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Articles Conference Reviews |
J.13 Queer Rhetoric(s) and SexualityJ.13 Get Out the Map: Remixing Queer Rhetoric(s) and Sexuality Author’s note: This panel included two presenters; however, I have concentrated on the first presenter in this review. The second presenter was wonderful, challenging and incredibly engaging. While looking through my notes on the second speaker, however, I seem to have basically compiled a reading list rather than any informative notes on the presentation itself. Rather than risk a misquote or, worse, a complete misrepresentation, I have decided not to review the second presentation at all. There was something telling about this panel when I walked into the obscenely spacious ballroom and saw the number of unfilled chairs. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from the panel title, and generally maps terrify me as they are, to me, just abstract representations of physical space with arbitrary indicators that do not effectively convey what it is to travel in real space/time. Coming from a rural area without a whole lot of diversity and with a small queer community, I was hungry for input from my peers. I sat a little in the back, but moved closer after a gentle, and well-deserved, chiding. There was a brief introduction, and then it was down to business for the presenters. Lee Sherlock took the stage. His opening remarks, about feeling as though he were about to pull off a dastardly plot in an abandoned airplane hangar somewhere, were both a great introduction and an honest comment. Maybe he was. Actually, maybe he did. His topic, the queering of fan video and fan fiction in the cybersphere, was subversive, and resonant. This was, he explained, a place for queers to pirate popular culture and hijack its heteronormative intentions, a space into which we could write ourselves. There was a technical flaw, common to multimedia presentations in highly publicized arenas, and the video he had prepared wouldn’t play. I checked it out later, and it illustrated some of his points very well. The video, authored by Sloane, a feminist critic, was set to the song “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor” by The Flight of the Choncords. It involved carefully edited clips from the latest Star Trek film. Under her editorship, it clearly commented on the lack of female leadership in the film. You may question the idea of authorship regarding pirated, or repurposed, media, but this was the crux of the discussion. In a place where we often find ourselves marginalized, fan fiction and fan vidding are a way to reclaim dominant culture and to write ourselves into it, bringing with us all of our confusion, deviance, and multiplicity of interpretations, both of ourselves and our places in it. In this impossibly large space, we can assert the plural singularity of the individual en masse. According to Sherlock, fan vids and fan fiction (from here on, in the interest of simplicity, to be noted as fv and ff) have a set of certain criteria that enables them to be viewed as authored texts, and to serve several purposes to the queer community. The question of authorship is readily addressed. In ff and fv there are editorial, or authorial, choices that must be made. What canonical texts are to be reappropriated? With the realization that the material is often heteronormative in nature, the decision of what to queer in the material and what to leave in the regular version must also be addressed. And these are just questions of content. There are still issues regarding style, etc. to answer. In regards to the opportunities opened up by ff and fv, they are infinite. The main opportunity that resonates the most with me is Sherlock’s discussion of the opportunity to transform heteronormative media from a passive form of reception to a “multimodal fiction.” This opportunity assumes a place where we are no longer subjecting ourselves, as is often the case, to media that refuses to include us, but instead a place in which we are invited to actively rewrite not only the characters but, on a fundamental level, the entire plot. This is also a place for us to form a dialogue and to use our own sexuality as a lens for the larger culture. As Sherlock stated, the confusion that is often produced is reflective of roles, codes, and social attitudes towards sex, and this is where the value lies. Rather than adhering to strict codification, this re-envisioned space allows for an “embodied personal reading of pop culture,” and more explicitly illustrates “the dialectic of desire and frustration” often felt by members of the LGBTQ community. This presentation was, essentially, an attempt to dig into the new space(s) opened by this genre of work: an odd blur of starting gun and a call to action, while at the same time a sort of cartography of inner/psychic selves translated back into the media that help inform them. Sherlock presented in the true spirit of queerness, offering a place for personal/plural investigation and resistance. The map in the title of the panel was as much a real, solid thing as any map, a place where symbol and sign are arbitrary markers of something real yet not quite nameable, a space so large that in fact the signs, the dimensions must be investigated and parsed on a subjective level so that the map transcends the size of the realm. And it was in the true spirit of queerdom that even the size of the seemingly empty ballroom could be constructed as both/and a reminder of the marginalization of the queer community and the space in which we have to travel. |