I'm going to Bristol!

[rm]

I've been making a lot of noise about Bristol, but today I can finally say my abstract has been accepted to the conference, Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception.

A Tangible Reality of Absence: Fan Communities and the Mourning of
Fictional Characters

Audiences, particularly those segments that self-identify as fans,
often respond strongly to the deaths of beloved characters in the
narratives of popular television, film, and book series. In some
cases, these audiences react to fictional deaths by engaging in
traditional mourning rituals, including memorial ceremonies and
displays, charity tribute funds, and personal presentation
modification.

Through these acts, audience members stake claim to otherwise
inaccessible desired bodies while also creating a dialogue that
eroticizes the deceased. These displays of desire also serve to claim
status within fan communities: after all, mourners are traditionally
not just lovers, but also friends, colleagues, and family members.
Thus, the mourning activities of the fan community become an act of
partial defictionalization, moving the desired bodies of personal and
narrative fantasy into a tangible reality of absence.

Not all fictional deaths, however, elicit such reactions. Rather,
whether audience-led mourning rituals occur is dictated by narrative
context, including the degree to which death is fetishized in the
source material and the accessibility of the character's flesh in the
canonical story.

By highlighting fan responses to the deaths of Ianto Jones from
"Torchwood," Hoban Washburne from "Firefly," and Severus Snape from
the "Harry Potter" series and comparing these responses to historical
incidences of mourning for literary characters, this paper seeks to
address the phenomenon of non-fictional mourning for fictional
characters and examine the narrative features that provoke these acts
of eroticization, which are often perceived as transgressive by those
outside of the participating communities.

That I'm getting to do this means a lot to me. Mourning as a lens through which to view the world, fictional and not, is this weird thing that's always been intrinsic to my nature. When this CFP came up right around the same time I was being utterly taken with/touched/fascinated by the Mermaid Quay display for Ianto Jones, this thing just sprung into my head, and all the preliminary research I did made it just stronger and more specific and fascinating and weird than anything I could have imagined.

To get to do something like this as an independent scholar without an advanced degree (I'm on a panel with three professors and my paper is paired with something related to Augustine (and thank god, I have more of a background in that than I should)) is huge. To get to do something like this about stuff I love, (and about characters I've mourned; 2009 has been a weird year) and at a conference that notes (in a manner that implicitly smacks down the notion than fannishness is weakness or sin) in the CFP that "many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters," is something I don't even really know how to emotionally react to yet.

But I wanted this like mad, and now have a lot of hard work ahead of me. This is the beginning of something awesome and something I deserve, and oh shit, now this means I'm going to England twice next year!

Some of you may be hearing from me with some requests for favors, or warning that I want to cite one of your fics (actually, I think there's just one of you I have to email about that). I also have to begin the great death fetishization re-watch/re-read of all this stuff (mmmm, science-y). Meanwhile, and this isn't even a joke -- this shit is fraught for me for I hope obvious reasons -- what do I wear?

Comments

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Huzzah!

Also : I'm glad to see you mention Firefly. The one thing I have found universal with all of the firefly fans / groups and such that I have participated in is this giant eats-everything-you-are void surrounding the death of Wash. It overtakes the death of Book, and ( kinda understandably ) Mr. Universe.

The only thing I found that kinda made me upset about the death of Wash was how it paralleled the death of Trinity in The Matrix, at least in the sense of the death scenes were remarkably similar ( piloting through an impossible situation , landing safe, death. ).

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Firefly is the odd one out in my three examples though. Fan reaction was intense, but the defictionalization element in it was much less present.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

'[m unclear ... what do you mean by defictionalization?

[rm.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between people being sad (or angry or outraged) that the character died and people engaging in mourning rituals for those characters as a way to establish a non-fictional status for them via the absence of their death (dead people and fictional people being the same in that we can touch neither).

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Do you think this is because of the genre differences?

Firefly is anchored in the 'old west' tales where death was inevitable and part of the pioneer experience - the spaceships almost seem an afterthought. Its almost impossible to find an old west movie that doesn't have at least one death in it either by accident, gunfight, enemy action and so on. On the other hand HP and TW are neck deep in fantasy where things from communicating with the dead is not only possible but commonplace, and cheating death seems possible around every corner.

[rm.livejournal.com]

No, I don't (at least as I'm defining genre). I think it's about the context of the characters in the narratives and the way the narratives do or don't fetishize death (HP and Torchwood have a lot of content about immortality and, relatedly, about how death is actually a good thing; Firefly doesn't).

You'll see! You'll see!

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Indeed!

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the more I think about it Firefly seems to treat death as an inevitability and something not to be thought about unless/until it happens, and when it does you get past it and keep moving. The phrase " any day above ground " comes to mind.

I see this in the way they accepted the death of the mud farmer who jumped in front of the shotgun blast protecting Jayne ( Jaynestown ), and in the way they had last words with the dying comrade ( The Message ).

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Also : have you seen the " Wash is my co pilot " bumper stickers?

[elisi]

Sorry about jumping in, but this is very interesting. Could there also be the fact that both HP and TW are set in the 'now', in a world that is almost our own? After Ianto's death f.ex., the fans had a specific, real place to focus their attention on (Mermaid Quay), somewhere they could leave actual tokens of mourning. Wash died on a distant planet far in the future...

(Also there's the whole issue of 'ships etc. I think I'll just leave you to it. :) Also, congratulations! It all sounds extremely awesome!)

ETA: I cried for half an hour solid after Ianto died. This has never, ever happened to me before. I still choke up when I see pictures. If you could explain this, I'd be very, very grateful!)

[rm.livejournal.com]

HP actually has no tangible location for mourning acts (although I will agree that people have been sort of obsessive about trying to figure out where Spinner's End might be, and have come up with some very precise guesses) and I haven't seen the HP mourning acts tied to place.

Tangibility is a huge issue though. You see more tattoo memorials in HP (where there is less place) than in Torchwood responses (where there is more place) for example. There's also markedly different mourning behavior associated with Sirius (where we do not have a body) and Snape and Ianto (where we do have bodies handled both at the moment of death and afterwards).

I have to say, I always talk about my permeable life, and I've always loved characters and cried for them, but I couldn't _breathe_ I was crying so hard for Ianto. And was pretty incapable of being in the world at all for like a week. It was, and I make a study of this both personally an in others, the strangest thing I have EVER experienced.

[rm.livejournal.com]

For lack of a better handy link, TV Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Defictionalization

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Thanks!