anghraine | Entries tagged with dissertation hell

My dissertation is in and my advisor responded to my anxious meltdown email about it by congratulating me on the achievement and telling me to get some rest and relaxation if I can.

I feel like both laughing and crying at this point, honestly. It's much too short because, despite the amount of time I've spent on it, I am an extremely glacial writer (probably not news to any of you l o l) and there will be a lot of work in the two-week revision time frame. But I appreciate being told to chill in a very nice way.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Under Pressure (Queen & David Bowie)

I suspect most dissertations are like nesting dolls to some degree, but I've kind of surprised myself with the extent that it's like "it looks like it's about family structures and patriarchy" on the surface, but at a deeper level it's specifically about gender essentialism in a context where this is understood as an inborn, fundamentally unequal, binary opposition, and about the way The Cisheteronormative Patriarchal Agenda fucks up people and family relationships.

So at this point, it's as much about the way the pressures placed by gender essentialism warps people as much as it's about misogyny in and of itself, though certainly very much about gender nevertheless. IDK but my advisor thought it was cool, so whatever.

Also my committee's draft is due tomorrow morning ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: One More Tomorrow (Electric Light Orchestra)

Rambling about family relationships based on my research for my PhD exams (16th- to 18th-century British literature):

One of the things that came up in my reading for my exams was, inevitably, ~the rise of the companionate marriage~. The usual framing is often over-simplistic and very heterocentric; people sometimes talk as if there was no concept of marriage involving romantic ties (sometimes even exclusive romantic ties!) until the 17th/18th century or something.

That said, IMO there’s something to it, at least in England. As someone who had mostly done research in the 18th and earlier 19th centuries, 16th-century takes on marriage often sound like they come from Earth 2. Over time, there’s more and more emphasis on the ties of marriage, companionship, and parenthood in cultural discourse, with other family relationships increasingly subordinated to those, even while ideas from earlier periods about the importance of those other family relationships persisted in some ways.

Like, there was a lot of talk about how brothers were supposed to care for the interests of their siblings, especially their unmarried sisters, but there’s also a lot of talk about how that was increasingly not happening, and how the ties between brothers and sisters were becoming less important and less reliable as a "net" for unmarried women.

Men increasingly resented their sisters for taking resources that would otherwise go to their wives and children, or simply denied them meaningful resources altogether in favor of focusing on their own wives/children. It was a really well-established dynamic by the time that Wollstonecraft wrote about it in Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Austen in Sense and Sensibility.

One of the things that S&S highlights is that John and Fanny Dashwood’s son does not need the resources that are denied to John’s sisters. He already has a comfortable separate inheritance. John prioritizes Fanny and Harry over his sisters both because of his character and because doing so had become very culturally normalized by then.

By the 20th century (at least in the UK and US), people prioritizing their spouses and children over their siblings or other connections was and is often going to seem "well, of course they would." But the degree to which that is the case is really influenced by cultural norms and expectations. Going back to Austen (surprise), she has an intriguing passage about it that speaks to the shifts in how the sibling tie was seen and experienced:

An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! it is so.—Fraternal love, sometimes almost every thing, is at others worse than nothing.

I don’t even have siblings (sort of surrogate siblings, but not people I was actually brought up with), but I do find the evolution and melancholy over this really interesting. And I do think that a lot of the, hmm, enthusiasm over the rise of the “companionate marriage” tends to ignore the cost of it.

Tagged: #i am pretty sure this is why austen keeps returning to darcy's sense of responsibility and deep affection for his sister #and why elizabeth thinks his way of talking about georgiana should have told her about his character #i've seen people be like 'just bc you care about your own family members doesn't mean you're a good person wtf' about that #but it was a big deal at the time! #wickham brings it up as something that people in general praise darcy for too #obviously this was of really immediate concern for austen herself #but plenty of people write about it over the years #and it's just ... idk #complicated

[ETA 5/28/2024: this is actually extremely relevant to my dissertation and something I was literally just writing about today!]

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: After the Fall (Trans-Siberian Orchestra)

I'm taking a brief break from my dissertation to ... uh, amuse myself by figuring out my readers' ranking of my genderbending fics on AO3.

Rules I'm applying: 1) I'm only including fic verses that are collectively at least 2000 words long because, well, I do have to go back to the diss, 2) verses comprised of multiple fics are ranked according to either the popularity of the series as a whole or the most popular individual fic (depending on which is higher; not combining them because there's a lot of overlap), 3) I'm considering both bookmarks and kudos in my judgment—we'll see if it makes a difference, and 4) I'm ignoring everything with less than 30 kudos and 5 bookmarks.

1. First Impressions | 215 bookmarks | 876 kudos | genderbent characters: Elizabeth Bennet (-> Henry Bennet) and Fitzwilliam Darcy (-> Catherine Darcy)

This is a genderswapped retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in its original period (not really a true "what if"). All stats are specifically for the original (completed) 36k fic. It individually beats out every possible stat for every other fic in the series as well as the series as a whole. (Note: The overall series is 44k words long.)

2. Lucy Skywalker series | 163 bookmarks | 406 kudos (The Jedi and the Sith Lord) | genderbent characters: Luke Skywalker (-> Lucy Skywalker)

This is a genderbent AU that mostly, but not completely, sticks to the rails of canon until the end of the ESB timeline, at which point it swerves into the "real" AU. The Jedi and the Sith Lord is the sequel to The Imperial Menace/the ESB plot, and the third fic in the main series, focusing on the consequences of Vader capturing Lucy. It's technically completed at 70k, but only in the sense that it explores what happens to/with Lucy and Vader until the nature of her captivity fundamentally changes, and everything after that will be a separate fic but hasn't been written yet. Although none of the individual fics have as many bookmarks as the series as a whole, my #2, #3, and #4 most bookmarked genderbent fics are all for the Lucyverse. (Note: the overall series is 129k words long.)

3. Love, Pride & Delicacy | 25 bookmarks | 163 kudos | genderbent characters: Fitzwilliam Darcy (-> Catherine Darcy, for convenience)

This is an actual Elizabeth/f!Darcy "what if" femslash AU rather than a retelling, though a slow one—it's still early in the overall story at 25k. It's also placed in the original P&P setting. There is no wider series.

4. The Lady of Gondor | 25 bookmarks | 119 kudos (we also are daughters of the great) | genderbent characters: Faramir (-> Fíriel)

This is a deeply self-indulgent Aragorn/f!Faramir/Éowyn AU, though it's not only a WIP but split into different vaguely related fics (some of which are also WIPs!) about some aspect of the verse in relation to Fíriel. I think the norms of Gondor and Middle-earth make the gender change particularly significant (in some ways more than any other verse), so actual plot and relationship changes tend to be the focus. The kudos are for the specific linked fic, which is a WIP at nearly 5k and the most Éowyn-centric of them. (Note: the overall series is about 9.5k words long.)

5. The Edge of Darkness | 17 bookmarks | 106 kudos | genderbent characters: Tarrlok (-> Taraka)

This is a genderbent f!Tarrlok AU, though told entirely from Noatak/Amon's perspective, and to some extent more about the impact on him than on Taraka herself (though she's extremely important to the fic). Even more than that, the linked fic is focused on the effect of the change on their family dynamics as children, until teenage Noatak leaves her behind per canon. The fic can look like a retelling à la First Impressions, since the basic plot points don't change, but the larger series is on course to swerve into full "what if" territory as well. However, like First Impressions, these stats are all for the completed opening fic (18k) and not the longer WIP series (32k), which is temporarily paused at the point where 37-year-old Taraka openly identifies Amon as Noatak. CW: child abuse.

6. Blood and Fire | 16 bookmarks | 67 kudos | genderbent characters: Tarrlok (-> Taraka) and Noatak (-> Nataka)

This is a dark(er) AU of The Edge of Darkness in which Noatak/Amon is also genderbent, and the bloodbending siblings never separated. Taraka fled home with Nataka back in the day, they only grew closer (...too close), and although Taraka still ended up on the Republic City council, her true loyalty is to Amon. She promptly turns Korra over when Amon shows up, which is where the fic begins; it's told entirely through Korra's attempts to navigate her circumstances as a prisoner of the Equalists. CW: incest, complicated F/F/F dubcon??? emotional bonding kink with occasional violence yet little overt romance and no sex. I am what I am. The stats are for the completed (though deliberately ambiguous) main fic, which is 10k, and not the side fics or the series as a whole (13k).

7. The Queer Rogue One AU | 12 bookmarks | 57 kudos (the words we've both fallen under) | genderbent characters: Cassian Andor (-> Cassia Andor)

This is, on one level, a relatively straightforward genderbent!Cassian AU that is more or less complete at 13k. The underlying concepts are: a) what if my male fave was a hot lesbian and my ship was f/f and b) what if we headcanon every single member of the main team as queer in some capacity :D and c) the SW universe is so blatantly patriarchal in the films that it's a particularly interesting setting for exploring the effects of the gender change on someone like Cassia, a female revolutionary and spy :D :D. It's a little challenging to properly evaluate where it sits wrt stats because I revised the scattered, vaguely connected scraps of the universe into a single fic through both sentence-level revisions and significant additions, but that revision is only on Tumblr (where the link currently goes to, sorry) and my GoogleDrive, not AO3. It's not even a series in my heart! But it is on AO3. Evaluate as you will, but when I finally get around to converting the AO3 version to the correct format this may or may not change. For now this is where it goes by AO3 stats.

8. Daughters of Númenor series | 5 bookmarks | 33 kudos (the voices of the sea) | genderbent characters: all Númenórean throwbacks in LOTR, but specifically Aragorn (-> Aranor), Faramir (-> Míriel), Denethor (-> Andreth), and Imrahil (-> Imraphel)

As might be guessed, this is an AU where every Númenórean throwback mentioned in LOTR is genderbent (in the backstory, this also includes Ivriniel and Finduilas of Dol Amroth, who become Túrin, Prince of Dol Amroth, and Gwindor of Dol Amroth). It's Aranor/Míriel and definitely focused on them despite the broader change (where Arwen is a non-factor for the OT3 in The Lady of Gondor because she went to Valinor with Celebrían, she actually is present in Middle-earth in this series, though unfortunately very straight). While Fíriel in The Lady of Gondor was never expected to be a warrior and gets on reasonably well with Denethor, this AU is more about the broader effects—so even though we rarely see f!Denethor/Andreth, it's significant that she was a trailblazer as a female warrior, loremaster, and ultimately the first female ruler of Gondor, inadvertently laying a foundation that Aranor could build on later (which would have horrified Andreth herself!). The specific fic with the most kudos in the series, linked above, is a nearly 2k fic about the effect of Faramir's canonical visions on Míriel. (Note: the overall series is currently 3k words long.)

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Livin' On A Prayer (Bon Jovi)

Angst is in scare quotes because it's just silly.

But anyway, I have this argument about how:

1) Historical context is profoundly important to consider when engaging with early modern literature and
2) This lens should not take precedence over the internal elements of a text and
3) Historicist critics should not only attend to the powerful influence of cultural context on early modern literature but also to the effects of critics' own cultural contexts, cultural anxieties etc on their literary analysis and their understanding of the periods they study and
4) It is not actually possible to understand your present "historical moment" and its impact on you with the same perspective you have on an era long past like early modern England because of uhhhh the nature of linear time and
5) You should still try.

The angst is that my first phrasing was "This is not actually possible because of the limitations of the space-time continuum" and then I was like "I don't think this is the project for referencing space-time or even the limitations of linear time lmao" and then I was like "I guess I could just reference 'human' limitations" and then I was like "but does that obscure the matter of chronological perspective that I'm trying to get at" and then I was like "this is a tangent of a tangent about at least trying to put in a modicum of critical thought about how you might be affected by your own culture and preconceptions so you're not a 21st-century version of the 1890s critics whining about the indelicacy of early modern drama..."

Now I kind of want to put the space-time continuum back.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy (Queen)

The title of this post refers not to a fic but to this single, still-unfinished chapter of my dissertation. The 15k does include the citations (which are extremely time-consuming to manage) along with notes for topics/quotes I want to cover and longer passages I have written but not yet integrated into the overall chapter, in fairness. I'm not a very linear writer! The fully integrated and continuous section of the draft that begins at the beginning and flows without gaps to where I am now is a mere *squints* 9k, about 28 pages in my document (the completed citations for this sections are 1.2k words).

On the one hand: I have so much left to write ;_;

On the other: I am having NO difficulty hitting word count goals, lmao. Thank you for being a profoundly interesting playwright, John Webster.

Indirectly, also thanks to 100 years of bad Webster criticism! I spent 2k of those words just getting into the various pitfalls of Webster criticism wrt Ferdinand specifically and many of them are way worse wrt the Duchess. For instance:

On the other hand, the twin sister who pushes Ferdinand’s turbulent nature beyond the limits of his restraint is not wholly innocent.

(A line literally published in PMLA in the 70s; the article it's from is "The Moral Paradox of Webster's Tragedy" by Robert F. Whitman. The diss is more like "It is not entirely clear how the Duchess pushes Ferdinand's nature, turbulent or otherwise..." but internally I'm just FUCK OFF.)

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: In the Hall of the Mountain King (Electric Light Orchestra)

1) This chapter is a monster (~12,000 words at this point with a long way left to go), mostly because I have so much to say about one specific play (one of three that inspired the whole dissertation concept to begin with), but it's only one of many texts under discussion overall. I'm tired, but also too ~~obsessed~~ ~~opinionated~~ interested in my topic and in doing right by ~~my guy~~ a very relevant playwright to cut it short. On one level it's fun and another aghhhhhhhhhhh

2) One of the fun/exhausting aspects of studying early modern literature (mostly plays for me) is that there's typically 400 years of accumulated scholarship to discuss in the course of positioning my argument and, well, actually making my argument. I actually enjoy the 50s-80s early modernist scholars quite a bit because they're less infected by Victorian traditions than the earlier ones, but less entrenched in fixing on One Theoretical Lens To Rule Them All and saccharine semi-corporate bullshitting that infects a lot of modern academia. So if they think someone's argument is bad, they'll just say so. Like, I kind of love this debate over the incestuous subtext (barely subtext) of The Duchess of Malfi where Louis Giannetti snaps out in a footnote, "Finally, he [F. L. Lucas] concedes that incest might be a possibility—'a suggestion, and an inessential one' (p. 34). How Professor Lucas can dismiss incest as 'inessential' staggers the mind" (307n14). Tell us what you really feel, Professor Giannetti!

(F. L. Lucas himself was a truly remarkable figure in Webster studies and also 1930s British anti-appeasement and anti-fascism. His Webster takes are a little wonky but it kind of feels less significant in the grand scheme of things. He didn't have the focus of later Webster scholars but given that his extremely varying interests included raging at the British press and government, helping refugees, putting fascist hate mail from Ezra Pound on display, and ultimately running an intelligence cell to fight Nazis, it's hard to care that much. He also wrote a sci-fi novella about overpopulation and, apparently, global warming in 1937.)

3) Anyway, I was going over The Duchess of Malfi and some of Ferdinand's many creepy, purity-obsessed speeches/threats to his sister, and stumbled over this one:

Your darkest actions: nay, your privat'st thoughts
Will come to light

me, wearily: Okay, Horde Prime.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: West Coast (Lana del Rey)

I was kind of mentally scolding myself for how little I read these days, how I just don't have the discipline or interest the way I once did, etc etc.

I also only wrote a little on my dissertation today because I spent almost the whole day reading five different scholarly articles that were each generally around 30 pages. And they were interesting, but by the end I didn't want to read or write anything else (okay, except one extremely pertinent article my university doesn't give me access to :|).

Dear self: maybe, just a possibility, but maybe you don't have the discipline or interest in reading outside of academia the way you used to because you're in academia. And in literature specifically, which necessarily involves a metric ton of reading things.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Piano Man (Billy Joel)

I saw an interesting, but also somewhat disturbing, conversation about the history of the Sansa Stark hatedom that touched on something I've been thinking about for awhile.

The Sansa hatedom discussion was sparked by someone asking about the reasons for the dudebro Sansa hatedom of days of yore. Someone else brought up these same dudebros' idealization of Arya by contrast with Sansa and how they basically valued Arya in "not like the other girls" terms. Yet another person argued that this was #problematic because the criticism of NLOG is homophobic. Somebody was like ... don't you mean misogynistic? Neither of these characters are gay? The previous person explained that the criticism of NLOG ignores the social context that it arises out of and disproportionately targets GNC women who are often lesbians, hence the connection with homophobia.

I do get that a lot of the kneejerk condemnation of NLOG rhetoric arises out of the misogynistic and gender essentialist and generally fucked-up perception of GNC women as threatening to femininity in some way, that plenty of those GNC women are lesbians or otherwise WLW and thus it can factor into homophobia in practice, and that those condemnations of the NLOG rhetoric are trotted out to dismiss the most basic criticisms of gender role expectations for women (imagine a conversation about the connection between the make-up industry or body hair removal and the widespread social pressure put on women to conform to narrowly-defined and generally harmful and expensive beauty standards that did not promptly turn into defensive choice feminism screeds).

I even get that there are over-invested Sansa stans who prop her up at Arya's expense because they find Sansa's conformity to feminine gender performance appealing and more appropriate to their own expectations for women/girls, and that they have used criticisms of NLOG rhetoric to bash Arya (or basically any woman/girl who even mildly diverges from gender performance norms).

But in this case, the conversation was about the ways Sansa has been harshly criticized for her association with femininity/feminine performance, mostly by adult men hyper-scrutinizing the gender performance of a fictional eleven-year-old girl, and framed as inferior to Arya because those men (like many men!) hold anything and anyone associated with femininity in contempt. That is something that very definitely did happen, frequently. There is a reason that "like a girl" or "girly" is an insult and has considerable power in defining what masculinity looks like to so many men and boys (there are further complications w/ this that I don't have the time to get into, but it's certainly a very conspicuous aspect of the construction of normative masculinity). The idea that an entirely accurate description of something that actually happened is problematic, even unspeakable, because the criticism has been misused in other contexts sits really uncomfortably with me. It feels a bit like creeping up to alternative facts from the other side.

However. I'm also writing about hyper-scrutiny in my dissertation—generally speaking, the way in which women's behavior (especially wrt sexuality) is placed under such intense scrutiny that you get this obsessive nitpicking and over-scrutinizing of anything and everything a woman or female character does or feels. Literary critics absolutely fall prey to this and that's the context of the discussion in my dissertation—essentially, that each individual nitpick they're making could be correct as far as it goes, but the cascade of so many of them and the way some early modernist critics concentrate this scrutiny on female characters does seem pretty misogynistic after a while. And I've seen that kind of behavior in other contexts.

Like, when MTG released LOTR art in which Aragorn was depicted as Black, some people were explicitly racist about it, and some people explicitly welcomed the depiction. But the thing I noticed was the way that some people would make all these detail-focused criticisms of the art that didn't mention race at all, but seemed very disproportionately directed towards the art pieces that presented heroic characters as POC. And many of the people doing this were familiar as the same people who responded similarly to The Rings of Power, especially the characters played by POC. Some of these critics just kept escalating and eventually went full mask-off; there was one former follower (former because I blocked him) who at first seemed a normal enough nitpicky purist (something I get), then suspiciously so, and within a couple of days his blog was just overtly racist responses to any heroic Tolkien characters being depicted as POC. Some of these people never went that far, but would actively minimize the impact of racism and misogyny on the general ROP discourse (like, there were popular ROP discourse memes in which the more respectable criticisms were presented up front in large letters and the racism/misogyny in significantly smaller font on the edges of the image). Others didn't do that, either, but still hyper-focused on every "wrong" detail about characters played by POC like Disa, Arondir, and Míriel.

It is, let's say, unsurprising that the ROP characters who probably got the most positive fandom reception in the end despite the general histrionics around the show were Elrond, Durin, Halbrand, and (more controversially) Galadriel. The most popular ROP ship by a gigantic mile is a white het ship, and at least on AO3, Celeborn (who does not appear in the show and is only very briefly and belatedly mentioned at all) shows up in more ROP fics than any of the characters played by POC (Arondir and Isildur barely squeak onto AO3's top ten list of commonly tagged ROP characters, following after Galadriel, Halbrand/Sauron twice, Elrond, Adar, Elendil, Gil-galad, and Celeborn, with Míriel, Disa, and Bronwyn not even making the list).

So, like ... it's not news that Tolkien fandom is racist and misogynistic. But the broader point is that popular condemnation of something can reach such a volume and be so disproportionately targeted that even things that are individually true or at least defensible in isolation start looking really suspect. And often they are really suspect in ways that become pretty obvious (it's about ethics in gaming journalism!!!!). But I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile my extreme distaste for "you can't use criticism of NLOG to characterize dudebro fans actively using that exact framework in a grossly misogynistic way because of the homophobes" and my extreme distaste for Tolkien fandom's refusal to consider the context before they start going on screeds about Arondir or MTG Aragorn.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: You Give Love a Bad Name (Bon Jovi)

I reblogged a writing meme urging anyone seeing it to write three sentences on their current project.

Tagged: #whistles

[ETA 4/6/2024: honestly, this has how I've managed to keep clawing through my dissertation. I'll tell myself to just write three sentences on it, that's not that hard! It's way less overwhelming than sections or chapters, and I usually end up writing considerably more than three! 10/10 writing meme, wholeheartedly recommend.]

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Who Wants To Live Forever (Queen)

I nobly spent most of today advancing the dissertation chapter I'm working on to 10 pages rather than praying to Mystra to kill suffering hyenas for Gale approval points. Ugh.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: L-O-V-E (Natalie Cole)

Profile

Anghraine

May 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Dark Blue for Funky Circles by ninetydegrees

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated May. 24th, 2025 07:08 pm