Geekery and the humanities

Cross posted at Geek Fem­i­nism.

I was at Apol­lo­Con in Hous­ton this year, and am really glad I went. I was on a cou­ple of pan­els, met some really nice peo­ple, and got to pon­tif­i­cate about geek cul­ture and sci­ence fic­tion for a few days. A cou­ple of things really got under my skin (I think this may be my fate at every con I go to), but the one that made me the sad­dest hap­pened at the Geek Girls in Pop­u­lar Cul­ture panel, which I was a part of. Dur­ing our clos­ing remarks, I noted that we seem to only be includ­ing women in the science/tech/math fields when we talked about “geek girls” and this is, I think, a real prob­lem. As a humanities-based geek myself, it made me feel like I was being left out, but also it seems to include the assump­tion that the STEM fields are sim­ply bet­ter than the human­i­ties, and every­one would be bet­ter off if all geeks were in those fields. I worded it care­fully, because I didn’t want it to sound like an accu­sa­tion, and so it came out much more “Dude, I’m a geek too, and it hurts my feel­ings when every­one acts like I should be a com­puter nerd to count as one.” The answer I got shouldn’t have sur­prised me, but it did. One of the pan­elists, and at least two audi­ence mem­bers chimed in with, “Well, the only rea­son you’re in the human­i­ties is because you’ve been dis­cour­aged from being in STEM.”

I was kind of stunned by that answer, in part because I had just told this group of peo­ple that I am mak­ing the human­i­ties my career, and their response was to basi­cally argue that it’s worth­less, or at least worth less. So I didn’t say any­thing for a sec­ond, try­ing to come up with an answer that wasn’t, “Fuck you. The major­ity of my work lately has been deter­min­ing the val­ues of this moth­er­fuck­ing sub­cul­ture right here, and you are the sub­jects of that work. It doesn’t make any sense for you to tell me that that isn’t worth­while.” I had told these peo­ple that I do fan stud­ies, and as fans, their response is tell me that I only chose my field because I had been dis­cour­aged from doing more impor­tant work? Seriously.

Some­one on the panel did back­track a lit­tle, say­ing “well, we should be encour­ag­ing every­one to be in the fields they enjoy and are good at, what­ever that may be,” but there’s still this…niggling. Because this is not the first place in geek cul­ture I have seen a strong pref­er­ence for STEM over the human­i­ties, and it’s not the first place I’ve seen it out­right said that the for­mer is bet­ter than the lat­ter, espe­cially for women. And that’s pre­cisely what that argu­ment is; by say­ing that I’m only in the human­i­ties because every­one knows girls are bad at STEM, they are argu­ing that all things being equal, every girl (or at least geek girl) would choose STEM. Because, you know, it’s bet­ter. Maybe the rea­son we like to think this is that geeks tend to buy hook, line, and sinker the idea that logic is bet­ter than emo­tion and objec­tiv­ity is bet­ter than sub­jec­tiv­ity. And we asso­ciate human­i­ties with the lat­ter and the sciences/math with the for­mer. But sub­jec­tiv­ity and emo­tion are not poi­son and they are not invalid. If you think an argu­ment with­out emo­tion is the best kind of argu­ment, go preach eat­ing babies to the poor. If you think that sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ences don’t mat­ter, then I guess we can all stop lis­ten­ing to the mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple of the world talk­ing about dis­crim­i­na­tion in their lives. Because “objec­tive” more often than not just means the words of white, het­ero, cis men, whose expe­ri­ences are fig­ured as neu­tral and who we seem to think are unaf­fected by their sex, race, class, sex­u­al­ity, etc.

I’m not claim­ing that every indi­vid­ual geek is con­sciously a logic-worshipping dude who hates gross lady feel­ings. But this logic wor­ship is some­thing that flut­ters just under the sur­face of geek cul­ture, and man­i­fests in seem­ingly harm­less state­ments like those made at this panel. In this cul­ture, mas­culin­ity is logic and sci­ence and fem­i­nin­ity is emo­tion and feel­ing, and one is clearly supe­rior to the other. Look at the show Big Bang The­ory as an exam­ple. while Leonard is our hero, he is not the star of this show; Shel­don is. And Shel­don, let’s be hon­est, is kind of a dick. He has no regard for other peo­ple and doesn’t think any­one is as impor­tant as him­self. But he’s smart, and super log­i­cal, and thus we like him. We’re sup­posed to like him, even as we roll our eyes at him, because he may be bad at social sit­u­a­tions but at least he is objec­tive! It doesn’t even seem to occur to most geek view­ers that, by most mea­sures, Shel­don is a ter­ri­ble per­son. Because that doesn’t mat­ter as much as his adher­ence to an objec­tive, log­i­cal world­view. The com­par­i­son of him to Spock indi­cates, I think, another geek hero who rep­re­sents this wor­ship of log­i­cal think­ing over emo­tional intel­li­gence; while Spock’s char­ac­ter devel­op­ment mostly con­sists of him re-valuing emo­tion, most fans seem to see him as awe­some because he appears to escape the emotion-ridden, sub­jec­tively expe­ri­enced life that we must live through.

I think one of the rea­sons this logic wor­ship is just under the sur­face of geek com­mu­ni­ties, rather than explicit, is because fan com­mu­ni­ties are actu­ally all about per­sonal expe­ri­ences (with the text, with each other), even when they pre­tend not to be. This is a cul­ture in which peo­ple dress up as char­ac­ters, role-play as char­ac­ters, write sto­ries about char­ac­ters, and thus relate the text to them­selves and their lives. We get emo­tion­ally invested in our games, in our TV shows, in our movies, and in our books, because that’s what fans do. So per­haps this obses­sion with sci­ence and logic is more an anx­i­ety than any­thing else; maybe fans over­com­pen­sate for what they know is their own deeply per­sonal emo­tional engage­ment with a text.

Now, I’m not anti-logic or anti-science; I do think these things are valu­able, but they can only be con­vinc­ing and pow­er­ful when they take into account emo­tion and the human­i­ties (for lack of a bet­ter term). None of these things work best on their own. Which brings me to my real argu­ment: the idea that the human­i­ties are less impor­tant than STEM is an idea that geeks need to drop, because the human­i­ties are con­sti­tu­tive to geek cul­ture, just as much as sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, and math are.

The idea that the human­i­ties is not impor­tant to geek cul­tures is patently ridicu­lous; most of the time geek fan cul­tures are based on books or TV shows (you know, things writ­ten by writ­ers and per­formed by actors, who are by def­i­n­i­tion in “the arts”); and game design­ers and writ­ers are likely to have stud­ied lit­er­a­ture and the arts to pre­pare for their jobs, not just pro­gram­ming and com­puter sci­ence. The study of the King Arthur myth, Tolkien, fan­tasy, and his­tory are not part of physics or chem­istry; they are part of the human­i­ties. Obvi­ously, sci­ence and math and com­put­ers are all impor­tant parts of geek cul­ture, but so is lit­er­a­ture and his­tory and the arts.

In fact, geek cul­ture is one of those places that the STEM fields and the human­i­ties have blended in a sig­nif­i­cant and sort of beau­ti­ful way; this is the cul­ture in which sci­en­tists and philoso­phers can and do have mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions, in which lit­er­a­ture and sci­ence come together in a novel, in which the engi­neer and the lit­er­ary critic talk for hours on end at a con­ven­tion, in which art and cyborgs are not at all at odds. This is the place where these two “oppo­sites” meet and min­gle and blend, and for our com­mu­ni­ties to really shine, we need to get rid of this under­ly­ing belief that one is bet­ter than the other.

So let’s stop rag­ging on the arts and human­i­ties, and stop dis­miss­ing geeks who do them as lim­ited or sti­fled. Some of us are drawn to the human­i­ties and arts because of what they do in our cul­ture and can do for our cul­ture, because we rec­og­nize that they are impor­tant in geek cul­ture and in our world. I am not a lit­er­ary critic because I couldn’t think of any­thing more wor­thy to do. And I don’t think being one makes me less of a geek than any­one else.