I had a reply to this post that I wanted to make a separate post to address, because there are a lot of points I wanted to touch on.
@decepti-geek said:
I think there's a third option here, which is that a lot of this stuff is a deliberate act of defiant wish fulfilment - more than likely in response to the fact that we know the apparent cooling off of their relationship in the show had something to do with ill-intentioned intervention from Berman. Talking about it in terms of they 'definitely' got married post-canon is a way to acknowledge and reclaim something of Andy and Sid's efforts to queer the characters. They were definitely queer because they were deliberately played that way, so they definitely got married as a self-evident endpoint for the work the actors did to give them a romantic dynamic. In a sense, the possibility that Cardassian society wouldn't even permit gay marriage is a meta stand-in for the more conservative values of the time not permitting a depiction of a gay (male) romance. In fic, we can change both - so we do, to reclaim what was railroaded out of existence in canon/irl.
So, I do understand the motivations behind this kind of statement. I’m as unhappy about the homophobic sidelining of the relationship as anyone else. But… well, it’s specifically using marriage as part of that rhetorical maneuver that I’m objecting to.
That wasn’t explicit in the post itself, because the focus was more on in-universe worldbuilding headcanons, but - as I alluded to at the beginning - I really, strongly object to using marriage as a casual stand-in for any longterm romantic relationship. Or for the realization of queer subtext, for that matter. In fact, I feel that way about longterm romantic relationships in general. Garak and Bashir following a traditional “relationship escalator” trajectory (with “marriage” as the telos), or being a “couple” with all the associated societal signifiers, is not the only way to affirm a queer reading of them or push back against the heteronormativity of the show. If Garak and Bashir, for example, just hooked up, no-strings-attached style, and never “dated” or “got together”, that would still be queer. If they were just friends, but their congeniality and emotional connection were premised in part on their shared queerness, that would still be queer. I very firmly maintain, as I said in the post, that Garak would never want to get married and would not be comfortable with that kind of institutional recognition of his personal relationships. That interpretation does not foreclose a queer reading of his character.
Fandom framings of Garashir like the one you’re describing remind me of a dreamwidth post that I found years ago and for the most part really relate to. It’s about different fandoms, but parallels a lot of what I’ve observed in DS9 fandom - namely, the way that the desire to push back against network/producer homophobia often leads to extolling very conventional and narrow relationship models as a “corrective” to that homophobia. Sure, some people just like marriage, or like traditional romance plots, and would be writing that stuff anyway. But the way it’s framed as the way of doing queerness is something i personally find really depressing and restrictive, tbh. Just because a recognizably committed, longterm, marital relationship is the most obvious and undeniable representation of queerness to the heteronormative gaze doesn’t mean that’s the only possibly. One of the gifts of queerness imo is its infinite possibilities, and the way it enables us to think outside the box.
That is to say that I have to object to this part:
They were definitely queer because they were deliberately played that way, so they definitely got married as a self-evident endpoint for the work the actors did to give them a romantic dynamic.
Marriage is not the “self-evident” endpoint for a romantic dynamic (and the fact that it’s culturally taken as such is something that needs more pushback). And a romantic dynamic - whether romantic in the affective sense, or in the “predetermined plot beats” sense - is not the only possible queer reading of a given dynamic. The casual, unexamined conflation of all of those things is an aspect of fandom, and this fandom specifically, that I find very alienating.
(That actually dovetails with the worldbuilding-based approach in my post - instead of taking “marriage” at face value as something people naturally end up doing when they’re in love, I’d much rather interrogate how “marriage” is actually conceived in context, and what its social/cultural/institutional purpose is, and how the characters respond to that.)
Regarding Cardassia:
In a sense, the possibility that Cardassian society wouldn't even permit gay marriage is a meta stand-in for the more conservative values of the time not permitting a depiction of a gay (male) romance.
I mean… not really. The paucity of acknowledgment of any non-heteronormative possibility on the show in general is a result of the more conservative values of the time in which it was made. The reading of Cardassia as not recognizing gay marriage or being generally homophobic is a) drawn from points that relate, generally, to its canonical authoritarianism and conservative values, which are important to its narrative role, and b) my reading, as a queer person. Speculating about how homophobia might play a role in the show’s established worldbuilding, or how it might affect characters and their dynamic with each other, is a way of exploring queer possibilities.
People can do whatever they want with their own fanfic. I’m not a cop here. And I understand that homophobia is an emotionally heavy topic that people might not personally want to engage with in their writing. But for me, I usually find “unmarked” queerness very boring and immersion-breaking, especially in a context in which it feels as though it should draw attention. And given that I’m also personally very interested in Cardassia - not despite, but because of, its awfulness - I’m pretty uninspired by the idea of it as a generic idyllic paradise for Garak and Bashir to live in. I’d rather engage with the Cardassia we actually know, and the Cardassia we actually know seems unlikely to officially recognize their relationship.
