all ghosts are gay

the blog of lu fairchild, a fictional character. part of the mystery dissertation project!

[weirdhorror-deactivated20190408]

[neoflect]

rather than death of the author i subscribe to a critical framework i like to refer to as Schrodinger’s Author where the authors intentions are important except for when i dont like them

[sacredwhores]

Germaine Dulac - The Cigarette (1919)

[lufairchild]

college students: check out this Hot New Craze everyone is talking About!!

paragraph breaks

[changelings]

Alternatives to Tumblr if the entire site gets deleted on the 17th

Facebook - see pictures of the straightest people you knew in high school

Goodreads - leave a searing 1-star review for your least favorite author

Jstor - log in through your library for a wild time

[fanhackers]

Tumblrpocalypse Special, Part 8

Today’s scholarly reaction to the Tumblrpocalypse comes from a locked thread on Twitter by JSA Lowe, reposted with permission. Read on for some delightful musings on the difference between “art” and “porn”.

what a nightmare—seriously, @tumblr? seriously?? in the year of our lord 2018 YOU are going to try to determine the difference between art & porn when ≈3000 years of human culture have been unable to do so?!?!? oh my actual god, I WILL NEVER STOP LAUGHING

“Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, & any content—including photos, videos, GIFs & illustrations—that depicts sex acts.” HOW THE HELL DO YOU T—okay you know what, never mind. Just…never mind.

“Written content such as erotica, nudity related to political or newsworthy speech, & nudity found in art, such as sculptures & illustrations, are [sic] also stuff that can be freely posted on Tumblr.” Oh—art! Well then! PLEASE TELL ME ABOUT THIS ART OF WHICH YOU SPEAK SO FREELY.

the temptation to post approximately A THOUSAND PHOTOS OF GREEK & ETRUSCAN POTTERY & another thousand of Edo-era shunga has NEVER BEEN SO STRONG

honestly, I’m grudgingly impressed—staff actually managed to do something WORSE THAN Strikethrough! it’s quite an achievement, I’m almost admiring (in the same way Ash says of the xenomorph’s blood, “I admire its purity”)

to conclude my eye-rolling spittle-flecked thread: here, have some 17c #shunga (春画)! I’m sure the RENOWNED ART HISTORIANS OF @TUMBLR will have a REALLY EASY TIME deciding if these are artistic or pornographic! have at it guys! don’t get turned on though!

just used the mass tag replacer to retag all my posts tagged “nsfw” as “art”! so THAT WAS FUN! may I suggest you do the same (and then backup your tumblr)! tags.circumfluo.us

now a gifset of James McAvoy having an on-camera orgasm is tagged art! so are romantic Victorian-style line-drawings of Yuri & Viktor making love while crying! & all my naked K/S fanart! I’m so proud of myself & my research at this moment! WHERE IS YOUR PURITY CULTURE NOW, TUNGLR

what about all the posts I’ve sardonically tagged #nsfw like gifsets of Misha Collins’ hands, or Gillian Anderson wearing clothes? WHAT ABOUT THOSE, @TUMBLR, did it occur to you for ONE HOT MINUTE to think about the ways we actively use the affordances of your OWN COTDAM PLATFORM

[lufairchild]

ugh I’m sorry I haven’t been posting!! I’m so mad about the new policy that I don’t know what to do. I’m not necessarily going to run into problems posting because my NSFW stuff is written, but my project is literally about sex. and about the very issues surrounding this ban. so it feels weird and bad to support tumblr, which is basically what using it is doing.

also it’s the end of the semester and I’ve been busy grading! and my roommate piper & I decorated our apartment & we’re going to do victorian christmas things like tell ghost stories and play parlor games. I might post about those things if I can stand using tumblr!!

[mysterydissertationproject]

find me here!

So. Tumblr is forbidding NSFW images and deleting NSFW blogs starting on Dec. 17. This is pushing a lot of fandom and queer people out. While folks are deciding where to go, many are heading back to dreamwidth, at least for now. I’m undecided about whether I’ll still be posting on tumblr, but either way, you can find this project here.

[lufairchild]

On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even the threat of potential encounters, with an 'otherness' of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfold as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up.

Lee Edelman, No Future

Edelman’s 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, posits that the protection of an imagined Child (not a real, specific child, but a concept of “the child”) is figured as the goal of any “good” politics. This imaginary Child is “immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege.” It must be protected from sex, especially queer sex; it “condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities.” 

This is to say: Tumblr’s use of “adult content” to signify “sexually explicit content” is not a politically neutral choice. In this formula, adult = sex and child = no sex. And since queers are so strongly identified (culturally, not “naturally”) with sex, especially sex that doesn’t produce children, queers are particularly vulnerable to accusations of being Bad For Children--and to a policy like Tumblr’s.

[flourish]

Why are we surprised?

I try very, very hard not to go all free culture, free/libre software, and fandom-oldbie-get-off-my-lawn on people.

I am suspending this policy for the next few minutes.

Why is anyone surprised that Tumblr banned porn? 

Look, Tumblr is a platform owned by big, faceless corporations. Every other corporate social network bans porn. They aren’t all good at it, and often the terms of banning are foolish (Honestly, “female presenting nipples”?), but they all do the same thing.

THIS HAS LITERALLY HAPPENED BEFORE.

When LiveJournal was shitty to fandom—way back during Strikethrough—people left in droves. And then went to Tumblr, another corporately-owned platform. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…?

But that’s not all. Several times, Fanfiction.net has banned erotica (and then backtracked, and then purged again, ad infinitum). That’s because it’s owned by a random dude who can pick to host whatever he wants, and sometimes what he wants is cleaner than others. 

That’s why fans founded other sites, and then eventually the AO3, which isn’t run by a single person and can’t just be fucked with because someone is having a kinda prudish ~moment~.

The only way to be sure our fanworks won’t be taken down is to own the servers.

I get it. It’s not easy. Not everyone is able to do things themselves. It’s a privilege to have the time and money to figure out things like how to run a Mastodon instance, or (insert whatever other free culture thing here). And that sucks! It sucks a lot. It means that rich white people can afford to fuck with free/libre culture, while the rest of everyone is like, “well, since we can’t spend a lot of time dicking with building our own, guess we have to accept the thing corporations are making for us and feeding us for fake-free.” And that really does suck.

But the world is not fair. Corporations do not care about you. If we want to have nice things, we have to make them ourselves, for our own communities. And people? 

EITHER LEARN FROM THE PAST, OR GET OFF MY LAWN.

[lufairchild]

I think this is a fair take, and I think it’s really important that we learn from both fandom histories around censorship and broader cultural histories around sex & representation [see: gentrification of times square, the u.s. sex wars of the 80s, etc]. absolutely. 

yet part of what feels so upsetting and frightening about this policy announcement is that it is predictable. it does echo previous events and trends. I think that makes it even more cause for concern. I feel like this policy fits firmly into a growing cultural trend towards moral outrage and “purity culture”--one that extends well beyond fandom. like, these things go in cycles, and we’re on the upswing of a conservative cycle. and that matters so much because (and is partly happening because) the u.s. and various other countries are in the middle of renegotiating cultural attitudes toward consent and power (the MeToo movement, for example). as in the u.s. sex wars, we can throw queer/kinky sex (and representations of it) under the bus, or we can center it in our political struggle against censorship and sexual violence.

I’m thinking about eve sedgwick on paranoid reading: we like to feel as though not being surprised will protect us from being harmed. but it won’t.

or--am I being alarmist? I mean, I agree that fans will move on, find new spaces, repeat the same cycles of the past; I don’t think tumblr banning NSFW images is the death knell of fandom or sex or whatever. (like, lol.) but anti-porn positions hurt sex workers and many of the most marginalized queer folks. and it feels as though feminist work from the 80s and 90s is terribly relevant right now.

[let me also just say: I am an american, english-speaking fan/queer/academic. so when I say “we,” I’m aware that “we” does not actually mean all readers. apologies for a narrow perspective & many many more takes on this are welcome.]

[ruinsplume]

Tumblr has just banned all visual representations of sexually explict material, starting Dec. 17.

You can read more about it here: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18123752/tumblr-adult-content-porn-ban-date-explicit-changes-why-safe-mode

So. Community: where is everyone going instead? Where is all the NSFW art and amateur porn, gonna go, especially the nichier (but very important) stuff like explicit trans selfies (to name one example that’s personally important to me)?  

Written content is still being allowed…for now, but…eeesh. This is not good, people. Anyone who’s old enough to remember the American sex wars of the 1980′s knows how this goes. In a move that is ostensibly about preventing kiddie porn, WHICH IS ALREADY ILLEGAL, crackdowns on sexually explicit material end up hurting women and LGBTQ + communities.

@ me if you want to let me know where you’ll be moving to. In the meantime, I’m gonna be uploading a ton of LEGAL VISUAL PORN on this blog as well as my porn sideblog @rumpusline, so if you don’t wanna see it, unfollow me now.

[lufairchild]

well.

this is really bad.

sex wars 2.0. I definitely agree. I wasn’t around in the 80s but I’ve been thinking about the sex wars so much recently and...I wonder if it would be helpful to put together a reading list of queer feminist work from the 80s/90s on the subject of sex and representation? 

obviously “let’s make a syllabus” as my first fucking response to this (in addition to dread & horror) reveals me to perhaps be more of a true academic than I’d thought. but like. so much writing has been done on this and we need it now, so badly.

I love that OP is going to be posting porn as a response. maybe I’ll post excerpts from 80s/90s scholarship on the subject? (but like also protest-reblog lots of NSFW fanart.)

where ARE people going if this happens, btw?

[gralto]

[gruntsandpoetry]

you and i have begun to blur

[lufairchild]

sex & form

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.

[atticescapee-abandoned]

Compare

My name is Lisa.

I’m five foot nine. My hair is long and it’s dark brown. I wear leather a great deal, high boots always, and sometimes glove-soft vests and even leather skirts now and then, and I wear lace, especially when I can find the kind I like: intricate, very old-fashioned lace, snow white. I have light skin that tans easily, large breasts, and long legs. And though I don’t feel beautiful and never have, I know that I am. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be a trainer at The Club.

–Exit to Eden by Anne Rice (aka Rampling), 1985

Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a witch, and I go to a magic school called Hogwarts in England where I’m in the seventh year (I’m seventeen). I’m a goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was walking outside Hogwarts. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.

–My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie, 2006

[vraik]

#g o d#that can’t be a real Anne rice quote

*”Rampling” was Rice’s pseudonym while she was writing erotica, mainly for this and the Sleeping Beauty quartet

[lumensuperbis]

i mean ….

lestat is on the my immortal train too lol

[the960writers]

Anne Rice hates fanfiction! My Immortal is a satire of fanfiction about the fiction from an author who hates fanfiction. This makes everything even better.

[pizzafishandchips]

@imperfectkreis

[whatsamobtoamadqueenfiona]

This is just more evidence that you could teach a full semester course on My Immortal.

[nerdfighterwhatevernumbers]

Add this to the ‘My Immortal was a troll all along’ evidence pile

[kyraneko]

I am absurdly, pettily happy that it’s Anne Rice getting slammed with the My Immortal comparisons.

(Is it me or does “My Immortal” sound very like the sort of title an Anne Rice book would have?)

[ladynorbert]

Have we considered the possibility that Anne Rice actually wrote My Immortal?

[gothiccharmschool]

:: squints ::

Y’know, the theory of Anne Rice having written My Immortal is nowhere NEAR as cracky as her last book was …

[robotsandfrippary]

I didn’t know what the hell “My Immortal” was referring to for a long time and I just ASSUMED it was an Anne Rice novel by all the quotes I saw. 

[littlesystems]

Anne Rice being the secret author of My Immortal is actually… not a bad theory? I mean, we know she HATES fanfiction, but also seeks it out (at least well enough to sue them) so she has some knowledge of fandom and probably of some of the styles/themes of the time. I could totally see her writing My Immortal in the dead of night, trying to wrap up every single thing she hates about fanfiction in one terribly-written package.

And she would never own up to it. EVER.

[makeitearlgrey]

Alright guys spread the news: we’ve figured out who actually wrote my immortal. It was Anne rice.

[asymbina]

Honestly, this makes just as much sense as any other theory that’s been proposed over the years

[catlessevercold]

@gischtglas

[puddingparamour]

This Just In: I just added onto the Wikipedia article for My Immortal

[stripedsilverfeline]

Considering that Anne Rice is a very bad writer–and she is, she really, really is–I find it hard to believe she has sufficient skill or wit to pen a satire of a fanfic. 

[drarryking]

Oh my god. I can’t say I thought she was a bad writer but holy shit I’m glad someone noticed this

[pintoras]

“Imagine a woman in the long skirts and high collar of the early 20th century standing in front of the painting she created. It is a massive piece—about 10 feet tall by 8 feet wide—and it is not a landscape, a portrait, a still life, nor a scene from myth or history. Dominating the composition is a bold yellow form reminiscent of a plant or sea creature, glowing amid colorful, biomorphic shapes and vigorous lines. This is just one of 10 such works that she has created almost entirely alone—sometimes walking on her work as she lays down the paint—and one of 193 radically abstract paintings that she has made in a few short years, between 1906 and 1915. None of these details fit with the story told in museums and art history courses. We know the first abstract painters so well that we often refer to them by last names alone: Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. We know who is celebrated for doing “action painting” on giant canvases laid on the floor—Pollock. Each of these men has been lauded for opening a way into new territory. As it turns out, that territory had already been explored by another artist. Her name was Hilma af Klint.”

— Who Was Hilma af Klint?: At the Guggenheim, Paintings by an Artist Ahead of Her Time by Caitlin Dover

[unpretty]

[justgot1]

THE FUCK

[curiouscanvas]

Inspired by @emungere‘s Hannibal fic Blackbird