ is used to ‘power up’ to use these abilities). Now here comes the apparent depth of Bioshock. Ready? Yeah? The depth is that you can choose to either ‘harvest’ the Little Sisters, nicking all their Adam and killing them in the process, or you can ’save’ them, using a special tool their creator gave you, and getting only a proportion of their possible Adam. That’s it. It has effects on how the game plays out, but it’s really a choice of two things, in the end: harvest a single lil sis, and you’re condemned to being the at least semi-baddie. Big ethical dilemmas, huh? At the same time, you’re misled by someone you apparently rely on, manipulated by them. Except that, even though I knew that this was the case, there weren’t really many options for going other ways. This just becomes frustrating, in the end.

So this is supposed to be the fabulous part of this game: it engages your ethics. But I have to say, as if I were a lil teenage gamer, HL totally pwns Bioshock in this regard. In Half Life 2 (I played HL after HL2, so I’m focussing on the latter), you’re being pursued through a city which is under invasion. Your friends, freedom fighters, really, are helping you make it through, in amongst making amusing comments about your taciturn nature (‘Don’t say much, do you?’ sez Alyx, coyly tucking hair behind her ear). I think it helps the drive of the whole thing that you’re continually under pursuit, whether you’re heading through the underground railway or sneaking into a prison complex. It makes the linearity of the path you travel seem more natural (coz you’re doing it at speed, rather than curiously investigating every lil door). Not just this, but at each location you reach, there is some information given, some decision reached about your next task. These flow pretty naturally: at one point, you’re just aiming to get away, then you discover your friend is in prison, so you go to free him. And so on. (In Bioshock, on the other hand, you’re clueless at the beginning, and it’s not exactly clear why you keep moving through the game (especially once you’ve been betrayed). I mean, sure, you want to know what’s happened, but do you really want to die to know? Perhaps not…)

Okay, so, so far, so seemingly-lacking-in-ethics, right? Yeah, kinda. Except that the entire story of HL and HL2 is shaped by the G-man. The G-man is a mysterious dude who appears randomly, pauses time, speaks weird and seems to be able to control the dimensions. At the end of HL, he makes Freeman (your character) the offer of employment. It’s not much of a choice, between facing a room full of aliens with no weapons, and accepting his offer. At the beginning of HL2, he claims to be responsible for bringing Freeman back to earth to fight the Combine. Yet as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the human who ceded earth to the Combine manipulated Freeman’s presence to unearth the core elements of the resistance. Instead of a simple one-off choice, then, the player is left in the position of not knowing whether or not s/he undermined the resistance even as Freeman appeared to be part of it. It’s not clear to what extent you are simply a tool of the G-man, and whether the G-man is on the side of the human resistance, as he seemed to be, or not. (At the very beginning of HL, it seems he’s responsible for bringing the aliens to earth in the first place). Everything you might have thought was simply survival, all those you killed in the game, all those lucky escapes, all becomes suspect. But because you only find out about this later, you wind up wondering if you had betrayed your own friends unknowingly, rather than, as in Bioshock, having to pretend to trust the person you knew was going to betray you in order to keep the game moving.

This seems a more compelling story to me; the querying of apparently innocent deeds, rather than the self-evident weightiness of the ‘kill or do not kill the little girl’ in Bioshock. This is, probably, partly my non-adherence to a teenage paradigm of good and bad. I’ve heard since that the creator of Bioshock was forced to simplify the storyline, on the claim that people wouldn’t be able to follow it. I suspect, then, that there are a few more dilemmas one would have otherwise had to face: perhaps even the alteration of the body through gene splicing would become a questionable matter for the player. It did seem to me a little odd that you killed off a bunch of nutty splicers (who had gone crazy due to too much gene splicing) but never seemed at risk of becoming one of them. Later in the game, you ‘become’ a Big Daddy (dressed up as one, anyway), so this element would have worked really well: to what extent must you participate in what you are resisting in order to resist it? At what point do you give over simply resisting and seek to dominate? These would have been interesting questions, but they never really quite make it into being seriously considered. And the big boss battle at the end is just kinda lame, in the end. Why is it that the games industry might be able to complexify its gameplay somewhat, but the final battle is always one of pure force?

In the end, Bioshock wants to be more interesting than it is. Its context is cool, but the splicers become nothing more than an irritant as the game goes on. Part of it is context, I think. Half Life 2 moves through a city, through blocks of apartments, through sewers, through canals (on a hovercrafty thing), along coastline, through prison blocks, through huge city buildings, through sand dunes (complete with ant-lions buzzing at you); you fight on farms, lighthouses, in prison blocks, in mines, in the big weird Citadel, in huge warehouses, in small cramped towns and so on. The variety of contexts requires you to be continually finding new ways of engaging your enemies; and they themseles are varied: regular combine soldiers, the shot-gun-bearing variety, big helicopter things you take down with a rocket launcher, roof-suckers, ant-lions, zombies, head crabs (of various kinds) and so on. It maintains interest, where Bioshock became just a repetitive exercise in shooting things.

So thanks, Valve, for trusting your gamers. And phooey to those stupid execs who made Bioshock just another FPS, albeit with pretty graphics.

 

Hoofering

Just in case you’re wondering what I’m up to… I am going to dance in public (well, all things being well, and my apparent inability to recall an entire sequence of steps being properly remedied). And what kind of dance will this be? Well… let’s just say that it’s potentially the most unusual dancing you’ve ever seen. Wish me luck finding a taffeta 80s dress…

 

Baby did a bad bad thing

Baby in this case being me (and that’s one of the few chances you’ll have to see me refer to myself as ‘baby’) and the bad thing being neglecting this blog shamefully. SHAME! I have been prompted to make this potentially one-off return (who can say? I have broken too many promises to the internet to trust myself to stick to anything… ever…) by, first of all, the brand spanky new year, second of all by the title of my blog glaring balefully at me from my bookmark bar, and third of all by Paul Gowder’s engagement with this post. If you want to see where I’ve been waxing lyrical, it’s been over there (poor Paul, I practically took over his blog for a moment there), over at AWB’s, long-windedly at Books Do Furnish a Room (a design philsophy I already adhere to) and more locally I’ve been Hoydenizing (they’re up for a weblog award. If nepotism counts for anything in this day and age, go vote for tigtog and Lauredhel. They do a great job at HAT).

But if I’ve been neglecting ma blawg, you should know I am an equal opportunity neglector. Although I have a small review (well, apparently I am wordy and long even when I am simply reviewing other people’s work!) coming out, the promises of papers have once more drifted into the ether. I have yet to write the terrifying email to editors of serieses my poor PhD might be welcome in (seriously, I started writing one: ‘Dear Prof. X, I was considering submitting a proposal for a book based on my PhD for the series X, and wanted to give you a chance to say no before I…’ wait, no, something’s not right here…). I’ve got plans for papers that really need to get underway, mostly for special issues which will probably, with my luck, already be packed to the rafters. In other news, I am peeling skin from burnt shoulders (seriously, it evokes kidness for me, back when I used to paint PVA all over my hands just to pull it off slowly later on), learning to hoofer, reading, ah, god, fiction! and being generally a lazy bum. This’ll change any second, no doubt . I have also applied for a job (eep!) in Ireland (accents, sigh…). That took a fair bit of doing, in the end, trying to enumerate the responsibilities of tutoring etc. But it was good to have done. I have heard nothing, but we shall see (I figure a thousand and one people applied for the job, as who doesn’t love an Irish accent, really?). The job kinda looks perfect for me, but probably half of that is just the process of writing the job app and trying to convince them of that…

I have to say, though, my friends, that laziness is extraordinarily relaxing. As are days at the beach, especially where there are waves involved. I shall try to be a bit more disciplined here at the blog, but you know me. Promises, promises… But happy new year, intertubular world. I hope it brings naught but fun, happiness and surprises of the good kind to you all!

P.S Thanks to all who sent me virtual congrats, both here and privately. You made it possible, midears! I should probably also let you lot know that I have been awarded a ‘Vice Chancellor’s Commendation’. Scare quotes designate me not really knowing what it means, but they tell me it’s for excellence in research. Suh-weet! You’ll let me know when I cross the line into boasting, right?

 

Champagne Days…

O I’ve actually been back in Sydney for a while now, without no updating of blog, which is bad; but, my friends, I have had big news, big head-spinning news…

I’m going to be a doctor. A Doctor? A PhD.

My examiners’ reports (for those of you not from Oz, you might not know that we don’t get a viva, or a defense or anything; we’re too geographically isolated for that. We get three reports from different examiners) arrived a little while ago. The HDRU (Higher Degree Research Unit) people wrote to me, making me panic by saying that they’d been forwarded to my supervisor, who would write a report about them, and then the committee would meet and come to some kind of a conclusion. I was sure that this meant that there had been massive discrepancies between the reports, but as it turns out, the answer to that worry is ‘No.’

I hadn’t written about this anxiety here, but I’m going to describe it now, because I know a few people round the place are waiting on results, and everyone who’d come before me told me stories that just didn’t match with how I felt. I didn’t want my reports. I sincerely didn’t. I wanted having handed the goddamn thing in to be the end of it. I wanted that to have been enough. Enough of an achievement, to just get it in. I wanted no criticism, not even constructive criticism. I know this is childish and stupid, but it felt like any tiny piece of criticism would be enormously devastating; would erase the whole goddamn thing. I’m like this at the best of times (insane, I know, and unsustainable, I know that too; we’re working on it, ‘kay?). My supervisor had completely lost any capacity to convince me of the worth of my work by the end of the thesis. I fell for the probably stupid and untrusting belief that she would say anything positive to get me to hurry the fuck up and hand it in (ooh, she deserves more than that, my friends! I am a terrible person!) I have a general tendency to believe every negative thing to the nth degree, and to disbelieve anything positive (generally by the bad bit of me telling me that people have investments in making me feel good. This is silly, I know; most people can’t be bothered having those kinds of investments.)

But really: I had worked so hard, but I was so so so horribly aware of its flaws: of stilted patches, of argumentation I remained unconvinced by (even as I was convinced enough to write it), of examples that didn’t match the argument. Quite possibly lots of this happened in imagination; I haven’t dared to pick the thing up again since I submitted it. When I received the letter that told me my supervisor had my reports, and that I would get a copy of them soon, my heart pounded and I (did I mention childish?) called my mama and said all of the things I’ve just said. She told me I didn’t mean all of them, and I assured her I did. And she ran out of comforting things to say, as is inevitable when someone has already decided the situation will be devastating with a tiny drop of negativity.

And then the reports came in. I am a wimp. I called my mama again, and made her sit on the phone with me; the first reading of my reports, then, was out loud. If I’d thought about it properly, this is dumb: words get weighty in the air.

But these reports, my friends, these reports?

Glowing, i believe is the term. I have had to carry around a copy of the reports with me, for when the bad bit of me starts to think I must have made up the positives. Pinching doesn’t work, even though it (my present state, not the pinching so much) feels dreamy. These reports have gone a fair distance to restoring some of my faith in academia (!), not because I like people who like my work (though I do), but because there is no point-scoring in them, no ego, massive amounts of encouragement, of a recognition of what they see as valuable and a real generosity in both the reading and articulation of why they call it (and they do) “a remarkable achievement”.

I could boast by pulling out ‘the best bits’ (as my sister wanted me to do) but I’m not going to. I’m just going to say: I didn’t want my reports; but the affirmation they’ve given me is… well, let’s just hope that this brief moment out from the ever-present imposter syndrome lasts; because it is astonishingly gorgeous. And that’s despite the numerous typos I have to fix!

[raises champagne glass] Cheers! (and be sure to meet my eyes; no seven years of bad sex for me, thanks!)

 

A Small Case of Hiatis

That’s right, my friends. I’m off to potentially sunnier, probably cloudier, definitely deliciously rougher climes for about two weeks. I’ll be back then with my overly involved take on why Half Life roolz Bioshock so hard it hurts. That’s right, kids, this is theory central, this is Take care, one and all!

 

The World Out There

O I’ve mentioned already that I’m adoring my students this term, and for the most part, this is true. There’s a couple of points, though, at which I’m banging my head up against a brick wall with a couple of them. Now before this sounds like a straightforward bitch about students, I want to say that that’s not quite it. It’s actually that the whole experience is making me reflect on how tenacious a particular conception of ontology and epistemology is. It manifests itself in these particular students as a complete resistance to the idea that there might not really be such a thing as ‘the natural body’; or rather, that ‘the natural body’ is just as much a construction as anything else. It echoes through the week on disability (’some people just are disabled’) and fatness (‘but some things just will make you fat, and fat is bad!’) and so on. But all of this is premised on a really particular understanding of the world: of the world as something out there, something at a distance. Something static, immoveable, unchangeable. Something which has been there, just less well comprehended, for those who came ‘before’ us in history. Something firm; something foundational; something to anchor the world.

This isn’t rare, not at all. And it’s a hard conception to shift. Our commonsense sense of representation works this way too: there’s the thing itself, and then there’s the word for the thing. It’s echoed by truth: truth is thought as the adequation of knowledge to the thing itself. The thing itself, though, is ‘out there,’ existing all by its lonesome, unchanging and forever just the way it is.

What’s intriguing, I think, is the hard work it takes to sustain an alternative conception, at least for a while. I have seen students grasp the complexity of, say, the idea that the body doesn’t exist prior to culture and then enter into it, but only becomes a ‘body’ within a given cultural context. Then, the next week, they’re back to arguing that this conception doesn’t make sense. Most often, these claims are premised on the assumption that in order for what I’m teaching to be ‘true’ (and it needs to be true, for them; some even stick with calling what we’re learning ‘objective’) it needs to cohere with what ’science’ (and this, I think, has less to do with science itself, which is often much more circumspect about such claims, and more to do with the authorisation of what has become commonsense).

There’s also some funny stuff that happens about not just the idea of truth, but the comfort of the idea of truth. I’ve watched a few students get wider and wider of eye, and I can see what’s happening. They’re falling for what I call ‘dumb existentialism’ (which by the by the mainstream media seems to think postmodernism is all about) in which the moment we lose a big-t Truth, the world slowly starts to dwindle into chaos. Meaning is gone. The world is everything and nothing. It’s all very deep, and I remember those conversations over beer when I was an undergrad.

(Hilarious side point: I remember talking to one particular guy. He was hot, he knew it (but unfortunately the hot faded, potentially because of this conversation). We talked cultural studies and I was taken that he was taken with it. Then I suggested that ‘who I really am’ isn’t so much given by some essence, but by the people around me (my attempt at a less depersonalised sense of ‘context’). He suggested that this was because I felt the demands that other people made on me too much, and that what I needed to do was go off to a Buddhist retreat like he did. Coz he found himself. He really did; he found some core, deep deep down, you know, just himself, his real self… and I thought of Foucault… and I thought of Butler… and I thought…OMG. Pretty or not, it was so hard to hold my tongue, coz man it was going to be biting.)

But back to my existential crisising students. What they usually forget, of course, is that ‘discovering’ there’s no big-t Truth is not the same as losing big-t Truth. When they freak out, they freak out as if now there’s no meaning. But the same significances still exist for them, just as they always did, because they never did depend on a big outside Truth. All it shows is that truth is given within a context, by a set of shared discourses; not that it’s any less true. But you know, that’s kinda less sexy than the artistic soul’s pit of despair on discovering that nothing means anything.

In other words, there’s a semi-willingness to challenge ideas of Truth. But there’s a less sustained attention to how and why particular things are made to count as truth, or why we might live as if they are, and so on. It’s like the stories about postmodernism the mainstream media likes to tell: it just destroys everything. They miss the construct in deconstruct; and they miss that deconstruction is not about making things false, it’s about highlighting their contingency. This issue comes up a lot: it’s like deconstruction has to be set back within a world view in which it is possible for things to be true or false, and deconstruction will tell us which is which. Strange, but it happens a lot. In conversation with someone online a while ago, I suggested that there were strategic ways that one could attempt to tell big-t-style Truths as a way of negotiating with the political efficacy of big-t Truth, whilst at the same time critiquing and deconstructing both the ‘truth’ and what let it count as truth, and the fact that it was politically effective. My interlocutor commented that this was disingenuous: to claim things were true because it was politically efficacious, but not thinking them actually true was to be, in essence, false. This line has been kicking around in my head with all this other stuff for a while now, and it just intrigues me how notions of authenticity and truth seem to remain throughout a critical approach. My interlocutor was very far from foolish, and grasped much of poststructuralist theory. But nonetheless, this theory was implicitly, it seems, set back within an ontology and an epistemology: in which there was a world out there that we couldn’t really touch but could use words that were adequate to it, represent it, and that that adequation bore with it a political and moral responsibility.

I don’t have much of great profundity to say about this. It does, though, seem to point out how thoroughly our habitual styles of being-in-the-world are inflected by these ontologies. My students come to class, and for some of them at least, their perception is shaken up. Yet they leave, and go and order coffee, and sit with friends, and chat and read and catch the bus and sleep and cook and work… and when they come back to class, their perception has settled again. There are those, of course, for whom the shaking up is too exciting to leave alone. They prod the ideas, turn them over, return to them; maybe even do what I as an undergrad used to do, which is talk endlessly about them to my friends. For them, poking and prodding and turning their own assumptions, their own habits around in their hands becomes… fun, addictive, exciting, terrifying… There’s nothing quite like discovering that the world is not out there. It’s in always already here, intimate of intimates; and you’re out there, too, distant and dreamt-of.

 

More vampires

OR those of you who have been readers of this blog for a while, you’ll know that vampires tend to crop up around me… well, in the pop culture I like to consume. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a big, long-standing favourite with me, for example. And I reviewed Elizabeth Knox’s Daylight a while back. And as I mentioned there (I think?), Sue Ellen Case grounds a lot of this fascination for me. In ‘Tracking the Vampire’ she argued (this was a while ago now) that vampires inhabit a liminal space, figured primarily as life and death. Given the tendency to homologise our binaries (oh yeah, baby, give me more, always more ;-P) this turned into a bigger ontological challenge, blurring the lines between a whole series of differences: between straight and gay, between male and female, between reproductive and non-reproductive and so on… and this, she argued, was precisely queer.

This is part of what fascinated me about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and part of why I think the stories about sexuality recounted in around and through BtVS are more complex than at least some people seem to think. I still remember a film student friend of mine gasping at all the symbolic significance of Spike (under the influence of the First Evil (caps necessary)) oh-so-sensually mouthing at a gash in Buffy’s arm. Mmm hmm. Kids’ TV? Nothin’ to see here, folks, move along.

So a while back now, I saw the pilot for True Blood. Ooh! Alan Ball! All cool with the Six-Feet-Under-ness of him! Ooh! Anna Paquin! All dark eyes and kissable (or is it?) mouth! Ooh! Vampires! I decided that I would give into my trashy urges and try vampire fiction again. Who knew, maybe someone could do something with a slightly less puritannical heroine than Anita Blake (maybe she got better, but ugh, save me from a girl with too clear a sense of right and wrong!). So in quick succession (I can’t really imagine reading them any other way) I read the Sookie Stackhouse series. Or, as it’s also known, the Southern Vampire series, by Charlaine Harris. These are the books Alan Ball is basing this new TV series on.

The books are, in themselves, that kind of easy-to-read, fun, never-going-to-be-high-lit-thank-fuck stories which made me dream of lazy holidays. They play on the down-home-ness of the American South, as well as the violence and racism of it. But they draw out some interesting things about the figure of the vampire in contemporary pop culture, and that’s one of the things I want to talk about.

It’s not unusual to see BtVS critiqued (and totally fairly) for its whiteness. There’s a particular line of argument which suggests that vampires and demons are taken as representatives of racialised others, the otherness which is consistently situated as threatening and (at least by Buffy) threatened by our heroes. I’m never entirely sure about this slippage between other-worldly and race, not least because I think that vampires manage to encapsulate, to different degrees in different spaces, a variety of forms of difference. They shape shift according to the work they’re being made to do.

But in Charlaine Harris’ books, the parallel is explicit. The setting of the American South is, I think, no accident. But it’s not just race. Vampires have recently ‘come out of the coffin’ (aheh aheh) and are now lobbying to have the same rights as humans (through the passing of the Vampire Rights Act). What precipitated this coming out? The development of artificial blood by a Japanese pharmaceutical company. Our brand spanking new blond heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, has numerous arguments with lots of different people about not being prejudiced against vampires. In the extra-long opening credits, which involve images of sex and death and Southernness (rivers and road kill and crocodiles and white trash sexy-dancing, and kids in KKK hoods and gospel-singing black people and mostly-naked girls, bar brawls and baptisms) set all in amongst each other to the tune of Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’, there’s a shot of a backlit sign that says ‘God Hates Fangs.’ Hilariously, and this really did make me laugh out loud, we catch a glimpse in episode two of a newspaper bearing the headline ‘Angelina adopts vampire baby.’ In fact, I can’t remember if it’s in the book, but in the series, she responds to her (Black) friend Tara warning her that all a vampire wants is to suck your blood by saying ‘Yes, and all Blacks are lazy and Jews all have horns.’ Except that as she’s reminded, drinking artificial blood is probably comparable to living on SlimFast… Sookie’s defence of vampire rights seems to be at least partly premised on a denial of this particular threat, especially when she’s defending her decisions to others: she argues that they can, will and should assimilate… while drinking lots of fake blood and having small kitchens (coz they don’t need to cook). But this isn’t the whole story: she also wants, and I mean wants, the vampire of her small town of Bon Temps. His name, my friends, is Bill. [giggle]

She’s drawn to him. Part of this plays out through another supernatural phenomenon: our friend Sookie is not only a waitress, she’s a telepath. Makes dating, amongst numerous other things, a bit of a bitch. (‘Is she a natural blond, nothing worse than a big black bush,’ ‘Maybe she’ll stop me dreaming about Matt Damon,’ ‘Wow, never thought those thighs would be quite that size,’ or ‘Wow, I wish she’d stop talking, she’s really annoying,’ or ‘I just want sex right now’ etc; though they stick with the earlier two, coz they’re funnier… (and maybe less critical of conventional masculinity?)). Vampires, though, don’t send out brain waves, so it’s kinda peaceful for our Sook, being around them. In some sense, it’s an unusual take on thinking about relationships in contemporary culture, which is usually ‘communicate every fucking little thing’…

But she is drawn to him. Scott Winant’s direction of this relies on long close-up shots of Anna Paquin looking wide-eyed, mostly, and lots of pregnant silences. Oh, and Stephen Moyer, playing Bill, looking mysterious, a bit pale, and mostly up from under his eyebrows. Hey, if an evil sexy look works, I say work it. In a moment that recalls the scene from BtVS described above, though, Bill offers Sookie his blood when she is mortally injured. She at first rejects it, not wanting to become a vampire, but once he reassures her this won’t happen, she suckles on down on his wrist. And wow… if my old friend Katy thought Spike’s lipping of Buffy’s wound evoked cunnilingus, I wonder what she thought of this: the moment is Loooong, and despite Sookie’s battered state, both her hands wrap around Bill’s wrist, capturing, drawing him closer, stroking, while her mouth does some serious work. They’re both half-frowning. There’s no missing the significance (well, okay, maybe I’m just dirty-minded or have read too much psychoanalysis, but c’mon!).

Of course, what’s particularly interesting about this is that it inverts the usual ‘first taste’ story—and there’s a Fiona Apple nod later in the episode, albeit evoking Sookie’s desire for sex/vampire suckage. But at least in this case, this isn’t about sweet virginal Sookie getting penetrated and made into a bad, evil, undead thing. Instead, she drinks deep. Bill’s maleness becomes complicated by a site that penetrates the supposedly inviolate male body (and there’s something intriguing, I think, about the fact that he bites himself so that she can drink). The sexualising of this shifts away from simple reproductive het sex, and into something queerer (as Sue Ellen Case would suggest).

But what’s also interesting is the effects of this queer exchange (and yes, he ‘cleans her up’, licking away the blood that covers her face (apart from, in a shot I suspect was not intended this way, but which I found cool and amusing anyway, a moustachioed crusting of dried blood)). As Bill explains to her later on, not only does this let her heal, but it heightens her senses and her – cue his cute Southern embarrassment – libido. In the book, it enhances her attractiveness, making her skin glow, her hair lighter, her eyes brighter… but I guess Anna Paquin doesn’t get much better? But intriguingly here, we have something other than assimilation happening: we have the blond white mortal girl altered by her interaction with the vampire. She’s made other than what she was. And in turn, he is altered by her blood: he knows where she is, and how she’s feeling. There’s a blurring, then, of the lines between Sookie and Bill, between their different ‘races’, between their self-contained identities. She shares in some of his sense of the world as her senses sharpen. He shares in her emotional state. As she says to him, “You were just licking blood out of my head. It doesn’t get much more personal than that.” (And Bill’s thinking “You ain’t see nothin’ yet, honey,” I’m sure. Lucky about that non-telepathic with vampires thing, huh?)

This will get more complicated as the series progresses: there are more vampires, there’s more blood-sucking, and some other fun stuff (shape shifters! werewolves! fairies (both magical and queer!)! maenads! dwarves! and so on). Sookie meets more vampires, shares her blood with them, and has some of their blood too. (Bill’s not going to be all that forever). Each of these is significant. She gets a decent amount of sexin’ from various males of various speices round about the place, and each of these ties bind, in different ways and to different extents.There’s more evocation of the ties between folks through the sharing of blood or magic. For example, Sookie’s brother, Jason, winds up bitten by a werepanther (thereby producing not a genuine shape-shifter, but a half-man, half-panther combo) because this werepanther wants the girl (also a werepanther) that Jason is sleeping with; Jason is preferable because he comes from outside their shared  community of shapeshifters, which has become so inbred many are permanently caught as half-panther beings. So the werepanther seeks to bind Jason into the community and thereby make him less attractive to the girl werepanther so that Jason won’t be the better choice anymore. (Confusing, huh?).

And I suppose in the end, this is what is intriguing to me: the supernatural, and particularly horror-focused evocations of it, seems to focus so clearly on undermining the self-containment of the liberal humanist individual. It makes the intercorporeal literal in the sharing of blood, and in the consequences of that sharing. This is, of course, Kristeva’s point, when she talks about how the abject functions: it dwells in the space between subject and object: both me and not-me, testifying to the incompleteness, the necessary permeability of my boundaries. For her, the edges of the body represent the containment and delineation of the subject. Thus the abject is both the condition for the possibility of my being an individual, and testimony to its impossibility too. And the powers of horror, as the essay is titled, lie in this dual function: the loss of self and the origination of it, the powerful seductiveness of losing the sense of the edges of the self, and the terror of precisely that. The queering of identity is often enacted through the vampire, through the werewolf, through the individual-becoming-other-through-the-other’s-gift. These are the stories that draw me to them. And it’s only partly about the sex. I think.

 

Am I back?

owdy to all those loyal enough to have me feeded. I’ve been gone for such a long time now, I’ll be surprised if anyone remembers I exist. This hiatus extended on into something more like a never-blog! I’m trying not to feel guilty for that.

So the lovely Nate prodded me a while back, wondering what post-PhD life was like. And this strange kind of limbo-land I’m in… well, for the moment, it’s pretty pleasant. Apart from the occasionally breath-taking bout of anxiety that strikes me whenever I think about the thesis, life is feeling pretty sunny. I have more time for my friends, more space for being someone other than a thesis-writer, which is kinda nice, and I’m convening a course I adore. And the students in said course seem brighter than your average bear, which makes for a nice change to the endless frustration of people last semester (Student: ‘But… well, I just think it’s wrong.’ Me: ‘What’s wrong?’ Student: ‘Homosexuality.’ Me: ‘[gape, thinking but we're 6 weeks in, this is a queer theory course, we've talked all about this for weeks on end, and that's all you got?] Ooookay, well, perhaps we might try thinking about why you think it’s wrong…’ [in head: again]). The other day, in a tutorial about donation of bodily tissues, I had the following (approximate) conversation take place:

Me: So what do you think of current ways of thinking about donation? Are they fair? Are they exploitative?

Student 1: Well, they’re pretty exploitative, a lot of them. And unfair.

Student 2: But that’s because of the commodification of bodily tissues.

Me: Okay, so are there alternatives you can imagine?

Student 3: Well, I can’t really see any, but commodification does seem to be the main problem. But it’s hard to imagine any other ways of doing things.

Student 2: That’s because of capitalism. Capitalism is the real problem.

Me: And my work here is done.

So yes, I am enjoying my students. It’s nice, first of all, to be doing both lectures and tutes, because it means that whatever it is that I teach them, that’s what they are meant to be learning. There’s less uncertainty for me, in that regard: it means that I’m not second-guessing my grasp of someone else’s explanations/theorisations/positions. But second, it’s really really fun to be running the course. I added in a week on the concept of ‘choice’: what counts as choice and what doesn’t, and how this works to naturalise particular kinds of interventions into the body, and raise others as political (or ethical, or social…) issues. It’s hard work, too. Even though the woman who is employing me gave me all of her lectures, this week (week 6) is the first week that I’ve really used them. I’m trying to take this opportunity to build up a bit of a backlog of lecture materials, slides and so on. So it’s all very useful, but hard work too.

I’m also having to think about The Future. Which I dislike and try to de-capitalise as much as possible. I need to publish, and am just heading into starting to feel guilt about that, so I think I should really just start writing. I have a few things arising from the thesis which need to be written shortly, and a few papers up-coming: a chapter for a book, a review essay on Judith Butler (has anyone else noticed the simply nutty number of books ‘on’ her that have just come out? Craziness!), and two planned articles for two special issues due early next year. I need to publish more than that, of course, but it’ll be good (hard) work to just do that, methinks. I’m helping to organise a conference, too… And somewhere in the midst of all of that, I want to apply for various fellowships at various places, and write a book proposal for the thesis (or, y’know, the book of the thesis… like the film of the book, y’know… ). In amongst all of that is the awareness that I desperately need to organise employment for over the summer. It’s easy to forget that it’s about four months potentially without money. I might wind up doing data entry, but I’m crossing fingers for something more exciting. Cross them with me?

In general, my currently post-grad friends, post-thesis life is much funner, at least for me. I keep trying to explain it to people, but most don’t get it: I felt like I was procrastinating all the time at the end of the PhD. Even when I was teaching. Even when I was doing other work. Hell, even when I was working on the thesis I was convinced there was something else more important, more signficant, more urgent about the thesis that I should be working on. This is a strange and stupid frame of mind, I am aware (and was aware at the time), but it is sincerely how I felt. Not feeling like my entire life is one big, lazy procrastination is extraordinarily liberating. Yes, I am much happier. It’s good! And as much as I panic about examiners’ reports, and the potential culture clash of American academics marking my work, and the potential GAPING HOLES in my argument… I am, for the most part, able to set it aside. We’ll see how I go when I get closer to when the reports come back, but yeah…

So yes, I am hoping to start blogging again. I am writing a fair bit at the moment, what with lectures and (ahem) fiction (shh, don’t tell anyone) and with the articles that I’m meant to be doing. But I’ve been hanging around posting long comments on various blogs (mostly grumping at anti-trans*, trans*phobic radfems) which is probably a good sign that I should be doing more writing back at home.

And yeah, I’ve totally missed you lot.

 

Acknowledgements

If there is one thing that this thesis has clearly demonstrated to me, it is the impossibility of recognising the various gifts that have gone into this thesis (not to mention the questionable ethics of attempting to do so). Nonetheless, there are some whose generosity has so altered me that I know without them, this thesis could not have been:

My supervisor, Nikki Sullivan, for her warm support, generous intellect and her unwavering belief that this thesis was worth writing.

My friends, who put up with me when I could think of nothing but the thesis, and who sustained me with cups of coffee and tea, red wine at Madame Fling Flong’s, ludicrous numbers of hours spent cheering Buffy and other superheroes on, chatting, laughing, frowning and furious at the world, and of course eating good, good food; and with their demonstration of the belief that there was, all evidence to the contrary, more to me than the thesis! And so especially: Sophie, David, Obelia, Beth, Kirstin, Matthew, Marita, Nicole, Elaine, Sam, Holly, Craig, Patrick, Hilary, and the little Holly; much loving gratitude.

My online interlocutors, for their ideas, patience and willingness to interact, but most of all for their difference; especially to Nate, Az, Fido and, again, the ever-astonishing Nicole (especially her knees).

My family: my siblings, Myf, Dan and Demelza; our gorgeous-in-every-way-possible and dearly missed dog, Megan; and especially my parents, Alan and Robyn; who gave me a curiosity about the tapestry of the world, the desire to tug on threads, weave, unravel, knot and splice, and a sense of wonder at the possibilities of patterns new, old and other.

Special extra thanks go to those who read bits and pieces for me, offered feedback and spotted flaws: to Elaine, to Nikki, to Nicole, whose generosity in this matter still makes my jaw drop; and to my parents, whose readings were warm and incisive, and opened my work back out in ways I’d forgotten it could.

And always, and still, Greg, whose gifts continue to resonate and alter, even after he is gone.