Anghraine

If you follow me on Tumblr, you've seen me trip into an unexpected (for me) Kirk/Spock spiral. I knew, of course, that the ship is the granddaddy of modern western slash fandom—and fandom as many of us know it wouldn't exist without the ship's passionate early fandom—but given that a) ships can be wildly popular without me personally finding them compelling and b) I don't tend to be into m/m in general, I really didn't expect I would fall head over heels for it.

I think partly it's because sometimes I was watching with people who strain to ignore all hints of homoerotic subtext between anyone when it's not explicitly spelled out, and I was annoyed at the refusal to even consider any other possibility than The Holy Bond of Totally Platonic Heterosexual Dude Friendship despite the truly copious amount of material in this case. But even apart from that, I went from being a bit surprised the foundational slash fandom juggernaut wasn't "more or less typical bromance filtered through fandom goggles" but actually the real super homoerotic deal to "losing my mind about this" due to some particular, uh, incidents in TOS. The final straw for me was actually the season 3 episode "Requiem for Methuselah" (in which Kirk has a decidedly mediocre het romance Spock visibly dislikes, leading to a final scene in which McCoy claims Spock can't understand love triangles or the victories or agonies of love that Kirk has experienced, and without so much as a scene break Spock just waits for McCoy to leave and then wipes his rival from Kirk's memory. unhinged gay shit is what I needed to truly succumb, I guess!). But there were also three major S1 episodes that heavily contributed to my eventual "AHHHHHH MY SHIPPP" downfall. These weren't the only wildly shippy moments in the season (hahahahahaha), just the ones that were the emotional equivalent of being punched in the stomach:

1) "The Naked Time": I love this episode for many reasons, not only K/S ones (in fact, more for Spock feelings in general). However. This is the episode where everyone gets space drunk and loses all their inhibitions, so they just start doing whatever their repressed instincts and fantasies and emotions drive them towards (the fantastic "I'll rescue you, fair maiden!" -> "Sorry, neither" Sulu-Uhura scene happens in that context). Most people are just kind of silly. However, there's a point where Nurse Chapel passionately declares her feelings for Spock, and he gently rejects her but is deeply upset about it. The next time we see inhibition-free Spock, he's jumped from feeling terrible about Chapel to feeling terrible about his mother's emotional isolation on Vulcan, and his own participation in it. Kirk tries to shake him out of it, and an increasingly anxious Spock confesses, "Jim, when I feel friendship for you, I'm ashamed." Kirk keeps trying to shake him back to his senses and he just says in agony, "Understand, Jim. I've spent a whole lifetime learning to hide my feelings..."

I will say that normally, I am not one of the lesbians who finds much catharsis in m/m or mediates my own feelings about my own marginalized sexuality through it (my main exception to this was Faramir/Aragorn as a teenager). But Spock's "in vino veritas" being not daring escapades or wish-fulfillment fantasies, but misery and shame over both his feelings and his detachment (in the fourth-aired episode of the nearly 80 episodes of the series), and also shame over his lifelong attempts to conceal what, and how much, he truly feels just hit so hard. The fact that we later discover that his cultural norms led to him getting railroaded into a het marriage as a literal child and that he clearly loathes the necessity of sex with his wife only intensifies the sense of déja vu I started getting. Who knew that watching subtextual pining from a science-fiction show aired in 1966 could tear off the scabs on my "lesbian raised Mormon" damage? Not me until this episode!

[ETA: I know some of you are SNW fans, so note that I'm pretty harsh about it under the cut.]

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I've talked a bit on Tumblr about it, but my mother has been struggling with her health for several years. She was doing better for about... I don't know, six months, after I bullied her into getting a referral from her distracted rural doctor who mostly just cared about the possibility of her a) abusing her psych meds and b) losing weight, and even when her oxygen levels were hovering around 91% in his own office would just prescribe prednisone at best. She was already disabled when she was hit by a car several years ago (she was driving her mobility scooter through a crosswalk at the time) and she has fairly severe asthma (she didn't even own a nebulizer and I'd also bully her into using mine when possible).

We're pretty sure she had a bad case of long COVID at one point, but anyway, I did insist on her seeing an asthma specialist in the city and that led to seeing other specialists and generally she was doing quite a bit better. But her lungs have been in pretty bad shape for a long time and it was a slow recovery from months on end when she was coughing up phlegm, choking on it when she tried to sleep, and coughing so much that she could barely carry on a conversation until a few weeks ago.

Then she picked up what everyone assumed to be the flu. She was apparently doing pretty badly; we came by to drop off some equipment (including my nebulizer!!), but she didn't want me getting too close because I'm also immunocompromised and she didn't want me catching her miserable flu that was aggravating her asthma. She seemed to recover from that and then got much worse—I later found out that her pulse oxygen crashed to 71% a couple of nights ago, she'd been taken to the local hospital, given treatment that brought her up to 86% while they did some tests to figure out what was actually going on. They sent her back home, determined she in fact has pneumonia, but she crashed another time and my father correctly called the ambulance immediately and she was ultimately taken to a hospital 100 miles away.

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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.

I’m not a proactive person at all, so getting all my class’s materials for the week posted before 7:30 AM on Monday feels like a major accomplishment.

I don’t really regret getting my MA in English, but I never expected the number of people who think it means I’m available to edit their manuscripts.

Tagged: #you're getting a phd in english? awesome! could you fix my book? #me (getting a phd in early modern and eighteenth century british lit) uhhhh #in fairness i've done creative writing concentrations at every opportunity—but neither of my degrees are in it! #idk

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.

I guess, theoretically, it's possible that there are allistic people who have some acceptable, non-shitty reason for their strong opinions about the removal of Asperger's Syndrome as a distinct diagnosis from autism.

But ngl I don't think I have ever seen a rationale that didn't come down to "now the diagnosis includes people who are disabled enough to annoy me but not enough for me to pity them." Maybe with a side implication of "if people who can mask are autistic then autism doesn't mean anything!!!!!"

The legacy of AS is complex and fraught among actual autistic people (especially given that the phasing out of AS for reasons of diagnostic unreliability was followed shortly thereafter by exposés of what an absolute monster Hans Asperger was). But allistic people who are super affronted about autistic people they consider insufficiently disabled are just—why do you care? In what way is this your business? What is the mysterious reason you're so very bothered by the wrong kind of autistic people?

Also, honestly, vanishingly few of these people seem to be a) psychologists in any sense, b) at all familiar with the diagnostic problems with AS vs HFA before the exposés about Hans Asperger's, uh, practices [CW Nazis], and c) sometimes have no idea what Asperger did or what purpose the distinctions between autistic groups served.

I'm personally in a kind of weird position wrt AS altogether because I was diagnosed as an adult and went through various tests over about 10 years between my mid-20s and mid-30s. Even the first suggestion of something related to autism going on with me happened right before the DSM-V was released and I had no involvement in AS-centered communities or anything. The suggestion that I might have AS or HFA didn't surprise me at all, though as a psych major I scrupulously avoided diagnosing myself or anyone else [the psychology students at my uni had been taught that those were The Rules and I've always been deeply concerned with Rules, I'm sure for autism-unrelated reasons]. But I was so overwhelmed by the apparatus of US psychological health care and just how many unfamiliar social interactions and transportation difficulties it involved that it took me a good ten years to navigate it all. I went from a university psychologist I was seeing in undergrad for anxiety/disassociation/depression who went "that sounds like it could be related to autism" to various clinicians repeatedly identifying me as autistic according to the DSM-V to "formally tested and diagnosed with a specialist's recommendation detailing support needs." So I was never actually diagnosed with AS or HFA or whatever, just ASD. The fact that navigating the system was such a lengthy nightmare primarily because of symptoms of autism certainly adds a fillip of irony to the whole thing, though!

I’ve gotten a bunch of new followers recently and I’m not sure why—but regardless, hi!

[ETA 4/28/2024: I'm cross-posting this one mainly for record-keeping purposes, though I've added Dreamwidth-relevant clarifications in brackets. I've also been recently fixing, consolidating, and adding some DW tags for a more consistent system over here, so some older posts are only under the tags for the relevant fandoms and characters rather than the specific book, show, or film they're referencing. Anything Austen-related is under #fandom: austen, say, but many of my older Pride and Prejudice-specific posts don't have the P&P tag because I instituted the specific tag more recently.]

Run-down: my name is Elizabeth and I’m a 30-odd, US American PhD student. I study 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century British literature, primarily 18th [ETA: and early seventeenth, these days]. I also kind of hate academia at this point, lol, so you’ll see a lot of complaining about it unless you block #ivory tower blogging [DW tag: #uni and academia for anything related to academia, while #complaining covers exactly what you'd expect].

I talk reasonably often about mental health issues; I have autism, bipolar II, and anxiety, and my general tag is #rare breed of attack unicorn [DW tag: the same; I also tend to tag the specific disorders more often over here, since I don't have to worry about them going into a site-wide autism tag or whatnot; e.g., posts about anxiety are tagged with both #rare breed of attack unicorn and #anxiety].

I write original fiction in addition to fanfic and angst about it; the tag is #original fic rambles [DW tag: #original fiction, though plenty of it is either locked or under a different account], and vaguer or more general writing stuff is just #writing [DW tag: the same]. Rambling about my fanfic is under #fic talk [DW tag: #genre: fic talk, usually accompanied by a specific tag for the fic or verse, such as #fic talk: lucy skywalker for my f!Luke Skywalker fics].

My main fandoms and other tags include:

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