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I bet you couldn’t. Excellent example of someone using big words to hide the fact that they’re just being a pretentious arsehole.
Basically she’s saying that TJLC is harmful and only serves to fetishise male homosexuality and glorify the writers, to which I say:
oh. there you have it.
OK, that’s what I got out of it too…. in the most pretentious language possible with an oh-so-clever zombie reference at the end to show they are really cool after all.
I have decided if it’s not worth putting out there in clear, accessible language, it’s not worth my reading it.
She’s saying three things, in language so heavily peppered with the jargon of literary criticism that, yes, it becomes exclusionary and elitist (accidentally, I assume, since this sort of thing isn’t usually mid0nz’s style. Barthes does this to litgeeks; you take a hit of him and suddenly you’re talking like the OED).
Anyway, her basic argument is that we don’t need Moftiss to have johnlock, and why should we care that much what the writers think? And she makes three points to support that.
1: That relying on the authors to make johnlock real in the show is harmful in the sense that it plays into patriarchy by putting the (male) writers of the show in a god-like position over their story, and framing us (fandom, women consumers of the story) as supplicants hanging upon their whim.
2: That in fandom, even though we like to think (and hopefully try to) use fanworks to re-imagine the world as a more egalitarian, inclusive place, we do have a tendency to repeat the sins of our culture in our fanworks. (E.g. point #1.)
3: That the argument people tend to come back with after points #1 and #2 are made is, “Yes, that’s fine, but we still need johnlock to be real because we need representation.” And she’s saying that’s BS, because “homosexuality” the fandom construct is not really the same animal as homosexuality as real human people live it.
These are all good points, so far as they go, but they don’t really go very far.
1 is old hat when it comes to feminist lit theory.
2 is perfectly true, and something we just need to keep working on. But relating to “the Author is dead,” it’s not really relevant here. ”The Author is Dead” means that the author’s Word of God interpretation of their own story doesn’t matter any more than anybody else’s does. For example, Rowling can say Dumbledore is gay and that Hermione should’ve married Harry till she’s blue in the face, but since she didn’t write it into the text, nobody has to buy into it unless they want to.
But the authors are still the ones writing the story to begin with. We can and do and will continue to love and write the idea of johnlock whether it ends up actually being played out in the series or not. But the only way for it to be actually explicit in the series is if the creators put it there.
3 is, I think, the most interesting and important point here, and is worth talking about a whole lot more, because there is a tension between queerness as a fandom construct and what we use it for vs. queerness as a thing some people actually live.
But in this particular argument, it’s again not relevant, because even if you want to argue that all us straight chicks are in it for the fandom slash version of queerness (which we can get through fandom and don’t need in the show itself), you can’t just dismiss all the actually queer people in fandom who are cheering for johnlock because media representation really is important to their real-life queer lives.