Not Taking Anything Away From You

I've been a little astonished by the response to my trans reading of Brave. Some people have been remarkably warm and affirming, for which I'm very grateful, but it's also generated more controversy (and more comments) than anything else I've ever posted on this site. People, it seems – many of them cis women – are really, really personally invested in this film, and some of them are Not Happy with my unorthodox interpretation. Looking beyond some nasty knee-jerk cissexism, I think I understand why the angry readers are angry:

They feel like I'm taking this film away from them.

Brave is Pixar's first movie with a female protagonist. Cis female viewers have watched Pixar release twelve prior features, most to critical acclaim, all to boffo box office, and all with male protagonists. They have seen Brave, hoping to see themselves and their family relationships reflected for the first time, and then they have had to endure feminist criticism drawing attention to the film's every single imperfection, while mainstream critics responded with a broad “meh” (perhaps because of “the average male viewer’s lack of practice when it comes to reading female-centric narratives for geopolitical content”?). And now they come across yours truly, suggesting that this movie doesn't even have the female protagonist they so desperately needed.

I get it, I think. It feels as though I am appropriating their property. The heteropatriarchy finally throws women a bone, and I snatch it away and give it back to the guys.

My gut response to seeing people's indignation was along the lines of, “Um, hi? You know who gets even fewer bones from the heteropatriarchy than cis women? Trans* people!” But now I'm playing oppression olympics, which has never been nor ever will be constructive.

Q. Who's more oppressed, cis women or trans* guys?

A. TRICK QUESTION! While we're fighting it out among ourselves, the heteropatriarchy is oppressing the shit out of all of us!

I am a fervent believer in textual indeterminacy. I believe that there is no single, singularly authoritative, “correct” way to read any text. I believe that hermeneutic polyvalence is a good thing, and that multiple different, even contradictory readings of a text can, should, and must coexist. I think that any reading is possible, even unto blurring the line between “(re)interpretation” and “fanfic,” and I think that readings we find difficult and challenging – even infuriating – are essential. But I also believe in judging the ethics of textual interpretations.

When we encounter a (re)interpretation of a text, we should ask the questions: Who does this interpretation serve? What cause does it promote? Why does it exist – what is it doing? Who is being given voice, and whose voice is being suppressed?

In leftist lit theory circles, we have a tendency to pretend that this is easier than it really is. We say, “Well, you can have a reading of the Bible that endorses slavery, or a reading that condemns it, and obviously we choose the reading that promotes liberation for the marginalized and disenfranchised.” That's an easy choice when it's “endorse slavery” or “condemn slavery,” but it's rarely so cut-and-dried. What do you do when it's a choice between “a voice for the cis woman” and “a voice for the trans* guy?”

This is the point at which I turn to polyvalence. You don't always have to choose. The cis woman and the trans* guy both desperately need an interpretation that gives them voice and meaning (and, holy hell, do trans* women ever need one too). My reading (which is mine and belongs to me) is done from my own social location and for my own purposes. Other people don't have to agree with it, because other people have other social locations and other purposes and therefore other readings; and we can do all these readings, and push and challenge each other with the kaleidoscope of ways we make meaning, and we don't ever have to say, “This trans* reading is suppressing / supplanting / invalidating my feminist reading.”

When we say that, we're accepting the idea that there can only be one interpretation. But texts are not the Highlander. “The” (single, authoritative, correct) reading of the text is a false and oppressive construct of the kyriarchy. Don't be taken in.

On Reading

I don't think I can overstate the influence Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” has had on me. It (along with chapter one of this book) launched the line of inquiry that led me to my current studies, which makes it basically responsible for both my current life and my foreseeable future.

I'm still wrestling with it, because I am still trying to figure out the concept of authorial intent. Mostly, I think I'm with Barthes: externally established authorial intent is of no account; we have no access to the psychological state of the author as ey was writing; and we should want no such access beyond what we have in the text itself. Ricoeur makes this a little clearer, I think, by distinguishing in speech between the utterer's meaning (what the speaker intends to say) and the utterance meaning (what the sentence in fact says), and explaining that in written discourse we only have access to the latter. What I get from this is that if “what the text says” and “what you meant to say” are not the same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.

But there's an additional layer of complication, which is: is there any such thing as “what the text says”? Texts don't have mouths. They don't say anything unless somebody reads – that is, interprets – them. So I'll refine that accusation: if “what somebody reads in your text” and “what you meant to say” are not the same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.

But is that fair? It's the principle I generally operate on, but it's hard work. If, say, someone calls me out for problematic assumptions in something I wrote, my first instinct is to defend myself by 'splaining, “That's not what I meant!” But I stop. I remind myself that intent is not magic. I remind myself that externally established authorial intent does not matter. I wrote what I wrote, and if even one person reads something problematic there, the problem lies with what I wrote, not with eir reading of it.

But. But.

I also have a belief – a tenuous belief, a belief I am struggling with, a belief to whose demolition I am open, but a belief nonetheless – that anyone can read anything in(to) any text. And is it then fair to hold the author responsible for everything that could be read into eir text?

Anyone can read anything in(to) any text. Does that mean you can take “A Modest Proposal” at face value, ignoring its satirical intent? Does that mean you can reformat “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in”and declare it a short story, rather than a poem? Does that mean you can replace every instance of the word “nunnery” in Hamlet Act III Scene I with “ham sandwich”?

Well... I don't like that phrasing. I don't like telling people what they can and can't do with texts. Of course you can do any of those things. You have a find and replace function in your word processing software. And I take a First Amendment approach to reading texts – I believe you have the right to read any way you want to. I also believe that everyone in the entire world has the right to tell you that your “Get thee to a ham sandwich” reading of Hamlet is utterly ridiculous.

But you know what? You don't have to listen to the entire world. If you find more meaning in “Get thee to a ham sandwich” than in “Get thee to a nunnery”, you can do that to Hamlet. Really. It's called fanfiction.

At its best, fanfiction is a glorious corrective, an enactment of what-might-have-been. “Get thee to a ham sandwich” is a flippant example, but there are countless examples of people rewriting texts that spoke to them, and making them speak better. Star Trek fan who wishes TOS had more women in it? Gender-flip Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Twilight fan unhappy with its total queer erasure? Make a Jakeward slashvid. Rationalist Harry Potter fan? Rewrite the series with a rationalist Harry Stu.

Fanwork is awesome because it blurs or even erases the boundary between reading a text and writing it. There's no clearer demonstration of my belief that all readings are also writings.

However – if all readings are also writings, to what extent can an author be held accountable? Death of the author is a great concept, but in this world of internet discourse that's neither exactly speech or exactly writing, author accountability matters. And comments sections mean that, when it comes to blog posts and tweets and Facebook status updates, we can have access to the utterer's meaning as well as the utterance meaning.

This idea that what we're doing online is a whole new form of discourse still needs a lot of work, and I'm getting pretty excited about doing some of it.

Derrida, Christ, and the meaning of the text

Derrida hurts my brain. Luckily, Yahoo Answers is there to help. Sally H asks:

When I think of the word 'dog' and have a concept of a dog in my mind - say a dog I saw yesterday, why is this not a correlation between signifier and signified for Derrida? Why is meaning deferred from signifier to signifier and where does this leave the signified? After all I still have the concept in my mind? No Derrida haters please, just a simple explanation. Thankyou x

I find this quite amusing, because my experience with Yahoo Answers until now was limited to mockery on the Never SFW Something Awful, where the questions (and indeed all SA content ever) tended less toward complex philosophy and more toward racism and comprehensive misunderstandings of how sex works.

My favorite answer to Sally H’s query begins “well, i am a ‘hater’” and ends “this guy has always confused the crap out of me.” However, if you want a decent explanation of some of Derrida’s thought, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere on the web.

How about Theoretical Semiotics on the Web? Semiotics for Beginners? There’s really no way to summarize Derrida’s ideas on semiotics. You have to get into Saussure, Plato, Lévi-Strauss; logocentrism, structuralism, deconstructionism; a whole host of complicated concepts and even more complicated chains of thought.

Like most of philosophy and literary criticism, Derrida’s theories focused on the relationship between language and thought. It’s a good place to start if you’re going to study anything in depth. Perhaps it’s just scholars making everything complicated as usual, but there’s an astounding wealth of theories about what the relationship is between language and thought, and how it works. I don’t begin to have an understanding of all these theories, but I do know that it often seems to come down to a fundamental, yet curiously modern, opposition: that of universalism vs. relativism.

Of course, I’m simplifying everything hugely, because going into detail would tax my brain beyond its limits this late at night, but it seems that the Christian is often a moral universalist, while the feminist is a moral relativist. As a Christian, one is supposed to subscribe to the notion of absolute truth; but it doesn’t take much critical thinking to reveal how many of our absolute notions are in fact the product of our culture and upbringing. Two thousand years ago, Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38), and people have been asking him the same question ever since. He never answered.

I’m still figuring out my personal beliefs on the issue of universalism vs. relativism. My first two years as a Christian were spent at a conservative evangelical church, and I knew going in that I was neither conservative nor evangelical. Sometimes it feels as though life would be a lot easier if I were. Conservative evangelical Christians study the Bible a lot, but they do it from a perspective of comfortable universalism. To them, the text comes straight from God, and it is the highest authority.

To me, this viewpoint fails to take into account all the complexities of textual interpretation. To claim that the text is the highest authority implicitly assumes that the text has meaning independent of any reader’s interpretation – that there is a single correct reading of the text – and moreover that this meaning can be discovered.

I suppose I want to believe that. As things stand, I certainly don’t believe it of any text other than the Bible. As for the Bible itself, well, I’m not sure.

Christ is the text. He is the logos (John 1:1, 14). Perhaps his divinity – God’s divinity – lies in his being the one text that does have meaning independent of any reader. Perhaps that’s one definition of what God is.