Geek Diversity

A bit of a distraction, reading all the blogs and googling SDCC cosplay, so I decided to write a different kind of entry today:

I'm not just an academic. Although I'm reading Great Expectations today for my scholarly pursuits, I'm also a geek/nerd with pop-culture affiliations that put me squarely in a camp with twelve-year-olds, fic writers, and game developers. The cultural association of geekery with juvenalia does actually parallel my studies of 19th Century autobiography and childhood, but it's not what got my attention this morning.

Portrayals of children are not as prevalent now as they were, although The Hunger Games does do some interesting things with our sensibilities on that score. That's still not the kind of diversity that concerns me right now, though. I get bored looking at pretty, white men. I get just as bored looking at CW-pretty, white women. They're boring, and so shallow NOBODY can identify with them. I'm tired of empty celebrity.

So producers of all kinds: I don't have any more trouble ogling Sulu with my female gaze than I do Thor, and no more trouble identifying with Storm than Katniss, or taking either attitude with any character played by John Barrowman, so BRING ON THE DIVERSITY! Don't underestimate the geek audience's imagination by thinking we need our fantasy worlds entirely consisting of Chippendale dancers. I'm white, and it wouldn't bother me at all to see Hollywood write a minority super-hero, or a female lead who doesn't become jello for a guy.

 - in response to this article.

Romantic Teetotaling

Teetotaling is a silly word. But in the 19th century, alcohol was a big subject. Both Anne Bronte in The Tenant of WIldfell Hall and Nathaniel Hawthorne in Twice Told Tales seem to advocate 100% abstention, though they give different arguments, and though they likely weren't as religious about it in their own lives as, say, Mormons.

In Anne Bronte's novel, Helen Graham advocates total abstention from alcoholic beverages, and teaches it rather forcefully to her son, because of the effects it has on the people around a drunk person. In the novel, they are violent, sloppy, rude, and gullible, and they gamble when they should be prudent. She forcefeeds her boy brandy when he is ill so that he'll associate the taste with illness (kind of like the way Germans can't drink root beer because their cough syrup was flavored with sasperilla), and both the readers and Helen's immediate audience are appalled by that tactic, her story, told to both audiences later, at least moves toward justifying her decision.

Hawthorne's story called "A Rill from the Town-Pump" personifies a water-pump as a kind of street crier selling his wares. It's difficult, through all the explication, to pry a moral. But this is Hawthorne, and there's always a moral. The story is basically selling the high points of drinking water, instead of the detriments of drinking alcohol as Helen did. Hawthorne also writes only on the individual benefits, like health and success. I imagine that in his time, Hawthorne would have been overwhelmed by temperance texts and movements to forbid alcohol. Politically. recall that rum was a major leg of the triangle trade, and a contributor and support of slavery. Temperance in 19th Century America was more than just a personal or even social decision: it had deep political relevance, especially in race relations.

Henry James's Children

Both What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw leave everything of the children's subjectivity completely in the dark. The reader is never given conclusive evidence of what the children see, or how much they understand, and in my head, it rather makes child psychologists look intollerably hubristic. It's one thing to understand a child's neurological functioning - the science, that is - but an entirely different prospect to think you can understand what a child is thinking, or what they would say, or whether they are lying.

Okay, all children lie. Rather, they experiment with trust. Why shouldn't they? Grownups lie to them all the time, about almost everything. Stupid grownups. Perhaps the only way to adjust to the trauma of learning that you've been given false information is to learn the skill yourself, to protect yourself.

So what are we doing when we think we understand children? I suspect, related to my previous post, we're empathizing through our own childhood memories, if we have them. So what is Henry James doing by denying all of that empathy? And why is his syntax so damned unparsable? Is he trying to confuse grownups so they feel as lost in a conversation as children do? Well congratulations - I got lost.