Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Alicia, and I'm here with my usual co -host, Grace. Hello. And Leah. Hey, y 'all. And today we'd like to introduce you to Taylor Driggers. Hi, thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be here.
Speaker: Thank you so much for being here. Taylor is a scholar of fantasy literature, theology, gender, and sexuality, and the author of the new volume, Queering Faith and Fantasy Literature, Fantastic Incarnations in the Destruction of Theology, which discusses using fantasy to deconstruct Christianity. Thank you all for joining us today. Let's gather around the fire in Mediceld, ready to pass the mead cup to friends old and new as we ready ourselves for a new journey.
Speaker: Today we'll be discussing queer fantasy and the difference between books written specifically to be queer inclusive and reading queer themes into a
Speaker: traditional text. The latter of those two is what this podcast is all about. And it's somehow a bit of a taboo topic within Tolkien scholarship, where the war is still raging in the year of our Lord 2023 about authorial intent. I'd like to start with asking how one comes to do something as controversial yet so brave as to include the words faith and queer in a title. Given the
Speaker: current political climate in the US and parts of Europe aligning faith with any type of queerness seems a bit oxymoronic and maybe even dangerous. How did you come, Taylor, to study both theology and sexuality?" Well, that's such a great question, and it's also a huge question to start things off with.
Speaker: But basically the most simple answer is that those are both things that have impacted my life historically. I'm a queer person who has had various different relationships to Christianity throughout my life, but it has remained a constant subject of interest and often subject of strife in my own personal life. And so that that's partly where I come at both of those topics from.
Speaker: especially as somebody who grew up an evangelical Southern Baptist in the South, in the States, and then came to an understanding of my own queerness within my mid -20s. And finding the ways that those different things can collide with each other, can often enter into conflict with each other, can often enter into quite productive and generative conflict with each other, I think.
Speaker: but then also how they can speak to each other, how they can be mutually illuminating. And I think my relationship to studying theology and fantasy also plays a big part in that. So I did my undergrad degree at a Christian liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. And for my senior thesis project there, I decided to look at theology in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings,
Speaker: and Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idols of the King, and comparing and contrasting those as different kind of medievalist theological imaginaries. And so I've always been interested in that. It's the topic, theology and fantasy is the topic that I've kept coming back to in my scholarly work as well. But as I sort of started coming to more of a knowledge of my own queerness, my own sexuality,
Speaker: and my relationship to theology and to Christianity has sort of shifted and evolved and kind of changed shape within various different contexts. The way that I've explored that in fantasy within my scholarly work has also shifted quite a bit. And I think particularly this project, this book, which is adapted from my PhD thesis, it was born out of a frustration that I felt with a lot of theological
Speaker: scholarship on fantasy literature, particularly on the works of Tolkien and C .S. Lewis and a lot of what I like to call the usual suspects within theological studies of fantasy. And so I became very interested in finding alternate ways of talking about ways that we can read theology and fantasy that also reflected what I was experiencing and also reflected the positions that I came to theology from.
Speaker: and the ways in which I felt like queerness and faith were, again, speaking to each other, sometimes conflicting, but also in very interesting and productive ways in my own life. So that is a bit of a rambly response to that question. But it is, you know, I do have a very personal investment in both of those topics. And so that I feel like has kind of
Speaker: born out in the academic work that I do. No, that's perfect. Honestly, I ask that question because actually I don't know if it's come up on this podcast. I am from Georgia, if you couldn't tell from my voice. And I also grew up queer in the South. I didn't grow up evangelical, but what ended up happening to me growing up as a queer person in the South is I just rejected Christianity, wholesale and religion, also just a general wholesale.
Speaker: And studying Tolkien as an unapologetic atheist is sometimes very hard because there are so many people who come at it from a specifically fundamentalist Catholic kind of approach. And I think it is fascinating that someone is actually doing a religious bent research that I think is useful.
Speaker: in 2023. People have been talking about Catholicism and Tolkien for 50 years at this point. Let's move on to do something new. Totally. I have a similar background. I grew up Evangelical Christian in Texas and very closeted queer. I
Speaker: kind of didn't even come to understand my own queerness until about my mid -20s or so. And I've had kind of a similar sort of relationship with Christianity. I kind of went completely 90 degrees and turned to
Speaker: animism and paganism for my spirituality but it's sort of like that question of faith and sort of I guess thinking about spirituality is something that I'm always kind of returning to and I'm deeply interested in like the history, the early histories of early Christianity and you know I engage with a lot of folks who study Christianity and Tolkien from a non -Christian perspective so like you know speaking with you Taylor is like this is like
Speaker: totally like my swimming pool of interest. And I'm like, I think there's a lot of complicated stuff to explore. I'm decidedly not Christian, but I feel like I know more about it than a lot of these folks who are actually producing these works about Tolkien and his Catholicism in particular.
Speaker: I mean, part of that is just having gone to art school, right? But the history of Christianity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like Alicia and I are both art school refugees, I guess, and survivors. So it's pretty difficult to to avoid the history of Christianity, for sure. I think that's one of the pieces that I am so delighted by in the research that you're doing, Taylor, is that the
Speaker: Christianity religion has acted on queer people for centuries, millennia, longer than we've had the terminology that we currently use today. And I'm really fascinated by scholarship and research that doesn't just cede the idea of being able to interrogate any of those themes or histories or anything to the purview of heteronormative society.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely. And I think that's another one of the reasons why I'm kind of invested in this research, even as my relationship to Christianity and Christian theology continues to change and evolve. And at the moment, it's in a place where I'm feeling like it's definitely in flux. But it's also one of those things where, as you said, Grace, because Christianity has often
Speaker: acted upon queer people, whether we desire it to or not, that there's a sense in which it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. And because it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, what are the ways that we can stay with that and inhabit some kind of a subversive space within that? And I think fantasy has an opportunity to really do some radical things in reimagining
Speaker: the structure of that in re -imagining doctrines and subversively working through particularly thorny areas within theology that I'm sure we'll get into in a little bit more depth with regard to fantasies, just queer potential more broadly later on in this podcast. But yeah, that's something that I feel very strongly about is that, okay, well, this isn't going away anytime soon. So, so what do we do with all of that? You know, how, how do we.
Speaker: respond as queer people. Yeah. So last summer you gave a presentation called Making Visible Notes on Queering Fantasy Canons, which I think gathers together a lot of really fascinating thoughts on what a queer canon would look like, how we might define it. And I think that you engage a lot with what we have referred to before as reader response theory, which is for listeners
Speaker: It's the importance that the reader themselves has in constructing the meaning of a text. This is pretty much what this podcast is all about, obviously. We're pretty big fans of radio response theory. So the paper is a really great read, Taylor, and I love that you engage straight up and say in the tradition of queer theory, these thoughts are just going to muddy the waters further.
Speaker: because I love that because queerness is inherently muddy and messy and evades clarity and definition. So what was it that first drew you to ask about whether there is such a thing as a, you know, canon of queer fantasy and how queerness might manifest in a text? I think I first became really interested in these questions of definition, these questions of
Speaker: kind of curating canons of queer fantasy and what we even define as queer fantasy. As I was approaching the end of my PhD, and I started noticing when I would attend conferences that there would be many moments where conversations about the history of queerness and fantasy would arise. And it felt like everyone had a different narrative of what exactly that history was.
Speaker: I think one of the really interesting things about fantasy academia is that it has such a close proximity to fantasy fandom as well. Often, fandom spaces historically were the only places where academic studying fantasy could present their academic work on fantasy and have it taken seriously. So fandom spaces have been a really important space for critical inquiry into fantasy where academia may be
Speaker: up until very, very recently hasn't been. And I think that's very, very interesting and great for a number of reasons. It's fantastic for public engagement with scholarship and building connections that might not otherwise arise within other academic fields. But with that, it also shores up some potential issues of communication. And I think one of the ways that that
Speaker: emerges or one of the ways that I started noticing that emerging at a lot of these conferences and symposiums that I was presenting at and engaging in conversations with other people at was that, for instance, I would get up and start talking about Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which is a novel published in 1969 that I think really speaks to a lot of contemporary queer concerns still
Speaker: And then I would be talking to a person who had an idea of queer fantasy as emerging in the 1990s. And then there would be another person who would say, well, we really haven't had a lot of good queer fantasy until maybe the early 2010s. And I think what often happened was we were all approaching the texts from different perspectives and with different interpretive frameworks in mind. And what would often happen is we would end up talking past each other.
Speaker: in these conversations. And so I think that was the point where I became really interested in really putting on paper, you know, what what do I think is a queer mode of historicizing fantasy? And again, I don't think I really arrived at a definitive answer. I think I did arrive at a place that is a lot messier. But I think that in kind of diving into that mess and diving into some of the questions that
Speaker: really thinking about queerness and its relationship to literature and its relationship to the history of a genre and what a genre can do with queerness. I think it still leads us down some really interesting avenues that are worth paying attention to and worth staying with and cultivating just as we think about not just scholarly study, but how do we read within queer communities and how
Speaker: do we function as communities of interpretation that actually produce meaning when it comes to approaching a text? So yeah, that was what I started to notice was just a lot of those conversations where it felt like we weren't entirely on the same page or we were talking past each other and then thinking about how to come at that from somebody who is equally interested in fantasy and also queer theory.
Speaker: That's really interesting to me. One of the conferences I go to is the Popular Culture Association of America's conference, their national conference, because they have a really good Tolkien studies area. And most of the people who are talking about queerness and Tolkien are honestly, they're talking about fan fiction most of the time. Like I have had my eyes opened over the past like five or six years so much to
Speaker: fan fiction because so many people study it. Occasionally we'll get somebody who's doing a queer reading of a specific part of The Lord of the Rings, but almost exclusively it's fans and fan fiction and fan art that's being discussed in terms of queerness. Have you looked into any of that? Because it seems like most of what you're doing is primary text. A lot of it is primary text, although I will say I do have a funny anecdote about fan fiction, which is that
Speaker: A couple of years ago, I spoke on a panel at Oxenmoot, which is a Tolkien society conference. I spoke on a panel on new voices and Tolkien scholarship, and immediately right after the panel, Una McCormack slid into my DMs, just have you read this queer erotic fan fiction? And she's great because she's a figure who kind of inhabits all three of those worlds, who inhabits
Speaker: you know, the world of fan fiction and fandom, the world of academia, and also the world of original fiction creation as well. You know, she is a creative practitioner within fantasy and science fiction too, but it was just such a funny encounter and such a wonderful kind of moment that emerged out of that panel. But yeah, a lot of the work that I do is concerned with primary text. I do have colleagues who are really, really into
Speaker: fandom studies and fan fiction, but it's not something that I really specialize in as my main area of study. It's just something that's kind of on my radar, on the periphery.
Speaker: Yeah, like I wonder now if the reason why people study that is something you mentioned in this talk is about how things are identifiably queer, like they're queer because some of the main characters are like explicitly queer as opposed to like a queer reading of a text. I wonder if people have a tendency to focus on that because it's easily identifiable as queer.
Speaker: I think that's something that is, it's a really understandable tendency, right? And it's something that I think about when I'm seeking out texts for study. I'm working right now on a project focusing on the kind of rhetorics and poetics of
Speaker: male homoerotic desire and religious devotion and how those things can come together in fantasy. And when I'm trying to identify source texts for that, I absolutely use a lot of those databases, a lot of the lists that people curate, just because it's often a convenient way of looking at, here's something that's likely to have something related to what I'm researching. And I think it is interesting that fantasy and science fiction studies
Speaker: have been literary fields that tend to focus heavily on the representation side of things. I don't fully know completely why that is other than just coming back to that idea of the proximity between academic study and fandom and people tend to study things that they are fans of and people tend to like to be fans of things that offer an easy mode of identification or mode of
Speaker: recognition, I suppose, for them. And that's something that I completely understand. But it's also one of those things where I think because there's been so much focus on that within the scholarship, something that we've maybe left behind a little bit is how do we apply queer reading methods to text, whether they are overtly, legibly queer or not. My thinking around this has been shaped a lot by
Speaker: actually one of my former master's students. And last summer, I was supervising a dissertation project that they were working on. Shout out to Kate Fry, by the way, if you're listening. But she was working on a dissertation project on queer normativity in fantasy fiction. And as part of that, she came up with this idea that she termed mimetic queerness. In other words, are characters in this text queer in the same way that somebody would be queer in our world?
Speaker: Is that queerness legible according to the ways that we detect or evaluate or interpret queerness in our world? Or is the queerness located in some element of the fantasy, the secondary world, that differs even from queer identities in our world? Is it doing something else or presenting an alternative way of understanding gender and sexuality?
Speaker: And I've stuck with that because I find it a really handy way of thinking about different ways of encountering queerness and fantasy. Are we recognizing something as mimetic queerness, as something that's queer in the way that we would understand it in our world? Or is there something else going on there? Is there something in the world building or in the way that we perceive or interpret or respond to certain events in the text that
Speaker: is making it read as queer to us. Taylor, in that paper you asked, and you kind of touched on it now, what I feel is a really important and captivating question. By what criteria are we to judge that queer sexualities are or are not explicitly present in a given text, given the histories of censorship and visibility and secrecy often attached to depictions of queer desire, presentation, and embodiment in literature?
Speaker: So, and how else might queerness manifest in a text? My question is, what did you find as you looked into sort of the historiography of queer canon in fantasy? And why do these questions matter so much? Well, I think I'm going to take the first part of that question first, just because I think a lot of what I have found is that there just still has been a lot of focus on overt representation, again, for understandable reasons.
Speaker: within the literature. I think the reason why it matters to me to kind of expand our idea of how queerness can manifest in a text or to maybe look at multiple ways that that can be the case is because of a lot of those historical factors, you know, that there have been so many texts and authors that exist in this kind of state of either closetedness or censorship or
Speaker: some other reason for needing to conceal an overt form of queerness. But also, along with that, I think fantasy itself has such amazing potential for articulating queerness in ways that don't need to be overt. So a text that I often like to refer back to, and I referred to it, I think, briefly in
Speaker: that paper is a novel by Hope Merleys called Blood in the Mist. This is an early 20th century fantasy text published in 1926. It's really interested in, so basically the premise of the novel is that there's this country that exists on the borders of fairy land, and it's in the early stages of developing a mercantile capitalist economic system.
Speaker: And through that process, it has sort of closed its borders off from fairy land. And specifically, it has banned the traffic in fairy fruit. And fairy fruit is associated with a very kind of melancholic, but also very joyful artistic sensibility, strength of emotion. It's also strongly associated with death within the text.
Speaker: And I love this novel because I think it has so many insightful things to say about queerness and about existing as queer, about the fluidity and situational nature of queerness as well. And I think it's such a remarkable text. You know, it's written by Hope Merlies, who was a lesbian. She had a relationship with the classic scholar, Jane Harrison, that if you read author bios of her
Speaker: actually still tends to be spoken of in quite euphemistic terms. But I really - Just gals being pals. It's so funny. I teach this novel all the time and inevitably when I bring this up, students will go gals being gal pals. But yeah, I think it's such an insightful text about queerness that doesn't
Speaker: contain any overt depictions of queerness, and yet also doesn't really need to, because it is a text that's largely about euphemism, about the ways that we deny the presence of queerness, even when it's staring us in the face, about how queerness, again, as I say in the paper, exists everywhere that it shouldn't. It kind of flies under the radar and it exists in places where it's thought not to exist.
Speaker: And the hiddenness of queerness within the text itself, I think enriches a reading of what it's commenting on in that sense. So I think fantasy is a mode of writing that can not just allow us to smuggle in queerness under the radar euphemistically, but it can actually help us to
Speaker: enrich and widen our understanding of what queerness is. It allows us to use language that's not normally available to us when we're talking about our day -to -day lives, to imagine how our lives are, but also how our lives could be, the kinds of worlds that we could build as well. So yeah, I think it's really interesting that there's been
Speaker: a lot of work done about the queer potential of fantasy, and I think a lot of work that is still yet to be done about that.
Speaker: Oh, I want to jump in here really quick because what you just said sounds an awful lot like Tolkien's vision of recovery that he talks about in On Fairy Stories, that you're put into a fantastic world to start seeing the primary world in a different way. And I this just makes me think more and more that Tolkien is an inherently queer writer, which is
Speaker: going to get me in trouble in some conferences. Oh, in trouble. Yeah. Good kind of trouble. Yeah. I don't know if you've read Jane Chance's book, Tolkien Self and Other, This Queer Creature, but that's very much the argument that she makes in that text, that Tolkien is just inherently interested in the queer things that jar with our habitual
Speaker: way of encountering things in the primary world. And yeah, I completely agree. I think recovery is such a powerful, it can be a powerful queer tool because it can defamiliarize and unsettle things that we just take for granted and constructions of reality that we tacitly accept or that become perpetuated and imposed upon other people and enforced.
Speaker: And I think the recovery of fantasy is, it has such potential to be a form of resistance to that.
Speaker: I'm fascinated by the idea of recognizing and constructing the queer fantasy canon also. We've obliquely touched on some of the different ways that it is difficult to identify these things in previous writings and writings from other eras and other non -Western civilizations and things like that because of how criminalized or shunned or what have you.
Speaker: the process of discussing this has been. It's only, and I would imagine the last few decades, really, that you, Taylor, can do scholarly research on this topic and own that your interest is not merely academic, that you have an investment in this personally as a researcher who has a queer identity.
Speaker: So I'm utterly fascinated by that. And within about 10 minutes of the time that I was reading a draft of your paper in order to prepare for this podcast, a friend had sent me a quote from a book. It was published in 1998, and it's called Pages Passed From Hand to Hand. And there's a quote that I wanted to pull out from there.
Speaker: The author here had said, for even if like Proust and Wilde, you have super sensitive antennae, a capacity to detect even the faintest stirrings of homosexual longing. The fact is that you are living in a world where the vast majority of readers and critics are so unfamiliar with the signs that they can hurry through an account of homosexual love fare as uncompromised as that in Baird, Taylor's, Joseph and his friend and not even register what it means.
Speaker: And I know that there are points that you talked about in that paper of things that arguably belong in queer fantasy canon that do get overlooked, that we haven't necessarily all had the ability to access and delve into and see how all of that
Speaker: connects because it has been so fractured and so underground for so long. So are there any particular texts that you want to make a case for in that that we should have a familiarity with or that it would be delightful to be able to go back and read and make sure that we have an awareness and familiarity?
Speaker: Well, one that I'm going to advocate for, just because it's also been just very prominent on people's radar in the past couple of years because of the recent film, is Circa Wayne and the Green Knight, which I think has such an interesting and playful, arguably, relationship to queerness and queer desire and the way that it kind of plays with and subverts
Speaker: the rules of medieval courtly love towards queer ends, where Sir Gawain finds himself at the castle of Lord and Lady Bertilak and strikes up a deal with them that whatever he receives in that house, he will give back to the Lord of the house in kind. And throughout his stay there, the Lady Bertilak keeps trying to seduce him and keeps showering him with kisses and
Speaker: Gawain is placed in a double bind because he can't accept her advances. You know, he can't infringe upon this marriage. That would not be the honorable thing to do. But he also has to return the kisses in kind to Lord Bertilak. And you get the impression reading the poem that he's actually kind of enjoying that. And they do enter this kind of strangely playful but intimate
Speaker: relationship made even more complex by the fact that Lord Bertilak is in fact the Green Knight. So that's one that I think has just been very prominent on people's radar recently. In terms of fantasy texts themselves, I think one that people tend to overlook quite a bit, again, it's another Arthurian one, is T .H. White's The Once and Future King, which I think in the figure of Sir Lancelot has such a poignant
Speaker: You know, again, to me, very personally resonant depiction of queer desire that is not acknowledged as queer, even by the person who is desiring, but that desire is still very palpable within the text. And it complicates the love triangle dynamic between King Arthur, Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot. Because not only is Sir Lancelot in love with Guinevere, he's also in love with Arthur.
Speaker: And the reason why he became a Knight of the Round Table in White's version is because he's in love with Arthur. And then finally, another series that I wanted to just highlight as one that is very influential, but one that I don't see enough people talking about is Samuel Delaney's Navarion series, which is a sword and sorcery series published between the late 1970s and mid -1980s.
Speaker: by Samuel Delaney, who people don't know is a black, gay, science fiction and fantasy author. And he's really interesting because he's very invested in reader response and in what Eve Sedgwick would call reparative reading of finding these literary traditions that are
Speaker: historically very antagonistic towards him and hostile towards him and seeing if there's a way that he can break them open and reinvent them and find something of meaning and also find something subversive within them. So the Navarion series, broadly speaking, tells the story of an ongoing slave rebellion within this fictional world.
Speaker: But it also has a lot of interesting things to say about the relationship between queer desire, race, power, economics. The third volume in the series, Flight from Navarion, is also recognized as one of the first American literary works to tackle the AIDS crisis. There's a portion of that text that keeps pivoting between Delaney's own chronicling of
Speaker: his life during the AIDS crisis in New York City as it's happening and an eerily similar pandemic that is happening within the fictional world that he has created. It's a hugely important series and it doesn't show up on people's lists, I think, nearly enough in terms of, you know, for how influential it is as a work of queer fantasy literature. So that's kind of three different ones. That's, you know, a
Speaker: taproot text from the Middle Ages that informs a lot of contemporary fantasy and then looking at an early 20th century fantasy work that I think has really important queer subtexts and arguably text. I think Lancelot's desire in T .H. White almost comes to the level of text and then an explicitly queer work that I think has been very, very influential in the genre.
Speaker: I just want to throw out real quick, if you haven't read Spear by Nicola Griffith yet, she's taking on the Percival story, but it goes really heavily into, well, Percival's gender bent, but it goes really heavily into the Lancelot, Guinevere, Arthur triad. It was very good. That sounds really good. Thanks for calling me out, Alicia. I bought it on your recommendation, but I haven't read it yet.
Speaker: Read Hilled first. Yeah, I have Hilled on my bookshelf. I need to read at some point.
Speaker: just because it's extremely my shit, but yeah. Very good. Spear is a lot shorter, easier to get through, but man, Hild is so good. I gave them both to myself for Christmas, so. Well, I was going to say that like the subtext of the Lancelot Guinevere Arthur story is also kind of given to explicit text in Guy Gabriel Kay's Pionafar tapestry.
Speaker: any of y 'all have read that. It's been a really long time since I read it, but, you know, spoiler alert, I guess, for a 30 -year -old book or trilogy, but it basically ends with, you know, it's the three of them, we kind of go off to heaven together as hand in hand in hand. So you talking about the Once and Future King kind of brought to mind reading that and kind of
Speaker: having that kind of body sort of experience where I was like, oh, that's something that I was feeling when I was reading The Once and Future King, and here it is kind of explicit, which I kind of wanted to touch back on that because something that I really responded to in your presentation
Speaker: was where you say, querying fantasy's canons may involve similarly intuitive searches for kinship in places where it is presumed not to appear in textual encounters unmarked by specific identity designations, but toward which, nonetheless, inexorably drawn, perhaps as queer readers, it is best to approach fantasy with an emphasis on its ability to draw our attention to what is otherwise unsayable,
Speaker: illegible or taboo about our bodies and desires. And I love that sort of like bodily experience that we have sort of as queer people encountering a text and kind of drawing out the queerness in a text with our bodies and kind of having the act of reading being a really intuitive kind of, you know, full body sense.
Speaker: So I was really responding to that. And I was kind of wondering if you could expand a little bit more about some of what you were saying about, like, what is unnameable and what is kind of unsayable, but nonetheless deeply felt. Yeah. So I think one of the things that I love about queer reading strategies is that they really do expand on a lot of the insights from reader response theory, where queer reading and a lot of strands of queer reading anyway, say,
Speaker: Look, forget how you feel like you're supposed to be reading this text. How are you actually reacting to it? How are you feeling about the text when you're engaging with it? And also, are there important things that can be gained even from strong misreadings of a text? When we're having just an intuitive reaction to a text that we
Speaker: ostensibly shouldn't be having or that's ostensibly the wrong way of reading a text. I think this is where we kind of get into some of the conflicts that exist within Tolkien studies about authorial intent versus reader response. And I think that's really important. I think it's really, yeah, it's, I lost my train of thought there.
Speaker: But I just quickly, I think that one of the reasons why that is something that is so hammered into us that we're reading the text the wrong way is because how literature in English is taught and specifically in America, like in secondary school, you are very much
Speaker: trying to read a specific way into a text and I think probably as queer people I had a really hard time with that because my teacher would be like oh well the curtains are blue because the characters sad and I'm like that's not how I read it at all.
Speaker: Maybe the curtains are blue because the character likes boys. Maybe the curtains are just blue. Yeah. The curtains are blue because the gentleman down the street had blue curtains and our main character finds that gentleman attractive, okay? Oh, you like blue curtains. I like blue curtains too. Yeah, but I think, yeah, it's interesting. So I think that's my main kind of takeaway from
Speaker: kind of applying queer reading strategies is to really think about the reactions that we ourselves are having when we encounter a text. And the example that I kind of root this in, in the paper, and I think just generally it's the reason why I feel as strongly as I do about broadening our methods and strategies of interpretation from queer standpoints.
Speaker: is I have such strong memories of reading the Lord of the Rings as a teenager. And I have a very similar experience to you, Leah. I was not able to come to terms with my queerness until I had left the South and was in my mid -20s. And I have such a distinct memory, though, of reading the passage in the two towers where Sam is making Stu and watching Frodo sleep.
Speaker: meditating on his face and his attraction to and desire for that face and his love for Frodo. And I remembered having such a visceral, almost bodily reaction to that of longing, of I want some part of that. That represents something that I want, that I can't name. And I think it's interesting being
Speaker: very strongly evangelical at that point and closeted and just not explicitly desiring a queer life at all at that point. I don't know how I would have responded if that had been an explicitly queer moment. And I think it's something that I think I would have been resistant to had it been. But because it was
Speaker: non -explicit because it was subtextual or subtext that I was at least identifying in the text, whether or not that was the intended reading. That was a moment of kinship that was accessible to me as the person that I was in that moment. And I think that's so important as well to really honor that experience of
Speaker: not being able to name what you're desiring. I think there's such a rich archive of experiences that can be found there if we really honor that and try to give voice to that and hold open a space for it, to hold a space for things that we maybe can't define, can't really put other words to in any other way. Another aspect of this, I think, as it
Speaker: relates to fantasy specifically is that fantasy, of course, is able to present us with all kinds of different bodies and bodies in all kinds of different combinations. So a series of texts that I talk about in my book a lot is Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, which features characters who are simultaneously human and dragon. And they often occupy this kind of marginal space with regard to gender.
Speaker: in that text. And I think that's so, it's such a potent way of thinking through the ways that our bodies are supposed to be versus the ways that our bodies actually do change shape and show up in places where they're ostensibly not supposed to, especially if we're queer, you know, they show up in combinations that we were told they're not supposed to and move in ways that they're not supposed to.
Speaker: I just gave a lecture earlier this week on monstrosity in literature, and I think monsters in fantasy can be such a great way of reclaiming bodily otherness and celebrating it. So that's another aspect of that related to fantasy specifically. We don't even necessarily have to relate to human characters. There's other forms of embodiment available to us through fantasy that can be really ripe for exploration and ripe for
Speaker: Again, attending to how we respond to that. How do we take stock of our reactions to seeing those things on the page?
Speaker: I feel like such a common experience with a lot of queer fans, especially in Tolkien, and among Disney fans, is how much queer coding there is in various villains, especially in Disney films. But I have these experiences speaking with fans who are big Sauron fans, right? And who are absolutely, absolutely fascinated by him.
Speaker: And other people get very weirded out and upset by it because you're not supposed to identify with the villain, right? And it's like the response I always have to these people is like, you're not queer, are you? Because we find ourselves in villains. We find ourselves in monsters so often.
Speaker: It's been codified with the case code and everything. Visual depiction in film has required that the only place we could exist is in villainry. And in monstrosity. And it's like kind of coming back to that line of like we sort of find ourselves in places we're not supposed to be. And that's what kind of brings that to my mind. And again, it kind of brings back to mind, you know, some of
Speaker: the resistance that there is in Tolkien to reader response. And again, this sort of like reading this, this queerness that, you know, we feel deep in our bodies and we can see ourselves, but people get very resistant to it. And again, kind of stack on the monstrosity in, you know, in how they perceive us.
Speaker: Which kind of brings us to something that you talked about in your paper. You noted that the Tolkien Professor podcast, Corey Olsen, who went out of his way to explicitly dismiss queer readings of Lord of the Rings, particularly that relationship between Frodo and Sam, which I also had a very visceral body.
Speaker: queer response to in your paper you say Corey Olsen claims that a reading of the relationship between Frodo and Sam as romantic quote desecrates the text vision of a chaste platonic male intimacy and I was wondering if you could say a little bit more there because I
Speaker: Yeah. Gladly. It's interesting because I've gone back and forth on my use of the word desecrates because it isn't the word that Olson himself uses. But I do in a sense think it is subtextually implied possibly by his positioning of these different readings in relation to each other. And I wrote a Twitter thread about this at the time where I just said, you know,
Speaker: I also used to really admire and stick up for Tolkien's depiction of profound intimacy between men. And then it just turned out I actually just wanted to have sex with men. That's my jokey response to that. It is an honest response as well, because that for the longest time used to be one of the talking points I used to hit on.
Speaker: about what I respond to in Tolkien. But I think it's interesting how those readings are always positioned in competition or conflict with each other, where I don't see a conflict existing. And I was talking about this not long ago with my colleague Mariana Rios Maldonado.
Speaker: who you should totally have on the podcast. She's a brilliant Tolkien scholar. She's on her wish list. Yeah, she's fantastic. But she pointed out that even if we take that reading at face value as a depiction of platonic male intimacy, it's still different from what we see normally in heterosexual male friendships. It still transgresses the limits of what is acceptable
Speaker: within modern heterosexual masculinity. And so on those grounds, even if we don't read it as romantic or sexual, it can still arguably be read as queer in some sense. And I think it's, again, so interesting that reading for authorial intent boxes you into a
Speaker: vision of the text that is just singular, that anything outside that reading of the text has to supplant that reading. When I don't think they need to be, I think we can hold multiple readings of the text together. I've encountered multiple people who also read Frodo and Sam as asexual as well, and that's a reading that I think
Speaker: you can absolutely hold together with other of your reading of the text. Yeah, Frodo, definitely. Maybe more difficult to read the text.
Speaker: Yes. Cannon. Cannon. Coming out strongly in favor of Sam fucking. Want to do a demisexual reading of Sam? Demisexual reading of Sam? I think that's definitely available. Demisexual reading of Sam I'm here for. Yeah. As the demisexual I'm here for all those readings. And I love, we can coexist. I hold all of them.
Speaker: You know, like I see the validity of all of those. We contain multitudes, you guys. Yeah, absolutely. Again, the beauty of queerness is that, you know, we're always I think queer is such a wonderful word because it means that it's not the final word. There's always more to be said and more to discover the way that we're often mysteries to ourselves even and can surprise ourselves in what we desire or what we pursue.
Speaker: in our lives. But yeah, that notion, we can hold all those different readings together and they don't need to be in conflict with each other is something that I feel very strongly about. Yeah, one of the things that really kills me about people who specifically about Tolkien want to dive into authorial intent is that these are people who don't subscribe to read a response theory because they think it's postmodernism and therefore useless.
Speaker: But the whole reason we know anything about Tolkien's authorial intent is because he wrote it down and therefore you are interpreting it as you read it. So you have your own inclination of what his authorial intent is because none of us live in his brain and therefore none of us know what his actual authorial intent is.
Speaker: And to just dismiss something like that close relationship between Frodo and Sam as being like, oh yeah, they were just friends. When you actually read some of the stuff that Tolkien writes about his relationship with his Batman, it is also bordering on queer, if not overtly queer. The profound love and respect he had for this subordinate person,
Speaker: That's not unusual in that particular period of history. One of the things that always just gets my goat and makes me go drag out my soapbox is when people have an argument that you can't have a reading of Sam and Frodo that's in any way queer because, well, history, it's just based on the relationship between officers and their Batman and all of this.
Speaker: Hi. Have we not read history? Are we not familiar with what's going on in the trenches? Okay. Yeah. Have we not read Wilfred Owen and Secret Sassoon at any rate? And just like Tolkien only hung out with dudes.
Speaker: Homosocial is how people generally characterize Tolkien. He only, as an adult, basically only hung out with female students who he was helping and his wife. Different when he was a child, he had a lot more feminine influence on his life, but his entire friend group were just a bunch of dudes that hung out. And a not insignificant portion of those female students were, in fact, queer women.
Speaker: Yes. Whose books he recommended. And a lot of the dudes he hung out with were queer men. You know, he and W .H. Auden had a very lively correspondence going on following the publication of The Lord of the Rings. So Tolkien's social sphere was, in fact, incredibly queer. The artist Molly Ostertag did a fantastic write up about this a few years back, talking about Tolkien's queer influences and queer social sphere.
Speaker: And yeah, incredibly queer in terms of the people that he spent time with and respected as fellow scholars and authors. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think that even reading it just for authorial intent and saying that there's absolutely no way it could potentially be queer is short -sighted at best. And also just dismissive of modern lenses of literary criticism. And I don't understand why so many people have such a hard problem with that other than the fact that it maybe shakes or moors a little bit. I wanted to pick up on something that you said, Alicia, about
Speaker: Tolkien's own letters and his writing about his own intent itself being a text that you need to interpret and extrapolate from. And it just reminded me of something that John DiCaputo, who is a deconstructive theologian, often says. And he talks about this in relationship to the Bible in particular. He says that if you really want to find out what a text says, put it on the table, closed.
Speaker: and wait for it to just impart its meaning to you. And eventually you find that it doesn't actually say anything. The work of reading and the work of interpreting is what creates the meaning in the text. And that's such a good way of encapsulating reader response theory and why it matters and why we can't really get away from it. There's always that step of interpreting the text, even if we're not perceiving that as we're doing it.
Speaker: Yeah, like in art school, I went for visual art and we are taught to view art as a dialogue from the artist to the painting and then from the painting to the
Speaker: viewer. So like both parts of that are important. I come at Tolkien studies in a way where I don't think that authorial intent should necessarily be completely thrown out. And that's kind of a controversial take. But I also think that reader responses equally, if not more important than the authorial intent. And I think that the way that those two things
Speaker: the dance that they make together is what makes the art and what makes the meaning. Yeah, I'm weird. I'm kind of stuck between two critical views there. I don't think it's contradictory, though. Yeah, I like that. It's a conversation, right? The entire work is like, it's a conversation. I think Chuck Tingle actually was talking about this.
Speaker: some time ago. World treasure, Chuck Tingle. And he was sort of talking about how, you know, you as the audience, the recipient of a piece of art, I guess, you're actually a creative co -participant in that creation, you know.
Speaker: The art that emerges is kind of more than the sum of its parts, which is the actual, maybe physical piece and the person who created it and the person who is perceiving it. And I've always loved that that kind of like, you know, it's this experience, the is what emerges out of the text is it's
Speaker: at least three parties, basically, you know, and what emerges between an author and a reader is ultimately what that art really is. To kind of bring it back, to bring a little bit of the theology back into it, actually, we were talking a little bit as we were preparing for this episode about the kinship that we feel with texts and how we feel like we, when we encountered queer texts, we're kind of encountering
Speaker: somebody who is, we're forging an intimacy with that text. I have a really good friend who does a lot of work around queer and trans readings of medieval theology, and he specifically is really interested in the way that medieval people engaged with the notion of the incarnation within illuminated manuscripts. And one of the things that he has pointed out is that
Speaker: manuscripts were themselves printed on vellum, which is made from animal skins. So when you are seeing depictions of Christ, you're encountering that literally through the medium of skin. And what does that mean for then the intimacy that you feel with that text and how you're meditating on the doctrine of the incarnation in that way? So that notion of intimacy with God,
Speaker: becomes very, very real in the intimacy that is being mediated through the medium of skin in the text. That's fascinating. That's such a cool metaphor to me for thinking about ways that queer texts, again, that idea of queer reading being very embodied, about engaging with this textual object as an embodied person and the
Speaker: reactions that you're having to it, and also whether we can think about that engagement with the text as a kind of relationship in some way.
Speaker: Yeah, you gave a really great quote from Eve Sokovsky Sedgwick. That kind of speaks to this, I think. The quote is, the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture of both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival.
Speaker: We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn't line up tightly with each other and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love.
Speaker: I love the idea that we sort of have this embodied investment in these works and what we invest is kind of a full -bodied experience of fascination and love. And I don't know that line that kind of really stuck out to me as like you were saying, as like a queer person having a kind of a full body embodied experience with a text and how we sort of invest these texts
Speaker: with love for ourselves and a sense of survival. And we kind of, there's a reason that we respond so fervently to these readings. It's kind of like, it kind of gives us a chance to love ourselves. At least that's kind of been my experience with Tolkien and kind of seeing, being able to kind of see myself even if I couldn't really name it at the time.
Speaker: kind of gave me a place, foundation to hold myself with a lot more tenderness and a lot more love. That honestly reminds me a little bit of when you're watching the special features of fellowship, when Ian McKellen is talking about making sure that that handhold happens between Freddo and Sam and how he saw that in the text and other people are going to be looking for it in the text.
Speaker: I think one of the reasons why those movies are so successful is because they had Ian McKellen there making sure that some of that queer subtext actually made it to the screen. I mean, the position of recognizing that there are going to be people looking for it and that it would be easy for other people to overlook.
Speaker: And that tension, I mean, that's what we've been talking about all the way along here with the texts that are explicitly queer or that are subtextually queer and all of that, and the difficulty in knowing, recognizing, and accessing a queer canon. And I also love that because it's an example where reader response actually becomes intent in the way that the text is reinterpreted and recontextualized.
Speaker: Another example of this, we were talking about monstrosity earlier. Have people here seen the performance that Sasha Velour gave where she is performing as Gollum? Yes. Yeah. It is absolutely brilliant. It's one of the best things I've ever seen. The way that that performance recontextualizes the character of Gollum and
Speaker: the way it plays with the surveillance that Gollum is under as somebody who has been taken in by the ring and is under the surveillance of the Eye of Sauron, to me is so fascinating. Sasha Velouris is one of my favorite drag performers because she embraces the abject, the villainous, the monstrous in her drag. And I felt like that was such an amazing reinterpretation
Speaker: of Tolkien that I think is actually doing some pretty smart reading of the text and thinking about Gollum as a figure who exists in relation to the closet, for instance, or in relation to discourses of representation of queer monstrosity. So yeah, if you haven't seen it, you can just Google Sasha Velour Gollum and it will be one of the first results that comes up. It's amazing.
Speaker: lip syncs one of the scenes from the Peter Jackson films and then does a lip sync of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights as Gollum. It's wonderful and hilarious and strangely poignant and I just love it.
Speaker: Yeah, it is excellent. I'm gonna have to check that out. Kind of going back to Proto and Sam's relationship and just like subtext of queerness in Tolkien. Taylor, you quote Jess Baddis, their essay Gazing Upon Sauron.
Speaker: And they say, any academic reading that imagines the Lord of the Rings is a sexless text, an impolitic text, a text without desire, has obviously missed the moments of longing, intimacy, and desire articulated in acts of looking and touch between unlikely combinations of characters. That really stood out to me.
Speaker: because of the wistfulness and longing that pervades that entire text. Like, I think is probably one of the most important themes is that longing. And there are so many longing looks in those books. And it really, we were talking about Sir Gawain earlier, it really hits that courtly love kind of thing. And Tolkien would have been aware of that and
Speaker: One of my favorite pairings is Legolas and Gimli, and I'm thinking in terms of the context of longing here, as Gimli is talking so poetically about the caves, and Legolas is talking so poetically, longingly about the trees, and then they travel to these places to see the places where each other's longing is situated.
Speaker: Hmm. That's beautiful. And as you say, Alicia, Tolkien is aware of what a journey means. He's aware of what longing means in the tradition of courtly love and storytelling and all of that. And we are also very aware of that. Yes, very aware. Like Frodo and Sam seem to be like babies for a ship.
Speaker: Because it is so overt in the narrative and then you start doing queerships and then it just starts getting kind of out of hand. It's so interesting, you know, we were talking about looking at queering texts as this kind of way of paying attention to our responses to the text and as recognition. But I think that other thing that notion of Frodo and Sam as being a kind of gateway to queer shipping
Speaker: touches on is querying as a mode of insisting upon our presence within the text as well, of insisting upon, no, I'm going to read the text this way and how that in itself can be a very powerful kind of counter discourse to conservative readings or readings that are very much focused on authorial intent or focused on maintaining a specific image of the author
Speaker: queer reading as saying, I am going to read it this way anyway, I think is really, really powerful. Again, I come at that from the position of doing queer theology, which very much starts from the understanding that if we don't insist upon our presence within this tradition, no one's going to do that for us. That work, whether that's fair or unfair, that work does fall to us to insist upon our persistence within these spaces.
Speaker: I love Jez Baddis's work in particular. I've really found their work really generative to think with recently, especially because they are really interested in that notion of fantasy as an articulation of longing, just fundamentally. Their doctoral thesis, which I also cited in my presentation, is focused around how magic in fantasy can often articulate
Speaker: a kind of melancholy or a kind of lack. And I think that's so important because it suggests a kind of movement as well. And thinking about orientation as what are we moving towards or what kind of structures the way that we locate ourselves and the way that we move. Again, very much linked to this idea of a journey and what form does that journey take and how do these characters interact with each other.
Speaker: on this journey, the notion of the quest is, yeah, just fundamentally, I think longing is built into the structure of that, not just in the sense that you're in search of something, or in the case of the Lord of the Rings, you're trying to get rid of something, but you're seeking to preserve something that's very dear and very important to you. But I think also there's moments along the quest that produce that experience of longing. I love the chapter in Lothlorien.
Speaker: because I think it articulates longing so beautifully, this kind of wonder at this place that you're in and what you're experiencing, but also that melancholy of the awareness that is going to end and the quest is going to continue. And yeah, I don't know exactly where I'm going with that idea of longing, but I really like the notion of fantasy as fundamentally just articulating
Speaker: a kind of longing and there being something very clear in that that we can attach to desire, whether that's desire for a particular person or desire for a different world or a different life. Longing just runs through the entire structure of fantasy. Yeah.
Speaker: And as you're talking about the journey, I'm reflecting that a journey often represents a liminal space, a space where things are in flux, things are changing. The process of a journey is inherently queer.
Speaker: And so as we examine all of the fantastical journeys from one destination to another, the story is in the space between and it issues categorization as queerness does. Yeah, I like that. It's constantly on the move. The quest narrative is always on the move, always in flux. And the notion that the journey fundamentally changes you as well.
Speaker: you know, there's things that are irrevocably changed as you're also moving through the narrative space. So yeah, I really like that idea. Yeah. Did y 'all have anything else that you wanted to touch on? No, I'm just over here overly pleased with myself for being like, no, I've now claimed all fantasy is queer. I mean, in a sense, that's part of what Vadis is arguing, you know?
Speaker: when they say that fantasy is manifestly queer, which is what they claim in the conclusion to their thesis. Love that phrase. Yeah. And they're very clear on the fact that they don't mean by that that all fantasy takes full advantage of that queerness or that queer potential. You know, they're talking about how a lot of fantasy can actually reassert or reaffirm conservative familial organizations or power structures.
Speaker: But just in the act of creating something that breaks with our notion of the possible and that, again, going back to that notion of recovery, unsettles our habitual representations of things. You know, that in itself implies a kind of queer activity.
Speaker: I don't know why this jumped into my head, but I have always read Aowan and Faramir's relationship as being inherently queer. And I'm starting to maybe put a little bit of a finer point on that because a lot of people use Aowan and Faramir's relationship as being a, you know, a taming of her. She becomes more traditionally feminine.
Speaker: And there are also people who have been doing research. There's some papers in Perilous and Fair about it, about how there's like a balancing of masculine and feminine energy within Aowin and Faramir. Like Faramir's a soft boy, Aowin's an angry girl. They get together and kind of balance each other out. But I do think that there is something just inherently queer about
Speaker: It was longing for freedom, her journey into being a warrior, her then the changing of her own morality to prefer healing over war and meeting up with Faramir, who is just a soft boy. I love him so much going and using that harnessing that destructive energy into something generative and resilient.
Speaker: It's not a really fine point yet, but it's getting there. I think a paper is brewing. I also think masculinity in Tolkien in general tends to be quite soft. It is quite a soft masculinity. You know, I had a student who did a project on AON last year, and one of the things that he brought forth in that project is
Speaker: Yeah, Eowyn becomes a healer, but also the way that Aragorn is identified as the heir to the throne of Gondor is by healing as well. And so healing is differently. And that Elrond's role also is of a healer. And so healing is differently gendered within Middle Earth than it is in our world. And I think that's an important detail to kind of bring forth in the text that indicates maybe how we are to read Eowyn's journey toward becoming a healer.
Speaker: Yeah. Oh, that's a really good point. She gives up destructive toxic masculinity for the form of masculinity that Tolkien prioritizes. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. So, dude bros, you need to read a little differently, don't you? That wouldn't require them reading the rest of the text. Yeah, reading in the first place, perhaps.
Speaker: Which I find is not always the case that has been done. Yeah. I was going to say that like the act of kind of touching back a little bit earlier, what we're talking about was sort of the act of reading something queer into a text.
Speaker: is kind of an act of defiance. It's kind of a radical act against cisheteronormativity and sort of the oppressive structures of our existence, basically, the water that we kind of swim in. And I kind of feel like this sort of tension between reading something as queer, kind of in defiance of perhaps what other readers are reading and creating in kind of in their experience,
Speaker: It kind of brings us back to how when we as readers, we don't exist like in a vacuum, right? We are sort of swimming in, especially queer people right now are sort of in a time where we are both kind of hyper visible and also at the same time trying to resist being stamped out of existence.
Speaker: especially in the United States, where we have literally hundreds of various anti -queer bills and laws being passed, where we have examples like the Don't Say Gay bill, we have in the UK, the Anglican Church just came out with a faux apology about how they've treated the LGBTQIA community in the past
Speaker: but we're still not going to marry you in our churches. Marriage is, you know, still between a man and a woman. This kind of is making me think about like our conversation about how restricting queer fantasy texts to things that are explicitly named and defined, it kind of makes us in a similar place to the text where it's sort of like we are both very, very visible and also very easy to kind of
Speaker: gloss over and pass over in a time where being passed over can be an act of survival or it can also be sort of an experience of destruction and sort of dismissal and silence. So that was kind of a long and rambly way of getting to it kind of it just kind of made me think about like how our queerness kind of exists in this tension of being both very visible and also
Speaker: invisible at the same time. And depending on what is going on, that can either be an act of survival or it can be an act of defiance as well. Yeah, that's really well put. I don't know that I have a ton to add to that. Yeah.
Speaker: It does make me concerned about the baby queers right now, right? The people who are trying to determine what the safest way to go about living is. Like I understand a lot of, God, are zoomers still kids? Like I don't even know where that is. I think a lot of them are going into adulthood now. Yeah. Oh my God. I'm always turned 18. Yeah. Like kids who are in their teens and twenties who are just figuring out their queer, like what are you,
Speaker: fantastic and also terrible time. We have so many more words to describe what it is you are and so many more people who are in the open about being safe people to talk to and all of that, but also just the crackdown by the conservative government is just horrible right now.
Speaker: I've been thinking about this in the context of because someone had mentioned to me, oh, like it's it's getting better. There's so much more representation in media, in books like it's more overt. And in thinking through this discussion, that's amazing. That's wonderful. But we don't have the very easy access to the historical canon of what has come before.
Speaker: since we're always digging for it. We're always trying to rebuild it every time it's torn down. And I worry that for young people or people who are newly coming to articulate their identity in this current day and age, that
Speaker: not having as much access to that historical canon and it being difficult to reach all of those pieces as there is an active effort to tear us and our media and our books and our words and our work down again. Every time that's a little bit successful I worry about
Speaker: how we connect back to our history because that's one of the only through lines of our entire history is constantly being cut off from it. What you were saying about being cut off from our history. Wait, I'm sorry, I have to interrupt a point that our recording cut off at that point and that's just a little too meta.
Speaker: Then Caster's like, I'm going to be a part of that tradition.
Speaker: Yeah, that is something that people who were under the age of 40 probably don't, I mean, I've been to a couple of talks now where people have been talking about like the AIDS crisis as like ancient history and not like something that pretty recently happened that killed an entire generation of queer people, essentially. And was one of the things that helped like cut that flow of information from older queer people to younger queer people.
Speaker: Yeah, we've lost a lot of elders, and it's sort of tangentially related, but I do think that there is sort of a movement in the younger generation that is sort of trying to navigate their experience of being queer in sometimes in ways that
Speaker: neglects or dismisses kind of like the earlier experiences of their community. And I think that we lost so many elders so that we kind of lost a lot of people who could have guided the young folks into having greater context and nuance with their own history.
Speaker: And we ourselves, our generation, lost out on this as well. We were directly impacted by the AIDS crisis, by the current laws that are attempting to be passed. We are living in these cycles of oppressions. I think there's also a lot to be said about the way that we are often demonized and stigmatized within the media also contributes to that sense of generational isolation.
Speaker: because we are deemed unsafe for young people to be around. Those connections often are not forged and I think that's almost as big a part of it as the destruction that AIDS has wrought. I'm very fortunate in my adult life to have quite a few intergenerational friendships with older queer people
Speaker: although they probably will not thank me for talking about them in those terms. But I have quite a few relationships with queer people who were around in the activism of the 60s and the 70s and through the 80s who had massive parts to play in a lot of that and who I'm able to have conversations about what that was like with them
Speaker: and also what we can take with us moving forward into facing whatever it is that's coming in the future. And it also, I think that does, this conversation that we're having about being isolated and alienated from our history, I think it connects to what we've been talking about regarding approaching historical texts in that
Speaker: you know, I don't think we should too readily dismiss that these texts have important things to say about queerness now to us and also had important things to say about queerness then that are different from queerness now. I think there's a lot that can be gained from difference as well as finding kinship within those texts. But I think it also does raise the crucial question of if we have this very fluid understanding of
Speaker: engaging with queerness in historical texts, where does that leave us in terms of methods for preserving that history and curating that? Because we can't really set firm boundaries around it the way that we maybe, to some extent at least, can for other forms of representation, where does that leave us in terms of curation and preservation? After I delivered this presentation at the Once and Future Fantasies Conference back in the summer,
Speaker: Jennifer Adebury, who is a folklorist, came up to me and said, look, as a historian and as a folklorist, my impulse is to say, no, with all the problems that cannons have, we need some kind of cannon. We need some kind of archive that we can use to preserve a lot of this material. And I was talking to her, and one of the things that she proposed, and I think that's something that's really interesting and something that I would like to pursue,
Speaker: in the research that I'm doing going forward is an archive of reader response, an archive that seeks to document not just the texts themselves, but how have people interacted with them? And more broadly, how have people engaged with the vocabularies of fantasy to give voice to queer experiences in everyday life?
Speaker: So a lot of the research that I want to do going forward is going to be diving into archives and periodicals and looking at erotica and periodicals of grassroots organizations and kind of seeing the ways that fantasy, religion, and queerness intersect or potentially how they don't intersect as well. I might not turn up much concrete information and that's also a possibility that I need to
Speaker: consider in terms of the implications it has for the work that I'm doing. But I'm really attracted to that notion of documenting our feelings about texts and media and how we respond to them. Because I feel like that also makes up so much of what we consider queer life to be. Queer culture is so bound up in reinterpretation and repurposing of
Speaker: cultural and textual artifacts. Well, and there's so much of the things left unsaid that we are to pick up on. This morning I was reading just the introduction to a book called Bad Gays.
Speaker: I love that book. Yeah. Yeah. It's about the more villainous gay characters, queer characters in history. You know, they make the point of, you know, we all embrace Oscar Wilde, but we kind of don't talk as much about Bozy because Bozy did some shit later on. We're not quite as eager to embrace.
Speaker: But in there, they're also talking about the relationship to the laws in the Victorian era and the early 20th century as related to the Buggery Act of 1559. Terrible historian, terrible at dates. But this Tudor era law
Speaker: which was specifically designed in order to be able to allow the monarchy to criminalize, provide a means of a death penalty, and then the seizure of lands.
Speaker: to priests within the Catholic Church, or within the Church of England later too, but to the Church when there wasn't even a death penalty for murder for the clergy at that point. This specifically, like the civil criminalization of homosexuality, of queerness, is related to the seizure of church lands.
Speaker: And a lot of people who were not at the level of having this much land and power and all of that ended up being harmed and killed as a result for centuries.
Speaker: So as we're looking at how people have responded to texts in the past and how we look at those responses now, understanding the stakes of what people were and weren't saying and how it was coded makes a huge difference for me, at least, in being able to pick up, oh, oh, at the time this was known to be queer, it was recognized as queer. And just because I don't have that lexicon today doesn't mean that I won't get anything out of reading it now.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think also another important thing that's bound up in that is the different modes of being queer that have existed throughout history. Another thing that I think Hugh Lemmy and Ben Miller pick up on in that book that is really, really resonant and really poignant is they really dispel this notion of an eternal queerness that we are only just now unearthing
Speaker: and that it's the static thing that was just waiting to be discovered. And those poor queers in the past just didn't have the words to talk about it. And I think what they're so good at demonstrating is, no, the language did exist. It's not the same language that we use now. And conceptually, it was understood differently at that point. But that is something important to bear in mind. And again, it's like you said, Grace, just because
Speaker: the differences exist doesn't mean there's nothing of insight that we can find there. No, that sounds like an amazing project that would be of benefit to a lot of us. I'm really excited. I'm trying to get it funded at the moment. That's the hard bit is getting people to give me money to go to these archives and do this. So fingers crossed that it happens because it's something that I really want to do.
Speaker: Yeah, fingers massively crossed. That's something that I kind of admire about Marquette's Tolkien archives is that it's specifically asking people to give their experience with Tolkien and saving it for history. I really feel like that that is a direction for archives to kind of towards and to kind of think about a lot more. Yeah, that sounds like a really exciting project. I really, fingers super crossed to get funding for it.
Speaker: Thank you. In terms of a closing thought, I might just end on the point that I end on in the paper itself, which is kind of where we're at now. A lot of what we've been discussing already about the ways that we are being targeted, being rendered simultaneously hyper -visible, at the same time, what whether there are forces that are trying to
Speaker: erase us, invisibleize us, cut us off from our history, eradicate us in many ways. I mean, just in the past week, the UK government has just blocked a resolution by Scottish Parliament to reform the Gender Recognition Act to remove some of the legal barriers that exist for trans people to legally identify as their current gender. So these are things that are definitely ongoing within the US and the UK. And I think
Speaker: where I still fall on a lot of this, even with all of the difficulties and the potential unresolved questions that exist in terms of, I don't know, in some ways talking about how we read queer fantasy feels like a very small part of it. But there's another part of me that feels like we do need and we are going to need every potential tool at our disposal.
Speaker: for nurturing ourselves and preparing for anything that might come our way. And not just in a reactive sense, but also in thinking about what kinds of lives we want to build and what kind of world we want to actively pursue and push for. And so I think what I would end on is just to reiterate that my
Speaker: goal, I suppose, in continuing to talk about this and question this is in making sure that we have a variety of strategies that we can equip ourselves to be nurtured by other worlds and to potentially dream of the world that we want to create as well.
Speaker: Yeah, this is how we survive. This is one of the ways that we keep surviving, like we have for ages and ages. I think we've talked in some previous episodes of the podcast about how
Speaker: Those conservative entities and even like neo -fascist entities have identified fantasy as a place where they would like to have control ceded to them, where they would like to be able to utilize it to meet their own ends because it is such a powerful tool for imagination and for mobilization.
Speaker: of people. And so I think absolutely it's important for us to recognize that fantasy is a place where we can look at building the world that we want to live in or interrogating the world that we do live in so that we can improve our primary world through the lens of what we learned in secondary worlds. Absolutely. Wow. That is a fantastic place to end. What a takeaway.
Speaker: And this is going to be like a super awkward transition now, but Taylor, are there any things that you have coming up that you would like to promote? I am currently involved in a research network that has just started up in Scotland called the Future Voices of Scottish Science Fiction and Fantasy. So you can check that out online, but we are hosting a series of events throughout this year.
Speaker: focusing on different aspects of fantasy and science fiction writing and how creative practitioners in Scotland specifically are using fantasy and science fiction to explore current political and social concerns. I'm one of the academic respondents for that, which means that I am writing an article in response to one of the events coming at the
Speaker: central question of the event from more of a theory -based academic perspective. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that I need to plug. There's a lot of things that I have in the works that I don't want to say too much about yet, just because they're just getting off the ground. But my book, Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature, is available via Bloomsbury.
Speaker: If you are affiliated with a university at all, I would strongly encourage you to ask your university to get a copy because it is very, very expensive to buy if you're just buying it as an individual. And that is just the nature of academic publishing. Unfortunately, there should be a paperback edition coming out soon that will be significantly cheaper, but right now the hardcover is very pricey.
Speaker: And I feel like I apologize for that almost any time I promote the book. I think that there is a paperback available soon on Amazon for like 40 bucks or something. There will be. Yeah. Yeah. So the paperback is on the horizon. But yeah, you can check that out pretty much wherever you can find books online. I would strongly suggest if you live in the UK, you can buy it on bookshop .org .uk and support your local bookshop
Speaker: And that's the way that I would prefer you to buy it if you're ordering it online. You can also follow me on Twitter at Taylor W. Driggers. And I regularly post updates about my research and teaching and just other things I'm involved with there. Yeah, that's all I have to plug, really.
Speaker: Thank you so, so much for coming and talking with us. This was such a wonderful conversation. I've been really looking forward to it. Thank you so much for being here, Taylor. Thank you so much for having me. I've really, really enjoyed this and it's been so great to just really talk with people who are on the same page. And I feel like it's been a really, really lovely conversation and I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker: I've had a great time. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for chatting with us. You were like the perfect first guest. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Speaker: Thank you everyone for listening. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, or stream our episodes directly on Zencaster, which is zencaster .com slash queer lodgings, the Tolkien podcast with hyphens in between all of those words. Please leave us a rating, like, share, and subscribe. You can find us on all your favorite social medias at Facebook slash queer lodgings and Twitter for right now.
Speaker: at queer underscore lodgings. If you would like to get in touch with us or suggest an episode idea, you can send us an email at queer lodgingspodcast at gmail .com. Thank you everyone for listening.
Speaker: I did want to get into this thing about longing. There's not a good way to segue from that. We long to be like Sasha Bulur. Speaking of longing.
