My dissertation places texts from multiple periods and genres in relation to each other as a way of approaching contemporary sexual politics in a creative, complex, and multifaceted manner. Charlotte Brontë is paired with Captain America fanfiction and my teenage diary; Victorian discourses around homosexuality and sexual agency are refracted through a work of still-in-progress Sherlock fanfiction; and BDSM Hannibal fic is in conversation with nineteenth-century texts about Spiritualist séances.

It’s a methodology I’m politically and aesthetically committed to (see the About page for why), but it’s a tricky one to undertake, because part of the point of this method is that it creates peculiar disjunctions and odd juxtapositions and refuses a singular explanation of itself. Why place these texts together? Is the justification historicist, formal, aesthetic? Is it that these texts parallel each other, compliment each other, argue with each other? In a project dedicated to digression, diversion, and multiplicity, part of the point is that there is no singular path from A to B, that when discussing sexual politics–the prevention of harm and the accommodation of desire–we cannot land on on set of rules, one singular truth, one pure non-problematic space free of power dynamics; so we cannot approach them through a neatly bounded, easily-summed-up argument that adheres to the artificial boundaries of academic disciplines. It would be irresponsible to enact a method of scholarship that replicates the very thing it is attempting to argue doesn’t work. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy: the project of bringing together very different texts is often frustrating, generating lines of thought and inquiry that peel off and zigzag and loop back around, and following them is challenging. Luckily, it’s the challenge itself that’s so important; it’s the challenge of holding all these multiple, sometimes contradictory strands at once that generates and enacts the kind of queer sexual politics we are searching for.

In my chapter about Victorian Spiritualism and emungere’s novel-length fanfiction based on NBC’s Hannibal, I consider questions of consent, agency, submission, and power in relation to the figure of the medium. Here’s a little bit about that:

In the above image, Will Graham (NBC’s Hannibal, 2013-2015) and Victorian spirit mediums (Annie Eva Fay, Florence Cook) stare with the same brooding eyes into some strange in-between realm that others cannot see. Their pale faces are made paler by their dark eyes and dark, mildly disheveled hair. Their lips are set in slight ambiguous curves; they look like they know something we don’t. And they are pretty. They are pretty in their vulnerability, their delicacy. They know how to wait; they know how to open themselves up to others. They are haunted by their remarkable capacities and the responsibilities and pains that come with them. They speak secret truths and suffer for it.

To be posted on Archive of Our Own under Lu Fairchild’s username (warning for explicit violence and non-sexual consent issues):

Most mediums speak with the dead. Will Graham speaks with their killers.

That is what he is, Hannibal thinks, watching Will’s eyes move rapidly back and forth under his closed eyelids, beneath thin pale skin with blue-branching veins that Hannibal wants to trace with his fingernail. Will Graham is a medium. He opens his body like a conduit and lets the words and thoughts and deeds of others pour out. He channels bloodspatter and broken glass and arcing knives. Hannibal imagines the insides of his brain, capillaries and secret chambers, tinged dark red in the light of somebody else’s violence. Will calls up the spirits of the vicious and the depraved, ushering them back into the scenes of trauma they have made. Will conjures murder.

He has, Hannibal thinks, the same translucence as the sheeted ghostly figures in nineteenth-century spirit photographs, as if his contact with the intangible traces of those not present has left him half-opaque himself. Will is enormously strong, to contain these killers within him, and yet he is patently vulnerable, smudged-bruised shadows under his eyes, curls like a girl’s, twitches and trembles in his forehead and fingers. Hannibal wants to place his thumb into the hollow at Will’s white throat and press until red rises up to meet it.

—

Hannibal watches Will channel him—watches Will close his eyes and make pronouncements about the copycat killer, about the Chesapeake Ripper. About Hannibal.

Hannibal’s thoughts course through Will’s brain. His words fill up the hollows of Will’s cheeks and spill out of Will’s mouth. Will’s nightmares are garish with razor-sharp antlers and weapons piercing flesh. Will’s mind is blurring at the edges as Hannibal invades him slowly, secretly, under cover of night. He is losing himself in Hannibal. 

Eyes unfocused, trembling, Will seizes in Hannibal’s dining room. Hannibal lies to him. Hannibal smoothes back his hair and clasps his glistening forehead, clinically, gently. Hannibal sends him out into the snow with a gun. 

Hannibal inserts a rubber tube down Will’s throat. A tunnel, a passage, a surgical opening of the entrance to hell. Abigail’s ear shoved down the chute. She is a willing sacrifice, a sacrifice for Will. He consumes this synecdochical offering, this portion of their surrogate child, now truly flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Hannibal forces her down Will’s throat and now they are both in Will’s blood.

—

Will fights back.

—

In fighting back, Will becomes a killer. Will manipulates, deceives, worms and wriggles his way deep under Hannibal’s skin, a parasite Hannibal does not know how to extract. In fighting back, Will kills and sculpts a man who believes he is a monster into the monster of all their dreams. In fighting back, Will becomes, every day, more like Hannibal.

—

In the moonlight, blood looks black. Will, in the moonlight, streaked in blood, is beautiful.

“It’s beautiful,” he whispers, and the miracle has been accomplished. Hannibal’s thoughts, in Will’s brain, coming out of Will’s mouth. Beautiful.

Both of them drip blood, their own and the Great Red Dragon’s. They grip at each other. Flesh of my flesh.

Hannibal knows what Will is about to do just before he does it. Long enough to stop it, if he wanted to. Long enough to wrench himself away, split them down the middle. It wouldn’t be precise, now, not surgical, not clean. But he could do it. Sever them in two with a bloody ragged wound, and watch his other half fall into the sea.

But he doesn’t.

—

And they fall into the deep. And hell spits them back up.