(no subject)

[melannen]

oh man oh man oh man con.txt is in less than a week how did that happen

okay so.

1: I still have space in my hotel room if anyone decides to come at the last minute and wants a spot to crash, at this point you can just crash in my room to make me feel less lonely. :P

2: I am running or co-running three panels. Guess how many I have prepped for? NONE.

It would be really, really lovely if my reading list would do my panel prep work for me. :D

Specifically:

Slash Through the Ages

: Which is to say, homoerotic transformative works from before the late 1960s. So far I have a dirty limerick about Enjolras/Grantaire and... some vague memories of other stuff. Sadly, I'm not going to be doing proper research for this because proper research would probably involve, like, a doctoral thesis and research trips to the British Library. BUT!

If anyone has any links to meta or sources about m/m (or f/f or other)-fic-and-art before Star Trek, I would really, really love you if you shared them.

Second, could everybody tell me their favorite m/m or f/f or genderqueer pairing(s) from canon that predates Star Trek? It would at least give me a starting place!

How To Put Fandom on Your Resume Without Putting Fandom on Your Resume

I'm going to be making copies of my current resume (suitably redacted!) which is full of fandom references, to use as an example. Does anybody else have a resume with fandom-related stuff on it (it could be anything from, like, running a 10,000 attendee con, to selling stuff on Etsy, to "familiar with Tumblr") that they would be willing to share?

ETA: I'm also, per request, looking for ways to leverage fandom experience on an academic CV, especially in disciplines other than fan studies.

And second, anybody have links to useful, fannish-community-literate jobhunting resources of any kind?

Making Story Happen

Oh ye gods and little apples, it would be helpful if, like, I could actually write stuff, before I attempt this panel. Um.

Does anyone have links to you favorite how-to-write meta, blogs, or resources?

Can you share with me the specific how-to-write quandary you'd most like to get help with - anything from "how to get a beta" to "how to write a summary" to "how do plot"?


3. As usual, there are about thirty-five panels on the list that I'd like to attend, which is problematic, because there are only seventeen panel slots. I hope nobody expects to ever see me outside the panel rooms. And I'm probably going to attempt an ad-hoc Les Mis one. (Of course, ten of them are panels I nominated or egged someone else into nominating. I should probably stop doing that.)

Comments

[coyotegestalt]

I'm convinced that I've seen references to old Raffles/Bunny stories somewhere, but I can't remember WHERE. Sorry, that's not very helpful.

[melannen]

No, but it gives me a pairing to start with, at least! Raffles/Bunny is an excellent one, and one I'd probably have forgotten about.

[marginaliana]

Re: slash through the ages - I've seen this going around on Tumblr about Plato arguing about whether Achilles or Patroclus was the top in the relationship. This seems to be borne out by the actual text.

[melannen]

OMG, that's classic! Thanks.

[dorothy1901]

If anyone has any links to meta or sources about m/m-fic-and-art before Star Trek, I would really, really love you if you shared them.

How about Plato's Symposium, written 360 B.C.E.?

Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus-his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far).

Translation: Aeschylus is wrong wrong wrong, because it's obvious that Achilles was uke and Patroclus was seme.

ETA: Also: David and Jonathan in the Books of Samuel.

[melannen]

Do you know of any textual analysis and/or fanfic etc. of David and Jonathan (or, for that matter, Ruth and Naomi, or Song of Songs, or any of the others) that contextualizes it as what we'd consider a same-sex romantic pairing, from before the 1970s? I feel like there must be some, and I'd know how to find modern discussion, but I don't even know what centuries or languages to start looking in, with that canon.

[jjhunter]

Re: 'Slash Through the Ages', I feel like I would be doing a service to the world to direct you to meretricula's wonderful post so about those Roman slave AUs we like so much.... Also, you should nudge her for more specific recs on this front, because she knows (and enjoys) ALL THE THINGS relevant to your topic for greek & roman yes.

Re: Making Story Happen, you could do worse than start with synecdochic's writing meta table of contents.

Re: putting fandom on your resume, mmm, nudge stultiloquentia? And/or TWC ppl in general. And/or look at the comments compiled for Naomi Novik at House Judiciary Hearing for skills-people-learn-from-fandom-and-apply-professionally -type stuff.

Good luck!

[melannen]

Hah, yeah, I somehow fell in with Rosemary Sutcliff fandom, so I know a lot of peopel whe are VERY PASSIONATE about writing your classical sex correctly. ^_^

And thank you for the other list, too! I knew about the judiciary hearing but would never have thought of it for this panel.

[white_aster]

Re: writing resources. I keep finding this on my Tumblr dash: http://thewritingcafe.tumblr.com/

Which has/links such awesomeness as worldbuilding advice and answers to random writing/research questions.

[melannen]

Ooh, thanks, that looks really useful.

[kate]

Agreed about Achilles and Patroclus, above.

I was coming to say that I was in the Alexander (2004) fandom because its slash ship is canon from millenia ago and there are actual existing texts (Plutarch among others) about Alexander and Hephaestion being dear until their deaths (unlike most m/m relationships at the time, which (I believe) tended to be older man/younger man as part of the mentoring relationship (Alexander and Hephaestion were of an age)). And one of the surviving texts talks about Alexander and Hephaestion and how they likened themselves to Achilles and Patroclus.

Mary Renault is famous for her books on Alexander which include Hephaestion as his lover and Bagoas as well, in the second one (Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy), which is fanfiction of Macedonian history, I suppose, as there aren't the actual words "Alexander and Hephaestion had sex" anywhere in existing ancient texts (though I think at this point it's pretty widely assumed).

[melannen]

Oh, yes, the millennia-long shipwar over whether Alexander/Hephaestion is canon is almost as much fun as the fight over whether Achilles tops.

The only Renault I've read is her nonfiction biography of Alexander, which shipped both of those pairings pretty hard, from what I recall.

[genarti]

I don't have anything fannish on my resume nowadays, but back in... oh, 2005ish, when I was trying for entry-level jobs with an extremely scanty resume of actual work, I did have this on my resume:

2000 - 2005 Brunchma.com http://www.brunchma.com
Moderator
• Supervised high-traffic forum of internet discussion board with over 1500 users

I'm pretty sure I got asked about it in the job interview for my first job ever (an extremely boring, a-monkey-with-arithmatic-skills-could-do-this sort of job, but nonetheless.) I framed it very much in the "intellectual discussions! Exchange of ideas among a community living in far-flung places!" context without any talk of fannishness, IIRC -- admittedly, assisted by the fact that the sub-forum I moderated was indeed the political/intellectual debate forum, and not one of the sillier ones. (It also wasn't explicitly fannish in the sense of creating fanworks per se, although it was a fan site for a particular website and was very much within that kind of geek community.)

[melannen]

Thank you for the resume bit! Do you mind if I copy it to a handout?

I think first-job-ever, desperate-for-anything-on-the-resume is when the fannish stuff is most important, really.

[lannamichaels]

I am so happy the fandom resume one is happening (I nommed it). :D :D :D I have no resources, but I want to take all the notes.

And we should totally do an ad-hoc Les Mis panel!

[melannen]

Dibs I'm not running it. (but yes we should!)

If (*cough*) someone wanted to take it on, I think you could even reserve a panel room in advance and get on the schedule - it looks like Fargo did already. (But not opposite the stitch-n-bitch, though!)

[rymenhild]

Does it have to be m/m? Here is John Donne, Sappho to Philaenis, which I can't immediately find a date for, but it's [L/l]esbian RPF from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

[melannen]

Ooh, f/f definitely works, yes! (Honestly I'd be okay with pairings in general, but it *is* a slash con. :P) I'll go edit that in, thanks.

[elanya]

I don't have it on my resume yet, but I am definitely planning on putting my tag-wrangling (organizing metadata!) and tag staff (organizing/assisting/overseeing volunteers, creating guidelines and procedures for volunteers, organizing implementing projects, all that stuff) when I go job-hunting next >.>

[melannen]

That's what I did! Especially the overseeing volunteers part. ..of course I did that, promptly got a new job, and am now running way way behind on my otw responsibilities. :P

[elanya]

as for early Slash, I was wondering about Sherlock Holmes fiction, and fanlore does have some potentially useful bits: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes

[elanya]

And for illustrative purposes:

(from here

:V

[beatrice_otter]

Isn't there some lesbian subtext in Count of Monte Cristo?

If you are looking for writing meta, Patricia C. Wrede's blog is the first place to look because she posts about it on a weekly basis. Also, synecdochic had some great stuff a few years ago. http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/282057.html

[melannen]

I beleive what's in Count of Monte Cristo isn't so much subtext as text - it would be interesting to look at how that was taken up by Dumas fandom, though!

[elspethdixon]

My favorite pre-Trek pairings are the super-predictable Holmes/Watson, Sam/Frodo, Achilles/Patroclus, Alexander/Hephaestion, and Enjolras/Grantaire, and the less common James Bond/Felix Leiter (original Ian Flemming book versions), Anne of Green Gables and her various "bosom friends," Robin Hood/Little John (Howard Pyle version), Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday (historical RPS and every film depiction ever) and Porthos/Aramis from the d'Artagnan romances. And Wonder Woman/other women, which is... debatably canon in William Marston's original Golden Age Wonder Woman comics.

DC comics might be worth a mention in the "Slash through the ages" panel, in that while I don't think any actual Batman/Robin fanfic predates the internet, thanks to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, homophobic freakouts from conservative politicians over how very, very gay Batman and Robin surely had to be were instrumental in creating the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s. Batman & Robin's relationship and how homoerotic it was or wasn't was actually discussed before a congressional committee.

There's also Victor J. Banis's "The Man from C.A.M.P." books from the 1960s/70s, which are basically gay James Bond/Man from UNCLE parodies (so, not quite full-blown fanfic, but in the same ballpark). (on his website here, scroll way down the page to almost the bottom)

(Something that might be worth mentioning in the case of some of these ships is the cultural history of insistently interpreting them as or reframing them as platonic friendship&devotion and continually shutting down gay/lesbian readings even in cases where that requires deliberate denial - as with Alexander the Great - and how suffocating that can feel to LGBT readers. There's an interesting discussion about appropriation and the persistent desexualization/straightwashing of homoerotic relationships to be had about the fact that it's most often characters like Sherlock Holmes and Enjolras who have strong cases for an LGB reading in canon who are most frequently interpreted as aromantic/asexual - sometimes historically, as with Holmes, in a deliberate attempt to shut down LGBT readings. You know, the "Holmes is uninterested in relationships, period, so he and Watson can't be gay!" argument+)

[calvinahobbes]

This reminds me that I read about how L.M. Montgomery had a female fan/student(?) who was in love with her and who L.M. ASFAIR rebuffed several times. It might not be directly relevant to the slash discussion, but it's certainly saying something about how these characters have always spoken to LGBTQ people, even when it went against authorial intent...

[espresso_addict]

You might be peripherally interested in the timeline of Tolkien fandom I put together a while back for Fanlore. MZB was publishing meta on the (lack of) Frodo/Sam homosexuality in 1961 but I could find nothing in the way of slash transformative works until the late 1990s, despite the fandom being continuously active. I've been in this fandom since 1986 and I wonder if slash zines went under the radar, or there just was no activity until mailing lists started and people realised they weren't alone in their slashy thoughts.

Sherlock Holmes might also be an obvious one to try? The Fanlore article mentions 'In 1941, Rex Stout first proposed his infamous "Watson Was a Woman" theory, in which he pointed to numerous instances of what, today, would probably be considered slashy subtext in order to conclude that Watson was really female and that she and Holmes were married.'

[calvinahobbes]

I have been trying so hard to think of pre-Trek slash, and it's been really difficult! If you still need leads, I'm not sure but maybe kouredios would have some ideas?

I know that Anne Lister would read the satires of Juvenal and try to glean exactly what kinds of (lesbian) sexual acts he was referring to. Classics, Sappho of course, also worked for her as a shibboleth when meeting other women she suspected of being "like her", page 163 in Lesbian Dames is an interesting read (it also mentions Lister's need to "read against the grain").

On my CV I put "Volunteer translator for an international nonprofit organization based in USA" (i.e. OTW), but as it is only tangentially related to my career path I have yet to be asked about it in an interview.

[ellen_fremedon]

I do mention OTW openly on my resume and sometimes in cover letters if my experience is relevant, and I am totally willing to share. But OTOH I have also been unsuccessfully job-searching for almost nine months, so I don't know if my resume should be used as an example of anything except failure at this point.

[melannen]

Are you planning to go to the panel? Unfortunately I have reached my limit of "having time to get stuff printed out", but if you're planning on going to the panel, you can totally bring a redacted copy and we can look at it.