Dreams, Russ, and Personal Voice

This morning I woke up with a dream.  I only remember the tail end of it -- something about Mark and me walking in Northfield/Astoria along old closed storefronts... 

In the dream, I awoke in our bedroom.  There was classical music playing from KWAX on the radio.  And on the floor of the bedroom, still glowing from last night, was the iron teapot with a tea light in it.  

I'm not sure how I was able to see light through the tea pot, which was pleasantly warm to the touch.  Good thing I didn't start I fire, I thought.  Mark was still asleep so I took it out of the room.  

And then the dream turned into a gardening dream... I was weeding early in the morning.  We had a (not existent in real life) plot in front of the house.  I was using a plastic claw or rake to uproot weeds and snag out dead leaves from around the roots of a small ?maple? and ?flowers?.  I had a brief conversation with with a dream amalgam neighbor, probably about weeding.

I woke up for real with the image of a warm glowing teapot and gardening.

---

I read more Joanna Russ this week, and her other works aren't speaking to me as strongly as her Kirk/Spock papers.  I was hoping to click with her Lovecraft essay, but I didn't, perhaps because the alien voice interests me more than horror induced by depression caused by the realization that chthonic forces will return the self to the void.  

The work of Russ that I have read is mostly from from 1985, and a lot of it is (surprise!) feminist theory.  The conversation about feminism has changed from thinking about a specific end goal  to thinking about a process or journey, and essentialist notions of discrete genders and orientations have become continuums.  And, although she reports about trying to get a gay male perspective on Kirk/Spock, it feels like she wasn't able to talk to many gay men.

On the plus side, Russ's papers have reminded me that stories have a latent content (heart or symbolic meaning) as well as a manifest one (rockets and dragons).

Russ's image of Kirk and Spock as divine male-male lovers spoke to me very strongly, and while Russ claims her story is written by a woman speaking to other women about egalitarian vulnerability in romantic relationships, her symbolic imagery speaks to this gay man.

Which leads me to questions about my own direction.  Do I need to write gay speculative fiction?  I think the world does not need Yet Another Coming Out Story.  Do I need to write male speculative fiction -- or, better question:  how do I write male speculative fiction as a gay man writing in (as "Women Destroy Sci-Fi" reminds me) a male-dominated speculative fiction market?   

Do I write a story about future men-without-penises, or male AIs, or a fantasy country called Tiresias, where the inhabitants may switch genders?  Oh dear, I think I'm being pulled into writing what Russ called "a dreadful Amazon Utopia" story.

I think the answer is "just write what you're interested in."  Like gardens and glowing, warm teapots.

More on Russ, Kirk and Spock

Whew. I'm back from the special collections room and another round of Joanna Russ essays.  This time I looked at rough, first, and second drafts of "Ravings of a K/S Addict," written thirty years ago, about, I think,1982 or 1984.

Russ is exuberant at her discovery of Kirk/Spock slash fiction.  After listing about eight attributes of Spock's which are also the attributes of non-traditional women in a male-centered and dominated culture, Russ hails slash fiction it as an exiting new structure enabling women to tell stories in women's language about women's ways of loving and romance.

Russ's essay drafts have energized me.  She breaks down the elements of romance fiction in order to show how they work in slash fiction written by women for women.  She makes astute observations about the differences between male and female writers.  Every other page examines a foundation of fiction's voice, construction, or social impact.  I keep asking myself how each page can be applied to my own writing voice.  It's exhausting.

Near the end of "Ravings", Russ writes that Kirk/Spock slash fiction allows women writers to not have to write on the slant (Emily Dickinson) or against male literature (Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf).  She writes that slash fiction has gotten away from the the process of writing fiction being an "unpleasant awareness of being different or marginal."  And later that Kirk/Spock slash is a Rosetta Stone because "[the authors of it] make their art from the same wishes, fears, knowledge, background experiences and desires as their audience.

The difficulty I have with "Ravings" is the essentialism in it.  For her, Kirk/Spock slash is romance and adventure fiction exploring the notion, what do romantic relationships look like in a universe where one gender is not undervalued nor exploited?  This necessitates a linkage of lists of gender traits which can feel a little quaint, as one woman asked me, "Spock is the woman? Do people still think [in gender binary] like that?"

What's interesting to me is her confession that, as a non-traditional girl who was smart, she could identify as the half-human, half-alien Spock, who was part of both worlds and belonged in neither.  This is exactly the same reason he appealed to me, a non-traditional boy who was smart.  I guess the language of women (and gay men) in the seventies early eighties was the language of alienation.  

I'm not sure that's still as true in 2014.  Back in the 80's, there was a lot of emphasis on "women's ways of knowing," or on exploring gay men as "anandros" (Harry Hay's term for "not-men") or gay men's "lunar masculinity."  My sense is that in the 70's and 80's the identity politics of gender and orientation equality was more about describing what a perfect society would look and feel like, whereas in 2014, there's more of an emphasis on the journey to and the dialog about equality.  Also, this was before e-mail was commonly used; web pages wouldn't exist for about fifteen more years:  the Internet in the United States was a collection of DARPAnet and other fledgling networks.  People were much more isolated from communities, and Kirk/Spock slash fiction was one way to share in a community.  (Russ reports that her phone conversations with another woman about literary theory, women's voices and slash fiction resulted in astronomical phone bills.)

While oppression based on gender, orientation, and perceived gender still exists in the forms outright harassment, and  of wage and marriage inequalities, it seems like mainstream American has assimilated the more palatable aspects of "non-traditional women" and the homosexual community (e.g. "Will and Grace," "Queer Eye," Ellen DeGeneres).  And it seems like LGBTTQ identity has become less about an either/or matrix of qualities and more a continuous space along the axes of social gender, biological gender, and orientation, with a person's expressions a fuzzy cloud instead of a discrete point.  Additionally, the internet has provided virtual community for far-flung folks (there's an essay, "How the Internet Dissolves Perceptions of Regional Difference, or 'Yes, We're All Individuals. / I'm not!'")

Still -- Wishes, Fears, Knowledge, Experiences, and Desires -- sounds like like a useful lens for crafting stories to me.  (Looks over list again...) And I'm pretty sure this is a tarot card spread, too.

Joanna Russ Kirk & Spock Slash Fiction

I managed to get to the Joanna Russ archives.  I looked through the holdings and saw holdings on HP Lovecraft, something called "Sword and the Poppy" and something called "Kirk / Spock."  I figured I'd start with Kirk and Spock.

The reading room is a wonderfully tall room, with corner molding of pyramids and disks, and old rectangular vases placed on darkly stained bookshelves.  The long wooden tables have foam book stands for holding old books open without straining their spines.  After a short wait, a librarian brought me some boxes and I found the folder I wanted.

I half-expected black and white photos of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in Star Fleet garb, or maybe a typed essay of some sort.  What instead came out of folder 13 was a loose collection of yellow legal-sized papers with a longhand draft of a Star Trek story on it.  The line edits and crossed out text gave insight to how she would introduce or develop ideas.

As I read, a very drunk Dr. McCoy walks in on a kinky (OMG!) domination scene (OMG!) between Kirk and Spock (OMG!), who, after four years of working together, have become lovers.  You could have knocked me over with a feather.  The story follows Dr. McCoy's dealing with being the fifth wheel.  The Yesterday's Tomorrow's Homophobia was odd coming from McCoy, especially given the rest of the crew's acceptance.

One particular sex scene (OMG!) near the story's end struck me, as Russ wanted to make a connection with Spock as Pan and Kirk as a Golden Grain God.  Again, the cross-outs in the manuscript were instructive about how she wanted to introduce the idea.  

Russ managed to cast two gay male lovers as pagan gods, had managed to do it without it feeling like one of them was the Goddess in drag or a queer retelling of Lot's Daughters, or an artificial queer gloss over a heterersexual construction.  I'm guessing that it was written after Ursula Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness," which would date it no earlier than 1970, but it could be as late as 1980.  [Edit--it appears that Russ was introduced to K/S fiction between "Wrath of Khan" and "The Search for Spock", or 1982-1984.]  Queer Pagan God-lovers were  barely visible in 1985, and I can't imagine someone imagining them in the seventies.  But Russ did.  [Edit--Russ mentions some gay K/S fiction, or at least a story where Kirk and Spock are gay, but it's a tiny minority.]

I skipped the "Alternate Universe Naked Slaveboy Kirk in Chains on Barbarian Vulcan" story and went on to read the draft of the essay, "Women's Pornography and Star Trek." 

Apparently, in the early 1970's there were a number of 'zines devoted to stories written by women, for women, featuring Kirk and Spock as lovers.  They followed a standard romance formula--restraint & reticence, trauma induced holding, crisis, responsibility-shunting circumstance, and a lot of sex--which I recognized in Russ's story draft.  

Russ preferred to call all stories with sex in them pornography, in order to stay out of the "it's not pornography, it's erotica" debate--hence her essay's title.

I was blown away because, apparently, her short story was pornography by a woman for women.  The reading room closed before I could finish Russ's essay, but her reasoning went something like Kirk = Macho Man, Spock = Alien "Not-Man," therefore Spock = Figurative Woman; and therefore, Kirk and Spock's relationship can easily fit--if not more nobly fit--into the framework of a women's traditional romance story.

I'm not sure I agree.  Judging from my reactions as I read the hot throbbing parts, her story worked fairly well as gay porn for me (partially because I took on a Spock persona to survive elementary and middle school, and partially because William Shatner pushed my prepubescent buttons every time he lost his shirt).  But maybe this is one of those manifest content / latent content things, and maybe there's more in the twenty or so pages of Russ's essay that I didn't get to.

I'm sure there must have been some gay male Kirk/Spock slash fiction from the early 1970's, but the only thing I can think of is a passing comment between two characters who had such great sex that think they must have been Vulcans in a mind-meld.  And on additional reflection, gay  smut from the 1970's follows a different formula:  desire, discovery of mutual desire, entrance into a permissive space, slow disrobing, hot throbbing bits, post-coital kiss & summary.  Eighties and nineties, it gets more about safe-sex, caring, and pride.   

So the questions raised are, 1) Are Russ and the authors of 1970's Kirk/Spock slash fiction co-opting depictions of male-male sex to reinforce heteronormative notions of male and female roles in romance?  2) If an author says, "This writing is for women," does that preclude its consumption and enjoyment by a male audience?  3) Is pornography inherently the literature of gender and orientation essentialism?  And, 4) What about Batman and Robin?