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May 19, 2013
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Clairesm’s response to Maggie’s blog post on slash and Maurice

‘Lets just hope that mycroft won’t find this.’ 

This (and similar) posters are BBC Sherlock RP-ing (role-playing) on the Maurice YouTube boards - appropriating (often, a limited understanding of) Maurice for their own Sherlock fandom purposes. The jury’s still out on how far their interest in Maurice extends beyond this (needs further research); but, in many cases, I suspect not far.

‘There’s something fascinating about the fact that the people on youtube who are writing about gay male pairings may or may not be gay men.’ 

From my own research (yes, this is what I do!), the commenters on the YouTube Maurice boards are around 50/50 male/female. This has always been the case: Maurice (the film) has had female fans (and, prominently, Japanese yaoi fans) since its 1987 original release. The Maurice cast interviews on The Making of Maurice documentary (one of the extras on the 2004 double-DVD Merchant Ivory Collection edition, also on YouTube) even refer to the film’s 1980s popularity among ‘Japanese schoolgirls’. The term yaoi isn’t actually used by James Wilby or Rupert Graves in these interviews(!), but the YouTube commenters aren’t slow to draw the connection.

The Maurice–slash connection is longstanding and multilayered, with the caveat that many of Maurice’s fans would not have recognised/used the term ‘slash’ with reference to their love for the film/novel. The impact of BBC Sherlock (since 2010) on the reception context of Maurice within internet/fan culture has, however, introduced new twists. (For my first effort to make provisional sense of this in a paper already published, see the link below.) 

In contrast with the gay male presence on the YouTube (and IMDb) Maurice boards (and Maurice’s presence on gay male blogs), the Mystrade subculture, BBC Sherlock slash culture in general, and the *Mystrade-related* YouTube comments on the Maurice boards are overwhelmingly female - even predominantly cis-female. While some female fans of Maurice (whether via BBC Sherlock or not) identify as queer, bisexual or lesbian, many others do not. Nor can their uses of ‘this extended text’ (as you put it) *necessarily* be presumed to be progressive in relation to the politics of queerness (if it’s possible to speak of those!)

Last, it’s important to add that internet fandom around Maurice, Maurice online fan communities, and Maurice fanfiction (mostly female-authored) *did not start with BBC Sherlock*. One purpose of the mauriceficlist LJ (which you found!) is to document these earlier stories and gain them a wider ongoing readership. 

The earliest Maurice fanfictions I’ve seen date from 2004 – perhaps non-coincidentally, the release year of the Merchant Ivory Collection DVD. The first Maurice internet fan communities also formed around that time, notably LJ’s mr-edna-may. 

Prior to BBC Sherlock, Maurice fanfiction was typically cross/posted in places like mr-edna-may, the (short-lived) Dreamwidth Maurice community Never Be Parted, and on LJ communities such as historic-slash, unusual-liasons [sic], or rarelitslash. Some of that ‘early’ Maurice fic has already been deleted by its author(s) – so it should be borne in mind the full extent of this ‘early’ Maurice fanfic activity isn’t fully visible.

For more, see Participations, 8:2, Nov 2011: 
(You’ll probably find Part 2 most relevant.)

-Clairesm

Tags: maurice slash mycroft/lestrade bbc sherlock lit fanfiction queer omg online culture theory e.m. forster maggie maggie lange

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May 19, 2013
Eye Witness News: 'Prostitution should be legalised'

JOHANNESBURG – The Commission for Gender Equality on Thursday said it now formally believes prostitution should be decriminalised.

The commission said if sex work was legalised, it would help protect prostitutes from abuse and would not lead to more people becoming sex workers.

The Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) said the announcement by the commission could change the national debate on the issue.

SWEAT director Sally Shackleton said this was progress.

“It’s a very positive and brave move and far too many of us are just not having this conversation.”

She added that the current system wasn’t working.

“The levels of abuse that are currently being experienced and the waste of state resources that could be diverted into programmes to assist sex workers are currently being spent to prosecute and persecute them.”

But the African Christian Democratic Party’s (ACDP) Steve Swart believes most people won’t agree with the commission’s position.

“We firmly believe that many South Africans would be opposed to the decriminalisation of prostitution.”

He added that this was the wrong direction.

“We’ve looked at other countries where this has taken place and it has not assisted in dealing with the issue of prostitution.”

This issue was discussed at the ANC policy conference last year, but no formal position was adopted. 

Tags: SWEAT south africa commission for gender equality sally shackleton sex work sex workers' rights violence against sex workers

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May 19, 2013
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IOL News: Sex workers want legal trade

This article absurdly identifies “sex workers” as one monolithic body instead of naming any specific sex workers’ rights org. 

 Sex workers in Durban on Friday welcomed the call by the Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) for the decriminalisation of sex work.

The sex workers said legalising the trade would ensure that they finally would have access to essential services, such as health care.

Decriminalising it would also create a platform for women in the industry to bring to the government’s attention the challenges that they were faced with, including discrimination and abuse at the hands of police.

The sex workers said they would support the call by CGE, saying the country was lagging behind international trends in its sex laws when compared to other countries.

“It is high time the country legalises what we do,” said a sex worker who identified herself as Slim Sexy.

Organisations and safety centres that work with sex workers have, however, expressed outrage at the proposal, saying the move would undermine women’s human right to dignity and exploit the vulnerability caused by poverty and gender inequality.

The organisations said they would lobby against the proposal, because it would fuel human trafficking and organised crime.

At the launch of the institution’s position on the country’s sex laws this week, the CGE’s commissioner, Janine Hicks, called for all laws against sex workers to be repealed. “We believe it is the only viable approach to promoting and protecting the dignity and rights of sex workers,” she said.

Human trafficking and child sex would remain crimes, she said. Hicks said the commission recently embarked on an investigation into the legislative response to sex work, and concluded that the current legal regime that criminalises sex work had failed sex workers and instead perpetuated substantive abuse of their constitutional rights.

Decriminalisation would mean reviewing legislation, including labour laws and retraining police officers.

She added that sex workers would be required to pay tax.

However, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, founder and executive director of Embrace Dignity, a non-profit organisation advocating legal reform to end prostitution and sex trafficking, said she was concerned that the process was done without proper consultation of a broad range of civil society organisations, as well as the people suffering from exploitation.

Having interviewed and worked with women engaged in “street prostitution”, Madlala-Routledge said she had learnt that the overwhelming majority of women wanted to exit the industry and be supported in finding alternative means of sustaining themselves.

Gloria DeGee, director of Umgeni Community Empowerment Centre, an organisation that offers support and service to women looking to leave the sex industry, said:

“The girls that we take in are broken, rejected and hurt.

“We often have to detox them of all the drugs they pump into their bodies so that they are immune to the work that they do.”

DeGee said legalising the trade would have an adverse effect on the HIV/Aids infection rate.

But Bafana Khumalo, director of Sonke Gender Justice Network, said he begged to differ, saying if given the go-ahead, the move would minimise infection as women would have access to health services.

“Decriminalising the trade will also mean that these women will no longer be abused by their clients and the police,” he said.

Tags: south africa decriminalization commission for gender equality sex work sex workers' rights health care HIV/AIDS police violence violence against sex workers structural police violence police misconduct feminists being idiots about sex work

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May 18, 2013
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THE HEKTOR QUARTERLY: A Journal of Criticism, by Hektor, Who Is A Dog, And His Name Is Hektor

sadybusiness:

Hello! Hektor is a critic now. Being a critic is a very hard job, for smart people! You have to look at things, and then you have to say, “things: do you make me happy?” And then you have to say it whether they do or not! You have to be very smart to do this, because if a thing makes you happy, everyone else has to be happy about it also. It is a rule! Because of how you said what to feel! 

Hektor takes this very seriously. Hektor is very serious about all the things now, because he is a critic, and he has to tell you whether you are happy. The other dog is not a critic. She is a girl dog, who is mean, and just has opinions. Hektor tells her: “Do you know that you are not smart? I am! I am smart! I know more about the things than you! You have to stop saying judgments about the things!” And then she bites him on his head. The people will give the other dog away soon. 

Now Hektor is going to criticize something. People! From now on, you are not allowed to be sad about GAME OF BONES! 

GAME OF BONES is a show Hektor is watching, because one of the people started to watch it, and then the other person who is a girl started watching it also and complaining. It is a new show because Hektor just started to watch it and it has four episodes and that’s all. 

GAME OF BONES is a show about five nice dogs. The nice dogs decide they would like to have some people, so they choose people who look like they never take any baths and they all probably smell like pee. What smart dogs! These dogs will never be given baths! These dogs will never have people who ask them, “what smells like pee?” They will know that it is THEM! THEY have the pee smell! Hektor concludes that this is a show about a utopian future in which people have adopted dog values. 

The five nice dogs have so many adventures! Often these adventures are delightfully comic in nature. One time, a man comes into the room, and he yells at the dog’s girl person, and he is mean in his demeanor and even tries to wrestle although he is not her friend. But then one of the nice dogs jumps on him and bites him. So he dies! Ha, ha, ha! Stupid person! You did not realize there was a dog! Now you are dead.

Later, a smaller person with a weird face who is called Joffrey is ALSO mean, and yells at ANOTHER, smaller girl person. So one of the dog bites him! He does not die, he just cries about it. Ha, ha, ha! Probably you are crying because you don’t have a dog, Joffrey! Probably what you think is, “I wish I had a dog! And also that I did not have a weird face! And also that I did not get bitten!” But NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE. You have a weird face, and a bite, and you do not have a dog to care about it when you cry, because no-one loves you. Humor! 

That nice dog who is called Nymeria goes off to have lots of thrilling adventures. Hektor assumes these adventures will be the main plot driving the rest of the episodes in the GAME OF BONES. 

Hektor has to explain the title, because you are not as smart as he is, because he is a critic now. Listen while Hektor explains to you, stupid people! 

The GAME OF BONES is the one where all of these dogs are trying to be the nicest dog who gets the most pets and treats because they are the best at getting mean strangers to cry when they are mean to the dogs’ people. The GAME OF BONES is very serious because if you don’t win it someone else gets all the treats. You win or you have just regular food! High stakes! Hektor would like this practice implemented into modern life. He tells the other dog, “I know that I would win the GAME OF BONES, and then you would be sad.” Then the other dog, who is a girl dog, and mean, bites him on the head, and then she knocks him down, and then she chases him around the apartment yelling. The people will give the other dog away soon. 

Hektor has decided you have to be happy about the GAME OF BONES but also he has a complaint, which is: Too much filler. The people are always very unhappy and they all want the nice chair. This is understandable, but pedestrian! Hektor enjoys other aspects of the people sub-plot, however, such as how they are always naked and humping each other to demonstrate dominance, because this shows they have accepted dog values.

Hektor’s girl person always complains and makes eye-roll faces during lots of the naked and humping scenes. She says things like “AGAIN” and “HOW ARE THEY FITTING A DECADE’S WORTH OF EXPOSITION INTO THIS, JUST SCREW EACH OTHER,” and “THIS IS THE NINETY-SEVENTH TIME IN FOUR EPISODES THAT I HAVE SEEN THE KHALEESI’S TITS.” Hektor accepts that people are adorably backward in their values. 

This is Hektor’s review of GAME OF BONES so now you have to feel this way about it because he does. Hektor is going to conclude with some news, which is: A spin-off starring Lady! Hektor wondered what happened to her at the end of the episode with all the biting because she wasn’t on the show any more. She is going to have her own show now. She will have three lady dog friends, and they will have lots of misadventures figuring themselves out on their own in the big city. One of her friends will be very responsible! The other one will not be responsible at all and have wild behavior. So irresponsible, that one! Always having behaviors all of the time! The other lady dogs will remark on this with bemusement. The other dog friend will be a puppy and very stupid. Together they will represent lady dog experiences! Some of them are uptight and the other ones are not uptight and then one is stupid and one of them narrates it. The show will be called “LADIES,” and though it does not seem like Hektor’s thing per se — he finds it somewhat narcissistic, and also, he doesn’t know quite how to say this without seeming like a mean dog, but he doesn’t think Lady is all that conventionally attractive — you should definitely watch “LADIES” if you are a girl dog and less smart than Hektor. 

Anyway, that is what happened to Lady, which Hektor knows, because he got insider news when he was worried and the girl person told him this was what occurred. Hektor gets inside news! He is a critic! Have all your opinions, once you make sure they agree with Hektor’s!

FUNDING PROVIDED BY: THE PEGHLEESI

image

THE NEXT TIME YOU USE YOUR HEAD TO STEAL A TREAT FROM ME IS THE LAST TIME YOU WILL HAVE A HEAD. 

Tags: sadybusiness game of thrones PERFECT A Song of Ice and Fire criticism

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May 18, 2013
"And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made."

— Kate Zambreno in Frances Farmer Is My Sister

Tags: Kate Zambreno frances farmer is my sister djuna barnes gertrude stein eww henry miller lit sexism misogyny writers are often misogynistic assholes francis bacon nightwood biography brian phillips objectification criticism

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May 18, 2013
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"Maybe I’m a bad reader. Sometimes I’m convinced I’m a bad reader! I like to savor texts and sometimes don’t have the language in which to describe them."

— Kate Zambreno in Frances Farmer Is My Sister

Tags: Kate Zambreno bibliophile lit frances farmer is my sister

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May 18, 2013
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"The essay is a form I’ve always found oppressive, a form so conservative it begs to be dismantled. In the San Francisco avant garde feminist poetic circle of the early 80s, a sort of patchwork personal essay was de rigueur. The feminist poetic essay was riddled with collaged texts and vulnerability. It switched person at will, “I” flipping to “she,” inside magically flipping to outside, and back again. I didn’t know what to make of all these anti-logocentric Theresa Cha/Cixous/Irigaray inspired poetic prose things, spastically shifting and disrupting before my eyes with no apparent rhyme or reason. 80s avant garde feminism produced lots of self-indulgent, sloppy work, but still it was exciting - and important - to undermine the patriarchal hegemony that created the MLA Style Sheet. Around the same time I discovered Kathy Acker, who in some novel had a character shit on a priest’s altar - which I’m sure she got from Bataille. Even though desecrating Catholic icons is so old school, has been done to death, the zeal with which Acker does it is infectious. Passion in writing or art - or in a lover - can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, panting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it."

—

Dodie Bellamy in the Barf Manifesto as quoted by Kate Zambreno in Frances Farmer Is My Sister

I think these days, though, people underestimate the disciplined power a bit of formalism can lend them. There’s no shame in appropriating the canon for one’s own ends, after all. Passion combined with discipline is a heady and effective combination.

Tags: Dodie Bellamy Kate Zambreno Kathy Acker feminism the 80s second wave lit theresa cha hélène cixous luce irigaray theory avant garde georges bataille canon frances farmer is my sister

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May 18, 2013
Another Order: Caty and Maggie are famous on the internet

Also, Maggie often refers to me in an extremely flattering fashion, so therefore you all should be reading her blog:

Caty said so many nice things about me (personal favorite is “self-possessed”) that I feel impelled to compliment her further.  In addition to being beautiful and charming, she is one of the most eclectic readers I know.  She truly understands that “the classics” are neither more nor less than a part of a balanced reading diet, neither to be revered nor feared. I continually try to keep this ideal in mind and model it, but tend to fall into one extreme or another when life gets stressful. If you don’t believe me, check out her goodreads profile.

Tags: maggie lange caty simon maggie is a genius emily books lit canon bibliophile

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May 18, 2013
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Another Order: Maurice on Livejournal, or What *is* the Queer Novel?

Look, Maggie wrote a thing. (Also, elsewhere on her blog she quotes me being overwrought about books.)

…now there are some thoughtful tumblr posts on the topic “what does it mean to write ‘slash’ about Maurice?”

Yet another wrinkle: Rupert Graves, who plays Lestrade on BBC Sherlock, is Alec (one of the love interests) in the Merchant-Ivory production of Maurice.  If you go to the youtube of one of the love scenes from the movie (NSFW), you get some Sherlock fanpersons in the comments.  Someone has even written “lets just hope that mycroft won’t find this,” alluding to the fact that pairings between Sherlock’s brother Mycroft and Inspector Lestrade are a subgenre of BBC Sherlock fanfiction.  Thus it seems that my semi-conscious connection of Maurice to Sherlock fanfiction exists in the internet’s semi-conscious as well.

I was starting to feel like the main character of Barbara Browning’s I’m Trying to Reach You, and not just because I was avoiding moving around punctuation in a paper I’m trying to publish from my dissertation.  Look, I don’t want to idealize the internet, and what it’s done to intellectual property. I don’t want to say we dissolve our identities and disappear into anonymity. And yet—there’s something so compelling about this extended text that the internet has enabled and that I can find so easily. There’s something fascinating about the fact that the people on youtube who are writing about gay male pairings may or may not be gay men. If Maurice is, really canonically, the gay novel, Maurice plus all this other stuff is surely the queer novel…

Tags: maurice maggie lange mycroft/lestrade Barbara Browning slash I'm Trying To Reach You sherlock/john rupert graves merchant-ivory queer omg online culture tumblr modernism lit maggie is a genius maggie

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May 18, 2013
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a story worn smooth: I’m getting overtired. Last night I had another drug dream. Running...

worn-smooth:

pinkstarzxo:

worn-smooth:

I’m getting overtired. Last night I had another drug dream. Running around my childhood home with a dozen baggies of coke (coke?) looking for a safe place to shoot up. Gave up on using a spoon because people kept giving me dirty looks, and just dissolved the coke in a baggie. Drank (?) most of it…

so assuming that you are in recovery…do these dreams ever go away?

I’ll just skip over the part where I talk about how ambivalent I am about the term “recovery” and all the other therapeutic words, and how the word serenity creeps me out because people use it to criticize the way you (I) deal with things.  But if I’m at all representative, the dreams don’t go away.  It’s been thirteen years, and I still get them, usually for several nights in a row every couple months.  But, Kate, the only other person I’ve talked to about it, said she never has dope dreams anymore, or at most, once or twice a year.  If you read Burrough’s dream journal (My Education) he was still having dreams about trying to cop in 1940s New York when he was 80.  (But he also never really quit, so maybe that’s a bad example.)

After 40 years of dope, my boyfriend doesn’t have any dreams besides trying-to-cop dreams. (Well, besides his apocalyptic dreams, but they are often one and the same.) I wonder why the mind latches on to these kinds of dreams—is it just b/c the wish fulfillment potential is so overpowering? (Although, one never actually DOES get to do the heroin in these dreams, or manage to buy it in the first place.) Thanks, Maggie, for reminding me of the existence of this tumbl blog.

Tags: dope freud william burroughs dreams heroin 'recovery' wornsmooth maggie lange maggie drugs