- From “Queer and Now” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from page 3 of her essay collection Tendencies
[IMAGE ID: Screenshots of a text saying:
I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to use, became a prime resource for survival.
We need for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love. This can’t help coloring the adult relation to cultural texts and objects; in fact, it’s almost hard for me to imagine another way of coming to care enough about literature to give a lifetime to it.
The demands on both text and the reader from so intent an attachment can be multiple, even paradoxical. For me, a kind of formalism, a visceral near-identification with the writing I cared for, at level of sentence structure, metrical pattern, rhyme, was one of trying to appropriate what seemed the numinous and resistant power of the chosen objects.
Education made it easy to accumulate tools for this particular formalist project, because the texts that magnetized me happened to be novels and poems; it’s impressed me deeply the way others of my generation and since seem to have invented for themselves, in the spontaneity of great need, the tools for a formalist apprehension of other less prestigious, more ubiquitous kinds of text: genre movies, advertising, comic strips. END ID]
Something something queerness in fandom, something something neurodivergency in fandom, something something BIPOC consumers in fandom and disability in fandom and everything from everyone in fandom, something something the way a piece of media just speaks to you when you need it most–like the way an academic text written by a stranger years before your birth feels like it was written with you in mind, or a show about cartoon turtles, or anything else in the world.
Something something and it just hits.
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