From Austin to A&M

TW for dis­or­dered eat­ing and mild self-harm.

I hate going to the doc­tor. I’m poor, so I don’t go often. But my hatred of going to the doc­tor started when I was 19. That was when my metab­o­lism began slow­ing down, and I began slowly gain­ing weight. At my gyne­col­o­gist, the only doc­tor I vis­ited reg­u­larly, the nurses started mak­ing com­ments. They would note my weight gain from pre­vi­ous vis­its. They would say that I should start eat­ing bet­ter, exer­cis­ing more. I was never asked about my eat­ing or exer­cise habits. They assumed that I was gain­ing weight, and there­fore I must be unhealthy, despite all the sci­en­tific evi­dence that weight and health are not nec­es­sar­ily cor­re­lated, that the “eat less, exer­cise more” approach to weight loss has no more than a 5% suc­cess rate and has neg­a­tive health effects on the 95%, and that being “over”weight doesn’t cause health prob­lems or death.

I haven’t ever really told any­one besides my part­ners this, but I have strug­gled with an undi­ag­nosed eat­ing dis­or­der since I hit puberty. I have a par­tic­u­larly cruel jerk­brain when it comes to my weight and food. Since I was a teenager, my jerk­brain has told me that I’m fat and dis­gust­ing. I would stand in front the mir­ror and my jerk­brain would pick out my flaws. My jerk­brain would cel­e­brate when I got the flu, because I wouldn’t be able to eat reg­u­larly for a few days. When I skipped meals (and I did that a lot), my jerk­brain would tell me that the pain in my stom­ach was vic­tory. When I gave up and ate, or binged, my jerk­brain would tell me I was worth­less. It would make me want to hurt myself. I never had the stom­ach for blood, so I would pull my hair. Until it hurt. Until I cried. Until some of it came out. “That’s what you deserve,” my jerk­brain would tell me, “because you’re gross and have no willpower.”

My jerk­brain did this when I weighed 85 pounds. It does it now, when I weigh around 155 pounds. It doesn’t actu­ally mat­ter what I look like, or how much I weigh, or what size jeans I wear.

It took a long time for me to stop lis­ten­ing to it. To stop pun­ish­ing myself for eat­ing by pulling out my hair. To stop cel­e­brat­ing ill­ness. To stop hav­ing an unhealthy and dan­ger­ous rela­tion­ship with my body and my food.

See, I thought eat­ing dis­or­ders either looked like anorexia or bulimia. I didn’t starve myself reg­u­larly. I didn’t purge. I didn’t even binge that much. From the out­side, my eat­ing habits looked nor­mal. Healthy. So I didn’t think I had an eat­ing dis­or­der. I still have a hard time call­ing it that (in part because I’m fat). But in my head, noth­ing was nor­mal or healthy.

I still strug­gle with my jerk­brain. On bad days, I will put off eat­ing, or feel guilty eat­ing. On good days, I either don’t care what I look like or am even happy with the way I look (!). I no longer pull my hair, or phys­i­cally pun­ish myself. I no longer say, “I’m not fat.” I am fat, and I have to be okay with that. I have to love and cher­ish and respect the body I have. [NB: I do still ben­e­fit from thin priv­i­lege. I can still, for exam­ple, buy clothes in stores. I am thin enough that well-meaning but harm­ful peo­ple tell me that I’m not fat.]

I’m doing a lot bet­ter, but the worst days are the days I weigh myself. It’s harder to stop lis­ten­ing to my jerk­brain when it has “objec­tive” evi­dence that I’m worth­less; it’s harder when I have a num­ber (SCIENCE) to beat myself up with, even though I know log­i­cally that the num­ber doesn’t mean any­thing. I don’t have a scale any­more, because I fig­ured out that it was bad for me. (My cur­rent part­ner keeps a scale, but it has to stay under the bed.)

So the only time I’m weighed is when I go to the doc­tor. It’s always awful. I usu­ally have to bat­tle my jerk­brain harder for a few days. I obsess about what I eat. (Some­times, I hope I’m preg­nant, to explain my weight as not-mine. If you know me, you know how fuck­ing out of char­ac­ter that is.) I delay eat­ing; I worry that I’m dis­gust­ing. I mean, a doctor’s visit is sup­posed to make me health­ier, not like this.

I recently read about some­one say­ing that they refuse to allow their doctor(s) to weigh them. “Holy crap,” I thought, “That’s an option?” It hadn’t even occurred to me before that I could refuse to be weighed. To know that I could avoid the stress and anx­i­ety I feel about doctor’s appoint­ments is a relief.

So I’ve decided that I won’t allow a doc­tor to weigh me any­more. I won’t step on the scale. I will stand up for my men­tal health, and I won’t work with a doc­tor who doesn’t respect that.

Hey every­one! I’m in the throes of fran­tic writ­ing and grad­ing, because the semes­ter ends on the 15th. So close! And I have what feels like hun­dreds of things to grade.

So I didn’t have time to write a post this week. Instead, I am going to give you a teaser, the first part of an essay I am writ­ing for a Doc­tor Who fan anthology:

There’s a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion that cos­play is unlike other fan pro­duc­tions. Accord­ing to this idea, cos­play is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent than fan art, fan­fic, fan comics, fan vids, fan remixes, filk­ing, pod­casts, and blogs. Those pro­duc­tions are about analy­sis, inter­pre­ta­tion, cre­ation. In those cre­ations, fans are respond­ing to the show, inter­act­ing with a com­mu­nity, and pro­duc­ing their own cre­ative con­tent. But cos­play is con­sid­ered, even within fan com­mu­ni­ties, to be doing some­thing else. Some­thing weird.

While most fans will con­cede that other fan pro­duc­tions are cre­ative, they often down­play the cre­ativ­ity of cos­play­ers, even when those cos­play­ers hand­craft their entire cos­tumes. Oh, sure, they’re tal­ented, but it’s just copy­ing, isn’t it? And often cos­play­ers are posi­tioned as imma­ture, and it is sug­gested that because they are all so young (they’re not), they are unsure of their own iden­ti­ties. Per­haps they use cos­play to try on dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties. Per­haps they are sim­ply overi­den­ti­fy­ing with a character.

While fel­low fans are usu­ally admir­ers of cos­play, they often have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that cos­play­ers aren’t quite capa­ble of sep­a­rat­ing fic­tion from real­ity, or them­selves from a TV show.

What I see in this dis­torted per­cep­tion of cos­play­ers is the expec­ta­tion that you can’t really under­stand cos­play­ers with­out psy­cho­an­a­lyz­ing them. When peo­ple ask me why fans cos­play, they don’t want to hear about how cos­play inter­prets the source mate­r­ial or makes polit­i­cal state­ments. They want to hear about child­hood trau­mas and iden­tity for­ma­tion. I don’t know why cos­play gets this dif­fer­ent expec­ta­tion, one we don’t have when we want to find out why fan artists or fan writ­ers do their thing.

From here, I’ll quote from Fan­do­ma­nia and from a fel­low Doc­tor Who fan, illus­trat­ing that they think cos­play is some­how about iden­tity. Then I’ll talk about how cos­play is gen­er­ally not about iden­tity, and in par­tic­u­lar, femme cos­play and cross­play  in the Doc­tor Who fan com­mu­nity are actu­ally about gen­der pol­i­tics, not gen­der identity.

And because I need to get myself psy­ched for my upcom­ing unem­ploy­ment (At least I will have time to write? Kind of?) and because I want you to know my writ­ing isn’t lan­guish­ing, despite my sad blog show­ing lately, here are the writ­ing projects I’m work­ing on:

1. Sev­eral blog posts are in the works. One about class issues and the stand­alone com­pan­ions in Doc­tor Who. One about stu­dent loans. Another about whether the Daleks are scary (I vote no). One about Martha Jones and how RTD wrote racial dis­crim­i­na­tion as a dis­tinctly his­tor­i­cal prob­lem. And a cou­ple of posts about how cos­play is rep­re­sented in the media. (This is con­stantly what my blog post queue looks like. I have too many ideas!)

2. An essay for a Doc­tor Who fan anthol­ogy about femme Doc­tor cos­play and Doc­tor cross­play. (That’s the one above.)

3. Another essay on cos­play in gen­eral, focus­ing on cosplayer’s mul­ti­ple moti­va­tions, for a geek magazine.

4. And, of course, I am con­tin­u­ally mak­ing myself feel guilty for my lack of progress on my book projects (one on cos­play, one on fem­i­nism and Doc­tor Who). Hope­fully I will get some of that done this sum­mer, too.

If any­one wants to be a reader for those book projects (or any of these projects), please email me! I’d really appre­ci­ate some feedback.

A photo of a sign posted in the halls of the Eng­lish depart­ment at Texas A&M Uni­ver­sity before a meet­ing about grad­u­ate stu­dents. The sign reads, “Things some of us [grad stu­dents] have over­heard or been told in this depart­ment: ‘Grad­u­ate stu­dents don’t have rights.’”

Peo­ple who know me are prob­a­bly really sick of me bitch­ing about grad­u­ate school. Really. But I do it because I feel like I am sur­rounded by a cul­ture that either has decided that higher edu­ca­tion is com­pletely worth­less and pro­fes­sors are lazy, freedom-hating com­mu­nists, or that grad­u­ate school is this per­fect won­der­land in which you can be cre­ative and care­free, and where every­thing is won­der­ful if you just work hard enough and have enough pas­sion. And both of these are so obvi­ously, ridicu­lously wrong that I, a paci­fist, am inspired to com­mit violence.

I don’t talk to con­ser­v­a­tives if I can help it, so that for­mer view­point is often one I only hear com­ing out of politi­cians’ and fam­ily mem­bers’ mouths. I’m going to assume all my read­ers know bet­ter than to think that higher edu­ca­tion is bad. So let’s address the lat­ter view. The Chron­i­cle ran this awful arti­cle today enti­tled “Grad­u­ate School is Art School,” which tried to con­vince read­ers that going to grad­u­ate school for the human­i­ties is, like, just THE BEST.

By far the worst argu­ment is actu­ally the first one the author makes. She writes,

1. You get to teach. Yes, enforced read­ing and grad­ing of under­grad­u­ate papers is akin to sadism or abuse, like minimum-security con­fine­ment. (It’s sig­nif­i­cantly worse than I antic­i­pated, to tell the truth.) But teach­ing is oth­er­wise exhil­a­rat­ing and fun. You have the oppor­tu­nity to give young adults—right at the moment when they have opened back up a bit—the gift of your atten­tion. They will occa­sion­ally have real­iza­tions dur­ing the course of your semes­ter with them. This is sig­nif­i­cant work.

They also sur­prise you on a reg­u­lar basis. You can encour­age them to see mean­ing every­where they look, to be curi­ous, to see lan­guage as a secret code filled with intrigue and mys­tery, to be will­ing to make mis­takes. It’s a rare kind of opportunity.

Oh for fuck’s sake. You get to teach? Is that a joke? Look, I love teach­ing. In fact, I love teach­ing fresh­men com­po­si­tion (that class every grad­u­ate stu­dent teacher has to teach, and most loathe). I do! But I also know that teach­ing a class is a fuck­ing ser­vice I pro­vide, for which I deserve to be com­pen­sated fairly. GATs (grad­u­ate stu­dent teach­ers) are not. Period. When I worked as a GAT at Texas A&M Uni­ver­sity, I made $1,100 a month. I taught one class, and I was expected to make a syl­labus, pre­pare and deliver lec­tures, come up with assign­ments, and grade at least 4 essays per stu­dent per semes­ter. Tech­ni­cally, I worked “20 hours a week.” In real­ity, if I was being fair to my stu­dents, I worked 30–40 hours a week. On top of my full-time grad­u­ate course load. Often, I had to be unfair to my stu­dents. To top off the shitty pay, you were not allowed to have another job. In the first cou­ple weeks at my pro­gram, a stu­dent was told that if he didn’t quit his part-time job at a book store, he would be kicked out of the program.

When I left the depart­ment, they were increas­ing the teach­ing load from a 1/1 (1 class in each semes­ter) to a 2/1 (2 classes in one semes­ter, 1 class in the other semes­ter), with­out increas­ing GAT pay at all. When the Eng­lish Grad­u­ate Stu­dent Asso­ci­a­tion (EGSA) talked union­iz­ing, the depart­ment made it clear that that sort of thing was unwel­come. This isn’t abnor­mal. Most uni­ver­si­ties are very anti-union, par­tic­u­larly for their most vul­ner­a­ble instruc­tors, like GATs and adjunct instruc­tors. As scATX points out:

Yes, we get to teach. But inside ever-increasing exploita­tive sys­tems. Those of us lucky enough to teach our own courses are not called “Instruc­tors” but rather “Assis­tant Instruc­tors,” though we assist nobody. The lat­ter title makes it legally eas­ier for a uni­ver­sity to pay you less.

The thing is, uni­ver­si­ties don’t even bother to hide how much they screw over GATs. They tell us, “It’s part of your edu­ca­tion! We’re doing you a favor by mak­ing you do a valu­able ser­vice for us for a pit­tance.” And, just…no. GATs are doing a job, for which they deserve to be fairly com­pen­sated. And when uni­ver­si­ties are trans­par­ently tak­ing on more GATs, because they can’t even be both­ered to fill their class­rooms with poorly-paid and non-unionized adjuncts any­more? Even though tak­ing on more grad­u­ate stu­dents is patently irre­spon­si­ble, when the mar­ket is so flooded that a human­i­ties PhD can­di­date has a 1 in 5 chance of get­ting a tenure-track job? You are not val­ued there as an employe, and the uni­ver­sity wants, point-blank, to make you work as much as pos­si­ble for as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. That is not exactly a cre­ative, nur­tur­ing, and reward­ing envi­ron­ment. And it’s not any bet­ter for the under­grad­u­ate stu­dents you teach than it is for you as a stu­dent and teacher.

I love teach­ing so much that I am cur­rently an adjunct at a Texas com­mu­nity col­lege, where I make $1750 per class, per semes­ter. That is god­damn miserly. I would be a bet­ter teacher if I was offered health insur­ance (a healthy teacher is far more pro­duc­tive), if I had enough money to pay for gas and car repairs (I’ve had to can­cel classes because I couldn’t get there), if I had less stress because of unpaid bills and lack of food (I can’t grade on an empty stom­ach). This is not an excit­ing or reward­ing job for me any­more, because I can’t ignore how much I am being exploited by my uni­ver­sity. I can’t ignore an empty pantry, or the bills pil­ing up, or the end­less let­ters demand­ing I pay back my exten­sive stu­dent loans. That shit affects how much I can enjoy teach­ing. That shit affects how well I teach. And it was worse when I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent, tak­ing out thou­sands in loans because my stipend sim­ply didn’t cover it.

Short answer: Teach­ing with­out fair com­pen­sa­tion is a rea­son not to go to grad­u­ate school.

But don’t worry! This arti­cle is full of more stu­pid and sim­plis­tic arguments!

3. You get to have an audi­ence for your (some­times sub­stan­dard) work. And a smart audi­ence to boot. You have peers, col­leagues, and men­tors who take your cre­ative work seri­ously, offer you earnest assess­ment, try to guide you, and, although they are hor­ri­bly over­worked, often try to give you what you need and desire.

Where else can you get such exquis­ite atten­tion for your writ­ing as you do in grad­u­ate school? Out­side of this set­ting, you would be send­ing your work to your mother, who would say, “it’s very nice, dear.” Or you would present your work to some highly eclec­tic writ­ing group, which includes at least one per­son who would like to dis­cuss his most recent UFO sighting.

Work in an office job and what you’ll find is that your boss, how­ever decent, is, by neces­sity, a very nice, highly civ­i­lized task mas­ter. You do what you are told—period.

Grad­u­ate school or your mother! Those are your only options! Look, I’m not say­ing that being a writer and researcher out­side of acad­e­mia is easy, but it’s not impos­si­ble. I have many col­leagues and smart peo­ple will­ing to read over my work and give me guid­ance. I have many read­ers who pro­vide me with encour­age­ment to con­tinue doing what I do. And I don’t think I’m an aberration.

Yes, “real” jobs are often not cre­ative. They don’t offer you the kind of research free­dom you have in grad school most of the time. But grad school is also full of “do what you’re told to do” moments. Half the research essays I wrote for my pro­gram were about shit I did not care about. Because I was forced to take classes in medieval lit, Roman­ti­cism, and French. They didn’t even offer classes I des­per­ately wanted, like sci­ence fic­tion courses and fan stud­ies courses. Hell, they only offered one pop­u­lar cul­ture course while I was there. So, I found grad school really limiting.

Even though grad school is sig­nif­i­cantly cushier than what I do now, because in grad school I’d have access to library resources and stu­dent loans, I would not go back, pre­cisely because I know I would be lim­ited in what I could research. Now, I just live at poverty level and write what I want, when I want. In grad­u­ate school, I’d be liv­ing at poverty level and writ­ing what I had to based on lim­ited course selec­tion and what my pro­fes­sors thought was “appro­pri­ate” for uni­ver­sity study. For free. At least I get to get paid for my writ­ing some­times as a freelancer.

Short answer: Grad­u­ate school and acad­e­mia are not as free and cre­ative as adver­tised, and you can often do your work out­side of them.

Next!

6. Grad­u­ate school is like a rite of pas­sage. If you make it to the other side of your Ph.D. (or even just your first cou­ple years of teach­ing), you feel enriched and empow­ered. You feel strong (although also per­haps job­less). You did what you were not sure you were capa­ble of doing: You stretched yourself.

Ugh, this rea­son is the worst. See, there’s this atti­tude within the con­fines of acad­e­mia and grad­u­ate school. Accord­ing to this atti­tude, grad­u­ate school is a rite of pas­sage; it sep­a­rates the wheat from the chafe. It sep­a­rates the strong from the weak. And what peo­ple mean by that is, if you fail at grad­u­ate school, it’s because you’re weak, or not pas­sion­ate enough, or you don’t have enough drive. But let me tell you some­thing: these claims are stu­pid and ableist. Most peo­ple in grad­u­ate school deal with the stress of the expe­ri­ence by abus­ing alco­hol or drugs, or by becom­ing unhealthy worka­holics. Almost all of my friends (and myself) at Texas A&M used alco­hol in a man­ner that was com­pletely unhealthy. We joked about it, but we all knew it wasn’t actu­ally funny. There was a woman in my pro­gram who just didn’t sleep, so she could get more work done, and she almost passed out in class in front of me because of the exhaus­tion. And we were encour­aged to be more like that. To tamp down the stress, deal with it how­ever, and just work harder and more. We did have access to some men­tal health resources, which was good, but we were rarely encour­aged to go use them. And since we were all com­pe­ti­tion, not just col­leagues, not every­one (includ­ing myself) felt com­fort­able open­ing up to each other. We were all pre­tend­ing it wasn’t killing us, so to admit oth­er­wise was to expose your weak under­belly to some­one who wanted to beat you at the grad school game. Not a good idea, even if you were friends, in an envi­ron­ment where friends became ene­mies at the drop of a hat. (Seri­ously, I could never keep up with who stabbed who in the back, or who was talk­ing about who to pro­fes­sors, or who was spread­ing mali­cious rumors about who, or who was no longer friends with who, in my depart­ment. It was exhaust­ing.) The depart­ment pit­ted us against each other, and pre­tend as we might, we were all influ­enced by that. We all com­peted for the same fund­ing, and the same fel­low­ships, and the same con­fer­ence grants. My vic­tory was almost always some­one else’s defeat, and that shit is per­sonal in such a com­pet­i­tive environment.

So if you are mis­er­able and depressed in your pro­gram? (And almost every­one I knew per­son­ally enough was.) You’re on your own. If you’re lucky, you can find non-backstabby friends. If you’re not, you can’t get too per­sonal with most of the advi­sors. You may be able to find a ther­a­pist on cam­pus that you like, but usu­ally no one will tell you that resource exists. You won’t find pro­fes­sors who will give you a lot of slack for issues like depres­sion or exhaus­tion. (I did find some sym­pa­thy my last year, but it was because [TW] my step­dad waved a loaded gun at me. That was a pretty extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stance.) And you’re told that if you aren’t suc­ceed­ing, it’s because you just aren’t strong enough. And that ableist crap is some­thing you’ll hear from pretty much everyone.

So yeah, I guess it’s a rite of pas­sage. Or some­thing. But so is pub­lish­ing a book, or get­ting your first free­lance arti­cle pub­lished, or get­ting hired to do your work some­where that isn’t a uni­ver­sity. Grad­u­ate school is unnec­es­sar­ily stress­ful and inac­ces­si­ble. You are not weak or not-dedicated if you don’t go, or don’t fin­ish. There are other ways to do the work you want to do, and a PhD doesn’t prove much of any­thing, except that you got a PhD. If you don’t want to work in acad­e­mia, I can’t imag­ine why you would sub­ject your­self to the undue stress and exploita­tion of a human­i­ties PhD program.

This is not to say, “Don’t go to grad­u­ate school.” I’m glad I got my M.A. Hell, I think I might even­tu­ally go back (to a less lim­it­ing pro­gram) and get another one in soci­ol­ogy or some­thing. But you should not go to grad­u­ate school think­ing it’ll be this cre­ative, nur­tur­ing space in which smart peo­ple con­gre­gate to do smart things. Go with your eyes open. Make sure you make and keep friends out­side of acad­e­mia and grad school. Make sure you have the emo­tional resources you need to stay healthy. Remem­ber that work is not more impor­tant than tak­ing care of your­self. Remem­ber that you shouldn’t do things for free, no mat­ter how good they look on your CV. Remem­ber that you deserve to be fairly com­pen­sated for the work you do.

Even if you do those things, you’ll prob­a­bly be bit­ter in the end. Most peo­ple are.

Short answer: Remem­ber that grad­u­ate school is tem­po­rary, a means to an end. If you let it be an end in itself, you’ll likely find your­self deeply disappointed.

Cross-posted at Doc­tor Her.

I just returned from the PCA/ACA con­fer­ence in Boston this year. I’ll be doing a write-up on the other fan studies/geek pre­sen­ta­tions I saw, but I wanted to post mine first. ‘Cause I’m self-centered like that.

My pre­sen­ta­tion had a pow­er­point. I’ve embed­ded it below. You can also down­load it, if you like.

Guys, I have been eaten by the busy mon­ster. I have so many writ­ing projects to com­plete, which is awe­some (!), but also time-consuming. I’m going to take a break from feel­ing guilty about not blog­ging, but I promise to be back in a cou­ple weeks.

The title of this post is inspired by Ladysquires excel­lent “Why I’m Not Proud of You for Cor­rect­ing Other People’s Gram­mar.”

The open­ing scene of the Sher­lock episode “The Great Game” is one of the many rea­sons I think Sher­lock is an ass­hole. In it, he ruth­lessly “cor­rects” a sus­pected murderer’s gram­mar, for rea­sons unknown. Some have sug­gested he’s just a pre­scrip­tivist, and other argue he may have been try­ing to get the man angry. What­ever the rea­son, this scene illus­trates neatly why I hate gram­mar prescriptivism:

(A tran­script and descrip­tion of the video is avail­able at the bot­tom of the post.)

A lit­tle lin­guis­tics 101: A dialect is a pat­tern of speech used by a com­mu­nity. Fre­quently, dialects are cen­tered around a geo­graph­i­cal region (an East Texas dialect, an Appalachian dialect), or cul­tural and eth­nic sim­i­lar­i­ties (African Amer­i­can Ver­nac­u­lar Eng­lish or Ebon­ics, Chican@ Eng­lish). Some dialects are com­pletely spo­ken, some are com­pletely writ­ten, and some include both speech and writ­ing. Dialects can dif­fer in mechan­ics (how sen­tences are formed), in spelling, in pro­nun­ci­a­tion, in rhythm (how much over­lap is per­mit­ted or how much pause is required in con­ver­sa­tion, how empha­sis is dis­trib­uted in sen­tences, etc.), and in vocab­u­lary. Some peo­ple speak and write more than one dialect.

By the time we went to school, we were already pretty com­pe­tent in our nur­ture dialects (that is, the dialect that you grew up with, which is often your par­ents’ dialect). From “Stu­dents’ Right to Their Own Lan­guage”:

Before going to school, chil­dren pos­sess basic com­pe­tence in their dialects. For exam­ple, chil­dren of six know how to manip­u­late the rules for form­ing plu­rals in their dialects. In some dialects chil­dren add an “s” to the word to be plu­ral­ized as in “book/books.” In some other dialects, plu­ral­ity is sig­naled by the use of the pre­ced­ing word as in “one book/ two book.” But in either instance chil­dren have mas­tered the forms of plu­ral­ity and have learned a prin­ci­ple of lin­guis­tic com­pe­tence. It is impor­tant to remem­ber that plu­ral­ity sig­nals for the nur­ture dialect reflect children’s real­ity and will be their first choice in per­for­mance; plu­ral­ity rules for another dialect may sim­ply rep­re­sent to them the rit­u­als of some­one else’s lin­guis­tic reality.

In a spe­cific set­ting, because of his­tor­i­cal and other fac­tors, cer­tain dialects may be endowed with more pres­tige than oth­ers. Such dialects are some­times called “stan­dard” or “con­sen­sus” dialects. These des­ig­na­tions of pres­tige are not inher­ent in the dialect itself, but are exter­nally imposed, and the pres­tige of a dialect shifts as the power rela­tion­ships of the speak­ers shift.

Some dialects get pres­tige. You all are prob­a­bly famil­iar with what is often called Stan­dard Amer­i­can Eng­lish, but what I’ll call Edited Amer­i­can Eng­lish (EAE). EAE is what you are often talk in pub­lic schools as “cor­rect” Eng­lish. This is the Eng­lish of the edu­cated. We often think EAE is sim­ply “right.” Every dialect that varies from EAE is “wrong,” “incor­rect” Eng­lish. This per­cep­tion is absolutely wrong. There is noth­ing gram­mat­i­cally pure, log­i­cal, or supe­rior about EAE. Other dialects, includ­ing the much-derided Ebon­ics, are all rule-governed and reg­u­lar, just like EAE. They just have dif­fer­ent rules.

The rea­son we value EAE, that it has pres­tige, is that the peo­ple whose nur­ture dialects are clos­est to EAE are peo­ple of priv­i­lege: White, upper– or upper-middle class, and gen­er­ally liv­ing in the North­east of the U.S.

Which dialect we choose as the pres­tige dialect of Eng­lish has always been based on the priv­i­lege of the speak­ers. When rich White Eliz­a­bethans used dou­ble neg­a­tives, dou­ble neg­a­tives were con­sid­ered “cor­rect” Eng­lish. Shake­speare used dou­ble neg­a­tives often. Now, how­ever, the dialects that use dou­ble neg­a­tives are mostly spo­ken by poor peo­ple and peo­ple of color. So now, dou­ble neg­a­tives are “incor­rect.” This is not coin­ci­dence: our culture’s gram­mar rules are deter­mined entirely by what kind of peo­ple speak that way. If those peo­ple are priv­i­leged, that dialect is a sign of intel­li­gence. If those peo­ple are not priv­i­leged, that dialect is a sign of igno­rance and stupidity.

A page from a book of York­shire dialect verse. Photo by Flickr user teach­ernz and shared under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

So when Sher­lock “cor­rects” this man’s gram­mar, he is dis­play­ing a par­tic­u­larly egre­gious prac­tice of clas­sism. He does what he can to make this man feel as though he is not intel­li­gent, as if he can’t speak his own lan­guage properly.

But what breaks my heart about this clip is the result of this “cor­rect­ing”: The man is basi­cally silenced. He doesn’t feel com­fort­able speak­ing in his own lan­guage any­more. Toward the end, when he is “cor­rect­ing” him­self, his sen­tences are shorter, less flu­ent, and filled with more pauses than they were at the begin­ning of the scene. He can’t com­mu­ni­cate as eas­ily as he did before the “corrections.”

Okay, yes, this guy mur­dered his wife. I don’t actu­ally feel sorry for him. But I’ve seen this in action. I’ve met many peo­ple who think they don’t speak Eng­lish cor­rectly. Whose Eng­lish teach­ers have taught them that they must stum­ble and stut­ter in class, or just shut up entirely, because they don’t know how to speak. Who don’t think they can write any­thing, because no one would under­stand it.

And they think that because they are poor and live in Texas, since Texas dialects are short­hand for “stu­pid” in pop­u­lar cul­ture, and that isn’t any dif­fer­ent in Texas. Or they think that because they’re Black and speak African Amer­i­can Ver­nac­u­lar Eng­lish. They think that because peo­ple have told them that. Peo­ple, like Sher­lock, have “cor­rected” them, called them stu­pid, or claimed to be unable to under­stand them.

So they stut­ter. They pause. They feel unsure of their words. They stop com­mu­ni­cat­ing. That’s a pro­foundly dis­em­pow­er­ing thing, feel­ing like you can’t com­mu­ni­cate. And that’s what hap­pens when you “cor­rect” dialec­ti­cal dif­fer­ences. So con­grat­u­la­tions, Sher­lock, on being a pompous, clas­sist asshole.

Tran­scrip­tion:

[A clip from the begin­ning of episode 3, series 1 of Sher­lock, “The Great Game.” The video opens with a black screen and a vari­a­tion of the Sher­lock theme music. White text appears at the bot­tom of the screen read­ing “Minsk, Belarus.” The text dis­ap­pears and the shot pans around a wall into a large, mostly-empty prison vis­it­ing room. Sher­lock and an inmate in orange prison garb sit across from each other at one of the tables.]

Sher­lock: Just tell me what hap­pened from the beginning.

Inmate: We had been to a bar, a nice place, and I got chat­tin’ with one of the wait­resses, and Karen weren’t happy with that, so…we get back to the hotel, we end up hav­ing a bit of a ding-dong, don’t we?

Sher­lock sighs loudly.

Inmate: She’s always get­ting at me, say­ing I weren’t a real man.

Sher­lock: Wasn’t a real man.

Inmate: What?

Sher­lock: It’s not weren’t, it’s wasn’t.

Inmate: Oh.

Sher­lock, exas­per­ated: Go on.

Inmate: Well… then I don’t know how it hap­pened, but sud­denly there’s a knife in my hands. And, you know, me old man was a butcher, so I know how to han­dle knives. He learned us how to cut up a beast—

Sher­lock: Taught

Inmate: What?

Sher­lock: Taught you how to cut up a beast.

Inmate: Yeah, well, then I done it.

Sher­lock: Did it.

Inmate: Did it! STABBED her, over and over and over, and I looked down, and she weren’t—

Sher­lock sighs and looks away.

Inmate: …wasn’t…mov­ing no more.

Sher­lock rolls his eyes and looks away.

Inmate: Any more. God help me, I dunno how it hap­pened, but it was an acci­dent, I swear.

Sher­lock stands and starts to walk away.

Inmate: Hey, you’ve got to help me, Mr Holmes! Every­one says you’re the best. With­out you, I’ll get hung for this.

Sher­lock: No, no, Mr. Bewick; not at all. Hanged, yes.

[Sher­lock walks away as the theme music vari­a­tion starts up again.]

Thank you, dear read­ers! Thanks to your gen­er­ous dona­tions (and a very gen­er­ous birth­day gift from my grand­par­ents), I will be going to Boston in less than a month! I’ll be pre­sent­ing a ver­sion of this blog post, and I’m very excited to hear the feed­back from other scholars.

I can’t thank you guys enough. Here is my birth­day gift to you, an adorable sea otter.

Cross-posted at Doc­tor Her.

As a researcher of cos­play, who often makes con­clu­sions about the fem­i­nist (con­scious or uncon­scious) inten­tions of cos­play­ers, I am used to hav­ing peo­ple say my research and/or con­clu­sions are ille­git­i­mate. I often have peo­ple tell me I’m “read­ing too much into” cos­play, that I’m assum­ing too much about cos­play­ers, that cos­play isn’t even more than women wear­ing pretty clothes (all women care about!), so what the hell is there to study?

The com­ments on my inter­view at i09 were no excep­tion. I didn’t com­ment over there, because you have to pay me money to get me to go below the line at major web­sites, but I will respond to some of the “threads” of com­ments that were com­mon over there. I also chose these four because I’ve heard them all before, and they are com­mon objec­tions or reac­tions to my research.

Reac­tion #1: Peo­ple can cos­play with­out hav­ing moti­va­tions! As exem­pli­fied by this com­ment:

While there are many fas­ci­nat­ing points about this inter­view, say­ing ‘…but even the ones who were less con­scious were clearly mak­ing up for what they saw as a lack of female pro­tag­o­nists.’ it is too broad a brush to paint everyone’s moti­va­tions with. Some­times mak­ing a cos­tume for fun is just fun with­out any deep, psy­cho­log­i­cal moti­va­tion behind it.

Pretty much every­thing human beings do cre­ates mean­ing. Fash­ion is no dif­fer­ent (and nei­ther is cos­tume). To say, “Some peo­ple just wear clothes for fun and with­out hav­ing other moti­va­tions!” is as silly as say­ing, “If I wear a suit to work, it’s because I have fun wear­ing it, not because my boss will then inter­pret me as pro­fes­sional and qual­i­fied.” Cloth­ing has mean­ing, both per­sonal and cul­tural. Cos­play is rife with mean­ing, deter­mined by the wearer, the fan com­mu­nity, and the cul­ture within which the cos­player exists. The femme Doc­tors are using cer­tain sar­to­r­ial choices (like corsets, which may have over­lap­ping mean­ings on the per­sonal, fan com­mu­nity, and cul­tural lev­els) to cre­ate dif­fer­ent meanings.

Cos­play­ers don’t always know why they make cos­play choices, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t sub­con­sciously mak­ing deci­sions based on the mean­ings they want to con­vey. My inter­views with cos­play­ers have borne this hypoth­e­sis out. At first, many want to say that they cos­play “just for fun.” And “fun” is a moti­va­tion behind their cos­tum­ing, but it’s not the only moti­va­tion they have. When pushed, they are usu­ally able to come up with all sorts of moti­va­tions for what they do. Or their choices con­ve­niently match up with their inter­pre­ta­tions. (Take my ques­tion to Niki La Teer, who dressed in a femme TARDIS cos­tume and just hap­pened to inter­pret the TARDIS as female.)

My short answer? No, peo­ple can’t cos­play with­out hav­ing mul­ti­ple moti­va­tions and with­out try­ing to con­vey mul­ti­ple messages/meanings. Every­thing in my research has led to this conclusion.

Reac­tion #2: Ladies cos­play­ing is for fap­ping. An exam­ple:

I would do unspeak­able things to most of these doc­tors. Yep.

Not to men­tion the TARDIS.

Just…gross. Stop it, fans, because it’s not as endear­ing as you think.

Reac­tion #3: The com­pan­ions are heroes, too! By say­ing they aren’t, you’re say­ing they aren’t awe­some. Exem­pli­fied by this com­ment:

River Song isn’t a hero? I’d argue that Rose becomes a hero in her own right, too. Though I have prob­lems with the direc­tion they even­tu­ally took Martha Jones in, she cer­tainly became her own woman, and a hero. We haven’t fol­lowed their solo adven­tures, but then Doc­tor Who isn’t their show– it hasn’t depicted Cap­tain Jack’s inde­pen­dent exploits, either.
Sarah Jane may have started out as merely a com­pan­ion, but her solo adven­tures have been covered.

All these char­ac­ters play sec­ond fid­dle to the Doc­tor, but since it’s his show, so that crit­i­cism seems invalid to me. Bat­man is a sec­ondary (or ter­tiary) char­ac­ter in the new Bat­woman series because it’s her book!
Like CJ, I applaud how this kind of fan activ­ity can crit­i­cize or just recon­tex­tu­al­ize gen­der and how it works in the Who­verse, but it seems unfair to these great female char­ac­ters to say that they’re mere sidekicks.

This com­ment even men­tions why I said that the com­pan­ions are “def­i­n­i­tion­ally” side­kicks in Doc­tor Who: the show is about the Doc­tor. It’s not a two-man show, it’s a one-man show. Notice how there are no episodes in which com­pan­ions appear, but no Doc­tor. But there are sev­eral episodes in which the Doc­tor appears with no com­pan­ion. That’s because the show isn’t about them. They can’t be “heroes” in a show that makes them play “sec­ond fid­dle” to a dude. You can’t actu­ally have it both ways.

Here’s the thing: this show does not have to have a White man as its hero. It’s not a require­ment to be on TV (even if it may seem like it). The pro­duc­ers have choices they make, and they choose for this show be focused around the sub­jec­tiv­ity of a per­son played by an actor in a par­tic­u­larly priv­i­leged set of social and polit­i­cal cat­e­gories. The peo­ple who say, “But the show’s about a dude, thus you aren’t allowed to be mad the ladies aren’t pro­tag­o­nists!” are com­pletely miss­ing the point. The show. Doesn’t have to be. About a dude. Even if they wanted to keep the Doc­tor a White man, it’s pos­si­ble to have a lead­ing duo in a tele­vi­sion show where both sub­jec­tiv­i­ties are at the cen­ter of the show, and one is not sec­ondary to another. (See: The X-Files, Cas­tle, Ware­house 13, Bones, etc.) Doc­tor Who chooses not to do this.

Fur­ther, it’s ridicu­lous to rec­og­nize that all the women in Doc­tor Who play “sec­ond fid­dle” to the Doc­tor and then tell me they are heroes/protagonists. I should point out that the rea­son I used “hero­ine” as the label here is because, in my mind, the use of “hero­ine” to describe a sec­ondary char­ac­ter is mainly rhetor­i­cal. Obvi­ously, women doing femme Doc­tor cos­plays are not of the opin­ion that com­pan­ions are sim­ply not awe­some. But they want more. They want women to be the pro­tag­o­nists, the main char­ac­ters, hero­ines.

The women of Doc­tor Who have been amaz­ing. They’ve been com­pli­cated, flawed, funny, bril­liant, and resource­ful. I think they could be pretty fab­u­lous hero­ines. But the show? It does not frame them as hero­ines. They may buck against the label “assis­tant,” but that’s what they are in the show. They are helpers and side­kicks. Their sub­jec­tiv­i­ties, their sto­ry­lines, their very exis­tence on the show (and in River’s case, their very exis­tence full stop) are pred­i­cated on the Doc­tor. They wouldn’t be there, and we wouldn’t see their sto­ries, with­out him. Which is why they can never be called hero­ines.

Reac­tion #4: Cos­play is deriv­a­tive, and thus not cre­ative (enough). It took a while for this guy to come right out and say this, but he finally did:

The prob­lem with fan­dom is that it wants to own the thing it loves and then trans­form it into their own image. Nu Who is a liv­ing tes­ti­mony to this, but what’s wrong with just lik­ing some­thing for what it is?

If you want to be cre­ative, cre­ate your own stuff. Fan­dom is inher­ently par­a­sitic these days.

[Empha­sis added.] I’d like to point out, first, the priv­i­lege inher­ent in the state­ment, “What’s wrong with just lik­ing some­thing for what it is?” Oh, you mean a pseudo-imperialistic show that often mar­gin­al­izes women, peo­ple of color, asex­ual folk, and GBLTQ peo­ple? Yes, I sup­pose I could “just like” that if I was so priv­i­leged that I had my head up my own ass.

So, fan cul­ture does indeed take raw mate­r­ial (a TV show, a film, a comic book, a novel) and (irrev­er­ently) rips it apart. Fans mine these texts for what they find rel­e­vant to their expe­ri­ence as a human being. And they trans­form that text. They recre­ate, re-imagine, rein­ter­pret. Bour­geois val­ues are against us doing this, in part because when fans recre­ate, they are refus­ing to accept the val­ues, inter­pre­ta­tions, and per­spec­tives that are given from the Pow­ers That Be (in this case, autho­rized cre­ators like actors, direc­tors, and writ­ers). Going against power struc­tures has never been okay with bour­geois value-systems, par­tic­u­larly when those inter­pre­ta­tions (like femme Doc­tor cos­play) makes appar­ent the struc­tures that oppress par­tic­u­lar classes of people.

I’m going to guess this com­menter is a straight, White, abled, cis-gendered man. The rea­son I’m guess­ing that? Because the show would already have to speak entirely to your (priv­i­leged) exis­tence for you to say you’re a fan with­out irrev­er­ently rein­ter­pret­ing the show your­self. (Or, he’s not, and he does rein­ter­pret, but he assumes that because he doesn’t write fan­fic or cos­play, it doesn’t count or he doesn’t do it.)

Let’s address, then, his state­ment that cos­play­ers should “be cre­ative” by “creat[ing] their own stuff.” This is a com­mon sen­ti­ment about fan works. Peo­ple act like fan works are deriv­a­tive, and thus they are less-than. I’ve got news for you, folks: Every­thing ever writ­ten down is deriv­a­tive, except maybe cave paint­ings. (Maybe.) Every song you hear on the radio is deriv­a­tive. (Yes, even the “good” music.) Every piece of art­work, every fash­ion cre­ation, every archi­tec­tural mas­ter­piece, every piece of chore­og­ra­phy: all deriv­a­tive. That isn’t a cri­tique; it’s descrip­tive. Fan works are sim­ply more hon­est than most about their deriv­a­tive nature.

So sure, you can draw an arbi­trary line between, for exam­ple, fan­fic and “real writ­ing.” But that line is a con­struc­tion, not nat­ural truth. There’s noth­ing more cre­ative about writ­ing some­thing not based on Doc­tor Who (or Harry Pot­ter or Super­nat­ural). You could argue that most fan­fic is ter­ri­ble, and thus it’s not real writ­ing, and I would laugh at you. Most of the fic­tion that’s been writ­ten down in the world is just as ter­ri­ble as the vast major­ity of fan­fic. Per­haps you want to argue that because fan­fic has not been pub­lished, it is not “real” or “cre­ative,” but then you’re just being an asshole.

Fan works and pro­duc­tions are cre­ative. Hell, the works you are derid­ing, those that rein­ter­pret the text to fit their expe­ri­ences, may even be more cre­ative, if sim­ply because they are more inter­pre­tive. Cos­play is not par­a­sitic, it is pro­duc­tive, like all other fan production.

Exam­ples of cre­ative processes are ana­lyz­ing a text, rein­ter­pret­ing a text, and cri­tiquing a text. Fan works do all these things. An exam­ple of a non-creative process is “lik[ing] some­thing for what it is,” or pas­sively accept­ing oth­ers’ interpretations.

Cross-posted at Geek Fem­i­nism.

Today is Inter­na­tional Women’s Day. A day that is ded­i­cated to end­ing oppres­sion against women, achiev­ing gen­der equal­ity, and cel­e­brat­ing women and their achieve­ments. For fem­i­nists, IWD should also be a day where we cel­e­brate women often left out of the dom­i­nant paradigm:

Tweet from Avory Faucette that reads, “Big love for #IWD for all my trans women, queer women, WOC, WWD, neu­roatyp­i­cal women, fat women, & all women left out of dom­i­nant picture.”

Obvi­ously, fem­i­nists hope­fully do all these things every day (or at least try), but IWD is a nice occa­sion to remind the rest of the world that half the pop­u­la­tion of the globe lives under dif­fer­ent and unequal con­di­tions than the other half.

But for Google? Inter­na­tional Women’s Day is about flow­ers. Because for Google, women are pretty much not impor­tant except as sym­bols of femininity.

The Google doo­dle for Inter­na­tional Women’s Day 2012. The logo replaces the nor­mal pri­mary col­ors with muted pur­ple, red, yel­low, and green. The first G is changed into the sym­bol for Venus, and the sec­ond O is a yel­low flower.

Google has come under fire for its non-holiday doo­dles, which often rec­og­nize the lives of notable peo­ple . And by peo­ple, I mean men. Google doo­dles that rec­og­nize inno­va­tors are over­whelm­ingly about men; as of 2010, of 109 notable peo­ple rec­og­nized, 8 were women. Eight.

And Amadi of Ama­diTalks pointed out last year that the Google doo­dles for Mother’s and Father’s Day fail to depict women actu­ally par­ent­ing (or even women at all), as well as fail­ing to depict any rep­re­sen­ta­tions of par­ent­ing that aren’t middle-class and White. Google instead set­tles for illus­trat­ing Mother’s Day with flow­ers. Every. Year. For a com­pany that claims to be cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive, this is lazy, and shows just how much Google knows and cares about women.

A tweet from @GuardianJessica read­ing, “I’m not sure about the girly #IWD Google doo­dle, to be hon­est. Flow­ers? Wtf? http://bit.ly/AAtxnQ.”

The Google doo­dle this year also includes a flower. Besides the Venus sym­bol (a sym­bol that we can read as either prob­lem­at­i­cally part of a binary sys­tem or as a ref­er­ence to the polit­i­cal fem­i­nist move­ment), the flower and the color change (pri­mar­ily pur­ple) are the only parts of the logo that indi­cate exactly what they’re try­ing to rec­og­nize today. Not only does the doo­dle fail to rep­re­sent actual women or actual achieve­ments by women (some­thing Google doo­dle fails at con­sis­tently), it also con­flates female with fem­i­nine. It con­flates “woman” with “girly,” sym­bol­ized by the flower and the color pur­ple (gen­er­ally coded as fem­i­nine in the West). And instead of actu­ally acknowl­edg­ing women, or sup­port­ing women’s equal­ity, the Google doo­dle phones it in, as it always does with women. They slap a flower on the page and pre­tend they give a shit, when in real­ity, this rep­re­sen­ta­tion is worse than none at all.

A tweet from @GuardianJessica read­ing, “And birth con­trol pills RT @mathildia @GuardianJessica I’d like to see a suf­fragette, rosie the riv­eter, a vam­pire & a peanut but­ter kitkat.”

The com­mute to my new job is about an hour, some­times an hour and a half, so I’ve been lis­ten­ing to the radio quite a bit lately. (By the way, radio in Hous­ton is pretty ter­ri­ble.) So I have heard Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” a lot over the past week.

The song takes place after a break-up, with a dude the singer clearly thinks is pretty smarmy, though she doesn’t give much evi­dence that he was abu­sive or even much more than just a jerk. The line from which the the song title is derived, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” is thus within the con­text of the break-up of a not-obviously abu­sive relationship.

You know the bed feels warmer/ Sleep­ing here alone/ You know I dream in color/ And do the things I want

You think you got the best of me/ Think you had the last laugh/ Bet you think that every­thing good is gone / Think you left me bro­ken down /Think that I’d come run­ning back/ Baby you don’t know me, cause you’re dead wrong.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger/ Stand a lit­tle taller/ Doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone.
What doesn’t kill you makes a fighter/ Foot­steps even lighter/ Doesn’t mean I’m over ‘cause you’re gone

The song still both­ers me, though, because I feel the line “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” even if it isn’t speak­ing explic­itly about trauma in this par­tic­u­lar song, falls in line with a com­mon lie we tell about trauma and its survival.

When some­thing bad hap­pens to you, you’ll prob­a­bly have some­one tell you that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I think this is a com­fort­ing lie, like believ­ing that blind peo­ple have height­ened senses. No one wants to think, “Oh she went through some trauma. That prob­a­bly fucked her up and com­pletely sucks.” So they tell them­selves (and you!) that it’s okay, because now you’re stronger. For me, though, this lie is par­tic­u­larly trans­par­ent. I spent my child­hood scared to death of my father, and now when I feel threat­ened by older men, I burst into uncon­trol­lable tears! Yes, that’s def­i­nitely strength.

I do have some things that could be con­sid­ered advan­tages. Because I have such prac­tice in hav­ing bound­aries (par­tic­u­larly phys­i­cal) pushed, I have made a con­certed effort to prac­tice set­ting bound­aries. But, I’d like to point out, I could have got­ten prac­tice set­ting bound­aries just by hav­ing par­ents that taught me to do that at a young age (like this awe­some mom) and hav­ing a life­time of healthy rela­tion­ships where set­ting bound­aries wasn’t dan­ger­ous or uncomfortable.

I’m also really good at pick­ing up on cer­tain red flags, like abu­sive behav­ior and con­trol issues. Which is good, I guess, but I wouldn’t clas­sify it as “strength” so much as “a defen­sive skill I picked up from unfor­tu­nate expe­ri­ences.” Not exactly enviable.

The “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” lie doesn’t exist alone. It’s part of a col­lec­tion of myths about abuse and trauma, myths that all claim that there’s some­thing pos­i­tive about those kinds of expe­ri­ences, or at least some­thing that makes it kind of worth it. When I tell peo­ple about the trauma I’ve been through, I am often told it has made me stronger, but also that it makes me deeper or more cre­ative. I even had a friend tell me that she wishes she had had real life expe­ri­ences like I did, instead of the happy and healthy child­hood expe­ri­ence she had. Because those, appar­ently, aren’t “real.”

This atti­tude comes from a cul­tural belief that pain not only strength­ens peo­ple, but also the belief that pain is deeper, more real, more inter­est­ing than hap­pi­ness or joy. Ursula K. Le Guin argues this in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Ome­las”:

The trou­ble is that we have a bad habit, encour­aged by pedants and sophis­ti­cates, of con­sid­er­ing hap­pi­ness as some­thing rather stu­pid. Only pain is intel­lec­tual, only evil inter­est­ing. This is the trea­son of the artist: a refusal to admit the banal­ity of evil and the ter­ri­ble bore­dom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to con­demn delight, to embrace vio­lence is to lose hold of every­thing else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any cel­e­bra­tion of joy.

I have been told my whole life that my dys­func­tional and abu­sive expe­ri­ences make me deep, strong, and inter­est­ing. And I’ve been told these things because peo­ple believe that pain is inter­est­ing and intel­lec­tual. It might be inter­est­ing to think back on dys­func­tional and painful expe­ri­ences, but it is not inter­est­ing expe­ri­enc­ing them. Pain is bor­ing, banal, and monot­o­nous. And as Le Guin notes, “to praise despair to con­demn delight, to embrace vio­lence is to lose hold of every­thing else.” If you say things like “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “I wish I had an inter­est­ing (read: abu­sive) past/experience,” that’s what you’re doing: embrac­ing vio­lence and prais­ing despair.

I’ve expe­ri­enced both pain and joy. And joy was far more inspir­ing. When I expe­ri­enced cheer, con­tent­ment, and plea­sure, I was a far more pro­duc­tive writer and researcher, and far more cre­ative. When my step­dad threat­ened to kill him­self in front of me (TW for that link), I couldn’t write reg­u­larly for almost a year. And the writ­ing I am doing now is not because that expe­ri­ence made me inspired or deeper, but in spite of the fact that the mem­ory of that episode makes me hurt and feel unproductive.

We should be valu­ing hap­pi­ness and joy. They are not stu­pid or bor­ing. They are beau­ti­ful, inter­est­ing, intel­lec­tual, and inspir­ing. Seek them out, and quit telling your­self that pain is a more wor­thy expe­ri­ence that will enrich your life.