Reading the TC fandom dissertation, part 4: the online TC fandom analysis begins…
An academic decided to write about us, online fans of Mary Renault’s works, for her phd dissertation in 2018, and as the subject of her research, I will be covering & commenting on what she wrote over a series of posts ✍️📑 (Here is part 1, part 2, and part 3)
For part 4, we begin to delve into Chou’s analysis of the online TC fandom, which she calls the “millennial fandom” because it sprung up in the new millennium (the mid-2000s).
“While Renault’s works have mostly lost their relevance for readers of historical fiction and gay literature, Renault has found a new fandom in internet communities. On LiveJournal.com, the social networking website that has been a platform for many fandom communities since 1999, there are two major communities devoted to Renault and her works: maryrenaultfics (since 2004) and maryrenault (2005). While these communities have become less active due to decreasing popularity of LiveJournal itself, Renault fandom is still active on more recent fandom platforms such as Tumblr and Archive of Our Own”
So far this checks out. These are all the places we have congregated in.
“Renault’s new fans are not the “older gay men” who have gone digital, nor are they the “serious-minded teenagers” interested in classical times, or the academics who are finally paying the author her long-overdue attention. The cult popularity that Renault’s works achieved in the community of online fan “prosumers,” especially for those who are interested in “slash”—fantasy about male homoeroticism largely produced for and by women—demands a renewed examination of how Renault’s works could be reread and re-evaluated.”
I’m pretty sure there are middle aged men, academics, and serious minded history-obsessed teens among us. But cis women (and bisexual folks) do comprise half of the fandom (according to an informal poll I ran a while back).
“According to Fanlore Wiki, one of the largest Wikipedia websites about English- speaking fan activities, one of Renault’s LiveJournal community has been in existence since 2004, aptly named “Mary’s Handmaidens.” On the Fanlore page about “Mary’s Handmaidens,” a passage describes the gender and sexual constituent of the online community: “The community includes members of both sexes, with (by comparison with many other fandoms) a notable contingent of men, though the majority of writers of fan fiction are women. Various sexual orientations are represented among the membership.” The statement about a “notable contingent of men” is a curious one compared to the “handmaidens” in the title of the community. Despite its consciously inclusive taglines (“the community includes members of both sexes”, “various sexual orientations are represented”), the community adopts a female persona as its identity.”
This is a fair point! The handmaidens group name really wasn’t inclusive. And cis women did and still do comprise the largest group in Renault fandoms (and slash fandoms in general).
“Another example of Renault’s Internet fandom is The Theban Band’s fan arts based on Renault’s novels (see fig. 4). Among fan artworks on Renault’s works by The Theban Band, one piece based on The Charioteer illustrates serial lines of flights from the fans to Renault, from Renault to her characters, and then from her characters to antiquity (see fig. 5). The artwork demonstrates the fantastical disposition of the simultaneous disidentification and cross- identification with otherness, which in the scene depicted is embodied in a leap to another time and place. This artwork captures the moment in which Ralph and Laurie’s flirtatious book-exchange takes place in The Charioteer.”
What about this above image demonstrates disidentification and cross-identification with its subject matter? It appears to be a just a faithful visual rendition of the scene from the novel.
“If Ralph is attempting to initiate Laurie to homosexuality, it is interesting that the knowledge of homosexuality that he passes on (instead of homosexuality itself) is explained as a fantasy. In this scene of erotic initiation of a young boy, the only physical contact between the two characters is through a book that is “just a nice idea.” In the same scene, the two are depicted as dangerously close to a kiss In the passage, Ralph merely makes an “outward movement” and then steps back. What takes place in between, the “[h]alf-remembered images” of “the tents of Troy, the columns of Athens, David waiting in an olive grove for the sound of Jonathan’s bow” preoccupy Laurie’s mind strangely more so than the immediate presence of Ralph.”
I guess she is on the no-kiss team for chapter 2. 😚
“Together with the Phaedrus that Laurie physically receives, the fantasy of a homoerotic past mediates the modern, homosexual relationship between Laurie and Ralph throughout the entire story. In this sense, Phaedrus functions for the two characters much like how Renault’s books function for her readers. The Charioteer is an adoring look to the past clothed as a story about the inner struggles of a modern homosexual, or, more precisely, about how the struggles must be negotiated through a fantasy of the past. Renault’s books were for her mid-century gay readers “a badge of homosexuality” in much the same way Plato’s Phaedrus is for Ralph and Laurie: a communication about desire in the present through a collective fantasy of a past that contains the ideal form of that desire. […] Laurie looks back into a mythical past in order to contextualize his homosexuality, and Renault herself turns to the idea of Greek Love to write about male homoeroticism. In a similar way, the 21st-century fans locate in Renault’s works a kind of male homoeroticism that seems unavailable in the here and now of post-gay sexual politics.”
What are post-gay sexual politics? In what way precisely is the kind of male homoeroticism in Renault’s works, and in TC in particular (since this passage focuses on TC) no longer available in the here and now? While things have improved a lot for queer people, especially here in the west, homophobia has not gone away! Do all LGBTQ people in the Americas and Europe (where Renault’s books are published) no longer face familial and social ostracism after coming out? Readers both in the old livejournal and here on tumblr have mentioned how they could relate to TC because they come from homophobic families and communities. Through TC and the Greek novels, people can read about characters experiencing similar emotions and situations, across time, space and sometimes gender, and feel comforted, knowing that they are not alone, that this love exists, it is real, and it will find a way.
“The three-fold leap in time for Renault’s millennial fans constitutes a fantasy that is thrice removed from the “reality” of sexual desire. If Ralph and Laurie could be said to negotiate their own identity through an ancient Greek philosopher, and if as critics have argued, Renault masks her own lesbian identity by male homoeroticism located both temporally and cultural distant from her own, it is much more difficult to argue that there is a sexual truth being filtered through Plato, Renault’s characters, and finally Renault herself for the millennial fans.”
While Laurie & Ralph and the mid-century gay readers use The Phaedrus / The Charioteer to communicate their sexuality through “a collective fantasy of a past that contains the ideal form of that desire”, the “millennial fans”, according to Chou, are too far removed from the “reality” of sexual desire to receive “a sexual truth.” This assumes that the millennial fans do not use The Charioteer to explore and understand their own sexuality and cannot relate their own sexual realities to the same-sex desires depicted in the novel. This, as I said in the paragraph above, is not true, since many readers in these online communities do identify as LGBTQ+ and can relate to LGBTQ+ experiences. It is true that many of the millennial fans are not specifically gay men using these gay books to reveal their sexualities to each other. And there are indeed straight women among us, but in my experience, we are definitely NOT a majority straight-women group. Most of us are queer people who, like Ralph/Laurie and the mid-century gay readers, have found each other through this book (as friends and as lovers ❤️)
My commentary on Chou’s online TC fandom analysis continues in part 5, and a tumblr username familiar to many of us here makes a surprising appearance in the dissertation 👀👀👀
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
titsay
ellievsbear
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
