Mashups and Revisionings:The Romance of Shared, Imagined Worlds
This will be a quick one, (even without pix,which blogger seems to be ignoring today). Because I'm trying to finish up a publishable version for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies of what I spoke about last summer in Belgium: Queer Theory, male/male romance by women for women, and what we can learn from one about the other. With proper academic citations and proof of argument -- which, I find, is particularly challenging as I lack much advanced academic background and as a fiction writer being used to making stuff up.
Still, it's been interesting, especially when I try to analyze my friend Ann Herendeen's bisexual take on Pride and Prejudice, Pride/Prejudice -- and as I trace its roots back to slash fan fiction. I wrote about this sub-genre a while back -- the amazingly popular grouping of do-it-yourself female Star Trek fans, who loved to share their own made-up alternate Universe wherein Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock maintain a hot and also tender erotic relationship. Kirk/Spock fiction it was called. Kirk SLASH Spock... giving rise, some two decades later, to Pride/Prejudice.
But I'd never read any of it until recently, when I got hold of one of the old zines, called Naked Times, and featuring, to my fascination, a story that I learned was a respected classic in the genre, the very hot and sweet 1979 "Desert Heat," by Gayle Feyrer, who some decades later wrote some well-loved and highly prized historical romances, under her own name and as Taylor Chase.
Connections everywhere... and to me the connections seemed particularly apposite since a few weeks ago I attended my first JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) conference, and found myself feeling like... well, like I imagine a Trekkie feels at their conventions, engulfed in the warmth of shared knowledge of a world and a population that seems, when you talk about it with other fans, almost as real as our own. "What would Eleanor Tilney say to that?" we asked each other -- or particularly dearly to my heart, "What did the maddeningly quiet Jane Fairfax think at that moment?" (I've got my own answers to that one on my hard drive that I hope will someday make it to print, in a work-in-progress currently called Jane Fairfax's Dream, though my husband likes to call it Bad Mr. Knightley.)
Connections and questions. About why romance -- and popular culture in general at this time -- lends itself so readily to mashups and revisionings. Why do the stories become so much our own, and so shared and beloved, that we want to bring the "hidden parts" into view? As, of course, some of our Hoydens have done, with Lauren's intrepid graduate student heroine on the trail of the "real" Pimpernel, and Janet's disclosure of what really happened during Jane Austen's trip to Bath and an encounters with a sexy bunch of vampires. Or even, on a less fan-fiction note, how Tracy and I have attempted to tell some of the "real" stories of political struggle under the glamorous Regency surface.
Readers, writers, and those hybrid reader/writers among you: Why do we love to retellings so much?
What are some of your own attempts (perhaps, still, like mine, in progress)?
And what are some of your published (or filmed or televised) favorite mashups, revisitings, and revisionings?
Still, it's been interesting, especially when I try to analyze my friend Ann Herendeen's bisexual take on Pride and Prejudice, Pride/Prejudice -- and as I trace its roots back to slash fan fiction. I wrote about this sub-genre a while back -- the amazingly popular grouping of do-it-yourself female Star Trek fans, who loved to share their own made-up alternate Universe wherein Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock maintain a hot and also tender erotic relationship. Kirk/Spock fiction it was called. Kirk SLASH Spock... giving rise, some two decades later, to Pride/Prejudice.
But I'd never read any of it until recently, when I got hold of one of the old zines, called Naked Times, and featuring, to my fascination, a story that I learned was a respected classic in the genre, the very hot and sweet 1979 "Desert Heat," by Gayle Feyrer, who some decades later wrote some well-loved and highly prized historical romances, under her own name and as Taylor Chase.
Connections everywhere... and to me the connections seemed particularly apposite since a few weeks ago I attended my first JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) conference, and found myself feeling like... well, like I imagine a Trekkie feels at their conventions, engulfed in the warmth of shared knowledge of a world and a population that seems, when you talk about it with other fans, almost as real as our own. "What would Eleanor Tilney say to that?" we asked each other -- or particularly dearly to my heart, "What did the maddeningly quiet Jane Fairfax think at that moment?" (I've got my own answers to that one on my hard drive that I hope will someday make it to print, in a work-in-progress currently called Jane Fairfax's Dream, though my husband likes to call it Bad Mr. Knightley.)
Connections and questions. About why romance -- and popular culture in general at this time -- lends itself so readily to mashups and revisionings. Why do the stories become so much our own, and so shared and beloved, that we want to bring the "hidden parts" into view? As, of course, some of our Hoydens have done, with Lauren's intrepid graduate student heroine on the trail of the "real" Pimpernel, and Janet's disclosure of what really happened during Jane Austen's trip to Bath and an encounters with a sexy bunch of vampires. Or even, on a less fan-fiction note, how Tracy and I have attempted to tell some of the "real" stories of political struggle under the glamorous Regency surface.
Readers, writers, and those hybrid reader/writers among you: Why do we love to retellings so much?
What are some of your own attempts (perhaps, still, like mine, in progress)?
And what are some of your published (or filmed or televised) favorite mashups, revisitings, and revisionings?
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