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Things I am not posting about this week:

1. Brexit
2. Guardian fandom, slash as an abstract concept, and the difference between queercoding, queerbaiting, representation and tokenism, and how that has played out across media and cultures in the last twenty-five years
3. The difficulty inherent in switching constantly between Guardian liveblogs and Guardian episode recaps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
4. How it looks like I'm going to end up having to dig out my old Mike Gravel for President merch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
5. The difference between historical fashion and historical clothing and why it gets my goat when people erase the difference
6. My current project, inspired by the search tips post, of going through my entire 600 pages of logged-in AO3 history to bookmark and tag stuff I want to hang on to

I am not writing posts about them, but feel free to ask me anyway, the rants are on tap.

I did, however, post to

fictional_fans about what types of fanfic are good for readers who don't know the canon, so you should go there to talk about that.

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how in the HELL do you have time for 6? (i guess it's because of all the not-posting you're doing.)

I just want to put all my 19 pages of marked-for-later into a "to read" bookmark tag, with a stretch goal of seeing if my del.icio.us still exists and then moving THAT to bookmarks. And probably neither of those are ever happening.

Edited 2019-03-21 22:04 (UTC)

I mean, I am only about a tenth of the way in after three days. But it's not actually taking all that long, because all I'm really doing is bookmarking fics where I see the title and my heart goes "yes" (and mark-for-latering ones where my heart says "...maybe, I should re-read to be sure".) Also I'm not saving any that are shorter than about 8000 words, because the idea is to download them as ebooks and save them to external backup once I'm done, and I get frustrated with short ebooks.

So the vast majority I can just scan past - I can do about a page a minute, opening-in-tabs the ones I want to work with, and then doing th bookmarks in batches after I've done fifty pages or so. And it's also something I can do while I don't even have the brain to *read* fic, because like I said, I'm only bookmarking ones where my heart sings. And any that I am that sure of, I'll have read multiple times, so I don't have to worry about missing them once, since they'll come up again.

If I was trying to do anything more complicated it wouldn't work.

(Also, the 600 pages are only things I've read while logged in, which is probably less than half my total fic reading.)

Oh that's a fun project, maybe I'll do something like that too. Except not with tags because I know my limits, much as I wish I was a different person, lol.

I mean, I am doing literally one tag, so it's not like I'm putting a lot of effort into descriptive categories! (mostly to separate these ones into my yearly "I'm bookmarking because I'm too lazy to do a recs post" yt bookmarks.)

But I actually went through a couple years ago and tagged all of my tumblr likes, so this feels way easier. :D

Turns out I AM doing it with tags, because AO3 can't seem to filter bookmarks by work length. -___- As such, the project has predictably become stalled out, lol.

I am in AWE at you tagging all your tumblr likes! I currently have...... over 10,000 tumblr drafts....... because of chronic avoiding that job and leaving it "for later". /o\

Yeah, I'm really wishing we had more sort options for bookmarks (and you can't use the URL hacking trick for that, I tried.)

I think with the tumblr likes I used the "reblog first, tag later" strategy, because Tumblr actually does let you mass-tag your own posts! So I reblogged everything, and then came up with a list of tags I wanted to use, and then used the mass-tagging page to do one tag's worth of posts a hundred or so at a time. It went a LOT faster. (I was reblogging to a sideblog that I had warned people not to follow, so it didn't matter that they weren't tagged when they were first reblogged.)

I can see why it might be this way from the coding point of view, but it's still frustrating!

OOooh, true, mass tagging DOES work on tumblr... hmmm. There's a way of making it possible, perhaps! Thank you. :D

Is the gap between historical fashion and historical clothing the gap between appearance and function?

More or less? (If I'd fully thought it through I'd've posted about it.) But the precipitating thing was a piece I caught on NPR yesterday where someone was talking about historical womens' sporting clothing and said something like "the 1920s were the first time women could wear clothes for sports that actually took freedom of movement into account" and I was just like. No. The 1920s were maybe the first time in a few decades where women didn't have to choose between high fashion and practicality, but if you think the vast majority of women who went skating in the 19th century were wearing high-fashion single-purpose 'skating costumes' right out of the fashions plates, you are very very wrong. Like. Most historical womens' fashion is impractical, uncomfortable, and unhealthy. But most modern womens' fashion is impractical, uncomfortable, and unhealthy. If you are teaching a social narrative based on the idea that most women wear things out of the fashion magazines most of the time... you need to rethink your narrative. Most women, most of the time, through most of history, have worn the most comfortable and practical things they can get away with and still keep their jobs. As I am doing today! And is is nothing that ever appeared in a fashion plate let me tell you,

This sounds a lot like my rant about historical marriage choice and class.

Honestly, I could probably adapt it to any number of popular historical narratives on the theme "the way people did things in the past was inherently worse than the way we do things now". The historical marriage rant is a classic though!

(Even something like slavery - yeah, the way the slaveholders did things was inherently worse, obvs., but, like, the enslaved people - of whom there were many, many more than the slave owners - actually did pretty amazing stuff within the constraints they had, and I'd rather treat them as the default people ....)

I think my favorite by which I mean most hated running theme here is, "...poor women [who are anywhere up to ninety-nine point nine percent of women depending on period] were not subject to these restrictions, but are not within the scope of this work."

Like, if non-elite women don't veil in your period, women in general mostly don't veil. Likewise picking their own spouses, working for a living, leaving the house by themselves, traveling alone, and whatever else it is Women Don't Do.

(Like, Melania Trump's life probably resembles Random Medieval Noblewoman's life waaaay more than either resembles mine, and that's not a coincidence!)

Ugh, yes.

I also like the ones that run along the lines of "five different laws forbidding this were passed in ten years, so clearly, nobody ever did it and it was taboo in the culture." Uh... that's not how that works. If people aren't doing it en masse, you don't have to constantly pass new laws about it.

As we all know, cultures which frequently prosecuted people for gay sex had no gay people because of their strong taboo; cultures which rarely enforced their laws against gay sex had no gay people because if they did they'd have been arresting them; and cultures without laws against gay sex had no gay people because if they did, SOMEONE would have objected, right?

"the 1920s were the first time women could wear clothes for sports that actually took freedom of movement into account"

HAHAHAHAHAHA

did that person never see a Jane Austen period accurate movie costume or

The moment I learned that the reason Austen characters change their clothes to go to dinner, go walking, or receive visitors was because otherwise they just basically stayed in pajamas all the time was the moment I became a true Austen fan. :D

And Empire gowns: comfy! Flattering! Pretty!

....of course in the famous awful P&P adaptation with Olivier? I think they re-use the GWTW dresses. Oof.

The Empire gowns actually had less range of motion in some ways than the earlier/later ones because of the narrower skirts, but they made up for it in other ways!

The difference between historical fashion and historical clothing

Would be interested in your rant on this topic :)

I. Just. Am so tired of "historical women's fashion is impractical and uncomfortable."

Everybody in every culture in history wears the clothing that makes sense for them in their place in culture and time! Sometimes the purpose is to show off that they can afford to wear deeply impractical clothing (this is usually where 'fashion' comes in.) But most of the time, even with middle-upper class everyday wear, if you think it's impractical it's just because you don't understand the differences between what seems practical in your culture and theirs - pretty much every "impractical" daily wear item that gets picked up by serious re-enactors who make it in the original materials and live in it in close to the original spaces is discovered to actually be quite useful and comfortable given the constraints of available materials. (I have always loved long wool skirts, but I didn't realize how much I needed them until I spent a year in a house with an unheated, uninsulated bathroom.)

Also the vast majority of all clothing through history is not fashionable! Some of it may have been fashionable when new, but most of that probably wasn't worn as everyday wear by everyday people. I have an actual late Victorian/early Edwardian dress passed down by my ancestresses, and I can't really date it any better than that because it's just kind of .... a dress. (It's black, so it was probably kept around as emergency mourning wear until my grandmother used it for cosplay in the 1930s, much like the 90s-vintage plain black dress in my closet.)

Hand sewn. The skirt is cut in a way that's obviously more about ease of piecing and sewing than about making a certain silhouette (it's pretty much indistinguishable in cut from the modern 'easy sew' pattern we used for my cat show skirt a couple weeks ago) and can be shaped all different ways depending on underlayers. And the blouse is the 'pigeon front' style that's often described as part of the super-impractical-evidence-of-women's-fashion-being-terrible "Gibson Girl" style, but it's actually super-practical to wear because it looks basically the same regardless of what kind of corsetry (or not) is under it, there's room to store handkerchiefs in the sleeves like grandma taught me, and I can add a hidden expander really easily if I don't want to bother cinching my waist in. And it's got a century's worth of repairs, patches and alterations on it. That's what historical clothing should be like, not copying things out of fashion plates and formal portraits. (Like, there's nothing wrong with an interest in fashion if an interest in fashion is what you're interested in, but that's not an interest in what the material culture of clothing actually involved for most people.)

This sounds a little like how the Arts and Crafts Movement (William Morris and crew) would blame 'hideous' prints on technology, when technology wasn't ready to print fabric in so many colors. Actual people were making that fabric the hard way. Technology was involved, in the sense that if you habitually hand down clothes to your servants, you have to be current not to look like a servant. And a way to do that was to pay for the more expensive, conspicuous consumption of other people's lives.

until my grandmother used it for cosplay in the 1930s

OMG wait what, your grandma?

I have photos of her wearing that exact dress to her hometown's bicentennial History Days in 1932! With a group of friends in very eclectic historical costumes, at least one of which I swear is dressed as a steampunk mad scientist (although it might just be a twenty-year-old motoring costume.)

Presumably that's why that particular dress was still in her closet seventy years later when it came to me. Just in case she needed it for more dress-up, and then before long it was too old to just toss. (I have some of my mother's outfits that were about thirty years old when I first borrowed them for costume parties, too. Still in my closet just in case!)

....I love your Nana.

I would love to see those photos! (Or any photos of the dress.)

You are in luck! I have them up in an old post from way ages ago!

Apparently I misremembered the dates on the cosplay but that just makes it better. :P

Ooh, thanks for linking these; how wonderful to have provenance of past cosplay use!

Curious about 2 and 5!

Also lol The difficulty inherent in switching constantly between Guardian liveblogs and Guardian episode recaps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, definitely thought you meant the newspaper in 2 at first.

I think I have covered both 2 and 5 somewhat in other comments, if you want to comment on them!

And I keep seeing people talking about Guardian on my reading list and thinking it's the other one! I've been trying to include the Chinese characters when I mention the Chinese fandom on here (except in this post, where I made it confusing on purpose :P ) and make it clear when I mean the newspaper, but it only helps a little. (I've actually written fanfic for a Guardian column in the past, even. So this is probably karma.)

2. Guardian fandom, slash as an abstract concept, and the difference between queercoding, queerbaiting, representation and tokenism, and how that has played out across media and cultures in the last twenty-five years

Ahhh, this is what I was missing, isn't it? Guardian is queercoded, and my previous fandoms have been (what I would term) fanservice. *facepalm*

Tell me more? *chin-hands*

I mean, I am definitely not the most advanced queer/fandom theorist in my circles! But I think of queercoding as, basically "it's the love that dare not speak its name, but we're willing to speak pretty much everything else"; and queerbaiting as "You dare me to say it, huh! Well I did so there! (no homo)".

I think they both can be called fanservice, and they can definitely shade into each other, and the same show can be queerbaity in some lenses and queercoded in others (and 'you people are imagining things' in yet others.) (I think it's also possible for things to be queercoded without the creators' realizing, if they put in things from RL that they aren't aware enough of queer culture to understand, although once you get to TV shows there's usually enough people involved that *somebody* knows what they're doing.)

Looking at your list of fandoms that I actually know things about, I think due South was pretty queer-coded. There was a lot of hinting around and putting in Easter Eggs for the fans, and it wasn't hastily papered-over with onscreen protestations and obligatory heterosexuality like queerbaiting usually is, and it feels like the creators are reaching out in fellowship to the queer and slash fans, not trying to exploit them without committing.

I think a lot of the 'classic'/pre-WWW slash fandoms had a fair amount of queercoding, more-or-less. And it's something I've noticed in more recent fandom, that there don't really seem to be as many fandoms like that anymore. And I think it's because in Western media, you can't really nudge-nudge-wink-wink about homosexuality right now: it's way too much a part of the centered public discourse, but also a really fucked-up part of the media landscape, so if you try to queercode these days, people - and not just fans - will immediately start loudly talking about how gay it is, and then the entire production team have to either commit to gayness, or walk it back and deny how gay it is in order to avoid scaring the execs and have nobody talking about anything else. So we get canon gay (often tokenizing) or queerbaiting, but very little of that liminal space of possibility where slash used to live.

And in a way that's good! It's not the love that dare not speak its name anymore. People who want to make stories about queer relationships don't have to code it anymore! If we're lucky there's even good representation! But it's still fucked up in a lot of other ways. And it means it's really tough to get that kind of slow-burn build in relationships that fandom likes so much for both slash and het, because canon creators feel this pressure to either make it explicit, to cash their diversity tokens, or go the queerbaity route where they try to play to both the slash fans and the homophobes at the same time. You can't slide the queercoding under the radar at all. And that liminal space - that let fans take the space canon was offering, and turn it into the kind of queer representation that they, specifically, wanted - is much smaller.

I think you still see it work sometimes in movies - this is where the Marvel Movies are remaining so beloved of slash fandom for so long, I think, because they can sneak the queercoding (see: Sam Wilson is absolutely the romantic lead) into individual installments and not be forced to walk it back until the next movie, which doesn't work for something like a TV series. (I think there's also queercoding in kids' cartoons still - Steven Universe is most definitely queercoded - but as it becomes more acceptable to have actual representation in them, there's less queercoding.)

And then you get Guardian, which comes out of an entirely different cultural context - and it's a context in which 'make the gay explicit' is not an option, it has the kind of utter necessity for speaking only in code that was in, say, some of the really queer Hays-code-era American movies. But it's also from a culture that doesn't have quite the same relationship between anti-queerness and toxic masculinity that the US has, the relationship that makes a lot of large media corporations still shy away from going full queer. And alos (from what I understand, anyway) the current Chinese censorship has a lot less cultural grounding than stuff like the Hays code did. So Guardian can have exactly zero shame about making the queercoding as obnoxiously obvious as they can within the letter of the law. (tbf, some of the Hayes code movies got pretty obvious too, cf: Some Like It Hot.)

So anyway, at least for someone like me personally, who associates slashiness in canon pretty directly with queercoding, Guardian feels like it's just spewing the slash out of a firehose. :d

*nodnodnodnodnod* I've had various versions of this conversation over lunch with the same fellow fan many times. ("Why aren't there any new slashy TV shows? Oh, that's why!") It's really interesting seeing your take on it -- thanks!

And it's something I've noticed in more recent fandom, that there don't really seem to be as many fandoms like that anymore. And I think it's because in Western media, you can't really nudge-nudge-wink-wink about homosexuality right now

I think this is why I've had so many OT3s in the last 10 years -- because you can still nudge-nudge-wink-wink (or even lean into a queercoded relationship) if one of the people has a different-sex partner, because assumed monogamy and bi invisibility are still alive and well. So with White Collar, it was incredibly slashy and could be because of Elizabeth, and a lot of Kdramas have "they all love each other, but only these two are officially getting together" kind of love triangles. And while acknowledging the fucked-uppedness of assumed monogamy and bi invisibility, I'm very happy in that space.

And also in the firehose (LOL!) that is Guardian. :-D

Honestly, I think a significant part of why I like that coded liminal space so much is because (as we established on this journal previously) I hate all canon ships, so I want ships that are safe from ever being ruined by canon :P But yes! Poly coding is definitely something I'm seeing in mainstream media these days (and has been around since those Hays code movies too, cf Singin' In The Rain.) It's interesting the way it interacts with the portrayal of deniable queerness, too - if you have well-developed canon het right there, it seems like it's a lot easier to get away with old-fashioned queercoding. You don't have to have Eliot and Alec loudly deny any possible gayness, because you can just point to Parker in the middle and get away with letting the homophobes pretend canon m/f means they can't possibly be into each other while making it perfectly clear that they are.

It actually reminds me a lot of the 'conduitfic' meta I was seeing in slash fandom fifteen/twenty years ago, talking about how slashers would use a female character as a 'conduit' to let the male characters have sexual interaction without directly confronting homosexuality - I feel like we're seeing that more and more in queercoded canons now, as slash has mostly stopped bothering.

...of course that does in large part rely on bi invisibility in mainstream media to get away with it, sigh.

Oh, that makes sense. I would consider Xena pretty queercoded. And the ending of Some Like It Hot is pretty on the nose. I guess queerbaiting to me felt like Lexa getting killed RIGHT AFTER she and Clarke finally had sex, although I still get JUST SO ANGRY when I think about it I might not be clearheaded. But the actress apparently had to/wanted to leave the show (I think she went to the Walking Dead prequel?), they wanted to yank heartstrings, so they killed her off. But IDK if that counts as baiting, since they did actually have a love scene.

Xena is definitely one of the prime examples of queercoding in fandom canons, yeah!

Once you get into openly canonically queer characters I think you get off the queerbait vs. queercode question and run into a whole different gamut of issues, 'killing your queers' being the most obviously visible, but there's also another whole spectrum between bad tokenism and actual good representation.

there's also another whole spectrum between bad tokenism and actual good representation

YES, definitely.

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