irradiantsam replied to your post “eruthiawenluin replied to your post “not saying that a big reason I...”
*shows up 15 mins late with sam meta* i really dont think that powers as an allegory for queerness is obscure at all, actually. From a lit analysis perspective, characteristics or traits or actions perceived as dirty, unwanted, or evil are often queer coded (or at least can and have been interprered as such) historically. Also, I come bearing gifts http://samwinchesterappreciation.tumblr.com/post/96656678833/im-sorry-i-am-super-dumb-and-often-have-trouble
Yeah, I feel like the very common queercoding of villains and the way Sam’s storyline in s4 in particular was written made that connection extremely obvious, but also I’m writing my term paper about the fictional representation of queer (coded) men as villainous in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period, so I’m sometimes unsure if I’m not just projecting on modern media - I’m glad to see it’s not the case! Additionally, this is… a very heavy topic, which I definitely didn’t want to start discussing without warning while drunk.
(Sidenote, but the Romantics? Gay. Gothic? Very gay. Actually a lot of Victorian literature? Extremely fucking gay, subtextually. Also a lot of their porn is… well, if anyone needs recs, hit me up, because I’ve read a lot of Victorian porn at this point.)
The rest of this reply is just me rambling, because I think we can leave it like that and it stands for itself, but I kind of want to just poke at it more for the sake of it. CW for talk about homophobia, abuse, rape, and me continuing to use “queer” as umbrella term.
Supernatural is one of many contemporary pieces of media that draw a connection between some sort of supernatural or magical powers, however deliberately or not. Some do it better than others, and it’s especially an issue with powers like that, which both portray the person in question as dangerous and marginalised at the same time, with the latter often being a justified result of the former (I’m looking at you, Dragon Age franchise, you did this terribly; Babylon 5 did slightly better with the telepaths, but the same principle of them being excluded from society because they are supposedly dangerous to society applies here as well). Using them as an allegory or metaphor for queerness, then, should be handled more delicately than it usually is, but the connection is nonetheless obvious: queerness poses an inherent threat to heteropatriarchy, in a way these supernatural powers threaten the stability of society. The depiction of these powers as unnatural, as a disease or infection, can trace back pretty directly to the dominant discourse about male homosexuality in Victorian times.
Before I get too off topic, back to the psychic powers and the post you linked. I’m just going to take it and run with it, because there’s one interpretation in here that also suggests letting the queer coded character out of the room he was locked into because of the thing that coded him as such in the first place was partially responsible for starting the apocalypse, and I don’t know whether I should think of that as inappropriately amusing or as clumsily problematic. Maybe both. Man, I wish we could start the apocalypse and tear down the entire rotten system of oppression with our minds, but oh well.
I do want to come back to the Gothic, just briefly, because it allowed writers more so than other genres to represent the supernatural, an thus also the unnatural, either explicitly or encoded as such in the narrative. The genre was supposed to be disturbing to society and make people uncomfortable, and thus subversive in and of itself. I believe that there’s a link between these implicit queer writings then and the use of supernatural powers as a metaphor for queerness today, all of which stem from the what the discourse of these times deemed “unnatural”. Hell, it’s a discourse you still see today, unfortunately.
Up until the end of season 4, the only canon queer characters (that I recall, I may have forgotten one who was confirmed as such) are: 1. The gay teacher that gets killed in order for Dean to get healed in 1.12. 2. Lily, one of the Special Children, who’s very directly linked to the supernatural because of her powers, and, oh, accidentally killed her girlfriend with them. Not to throw shade, but why bury your gays if they can just bury each other instead? And of course Lily gets killed soon after. 3. Alan, the Ghostfacers intern, who is also killed and then turns into a ghost. There’s definitely not a trend here. 4. the dude Dean gets send to as a joke in 4.12. The tl;dr of that is that four out of five queer characters are dead, and the only one who is not was included in a joking manner, whereas the other four are all linked to the supernatural by either their powers or by their manner of death. I don’t want to claim that the writers did this deliberately – I don’t think they did, actually, most characters in this show get killed off, after all – but it’s interesting to consider within the larger context of homosexuality in the Gothic.
...there’s also something to be said about it being the only one of the Special Children who’s not white being the one who kills Sam, but if I get started on that, we’ll all still be here tomorrow.
Essentially, I’m interested in how there’s a part of the Gothic tradition that allowed the representation of the Other, including queerness, through the lens of the supernatural, and what the implication of Sam’s psychic powers being inborn, rather than caused by the demon blood, would mean for that. If that is the case, then his demon blood addiction and detox in season 4 with subsequent “disappearance” of his powers, despite them not actually not having been caused by anything (see where I’m going with this? I think I’m so clever.), is very much allegorical for going back into the closet (Bobby’s panic room) and being forcibly silenced. We still deal with the temptation of the demon blood in season 5, and the decision to embrace it one more time in order to be powerful enough to lock away Lucifer and himself in the process is considerably more painful to me now. Oh well.
As for the silencing… I want to quote something I recently read in Marianne Constable’s Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law here (which I was actually reading for my Introduction to Sociology of Law class), because it’s fitting for both the analysis of Victorian culture and for Sam’s situation:
"Subjects' silence in the face of powerful (or obfuscating) official institutions and texts or silence in the face of a powerful and discursive law indicates the absence of power. Absence of words - the absence of stories and voice, the absence of history, as articulation of a past ... constitutes absence of power.” (55)
In the late Victorian times, this could be applied to male homosexuality – the love that cannot not speak its name, if you want to be cheeky about it – and how they had to hide from the law and were not protected under it, how they had to be forcibly silent as the only protection.
With Sam, there’s to consider both the subjects of the psychic powers as well as the themes of rape and abuse. Marian M. MacCurdy wrote about silence in The Mind’s Eye: Image and Memory in Writing about Trauma, which I’m also going to quote, because I’m over a thousand words into this post so I might as fucking well.
“Silence perpetuates trauma and the same and guild that often accompany it … The list of “whys” is as long as the list of traumas that can afflict us.” (p. 2) and “[S]ilence equaled powerlessness; story telling equaled power. … Writing can be an act of power, a way to break the destructive silence that perpetuates oppression.” (133).
MacCurdy’s work is about therapeutic writing, technically, but I think the psychology behind it is also very applicable, so I’m going to try and explain what I’m trying to say.
There has been a lot of silence surrounding Sam’s powers. John knew way more about them than he told Sam, not to mention that he deliberately kept Sam’s own history from him. “The absence of history, as articulation of a past” (Constable 55) is the lack of knowledge Sam has about Mary, to a point where he was not even allowed to ask about her, and, on a grander scale, the implicit engagement of the forces of both Heaven and Hell in the history of both the Winchesters. On the other hand, Sam himself only told Dean about his visions when he absolutely had to (which is understandable, of course, but still). Especially in the last few seasons, Sam has not been allowed to react much to anything in a visible manner. A lot of people have talked about it already, so I won’t drag that up again, but: if “story telling [equals] power” (MacCurdy 133) and Sam, as a character, is no longer allowed to tell that story. The writing itself takes that very thing from him. Equally, his powers have been taken – not just in the metaphorical sense, although that certainly as well, but his very literal powers. The law, in this sense, would be Dean, and the hunting community to an extend, with the dominant discourse being that demon blood is evil, and the powers resulting from them are evil.
And… the issue with this is just. Reading these powers as queer, in both meanings of that word, makes sense, but it carries an uncomfortable, problematic, even horrifying implication with it. The source of them is bad, so Sam is not “clean” and deserves to be locked up and die in the attempt to cleanse him. (And isn’t it interesting that when Dean makes the decision to forcibly detox Sam, it’s fine, but when Sam takes on the Trials and decides for himself that his purification and resulting death are acceptable, both for himself and the greater good, Dean disagrees? Oh well. Well. Not the point, but there we are with the bodily agency thing again.)
I guess what my conclusion of this is, wrapping all the way back to what I originally said to Eru: Sam’s powers as a metaphor for queerness work wonderfully, and it’s a reading that would become significantly more powerful if, after being forced to lose them, to repress them – deliberately or unconsciously – and struggling with the supposed source of them, it would turn out that it’s not just the demon blood, it’s maybe a catalyst helping their development, but not the cause. It’s just who he is, as a person, nothing to be fixed or cured or evil, nothing to be silent about. Sam is very easy to see as queer – the reading of his powers aside, he does not have a canonically stated sexuality, and in fact a relationships of ambiguous nature either joked about or implied with several male characters which he never denied – but the powers do add another layer to that. In an ideal version of the show, Sam would reclaim his powers, gain a voice, and be openly queer. I expect none of these things to actually happen, nor do I trust the writers to get it right, mind, but there is a lot of potential here that would make for a good narrative.
He just deserves to have a voice without his family members trying to oppress his sexuality psychic powers until it gets to a point where he silences himself. He deserves a narrative that doesn’t punish him for who he is.
(This entire thing is just... what my brain came up with on the spot, I kept going back and adding more paragraphs and then doing other things, so it’s super disjointed and not well thought up, lmao fuck I’m so sorry Rose.)
irradiantsam replied to your post “did Lucifer seriously use the words “Sam’s a hater”, is that really...”
plot twist: lucifer has been an extreme dean girl in disguise this whole time. suddenly all the gross victim blaming and fandom love for him makes sense
