me + milk and cheese + Richard Armitage + fandom identity battles, part 2

From part 1.

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Source: RASnarktastic.

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What does this have to do with anything related to Richard Armitage?

I laughed when I saw this graphic, because it was a “trigger” for memories of years of tussles about milk. It made me think of the identity battles of my childhood — and what my grandparents would have said if anyone had ever told them s/he were lactose intolerant. And yet, for the lactose intolerant, knowing where lactose is in one’s food is a plausibly vital issue. I can even potentially see why one might want to go to great lengths to avoid confrontation with reminders of lactose or bouts of pain after consuming it.

It’s also neat because it’s so nicely hyperbolic. No lactose-intolerant individual I’ve ever met has told me that I can’t drink milk in his or her presence. So no one has to feel attacked by it. Unless they choose to feel that way, which is the point the submitter is trying to make, I think, about all identity battles. No one else’s identity expression has to make me so angry that I have to react to it by trying to end it (either rhetorically, or concretely) unless I choose that issue as the hill on which to stake my own identity flag.. Thus, metaphorically, too, the graphic seemed to say so much about stuff that’s been around the fandom for years.

Before Armitage started showing his chest hair so freely, some people insisted he had none and fought hefty verbal battles over it — probably something only legacy fans remember. There’s the whole smoking thing (did he? does he? can I stand it if he does? what if he still does and I like it?), which has been going on for years, such that anyone who still wants to say anything about it apart from the common consensus needs her head examined. A while back on Richard Armitage Confessions some hurt feelings surface over whether it’s okay to say one’s afraid he might get fat, and if that statement doesn’t trigger the eating disorders of other fans. Dare I write Armitage-related RPF or slash or mention that I enjoy them or publish my sexual fantasies? That was a big one we fought out right here in the spring of 2012. Last spring there was a sustained episode of wikipedia entry sabotage, a battle inter alia and from one side a humorous one over how to talk about Richard Armitage. The other side was, of course, at first wounded and then resigned.

There have been a lot of rather fierce squabbles again recently. I’m referring to them rather than linking, because lately I’m not confident that we can talk about these things without a dustup, and I don’t want to restart one inadvertently. I want to comment on the phenomenon, not refight the battles. Such as: “Cat vs. dog” a few weeks ago. Last week: “what was Armitage really like at the fan event?” which has developed into “can an actor really be an introvert?” (Yes, as we’ve been saying here for years.) There’s the question of counterfactual photo manipulations that put him with objects or fellow actors or clothes that people like or don’t like or develop moral or ethical objections to. I touched a nerve, too, last week, when I wrote a post that ventured onto the territory of “who is he really?” even though I said explicitly that it was my picture I was describing. This storm was a problem, because that is one of my main questions — it has been from the very beginning of this blog. I write regularly from a number of different perspectives, analytical, personal, poetic, impressionistic, about who evidence suggests Richard Armitage is.

Which gets us to the question of why we engage in these battles, to the point that they’re considered a normal, if distasteful, aspect of fandom. I have thought for a long time, and behind the scene discussions tend to confirm, that these battles don’t really concern Richard Armitage. (Sorry, Armitage.) (That was a joke, I’m sure he’ll be relieved to hear that.) (That was a joke.) They are battles about us. This is why the topics are often so relatively minor from the perspective of people whose identities are not engaged by them. I’m not an animal lover or hater, nor do I have a firm preference for cats or dogs, but a lot of people do and some of them were fundamentally exercised by what was a flippant statement. Since I have no chance of sleeping with him, I don’t care who Armitage’s romantic partners are, particularly, so I don’t care if I see people of either gender photoshopped into pictures with him. (Except me. I’d love to see a manip of me photoshopped into a picture with him. With much better clothes than the ones I typically wear.) (That was a joke.) (Can I make a true statement ironic by putting an emoticon behind it?) (What do you think?) (If I say something mean, is it funny with the right emoticon?) But I do care about the (in the sense of the MBTI) introversion question. Because I’m one and I recognize pieces of myself in him. That’s key — I recognize pieces of me in him. That recognition serves to bolster my own self-awareness and the legitimacy of being an introvert — particularly in an extroverted world where that quality is sometimes an embattled one. The fact that I call my crush an introvert thus makes it okay for me to be one. He’s a stronger version of myself, then, something I admire, and that relationship means I can use what I say about him to make myself stronger.

Thus the point here isn’t preference (beard or no beard, introvert or extravert, did he look tired or rather bored?), per se. Nor is it, in my opinion, the actual facticity of any statement he makes or the reasonability of any conclusion we draw from any statement he makes or thing he does or doesn’t do. It’s that we need him to be a certain way because our own self-images are drawn into question if he contradicts (or other fans contradict) our idea of him. If his introversion makes mine okay, if it makes me feel a kinship with him, if he’s not an introvert after I’ve expressed that impression and provided evidence for it, the legitimacy of my own introversion falls into jeopardy. We embrace patterns of Armitage behaviors based on our impressions and our identities — indeed, the reason why we’re fans is that something about him or what he does speaks to us deeply. And things we attribute to him make our feelings okay — whether that’s virtue, or high culture desires — because if he’s really a good person, or really cares about theater, or really serious, then it’s okay that our own emotions feel so ridiculously overwhelming. But if we need him to be a high-minded fan of literature, what happens when he describes himself in Sydney as someone who laughs about juvenile party trick? Can our picture accommodate that? And if he manifests differently than we expect him to, in subtle or radical ways, to what can that divergence be attributed?

My impression is that we refuse to say it’s Armitage or his choices that challenge the picture, because he is the person we admire and focus our devotion on. The love we feel, that same thing that gives us energy as fans, that makes us feel so good, that gives us the capacity to exploit our potential for all kinds of things, can’t be mistaken because that would lead to shame. It’s embarrassing to love badly or undeservedly. So our devotion can only be shaken by some dealbreaker so prejudicial that it borders on incredibility (like incontrovertible proof of spousal abuse, hypothetically, or racist soccer hooliganism), in which case we’d then abandon him immediately and on principle. His failure to be what we want him to be can’t come down to us — we can’t be the ones who didn’t see everything or misinterpreted or loved a man who turned out to be cat-averse or something much more objectionable from our perspective. How can we have been so wrong?

So we have to find another explanation. We have to make someone else responsible. This, incidentally, is my theory about why Armitage’s agent gets blamed for every career step of his we don’t like. If we can’t find someone else to blame for a conceptual picture of Richard Armitage that contests our identity (smoker, drinker, cat-averse, or whatever it is), we’ll blame the people who created it. We’re unlikely to look at our list of preferences and conclude that we are the ones who are making the list. It’s always someone else who’s tampering with our picture of Armitage. The “false friend” who leaked a candid photo or video of him from twenty years ago (who also, in my opinion, does that as a piece of an identity construction — “I am someone who remembers a past shared, however briefly, with Richard Armitage”). The press. He can’t possibly be saying those things; he must be being misquoted. Who would ask a question so likely to generate controversy? Or the interviewer tricked him into opening up to her — something I used to hear a lot from legacy fans. Maybe it was an autograph hound — the person who pushed him into having a (ridiculous, rumpled, unsmiling) candid photo made so that his autograph could be sold. Or a fellow fan is made responsible (who by the way is also sharing a picture because part of the identity construction of many fans is getting to meet the crush or be pictured with him and putting that on display). The making fellow fans responsible, which isn’t new — I was told within the first months of writing this blog that I was “twisting his words” — has been a particularly evident strategy lately. This strategy is particularly safe when we can box those “other fans” into a category as “crazy” or “malicious” or motivated by some impulse we can disapprove of because our disapproval of it (I’m thinking of shipping here) and their status as “not like us” bolsters our own identity: “I — as opposed to those people — am not someone who would entertain inaccurate thoughts about Armitage, or speak about counter-factual fantasies” or “I — as opposed to those people — am not someone who pries into the private lives of others, especially not people I claim to respect.”

Now, I’m on record as believing that none of our hands are clean, and that the specific manifestations of our praxis are much less important than our similarities of attitude — in other words, that those other people are us. Just like any cat lover or shipper, I’m fighting an identity battle on this blog, as well, in case you haven’t noticed, and I can tell you what some of the sore spots are. I’ve even told you why. I write about his identity because I’m trying to figure out mine — and I have particular needs. The two that are most acute are for him to be happy, and for him to keep working. I can even tell you why those are needs of mine, and I have. The things I want for him are the things I want for myself. There are other sticky moments, and they’ve changed and developed over the years as I become aware of them and work through those battles for myself. A possible struggle with punctuation — and the jokes I made about it right afterwards and a year later). Or smoking (though it means something different to me than it means to most fans.) Armitage’s relationship with his family. The nature of his intellect. Whether he feels people are always watching him or telling him what to do. Are any of those themes you see in my life? You’ve been reading for years, and some people write to say they like what I write about myself more than what I say about Armitage.

The fact of an identity struggle means, in essence, that there isn’t, per se, an identity construction for Armitage written or graphicked by a fan that’s really wrong. We’re all creating a picture. We can talk about data like his birthday, but beyond that, there’s little to say. There are as many of those bigger constructions of Richard Armitage as there are of us. One reason I like RPF is all of the different Armitages I discover in them — even when they’re not consistent with my Armitage. I like knowing how other people read him. It will also surprise no one to learn that I tend to be very interested in evidence and its interpretation — if you assert something that I think is off based on stuff I’ve read, I’m going to ask what your evidence is and how you interpret it — because that’s something I teach for a living. And also, because it’s something I want to know. Because you might affect my view.

To mix the milk metaphor I developed previously intertextually, we’ve all got our sacred cows (a term proposed to me by a fellow Wisconsinite of our mutual acquaintance). I’ve listed some of my struggles above, so I am included in this. The identity battles aren’t going to go away. Please — we should battle away, on any question that interests us. I like to argue about the meaning of the things I perceive in Armitageworld as much or more as the next fan. I just wish we could stop pretending that these battles are either about Armitage as he is, or that they are not primarily about us and our needs. I suppose the discussion about respect will inevitably creep in, because “being respectful” is an important part of some of our identities and each of us draws that line differently, both personally and culturally. Since the voyeuristic element of fangirling probably challenges people’s definitions of their own respectfulness of others, it’s possibly a natural discussion. Still, I think most people — including the people who do things I don’t like — try pretty hard to follow their consciences and don’t need to be taught. I don’t believe that anything I’ve written here is disrespectful — I have a conscience and I don’t need you to regulate it for me. Which is a second point — those things are not going away simply because we rail against them. In fact, they may become even more pronounced. I try to walk away from these fights when I see they’re not going anywhere interesting — just not comment or press the window closed. I’ve been less successful at that lately, I think because my own identity issues are coming to a head. Sometimes I’m already in a conversation and someone starts an identity battle, and I need to get better at just leaving those if they’re unproductive.

As a side note, it used to be that the bloggers as a group had more shared experience of a fandom that restricted certain kinds of speech about Armitage (the “no personal discussions” rule that still prevails on the boards) and because in part, we started the blogs in order to have more discursive freedom, we were more conscious of the freedoms of others to speak as they pleased. This generation of bloggers have mostly never participated in the Armitage boards and thus doesn’t share that experience. The blogs used to be a free speech space, one that we needed, and one that seems called into question now. I stand behind that. We need more space for expression, not less.

So that’s my history, so while I won’t go looking for it, one thing that I will oppose when it runs across me or appears in a space I’ve already started to participate in is the kind of identity expression that says that fandom expressions that reflect others’ non-criminal searches for identity should be foreclosed because they are false, plausibly counterfactual, or disrespectful. Crimes are crimes on their own merit and they don’t need me to denounce them. I may not like what others say (I think we all have those things — I know that once upon a time the whole “peaches” thing drove me crazy), but I don’t see any justification for telling others that that they may not say them. It runs against all my free speech inclinations, for one. Some fans shouldn’t say something because others’ principles are offended by their speech? I’ve never seen anything any Armitage fan has done that remotely approaches shouting fire in a crowded theater. I should not speak about how I feel because your identity could be harmed? What about my identity? Because the second reason for not foreclosing others statements, manips, jokes, and gossip is something I realized in the summer of 2012 in the context of an OT discussion in the fandom that I won’t link to here, again to avoid inadvertently restarting a fire. The second I start barring other people from exploring their identities — however they wish to do that — I start making my own search impossible. If fandom does involve identity, if Armitage is important to us because we see pieces ourselves in him, when we start forbidding others from doing that, we’re hampering our own self-awareness and ability to explore our needs. This not about disagreement about content or substances. Everyone disagrees. But we don’t try to stop each other from speaking. If I tell you not to manip, not to gossip, not to fantasize, not to use words I don’t like, to leave topics alone — I make it impossible for me to do that.

If you’re going to say: Armitage is harmed by fans, I say, ceterum censeo, prove it.

If you’re going to say: Smoking endangers health, I say: we already agree about that. If you’re going to say, because it endangers health, it must be condemned at all times, I say: my appreciation of his smoking is not about the health consequences of using tobacco, it’s about its symbolic value. If you don’t get that, your comment will be OT.

I’ve mentioned recently that I’ve started to feel like I can’t assert anything anymore, even in my own space, without generating an unpleasant storm around me. It’s possible that the blog is getting too big — or that it’s too small for what I need to write eventually, and that the car I’ve driving for so long is breaking down. Someone who really dislikes me once tweeted an insult at me and called me “the mighty Servetus,” and maybe it’s the case that my own assertions of identity here via the different kinds of pictures of Armitage I draw are becoming threatening to some readers. In any case, the hassle makes blogging not fun. Some other stuff happened today that made me think the future of amateur fan-blogging about entertainment and actors more generally is fairly bleak.

This is not a request for strokes — I’m happy if you enjoy the blog and right now, anyway, I don’t need tons of encouragement to keep on. I’m very motivated, I’ve got lots to say, more energy to say it than I’ve had in well over a year, and you may have noticed that I’m writing and publishing more lately. (Note: five thousand words today, AND I saw fifteen students while I was writing. Where is this energy coming from?) But the thing is: There’ll be more open identity discussion here in the future rather than less, I imagine, not least because of my own sense of time being short. I’ve been told the blog is no longer a “safe place.” I think it can be. I’ll try not to blow off the handle but I also ask readers not to do that either — to realize that we’re all engaged in identity definitions and that no one’s is illegitimate — except the person who intervenes to say we shouldn’t be doing it.

[I realize that this post is so controversial that all hell might break loose, but I’m leaving comments open for now. I’d appreciate a discussion of identity battles as a phenomenon of fandom generally and of this fandom and of strategies for having thoughtful discussions about things that interest us — not the re-engagement of recent identity battles. Meanwhile, since writing something like this is an act of identity, I’m going to go drink a beer and wait to look at the comments section until I’ve detached from the text a bit. It’s usually my practice to respond to every comment if I can think of a response, but in interest of not driving myself crazy, I reserve the right not to do that here. So if you leave a comment to get a rise out of me, if my resolution is working, don’t expect a response. Usual comments policy — see sidebar — is in force.]

~ by Servetus on November 13, 2013.