Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Leah, and I'm here with my usual co -hosts, Alicia. Hello. And Grace. Hi.
Speaker: Let's have a seat at the high table of Rivendell, pour ourselves a glass of Miruvor, and get ready to seek counsel, and talk about queer stuff with some of the lore masters of Middle -earth, scholars whose work in token studies we've all been reading and admiring for years.
Speaker: And personally, I kind of can't believe that we're talking with them and becoming pod pals with them. Today, we are very excited to talk with the three co -editors of the forthcoming book, There Are Many Paths to Tread, Queer Approaches to Tolkien's Middle Earth, which will be forthcoming in early 2025. Robin Reed, Chris Picaro, and Steve Yandl, we're so glad to have you all here. Thank you so much for coming.
Speaker: Thanks for having us. We appreciate it. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Yay. So before we get started, can all three of you introduce yourselves with your name, your pronouns, and tell us a little bit about yourselves for our audience? Okay. Well, I've been doing everything alphabetically and since it's so rare for me to be the first in an alphabetical group, I kind of gloat about it. It's so much fun. I'm Robin Lee.
Speaker: My pronouns, she or they are equally appropriate because autist is not a pronoun and you know this is something we need to fix but nobody has. I'm actually happily retired. I escaped from my university job in Texas in 2020 and
Speaker: Since much of what I taught and wrote during the time I was there is now illegal in Florida and maybe illegal in Texas, I figured that my sense of timing was impeccable. My areas of interest have been feminist science fiction, what used to be called multicultural and is now called marginalized literatures, and especially critical theory approaches. We're feminist and intersectional and also
Speaker: We had Critical Race connected with those. And I started doing Tolkien scholarship after Peter Jackson's film sucked me back into the Tolkienverse. Wonderful. I guess I'll go next. My name is Chris Vucaro. Pronoun -wise, you know, I have this thing about the pronouns. He works fine. They is fine. She is fine. Whatever you really want to use is just wonderful for me, really. And my friends who use all of the above.
Speaker: I teach at the University of Vermont, where I've been since 1999, and I've been teaching Tolkien classes there since 2002. I did my very first publication in 2004 on the white tree. And then, well, anyway, that's the history. Currently, I am working on queer studies, feminist theory,
Speaker: eco -criticism kind of merger of all those. And I'm currently working on not only this book on queer talking, but a book on sadomasochistic theory and beowulf. So that's me. Hi, I'm Stevie Andell. I'm really pleased that you are allowing us to talk on your podcast. These are the topics we think about every day. I've just finished year 20 at
Speaker: Xavier University in Cincinnati, where I teach in the English department. It sounds like Chris and I started our Colton class about the same time. So when I got there in 03, I started teaching a Colton course along with the literature that I most often teach. This past July, I moved into an associate dean position at the university. I hardly know what I'm doing. It is a crazy position to be in. My
Speaker: I jumped into Tolkien. I grew up in this, I don't know how we're revealing up front, but I grew up in this evangelical family. So reading Tolkien and Lewis was really common for us. And I actually published more in Lewis before I turned to Tolkien. I was able to go to this Tolkien centenary conference in 92, where we met Priscilla Tolkien. She had us at her house. We met Christopher Tolkien. I got to meet two of his son and daughter.
Speaker: And that it was very easy to then move into, as we all know, spoken is queer, queerness is part of humanity. And so I'm pleased that the Tolkien scholarship continues with this book. I also do work in medieval lit with medieval prophecy, middle Welsh. And I've also been doing work on medievalism and the Disney parks, which is not at all related, but I think intersect with popular culture.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm super into that. Thank you guys so much for introducing yourselves. So I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about this anthology some more.
Speaker: I understand that this sort of emerged out of the far right backlash against the token society's token and diversity seminar, or at least those attacks really punctuated and inspired, shall we say, the urgency of this collection. Can you tell us a little bit about how U3 came together to work on this and some of your motivations behind it?
Speaker: Well, I sort of started it off because, and it was in 2017, although obviously what happened in 2021 made very clear what we already knew was happening.
Speaker: Actually, the major inspiration for it was Jane Chance's first monograph on Tolkien. It does many wonderful things, but it's looking at queerness as alterity, as difference. And then, of course, Chris and Yvette's Tolkien and alterity came out. And another wonderful piece, but both of those focused on alterity in that one definition of queer. And I wanted something that did much more queer
Speaker: work, and especially with regard to queer women, non -binary trans issues. And I said, golly, I need to do this. On the other hand, I am not a medievalist. And I know there was this whole queer medievalism that was developing from Tyson Pugh. I said, who do I know who's a medievalist and likely to do queer theory? So I wrote Chris and Steve. And they said, yay.
Speaker: And we started working on it. And then COVID came, which is why it's taken so long. But we did get far enough that when the Tolkien and Diversity call for papers came out, we said, woohoo, that's a whole bunch of us sent in proposals. And yeah, then the backlash happened. And at that point,
Speaker: On the other hand, we also picked up a couple of really amazing new chapters from the Tolkien and diversity. So it worked out well in terms of that that we wouldn't have had otherwise. So I think although it's taken longer than we would like, it was worth it because it's going to be better.
Speaker: Yeah, I want to touch on the backlash to Tolkien and diversity a little bit because we have spoken a lot on this podcast just generally around shithead alt -right people coming in and abusing Tolkien scholars and fans. But like this particular incident was very widespread and the first time that I can remember that
Speaker: an organized group of scholars and fans were attacked quite in this way and it's something that has kind of perpetuated since then. What ended up happening was the Tolkien Society ran a Tolkien and Diversity Seminar where there were a lot of people who were
Speaker: presenting on shit that we would really like, honestly. We're things looking at marginalized races, that sort of thing. And there was a group of incredibly angry conservative people who read the titles to some of the papers and started a concentrated campaign to shame the Tolkien Society, essentially, for hosting this and besmirching Tolkien's name.
Speaker: I think our collection grew out of this same impetus that the conferences have grown out of. We all know Tolkien scholarship has been around for a long time. And for the most part, folks were fine with saying, you know, Tolkien scholarship could be very conservative. They just weren't interested in queer things. And there was a lot of queer scholarship. There's so much going on. There wasn't much attention paid to Tolkien.
Speaker: And so once the Tolkien scholar said, you know, some of whom are queer said, let's start doing this. And the queer theorists pointed their eye towards Tolkien back when everybody's hackles got raised. I don't know what the metaphor is. And we, I remember when we came together, we're three friends, we didn't know each other so well to tell them the zoo. And once we saw the value of kind of bringing these voices together, because we all were unified by this idea that how dare you tell us
Speaker: where queer desire is, or how to read a text. And if that far right is equally adamant, like, don't you dare touch my precious token. So this kind of conflict was, I think, inevitable. But of course, queer voices are going to win in this. Yeah, you can't say, here's an author who's able to talk about humanity, but isn't talking about queerness. Yeah, 100%. Robin? You say, go ahead, Robin.
Speaker: OK, yeah, I could drop the link and you're free to share it in the chat to one of the presentations I did, because as Leah knows, especially my response to this was to start studying these people doing that. What we're talking about is unique. I mean, there was a debate, I gather, when the Tolkien and Pagan call came out from the society. But that was within the Tolkien Society's Facebooks and social media. Yeah. What happened with this?
Speaker: And I'm pretty sure by what the first article that was published had somebody sent the alt -right
Speaker: blogosphere, the links to the call for papers. There was pushback in the Tolkien Society, social media. But of course, the moderators being on the job booted all of that out. But so I tracked all the articles when they were published. I archived them so I don't have to link to the sites. And I did a corpus linguistic study and looked at the attacks on that. And it's a whole alt -right blogosphere.
Speaker: And although it's unique to Tolkien studies, this is not unique. Craig Branson, who does the American Inn podcast, has been studying
Speaker: the prevalence of fascists who wanted to use Tolkien to make America great for decades. This started happening in the 1950s and 60s with the conservatives, although Craig says it really took off after 9 -11 when the different conservative Christian groups got together. So these attacks on big media are a standard, bog -standard tactic of far -right extremists.
Speaker: And Craig is doing some fascinating work on it. We'll have a book. He's been working on a book for a while, but of course he started it before COVID and you know who that is. So yes, this is not isolated. I mean, you probably know that. I mean, the attack on the Ghostbusters remake, attack on the rings of power, which was also - Star Wars. Star Wars just in general. Yeah, it's all over. So we need to, I like situating in that because as Steve says,
Speaker: the sort of thing that is going to keep happening. Yeah, I really appreciate the plug for Craig Franzen's work there because it was through listening to the American id podcast that I started being paying very careful attention to the media coverage that was happening around Tolkien and Rings of Power and everything the last couple of years and noting when authors who were writing for publications like Forbes
Speaker: We're also cross publishing or also publishing in like the national review and things that were even more extreme. And then these were being very mildly sanitized as the mainstream coverage.
Speaker: Yeah, or like Wall Street Journal has, you know, some crossover authors between them who write about Tolkien in different spaces and in slightly different ways. But honestly, I have noticed as the general American political atmosphere has gotten more and more extreme and things have gotten more and more permissible. Even those mainstream media authors are getting a lot less difference between perhaps their national review
Speaker: articles and their Wall Street Journal articles, which is really depressing. And and it brings me down when I'm thinking of the state of the the Tolkien community. What I'd like to emphasize about that that Tolkien and diversity, there was a horrific backlash, although it disappeared pretty quickly. And it's, you know, typical of people complaining about academic titles. Totally. But everybody who was listed on the program presented their work.
Speaker: the Tolkien proceedings came out and they did not stop us. And the anthology is moving on. Yeah. Well, there's a big time sync difference in writing a reactionary tweet about
Speaker: how dare they have the word queer in this title of a paper versus actually having to sit through a presentation to come up with actual things to complain about. Just why most of the pushback we get as a podcast is about the name of our podcast and not any of the things we've ever put out there. There's hours of content you could listen to. At my university, Xavier University, there's protests about anything that's upset
Speaker: the Catholic Church and yet they've put on three productions of Angels in America that no one has protested because it includes the words angels in America and not actually read any of the materials that they have.
Speaker: That warms my heart, man. You are excited that this collection is going to meet that in the middle, that at least I know any Tolkien book that comes out, I'm going to buy it. So the fact that queer and Tolkien will be in the title together, that there'll be Tolkien fans who might not have thought about queerness are going to get this, that queer theorists who maybe haven't dipped into Tolkien are going to be introduced to it,
Speaker: folks of pop culture and fandom and fanfic and medieval. We hope that it's going to kind of be useful to everybody. Ah, yeah. Speaking of kind of bringing together a bunch of different approaches, what were you guys thinking about when you were putting together the call for proposals? What sorts of approaches were you really hoping to see? And yeah, what kind of perspectives were you really looking for when you put together the call for proposals?
Speaker: One of the things that I really wanted to see is more by queer women about queer women, because if you look at a lot of the Tolkien scholarship, there's a lot of feminist stuff on Tolkien.
Speaker: but it's great. And a lot of the gender and queer stuff on Tolkien is by male scholars looking at, understandably, Fredo and Tam. And so what's missing is the queer feminist work. And with all the good work that Jane's book does, it's not quite there in terms of things. Her book has nine chapters and all the female characters are stuffed in one.
Speaker: So I wanted to see more about that. And I wanted to see more about Tolkien fan fiction, which sort of overlaps with queer women because Tolkien for being one of the oldest fandoms and having the movies and the adaptations and studies as of discipline is not looking at Tolkien. So Chris and Steve, what were you hoping to see? Well, I know that we really wanted to bring in arguments
Speaker: incorporating critical race theory and just looking at race, intersectionality, certainly with race. I had put out a book on the body in Tolkien's Legendarium that did not quite cover that topic and got soundly
Speaker: reminded from the community, which is wonderful. But it wasn't because of that. I had hoped to correct that error. And I know Robin and Steve are way ahead of me on that anyway, as far as just wanting to bring in critical race theory and intersectionality. And so we really tried very hard to bring in a robust sort of section that dealt with that. Though it's still hard, right, Robin? It's still hard to find people who are working on that.
Speaker: So, you know, we're still, it's still an uphill battle in some ways. Well, I mean, it's really not there in this anthology for various reasons. And I can say because the other anthology I'm working on is Race Racism in Tolkien. That is not looking at any kind of intersectionality with queerness. I think there is some stuff there in terms of long standing systems that trying to bring together critical race and queer theory is hard. And of course, one of the reasons it's hard is
Speaker: huge percentage of people doing Tolkien studies like the rest of academia are white. So yeah, there's reasons, there's lots of reasons why that's hard. The time it's taken us to put this together I think has also been useful that we've, it becomes clear and clear to us that this has to be a foundational first step. Every one of these essays I think points in interesting directions. It's almost as if we just want to get past this so we can get to the next step, but it's inevitable
Speaker: I also felt when we came together, I've known Robin's work, I've known Chris's work, the things they're interested in, the kinds of scholars that they can get their hands on. And I was pleased to be part of something that I knew was going to go in areas that I just couldn't have even imagined because I know that this collection would look radically different if any one of us was doing it on their own. And so I'm pleased that
Speaker: Yeah, I've learned that these areas that don't get considered are going to be next to each other in these chapters. And I'm really excited to see, yeah, we'll all be reading chapters that we might not have read otherwise. Well, that brings me to my next question, which is what, if anything, surprised you when papers started coming in? Did you find anything you weren't expecting or anything you're really excited for us to get a chance to look at when it comes out? Hmm.
Speaker: start with some of the logistics. Maybe Robin and Chris are more familiar with this, but just the, our interaction, our distant interaction with the Tolkien estate reminds us that this is a property. It's just not the far right that's overseeing this. They have very specific considerations about the number of words that might be quoted. And so we think we're all thinking very carefully about
Speaker: how we're dipping in various corners of the Tolkien corpus, how much we're actually pulling. And I hope to our benefit, it's causing all of us to say, you know, here's the heart of my analysis. I don't need the lengthy quotation per se, but if we go into this collection with, I think, a really comfortable sense of most of us, we're not doing any plot summaries. We kind of understand this corpus. We might go a little deeper here and there.
Speaker: But it's time to just revel in this queerness and not concentrate on, well, this is what Professor Tolkien said in the mighty words. Right. Oh, my God. I have a tangent question to that in dealing with the estate. I vaguely know how difficult it is to get the estate's approval on some things.
Speaker: And I have heard some small trickle of murmurings about certain books that have been published lately that they will not disclose whether they have the estate's approval or not in actually publishing them. I was wondering if you have a take on that, given your now experience with dealing with the estate. Do you think they have approval? We actually need to correct. We are not dealing with the estate. OK.
Speaker: What we're looking at is, and what Steve was talking about, the issue of the fair use. What is fair use to quote without having to pay these days? And our publisher, McFarland, who is, by the way, I highly recommend McFarland.
Speaker: as a publisher. For one thing, their books are not priced in the three figures. They do a fantastic job. They're pulling out the newest stuff. They're incredible. Our editor gave us the limits that Steve talks about, you know, quote, this much and no more, and we don't have to ask permission.
Speaker: Interesting. What I've always heard is, again, if you go over that, the Tolkien, you have to go to the Tolkien estate and they will probably ask for a fee. Right. There are issues, mostly when you're talking about the Tolkien estate, you're looking at needing to get permission to take quote from the not yet published material that is in the archives, especially the Bodleian. I see. And I don't have any thing to say about that.
Speaker: Her little finger once would have told me, you know, if you don't have to, don't try and get involved with getting the estate's official permission for anything. And that was for a research grant some of us were thinking about. So I don't know, Chris, if you want to talk about it. I know you've had some experience. I don't have much more to add. I mean, you're right. Like some presses are a bit more financially daring and are willing to allow for more.
Speaker: you know, a far greater word count, right? But others just simply, you know, can't. I mean, it's just, they can cease to exist, right? And so then they have a really, really solid word count that you have to stick to, which is very hard than when you have a group of like 14 or 15 essays. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. So it's a word count throughout the entire book. Okay. For various pieces, exactly. So perhaps no more from this.
Speaker: But it's, of course, Robin making a crucial distinction here. We are absolutely writing this in a scholarly setting like this is out in popular culture. I'm so pleased that we're not trying to publish an unpublished piece or something from a letter.
Speaker: This is us as scholars saying, this is something out there. So we've got these guardrails that we're following, but the estate can say whatever they want. You know, I don't think they're as far right as this far right group, but hey, I mean, this is part of queer scholarship. We're here, we're readers. When we read this stuff,
Speaker: I'm not, can't not read it through a queer lens. So you'd be upset all you want. So these workouts are really about just making sure that we're doing kind of what fair use rules are calling for us. But I'll jump in because one editorial sort of professorial thing I've always said is
Speaker: If you're relying on huge chunks of quote from the primary source, make your point why the readers are familiar with poking, you know, go read, none of the rings. If you're not analyzing or explicating the quote or doing something with it, if you're just popping it in, that's going to be a weaker piece of academic scholarship.
Speaker: So now that said, in early drafts, I said to people, yeah, big chunks in, it's easy, but then go back and think and revise and analyze. So it's been a part of the process. Going back to surprise, I mean, we started this so long ago and it was so pre -COVID, I have a hard time remembering if I was surprised about anything
Speaker: at the beginning. But one thing that was a pleasant surprise, and I think is going to be one of the strongest elements of this book, is the number of trans reading. Because that's totally new. And one of our authors, they saw our call shared on Tumblr. And that's where they got in touch with us from. And I was going. I love that. Yes. And so I always bug my friends like Alicia and all my other cool friends who are on Tumblr. It's like, oh, I'm on Tumblr.
Speaker: because I can't figure out something. So that was exciting and a fun surprise.
Speaker: That's really cool. I love the idea of budding scholars publishing a lot of, like a lot of scholarship kind of unfolds on Tumblr anyway. Like a lot of fan stuff unfolds in the same way. And so I love that. A lot of fan studies and surveys and things that you can then dig into the fandom response and all that. I've been on Tumblr for like a decade and a half and I'm still terrible at it. So.
Speaker: Yeah, shout out to that episode we did about Black Fingon where that survey came from Tumblr both. Exactly. It was on Tumblr and the idea for it came forth on Tumblr. Although I'm a huge fan of fan scholarship and we do have that, I mean fan fiction and everything, I need to specify
Speaker: A survey done on Tumblr by a fan would not be appropriate for an academic journal because it does not have the review, institutional review for human subjects safety or training in surveys and a bunch of other stuff. And that may be seen as just gatekeeping, but there are also issues about that. But we don't actually have any of our fan pieces, fan studies pieces don't do survey. What they're doing is analyzing fan fiction and working with
Speaker: what fans do in transformative works. And that's really one aspect of it. But I mean, there is fan meta. Fans do scholarship. It is using all the tools of scholarship. And a number of people I know who are in graduate school and working and going to become graduate faculty people are on Tumblr these days. So yeah, that's why it was so great.
Speaker: Yeah. And we're already kind of dipping into this. Like, what kind of directions do you see queer Tolkien studies moving? Like, now? Especially you guys have, like, such an interesting, like, historical view of this, because you've been working on the anthology so much. But, like, have you seen a proliferation of queer Tolkien scholarship coming through?
Speaker: I think this overlaps a little bit with surprise in the sense that the legendarium is so huge. There were at least two pieces in our collection that I remember reading and thinking, I never thought. I thought I knew all the characters, but here's a little corner of queerness I hadn't considered. And so I guess I would really say the kind of scrutiny that queer studies has done in other areas
Speaker: we are now opening up the whole legendarium. So I see over the next decade, folks are going to be, yeah, what about this little corner and that little corner? I'm eager to see where those new studies are going to go. And the intersectionality, of course, that we've been playing with. And it's just nice when you have a collection like this, when you have a volume like this, we're able to encourage authors to submit their work
Speaker: for the call for papers in a subject that before this, there was a tremendous amount of gatekeeping and you know, there still is, you know, there are journals out there and there are of course Tolkien scholars out there that don't quite feel that queerness, you know, has a place in Tolkien studies and the legendarium and the deeper you dive into, let's say sexuality, they get very uncomfortable.
Speaker: connecting Tolkien with anything sexual, right? Like, this is just not me. These two things are very, very different. They could not go together. He's not a human being. This is hagiography, you know? You know, so, you know, so for our volume to say, hey, you know, there is a place for your scholarship and there will be a place for other people's scholarship, you know, in the future. We have to make a place for our scholarship because we're not always, and I don't want to, you know, there are many journals out there.
Speaker: There's some very fine Tolkien journals out there that are very willing to publish queer material, but there are some that aren't. And it really do have to be bold and determined, I think, in order to still, to this day, to publish queer Tolkien scholarship. Yeah. Yeah. So like follow up to that, is there any direction you want to see Tolkien studies go more towards in the future?
Speaker: Well, I think this goes back to what we talked about earlier. Issues of critical race, intersectional approaches that take race, gender, sexuality. And that is very hard scholarship to do. I know I have tried and beat my head against the wall many times. But that's, as far as I'm concerned, the most important issue is issues of races and racism. Chris was talking about how there are Tolkien scholars who don't want to
Speaker: acknowledge any kind of sexuality or queerness, more normative than not. I'd say the defenses in Tolkien studies are even stronger against talking about race and racism. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So so much so that I see an awful lot of the scholarship that's done as being a denial that that is they want to say Tolkien wasn't racist. Look, he wrote this letter to his German publisher.
Speaker: And he said apartheid was bad. And he did do both of those things. But as Erlen Figerus pointed out, there are many contradictions in Tolkien. So you can't possibly be obliquely referring to that book that was, quote unquote, the first book on Tolkien and race that came out after Demetra Feeney's book, could you?
Speaker: But to me, to be fair, actually, and I didn't write any of the reviews for that. Alicia's talking about Robert Stewart's book. Demetri Fimi's book is fantastic, but she only has really one chapter, chapter nine, that deals directly with race.
Speaker: It is an intellectual history and she looks at a lot of other stuff. Race is part of it but not to the extent that Stewart is. Plus Stewart's book actually does something very valuable even though there are some problem areas with it which is his background is the history of French Marxism.
Speaker: and European history, not literary studies. And he brings his knowledge of racisms in Europe, blood and soil racism, aristocratic racism, the other types of racism, and even the fact many people don't understand there are multiple types of racism.
Speaker: out there. And he deals with that very well in his chapters. The thing he does is he is also trying to defend poking that, you know, poking wasn't as bad as the Nazis and the KKK, therefore it wasn't racist, even though the body chapters engage fully with, look at all these racism. And yeah, right. So it is really in a sense that first book completely focused on race.
Speaker: But academic scholarship is always a dialogue, and I predict that Stuart's book will kick off a whole bunch of responses and dialogue.
Speaker: That's a very generous way of putting it. I like that. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, to be perfectly clear, I have not read the entirety of the book. I read Demetriphine's response to it. And I read the introduction and the conclusion, just so I kind of had a feel of what he was doing. And I'm sick to death of reading
Speaker: people defending Tolkien as, well, he was a man of his time. He wasn't that bad. I'm just over it in general. That argument also tends to have absolutely no contextualization or grasp of what his time entailed and what being a person of his time entailed and what the prevailing attitudes were.
Speaker: a lot of that criticism tends to just take our inaccurate backwards view of what it must have been some number of decades ago that isn't actually grounded in the reality. Right. We're the best it's ever been right now, so it must have been worse back in the day, even though, especially when you're talking about conservative religious views towards things like homosexuality,
Speaker: Is it any better today than it was 20 years ago? I don't think so. Yeah. That's a great point. I like the idea that we're challenging this kind of essentialized version of what mid 20th century Britain was like or Catholicism. I'm not religious myself, but the notion that but I grew up with this evangelical
Speaker: setting and the idea that Christianity is posed as unified or this kind of one thing. I mean, Tolkien's Christianity is different from many people and that's worth exploring for something I'm looking forward to. I would just add that the whole field of linguistic scholarship I think would really benefit. This language is inherently clear. We're talking about gender and this ambiguity of
Speaker: these lexical spheres. I would love to see those folks who know the linguistic stuff so well to kind of dip into those. So we need to find that queer linguist. I shouldn't say that. One who knows queerness, queer theory, and does the linguistics to do that work. They needn't be queers themselves.
Speaker: It's a bonus, but you know, I love that that language is inherently queer. I love that idea because language transforms and changes over time and is always sort of interrogating itself and also
Speaker: changing how things what things mean and everything kind of like like there are certain like pieces that fall to the wayside and are lost in time and other things that are preserved and carried forward through very very long stretches of time yeah I oh I love that idea and I too would love to see more linguists engage with with queerness in Tolkien
Speaker: because honestly, a lot of linguistic stuff kind of goes over my head. And I'm like, I feel like I'm a bad Tolkien fan in that I'm like, my eyes kind of start glazing over when I kind of start reading some of this. I'm kind of like, but I'm kind of like, if you add gay into it, then maybe I'll pay attention a little bit more. I mean, we all know there are those far right folks who would say, you know, your dialect of English isn't standard English and you are uneducated. I'm going to say,
Speaker: When have you pronounced the K at the beginning of the word night for the past? None of us has done that for hundreds of years. You're a world part of this.
Speaker: queerness, so get off your high horse. I mean, there are also a bunch of right wing people who are terrified of pronouns now, just in general. They're like, no one, no one ever had pronouns, you know, like, yeah, we need to know what pronouns even exactly. In terms of that sort of linguistic thing, one of my rants, because of course, I'm a huge fan of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Speaker: I mean what what Tolkien fan is not is the way in which too much of the scholarship people just look clear up in the OED and they grab out one of the meanings and then they quote it and go from there and you know okay that's that's legitimate but if you're looking at the OED
Speaker: The entry on the OED for queer is something like 14 ,000 words. I did a whole thing on it. The many meanings of queer. So looking at the multiple meanings of queer, how they changed over time, because I mean, that's the genius of the OED is to look at historical change over time.
Speaker: and the selected quotations that they picked to exemplify the meanings is crying out for analysis on its own. You sort of queer linguistics, I mean, you certainly work with tokens in men and languages, although I have the feeling that the Tolkien linguists
Speaker: And the ones who started the field are a little bit in that more conservative area of Tolkien studies. Not all of them. Is that perhaps the biggest understatement of the world? Yeah. Well, I've only heard it from afar. There are at least two of them that are cool. OK.
Speaker: But yeah, the extent to which what the OED shows us about the many meanings of queer and how often that's ignored by people who are just looking for a dictionary definition sort of needs to be done. And that's something I would like to see people doing more of that kind of work.
Speaker: I love etymological work just in general. We did a, one of the Tolkien Tuesday, it's a hashtag that happens on Twitter. One of them was for fairy, as in fairy the place. And we ended up doing a tweet read about fairy as slang for gay man. So I got to dig into the OED and etymology for that was so much fun. In case someone is listening and does not know this, Tolkien wrote part of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Speaker: Just, I try to keep it, yeah, for people who aren't just like so stuck up Tolkien's ass. This is where all of us are, basically. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Anyway.
Speaker: I have just been reflecting on Robin's point about really how often in the scholarship and all of that, there's this instinct to defend Tolkien from any current or modern criticism or what have you. And it strikes me that this is the challenge that we're having in fandom as well as in academia is that we get these very, frankly, extremists,
Speaker: deeply radically conservative viewpoints that are spouted and that we then in even entering into a discussion like we're constantly in the place of having to refute that extremism and we never really get to the chance to have the actual interesting conversations, the actual necessary conversations there.
Speaker: So often drowned out by all the work that we have to do in order to even set the stage to be able to have those more meaningful conversations. So that's one of the reasons that I'm really excited about this anthology that you're putting together. It's like this is one of the chances to have the deep and important conversations and cutting through all of the noise that comes before it and going, no, we're just having this conversation.
Speaker: Craig Franklin would say, and he has said this about the online response to the far -right extremists, and sometimes it's academics and sometimes it's fans, that the more attention you give to the far -right extremists, and if you link it back to them, you are helping in their recruiting efforts. And a number of the far -right extremists have said out loud they used hoping to recruit young men.
Speaker: always about the young men. That's why when I did my work on attacks on Tolkien and diversity that I linked to archives.
Speaker: an archived copy, not to the original site, because of course you have to cite your sources. I also do a corpus analysis, which means I'm not quoting anybody and giving their name spread. I'm analyzing patterns in the, I forget how many thousand words I collected for the database. And so that's, these are methodological things that have to take place, but Craig would support this. No, don't
Speaker: There are places where one might try and engage with someone on their ideas about cocaine on a one to one basis. But if you want to, I mean, we didn't care. I mean, when we put this together, we didn't care about what either the far right extremists or some of the more conservative cocaine scholars might think because we don't have to. Hell yeah. Queer studies is a growing field.
Speaker: But when we started, we were all safely employed. Now I'm safely retired and I have no more bucks to give. We're doing it on Substack. And we're going to do this because we can. Because this is what our lives have been and we've been doing. I first read 12 came when I was 10. And that was considered weird. It wasn't considered queer because that word wasn't around in 1930.
Speaker: five in any meaningful way. And then now I know it's harder with with fandoms, but there is this idea of the more attention you pay trying to rebut these far right extremists, the more attention they're getting. Hmm. And that's a real frustrating part of just a far right strategy. Generally, I mean, we see this in the US Congress right now, that conversation by default kind of brings people together if it's
Speaker: the nature of a conversation, which is, I guess, different from a fight. But to kind of raise all this noise and actually shut things down works for the far right. Great. Let's stop it all together. Let's shut down Congress.
Speaker: the tantrums work. And so the notion, I mean, I think you've pointed to this. We love the idea of a book as well. That's the conversation that's happening with the scholars, with the reader. You can sit calmly and kind of engross yourself in that conversation. The book is not going to be stopped. Yeah. I think it's something
Speaker: we can all be mindful of as whether we're engaging in a scholarly way or a fan -ish way or professionally or what have you or just, you know, being out on Twitter as it continues.
Speaker: ever crumbling downfall, but accelerating. Just being mindful of how the ways in which we engage may be counterproductive to the values and goals that we actually hold and how we can engage instead in order to build up the responses that we want instead of feed the trolls because I have enough trouble feeding myself. I do not need to feed the trolls.
Speaker: Yeah, and it is important to, in very specific instances, raise awareness against specific people who are doing harmful, abusive things in an effort to keep a community safe. However, you have to be really careful about that, because if you give these people a molecule of air, it just explodes. Yeah. It's an ongoing conversation on one of my little
Speaker: enclaves on the internet about how to deal with abusive people on Twitter and how to help people who were being abused by them without also just making the situation worse. And there's no easy answer to that, really. But one of the things that I think anywhere that you can do is to create, inspired by the frustration that you feel, to create the thing that you want to see, like this anthology, like
Speaker: I've definitely written some spite fan fiction. I'm not going to lie. I can be I can be inspired by spite like the podcast like this podcast. Pretty directly, honestly, pretty directly. Yeah, I've come to acknowledge in the last few years, I'm very readily fueled by spite. And I like a lot of my creativity is fueled by getting frustrated about something, not wanting to argue about it and wanting to just go do the thing that I want to see. Right. Great.
Speaker: a mantra for life. I like it. Let's get a little bit more positive. Are there any up -and -coming scholars, especially any who are featured in your anthology, who you guys are excited about, want to read more from? Yeah, all of them. All of them? I actually did account, but like I said, Steve says we're excited about all of them.
Speaker: At the moment, we are looking at having 13 essays, and this isn't our preface and introduction, which we're still messing around with. I think we've written at least five versions of it. And we also have a chapter that is a chronological bibliography on Tolkien and alterity to acknowledge the extent to which the scholarship on alterity includes queer scholarship, but is not limited to it.
Speaker: hopefully maybe to emphasize the need for intersectionality. Of those 13 as I was counting through them, five or six is like scholars who've published before to various degrees. I mean Christine Larson is everywhere in Tolkien studies. Chris and Steve both have essays in it and there are other people, Nicholas Burns, mothers who have published.
Speaker: But of the ones we have, seven or eight are by what academia tends to call junior scholars. And this is going to be their first academic publication. That's really cool. And a number of them, at least when we started in 2017, were in graduate school.
Speaker: one has started graduate school after getting their essay accepted by us and is working for it. So what we have is a lot of the younger scholars, both in terms of age and also in terms of where they're at in their academic training and career. That's why the anthology reflects the newest and cutting edge things in queer theory. I mean, one of them, of course, was one of the ones most targeted by the haters
Speaker: is Dana Peterson Deeprose of Something Mighty Queer destabilizing cis -hetero -amatonormativity in the works of Dolce. And I don't know about Chris and Steve, but I was sitting there going, hi, never heard of this. This is an amazing concept. Dana's presentation was gonzo fantastic. And like I said, the title drew a lot of hatred, not that anyone
Speaker: actually understood what that was from the title. So yeah, we have, I think we're looking at people who will go on to be, I hope, publishing much more, and that this is maybe just their first. I mean, I think all of them is my answer that I gave already.
Speaker: Of course. I like the idea that I mentioned before that we're excited that these are voices that will be next to each other. But the fact that we're also reading each other's pieces to various extent. So the notion that we're all kind of we're building this larger community, we're learning the vocabulary from each other.
Speaker: queer theory re -revel in kind of these new, this is not a field that says oh we've figured out how the atom works or whatever, this is all about oh what's this new way of getting at this field that is by its nature cannot be contained or controlled and so let's find new avenues and paths and we're all doing it in different ways. So I like the idea that this
Speaker: breadth of scholars in these different kind of research areas are all going to be part of this unified voice under the cover. And that's, I have to say, that's the real tension in doing medieval scholarship. It's, you know, the medievalists loved their category. It's all about how do we contain and control. And queer theory is all about those boundaries, those borders, those hard and fast divisions don't exist.
Speaker: And so there's a little bit of in my head that I'm constantly working back and forth between saying, how are we holding this together? But there's another part of my brain that says, these pieces don't go together, because it's queer theory. And we're doing all these different things. And that's, yeah, part of the beauty of it too. So you all know that you're thinking about this too.
Speaker: Well, in speaking to the medievalisms of like, I feel like queer theory is also a lot about like exploding sort of hierarchies and the medievalists were all about hierarchy. And that's exactly right. Right. And so it's sort of like one of the big things that really interests me about going deeper into queer theory and also going deeper into medievalism and just like as out of curiosity is like
Speaker: how much more leftist it makes me and also how much more like anarchist it kind of makes me because I'm kind of like these guys were obsessed with hierarchy and I'm kind of like you know I love sort of seeing that tension between the two and seeing how how each of them can kind of like you know expand those boundaries and explode those boundaries even more even as we're also trying in queer theory to kind of hone in on sort of accepted like definitions of things or
Speaker: hone in on particular experiences or like very specific experiences, you know, in addition to these, like you said, kind of undefinable, like the undefinable experience of just of queerness itself, you know. Leah, it's fascinating you say that because I'm reminded of that one letter where Tolkien's essentially saying anarchy for everyone, let's go firebomb whatever this building is. That's right. That's right.
Speaker: Yeah, which is a very poor paraphrase of that letter, by the way. Yeah, that blew my mind. I sort of think it's an issue when you're talking about, I mean, there are people trained in medieval studies. And then there, and the medieval history
Speaker: I collaborated with, taught with, wrote with a medievalist historian who studied the, did the historical stuff. And that means not just the literature, because there really isn't much of the literature from the middle ages that survived. And I can't believe how when I sat through a Kalamazoo thing on the dating of Beowulf or something, which apparently medievalists have fist fights about.
Speaker: and it has not resolved it. But I think it's important, and this is something I'm going to be saying in a presentation I'm giving at the Northeast Popular Culture next month. Contemporary medieval scholars are doing all sorts of work with not only gender and sexuality, but race and many medievalists of color. So this idea that many of us have about the Middle Ages, which remember in Europe that we're talking about 400 to 1400,
Speaker: and multiple countries, the Middle Ages being this hierarchical and all this other stuff, then maybe not. That reflects the state of medieval scholarship at that time. And that has changed. So in terms of, and I'm not a medievalist, I'm a postmodernist, but I realize I have to read some of the medieval stuff that's out there, not because I want to talk about poking in that medieval context, but because it's important to know
Speaker: that if you look at contemporary medieval scholarship as opposed to the state of the medieval scholarship in the 50s and 60s when medievalists started writing about Tolkien, this is not your grandfather's middle ages anymore. Absolutely. So there's all sorts of great possibilities out there, but I also think very strongly
Speaker: It was important, medievalists started the field of focus studies, medieval and folklore scholars, Tom Shippey, Berliner Liger, Jane Chance, but after Peter Jackson's films hit, you had an explosion, and Dimitra Pimi talked about this in her book, Scholarship on Tolkien Because of the Films, and you have a whole lot of people like me. I ran away from my Chaucer undergraduate course in horror.
Speaker: And that's not even older medieval stuff. A whole bunch of people doing film, doing adaptation, doing tourist studies, doing queer theories and all that other stuff. And there is queer medieval theory. Tyson Pugh comes up, but I don't work with Tyson Pugh because I'm not a medievalist. I will work with queer theorists.
Speaker: like Sarah Ahmed and Adler and all sorts of stuff. So queer theories are all over the place as well. It's when you ask what I see about future things in coping studies with queer theory, I see it going
Speaker: like one of the fireworks over Bilbo's house in multiple directions, huge trails of light, not just, we're going to do this. Yeah. I love that image. I think it's interesting to the role of fantasy, personal, you know, fantasy when it comes to literary interpretation, right? And that's from the very beginning of literary interpretation. I don't know how far back you want to go. I mean, you know,
Speaker: 2 ,000 years, 1 ,000 years at least, but definitely current day, right? That some medievalists, you know, you can take a look at their interpretations of Beowulf and you can see how their interpretations, their lens, the lens they use is so informed sometimes by kind of cis hetero paradigm, right? And their own fantasy, their own desire, one case in point, like so many people try to heterosexualize Beowulf, right? Look at any movie on Beowulf, right? Look at any comic book.
Speaker: that deals with Beowulf and there's always some kind of heterosexual energy. There is zero heterosexual energy around Beowulf in the Beowulf poem, zero, right? And yet really serious scholars will promote these very serious interpretations and arguments that kind of create this heterosexual energy around him. And so I think it's important for us to recognize that because if they can do it and they can,
Speaker: then we can do it, right? The queers can do it. And we can say, well,
Speaker: there's nothing wrong with you giving your sort of heterosexual fantasy because interpretation is always a kind of failure in some ways. It always fails to quite grasp the thing it attempts to discuss, right? And so go ahead and have your heterosexual fantasy, but we're going to have our queer fantasies too around this, right? And I think it's exciting to have scholarships that actually literally promotes the fantasy that where the genres blur
Speaker: you're giving your analytical argument and boom, next you're reading some fantasy, queer fantasy inserted, embedded in the text and then out because really we're just exposing what a lot of scholars have been doing for centuries, right? Is that, yes, my interpretation. And so this is true of Beowulf, it's true of Tolkien studies, true, right? That what I do, the way I read the text is in part because of my queer desire to see the things this way, to see my own world exist in Middle Earth or my own paradigm,
Speaker: My own logic, yeah. I want to jump in here to support Chris's point about the heteronormativity of Beowulf. At one point I got really carried away and in my graduate gender theory course, our set text, meaning the work we would apply all the gender theory to analyze, was the Seamus -Haney translation of Beowulf.
Speaker: and senior scholars all male in my department several of them went bonkers. One of them came up to me and said what are you doing teaching Beowulf in a gender theory course? Beowulf has nothing to do with gender. My medievalist buddy who by the way was also a Harry Potter fan was on the sidelines going go Robin go Robin go Robin because she said Beowulf should be taught everywhere.
Speaker: So we did it, and early on in one of the graduate seminars, the students were arguing that any of the, that applying these clear ideas to Beowulf was presentism, that we were putting that on the text. And I said, hmm, okay, that is always a concern in interpretation. Why don't you go away, reread The Same as Haney, and come in next week with all the textual evidence for Beowulf's heterosexuality.
Speaker: They came in the next week and went, there is none. You can come through it every other way. There is none.
Speaker: And so what Chris is talking about here, and I'm talking about here, is another thing that tends to upset some people. It is reader response reception theory. It is the author's intentions, if you can even discern them, do not outweigh the reader's active interpretation. And all readers will bring different experiences, tools, reading to it. And it's not as easy as anything you say about it is right.
Speaker: because that's your opinion, which my students always wanted. It is possible to say you can develop a huge number of very strong arguments about very different interpretations. And that's what we're doing here. We are bringing in these very strong arguments that are textually based, based around theory and
Speaker: the transformative readings of a number of our contributors who are queer, as are the editors. Just jumping on my soapbox for one second. You can't reliably discern authorial intent unless you literally Ouija board this person back from the dead and have them inhabit your body because anything we are basing our interpretations of their authorial intent on
Speaker: is something that we have read and we have processed through our own brains and colored it how we are going to color it because of our own personal lens. I cannot say that enough. I could push that further. I think literary scholars would say, you could have, and I've had a poet in the room that I brought as a guest speaker and what that person indicates as authorial intent, we would also say, we don't care.
Speaker: I mean, we will, I don't think you can make a case that you knew exactly what you were doing. You were talking about how humanity is bigger. And as Robin and Chris are both pointing out, this is bigger than, I mean, I certainly understand the point that you're making, Alicia. But I would say, authorial intent, mess gets in the way.
Speaker: Tolkien and C .S. Lewis were both big on, don't look too close at our personal lives because they knew, they felt nervous about that. But for a century, we've thrown that off. Literacy scholars, we don't care what the author intended to do. We've got the text in front of us that read responses to his demo.
Speaker: And I will roll up Berlin Fleeger's, But What Did He Really Mean, published in Tolkien studies, which makes it harder to get a hold of, and The Arch and the Keystone, where she proves with quote after quote after quote after quote that Tolkien contradicted himself in his letters, in his essays, in various versions of his essays, in his fiction. And anyone who wants to talk about Tolkien's intentionality at
Speaker: They're not able to take on Berlin Flieger's brilliant explication of it is going to fail because even if you had the Ouija board, that's only poking at one point in his life, you know? That is very true. At the end of his life. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: It makes perfect sense that Tolkien would become this spokesperson for the far right. He's at the center of what seemed to be these super bastions of conservatism. I mean, he's a linguist. He's looking at Beowulf. He's doing medieval scholarship at Oxford. And these are all areas that we all now know are super queer. And so we have a front row seat. There's no way that the far right side is going to win in this discussion. We're just going to watch the queers going to keep coming up. They can defend.
Speaker: strong thinkers already understand past those kind of simplistic arguments that they're using. Yeah, finding out that Oxford was a hotbed of queerness while Tolkien was teaching there was very illuminating to me. Yeah, I think that's a future episode, y 'all. That's a fun future episode. I was going to say, that would hate Grace's history nerd buttons, for sure.
Speaker: Well, if you don't allow any women into your sanctified. What do you expect will happen? Something I bring up a lot because we are talking about some of the conservative bashing of liberal ideas of cooking, but there are.
Speaker: left and liberal people who bash Coking for being a sexist. And that gets complicated too. That is, they want to make this very simplistic notion. And it's like, well, you know, go read John Ratliff's essay about Coking's women students. And the fact that when Oxford let women in, the professors, the dons were told they didn't have to teach women if they didn't, they didn't have to work with women if they didn't want to. The women students were very much second class. Coking worked with women.
Speaker: I mean, he didn't quite understand why they maybe couldn't go on and develop professional lives like his male students. And that's on him, but a lot of men don't understand that, and don't want to talk about systemic issues. But, you know, heroin. And I'm going to put a plug in here for David Craig's queer lodgings, which I know you all know. It is one of the few queer essays that deals with
Speaker: and Sam and male characters and also AO1. That is, as far as I'm concerned, hands down one of the best interpretations of AO1's characterization and the fact that Craig understands that these gender roles interact with each other and what happened in Britain after World War II affected gender roles for men and women. So, yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker: Well, I do have another question. And this is a question that I think we've already answered a dozen times tonight. We answer it every time we're talking about this topic. But I want to be able to pose it to each of you to just sort of like put a button on it or to delve deep into it. And that question is, in your opinion, why does it matter
Speaker: to engage with Tolkien through the lenses we've discussed today? Why is it important that scholarship extends to these lenses? That's an excellent question. I think we are, as queer scholars, biased in this. But I feel like queer scholarship has been able to take the best of gender theory, race theory. I guess I'm thinking of areas like
Speaker: semiotics. I mean, these are, they filled over the decades and really helped one just become a better reader and thinker about how text work, how language works, how authors work, how literature works. So the idea that I think in every literature class that I teach, there's some queer theory along with other kinds of theories, but to just say these are ways of just
Speaker: making you understand the world more fully and the complexities. I mean, challenging binaries is, I think, critical thinking 101. But again, we're biased. Just for people who might not know, would you like to explain what semiotics is? So the study of signs, I mean, in some ways starts with one of the most basic kinds of binaries of here's the
Speaker: the signifier and the signified, what we're trying to point to in the world. I think as a grad student, maybe the first step that interested me, this disconnect between when I pronounce the word tree and I then see this thing outside, this big, well,
Speaker: What I say isn't that thing. It can never be that thing. And how does this connect? That got me into linguistics, and I think that's, yeah, got me interested in Tolkien. But it's all about challenging. I mean, those are the simplistic ideas. We probably all know folks that would appeal to, well, here's the dictionary definition of something. I mean, that's not critical thinking at all. So how has the word changed over time? How is it that, I mean, we understand dictionaries are written by how language is used.
Speaker: prescriptive kind of thing. And I think most people do understand that. But we want everyone to get to that point to understand, yeah, that's the complexity. So send me out a study of signs. And also encoding and decoding meaning. Yeah. Right, exactly. And I'm sure the other scholars in other areas would say, well, it all comes together in our
Speaker: is the fight we have at universities all the time. My biologist friends would start to convince, everything is biology. Everything's biology. And yeah, I want to be at those fights. I think that they're, it's kind of hilarious. There's definitely some queerness in biology too. Yeah. I was going to say, when I think about what we're attempting to do, I think we're attempting to make a, to offer a more complete picture.
Speaker: because there's so much out there really it's just bizarre how sometimes people just shy away from fantasy is a form of speculative fiction in a way right it merges from that and science fiction but it's also a form of medievalism so it's a form of like reconstituting the past and imagining the past many people want to read to reconstitute and reimagine the past as as not queer right and so i think that's why they get pissed off when they're like oh my god wait a minute that you know these
Speaker: medieval -like looking hobbits. They can't be multicultural and multicultural, you know, in various colors and queer. We don't want to imagine that kind of past. And so they try to create a non -queer past when the past was so queer. One example I'd like to give is that people will talk about Tolkien and C .S. Lewis going to the Eagle and Child Inn in Oxford and discussing their work with the other inklings.
Speaker: maybe they'll talk about how their nickname for it was the bird and baby. But will they talk about, let's see, and it comes, of course, from a crest, a heraldic crest. But the heraldic crest with the eagle and child is a depiction pretty much of Zeus and Ganymede.
Speaker: this idea of this father, this all father God, who swoops down and picks up this young man because he's super attracted to him, right? And falls in love with this young man. And so he takes him, right? That is the burden, that is the Eagle and Child story, right? And so few people want to hear that when they think about Tolkien and C .S. Lewis at this inn. And why?
Speaker: We have to remind people that they knew the story of Ganymede. They all knew it. And they knew what the Burden Baby slash Eagle and Child meant, right? So projects like ours are just sort of trying to complete the picture, right? Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's no just it's just that equal was just carrying off a poor innocent baby that wanted to eat it. That's that's what that's what that is all about. What are you talking about? One of those original signs now sits in the kiln, which is owned by a conservative Christian group that holds regular Christian writing workshops there. And I've been there a few times.
Speaker: And they're all of their heads have just exploded with Christmas story. This is also what the point that I'm getting at, too, if like, if you try to just gloss over, you know, so and so was a man of his time, and your understanding of
Speaker: the cultural conceptions at that time do not include that this man of his time was meeting at this pub that referred to this very queer story and that Ganymede was a terminology that was used within the queer community to explicitly point to
Speaker: queer people, queer men in particular, and this was like as much of an understood code as being a friend of Dorothy in a later decade and things like that. If your understanding of that historical context is lacking, it's very easy to create the past as this blank slate that you can just impose your own views upon. But in reality, these people who are meeting here have this understanding of the place where it is. Right, right. They must
Speaker: I'd like to pick up on what Chris and Steve both said in terms of our goals and why we think this is important to do other than if this is what we do. And my take these days, post COVID, post token and diversity, I hope eventually it will be post Trump, is that what has been called the culture war in the United States. And it's been going on since the sixties.
Speaker: is actually a political war. And we need to acknowledge that. That is this issue, this conflict over what is culture, what is worthy of studying.
Speaker: I mean, they are trying to criminalize librarians and teachers in Florida and Texas and some of the other states. Or if you let anything out, any sort of book that meets this definition of badness in terms of queer race. So there's this issue of representation. And as someone who grew up in Idaho, northern Idaho,
Speaker: fifties and sixties and seventies and issues of representation and poking was so important to me for so many years. And I was told in so many ways I shouldn't even be reading it. It is something that is a part of that. But I mean, my bias, what do I make what Steve says? I always deal with things by reading about them. This is how I learned about everything. I think it's sort of an office thing. So for me, having a book and a publication that's fairly
Speaker: relatively accessible for an academic publication. Doing what this is doing is, this is why I'm still doing my scholarship after I retired. My partner is not doing scholarship. She's having a whole lot of fun doing other things. I'm still going to the college because it's important.
Speaker: Yeah, we're doing this podcast and, you know, we joke about how this is sort of our, you know, we do we do scholarship, you know, in our spare time outside of our our day jobs just because we like to, you know, and that's something that I think
Speaker: we've talked about before in that a lot of folks on the far right get really pissed about is that we're doing this stuff and we're also still somehow existing in other spheres and others in other places, not just in Tolkien. It's like this is this is part of our our whole being basically and I don't know if that makes a lot of people really really upset and it sort of makes a lot of people upset that we're doing this like in our we're doing this in our spare time because it's important
Speaker: So, yeah. Yeah, you're doing an amazing thing. I mean, this political fight that Robin points to, you're in the center of it and you're getting pushback. I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know because you're doing absolutely the best work.
Speaker: oh thank you so much thank you for saying that and yeah and thank you guys for for your work and for putting this anthology together for so many years because i i really think that it's going to be so valuable for a lot of people and it'll be so nice to uh cite a book that's not perilous and fair oh man
Speaker: We're all queer and we don't like to choose, okay? We like to have lots of options. Yeah, we're all bi. We all want to have more than one thing.
Speaker: But yeah, I really feel like this will be, like you said, like a really lovely, a stepping stone and also a push at the boundaries, you know, kind of breaking through some of those walls. It's really important work. And I feel that very, very deeply down in my bones. So thank you guys so much for all of your work.
Speaker: Yeah, I second, Lias, thank you. And also, I want to take a moment to answer the question that I pose to you and why it matters to me that you're doing this. I think it matters immensely to have anthologies like this, to have work like this, that new and upcoming scholars or scholars who are coming back into the field who do hold queer identities, who do hold marginalized identities,
Speaker: have things to look at and say, yes, here's validation of the thing that I know. I know that I belong here, but here is validation of that thing. Here is a path that the rest of us can continue to follow and build upon. Here is the framework that is being built and we get to continue building on.
Speaker: So thank you so much for the work that you are doing to establish this and to lay the groundwork and build upon what already exists, but build us in new directions. Thank you. We'd love to test now. We all agree. We do.
Speaker: Well, one of the things that's so amazing about Tolkien fandom is how many of the fans read the scholarship. Yes. And arguably, if you've been reading Tolkien and you get into reading all the stuff that Tolkien wrote, especially in the Middle Earth, you're already used to reading scholarship in theory, so why not? And that's why I was so happy when you guys invited us on. It's like, yes, this will get the news out to people who might not have realized it.
Speaker: I have said on multiple occasions that Silmarillion fanfic writers and cosplayers are so knowledgeable about Tolkien, they can just like cite things off the top of their head that I'm like, how do you even know that? That's like deep in Volume 9 of Home, my dude, what are you doing? Yeah, it's scary. It's so impressive. And almost all of the Silmarillion fanfic writers and cosplayers I know are queer, and I feel like they will greatly enjoy
Speaker: this anthology because, you know, queer people exist and we re -told him and we have thoughts. We have some great chapters on Silmarillion pieces. Yes, that's exciting. I'm so excited for this. You guys, I'm just so excited. Yeah. But we're thinking, yeah, what happens, we're looking forward to volume two
Speaker: Maybe we get another season of Rings of Power, a new version of Lord of the Rings, more queerness. Oh, man. There's a lot more to look at. Okay, I'm just getting too excited now. That's kind of a monkey's paw situation, but perhaps. My question to Steve, because you brought this up the other day, do you see yourself editing volume too? Because I have to tell you right off, I don't see myself doing a sequel to it. Various reasons.
Speaker: Well, maybe Chris is up for it to do it. Yeah, once Robin sees the huge windfall that comes up. I have this and I have the racist anthology that also has due dates in 2024.
Speaker: And after that, I am by gosh, going to turn my atheist animist and agnostics project into a book. Oh, nice. So that has to come first. So I could be a consultant for a reader if you guys go and do this. But, you know, I think you got to get Sarah Brown to be your your third editor. You like threesomes? Yeah. Yeah. Because you guys are already doing that. We are and I are already doing or co -authoring the
Speaker: race, gender, and other in Tolkien's Legendarium book that we're putting out together. So there's that. I am slowly working on gazing queerly, which is like a
Speaker: look at Tolkien's art, the illustrations, looking queerly at Tolkien's art illustrations, or illustrations by others on Tolkien's art. So there's a lot going on in the future. Oh, yes. So if you're looking at other people illustrating Tolkien's art and then other people's other artists as well on Tolkien. I feel like I don't need to point you towards the Nautogy and Cola.
Speaker: One of my long -term goals is I want him to do a painting of silver gifting for me. I want it so bad and I want it just as homoerotic as that picture of Frodo, Gollum and Sam. It would be amazing.
Speaker: Well, as we're kind of wrapping up, we're kind of already kind of getting into it. But what else would you like our listeners to know about in terms of your work? Is there anything else that you would like to talk about with what you're working on or what's coming up? And is there anything that you guys would like to plug in addition to the anthology to our listeners? Yes, please. Let me know how large of a new bookshelf I need to build. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Well, I'd like to encourage people I'm the area chair of the token studies area at Popular Culture Association, and their conference is in late March and 2024 the submissions are open Alicia is going to submit a proposal she's been she's been there before.
Speaker: It's great. I talk about it all the time. Which city is it in this year? Chicago. That's what I got. I believe it's on my birthday, so perhaps I need to give myself a birthday present of attending. So if people are interested, like I said, we'll be having sessions, and really the conferences are where the newest stuff happens. For example, when we set out the call for papers in 2017,
Speaker: We had two paper sessions at the 2018 popular culture, queer token one and queer token two. And not all, but most of the people who presented there are in the anthology.
Speaker: And we'd always, always be open for more. And Chris, part of the reason he can't come to pop culture very much is his University of Vermont coping conference is like always a week off pop culture, which is tough. But tell them about your, you're so good at, you're better at plugging it than I am.
Speaker: The University of Vermont, I've been organizing a Tolkien conference since 2004, when we had our first symposium in 2004 with Michael Droud and Jane Chance. And well, those are the two out of, and Matt Dickerson actually from Middlebury. And every year we've had amazing keynote speakers from Varelin Flieger and Tom Shippey and Jane Chance and many, many others. And some of them right here with Robin Reed, for example, as a keynote speaker. So yeah, we've been going strong and this April is our 20th.
Speaker: anniversary. Wow. Yeah. Dr. Sara Brown has like, you know, so very excited. Yeah. Wonderful. So just to reiterate, we are still doing work on this volume. So that's part project of the stuff we're doing. I'll just quickly add a project of mine strays away from Hogan, but is also, but it's still clear. I'm working on
Speaker: the opening day attractions at Epcot in 1982 as queer, as queer narratives. Tim is going to be so fucking upset he missed this recording. But Tim's obsessed with Disney. He worked at Epcot as a professional Canadian. That's awesome.
Speaker: Oh, that's amazing. I'm gonna have to tell him. Well, I mean, he'll hear it when he's editing this. Sorry, editing Tim. Yeah, that sounds great. That's fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker: So thank you all again for such a wonderful conversation. We've been saying it all evening, but we're so excited for this to come out and we're so excited for all of your other projects as well. There's so much goodness to come in Tolkien. It's a really exciting time to be a Tolkien nerd and an academic Tolkien nerd as well. So which of us should do the outro, do you think?
Speaker: I always like to have Alicia do it because Alicia's not good at it. Yeah, you do. I don't like doing the outro because I messed it up. Before we do that though, are there any social media things like Robin, your sub stack, anything like that that you want a chance to plug also? Go ahead and come in here.
Speaker: Yeah, the sub -stack, which I think you guys have, because that's where I decided I was going to put a whole bunch of stuff that I wanted to get out there and not have to wait for peer review scheduling. Because as you see with the anthology, peer -reviewed scholarship is not the fastest. So yeah, we're having a lot of fun over there. And I also, although I love PCA and have been doing it for a long time,
Speaker: I'm hoping I have a virtual conference because one of the things I think that's most important for coping studies, but academia in general is to make academic conferences more accessible in the ongoing pandemic and what the universities are pulling. So I have a virtual conference project there. So people who know of conferences like the Mythopoietic and other virtual conferences or hybrid conferences, I want people to send me that information so I can put it up there so we can circulate
Speaker: Thank you. I have no social media stuff to plug. Thanks for that opportunity. I barely remember my Facebook password. Yeah. I'd say a wise choice, probably. It's so much more done. Your choice. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: All right, please leave us a rating wherever you listen to us or on Facebook. We're getting pretty close to being able to show up a rating on our Facebook page. Please like, share, and subscribe. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or you can stream our episodes directly on Zencaster. That says zencaster .com slash queer lodgings is talking podcasts with hyphens in between all of those words. You can also find us and stream our episodes on queer lodgings .com, which is our
Speaker: sort of still newish website where you can find all of our resources that we mentioned in episodes. This one's going to be a bit of a heavy lift. Transcripts on our older episodes and all kinds of other goodies too. You can find us on Facebook at queer lodgings, Twitter for right now, at Twitter, not X, at queer underscore lodgings. And we have now joined blue sky at the behest of some of our Twitter fans.
Speaker: We are there at queer lodgings or you can send us an email at queer lodgings podcast at gmail .com. Thank you all. Thank you so much. So excited for everything.
Speaker: I'm still hearing a bit of an echo, but it's not as bad. Chris, go ahead and talk because I think I picked it up the most when you were talking. Okay, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing. Tolkien, queer Tolkien, queer queer queer Tolkien.
