Researching Affectively in Moments of Distress

Several distressing events are occurring in the outside world as I attempt to write the methodology of my PhD research project. Ironically, or (and?) perhaps interestingly, my methodological framework seeks to utilize “affect” and its epistemological tools to think about embodied experiences and agencies. I had always considered affective engagement as important even if I did not know of the term before beginning my postgraduate degree. Every time I lost an argument over a display of excessive emotion, I felt the need to iterate that to be emotional does not equate to being irrational. But then that is old theory.

What I want to discuss here is more than emotion; after all, affect is distinguished from emotion precisely because of its physiological nature, rather than (just) the cognitive or psychological. I had not paid much attention to the deeper implications and resonances of this physiological element, and assumed that affect and emotion could be used interchangeably, with affect just being reflective of the academic tendency to jargonise simple things. However, as I agonise over each word that I have to produce for my scholarship, even as the world burns outside—and not just, unfortunately, Australia, as I literally breathe in the smoggy air in Melbourne—but friends and teachers back home in India, beaten up by goons in their own university. I feel the dissonance of my research and the act of research writing, and that of the outside world which is no longer “outside.” I get goosebumps if I look at the pictures of comrades from my educational campus threatened and bloodied in their own “safe space” and when I think of the very professor who wrote my recommendation letters to be able to study abroad, injured. In such a context, there is no critical distance that separates me from the physical difficulties of working and writing at this moment. Every time I open a new tab and look up a new reading, every time I write a word or a paragraph, I feel my fingers shaking. More so because my affective politics is the most critical in the case of my family. Vehement supporters of the fascist party that rules my country and produces this violence, my parents and—to a less extent—my sister are the hardest to engage with on such matters. Because of my emotional bonds with them, I cannot rest easy with their opinions, and the gap between our ideologies causes distress in very affective—bodily, messy, real—ways, with tears and cramps and dizziness.

Even as I research on mental health and affective pedagogies I see no respite from my own distress and the hardship of academic necessities. I have to write this chapter in time for a deadline which I already guilted over for taking a longer than essential break over Christmas. I cannot afford to “waste” a single day even if it seems impossible to work as I constantly check my newsfeed and social information. I avoid a conversation with parents because their support of evil will remove that one barrier that prevents my breakdown.

And I go back to work: the privilege of not being actively oppressed.

The Endgame as the Ending: On Steve Rogers and Captain America’s Happily Ever After

As this blog knows, and stands testament to, Captain America has meant something to me. It started because of the fandom, and its place in my life was important because of the timing in my life perhaps but it became more than that. I don’t even know how it became a part of my PhD (more on that later) that I happened to get sometime after I spent nearly a year reading all that Stucky fanfiction.

I loved these characters and their stories because of the fandom, because of the character insight and backstories and wonderful narratives and beautiful writing, but all of that is ultimately connected to the original stories: the canon is the canon and will always hold that ultimate position no matter how much I try to dismantle the hierarchy (yes, fuck whatever I say for my research). Though Civil War was a train wreck that I managed to obliterate through consuming enough fanfiction and fanvideos; but maybe because I am not involved with the fandom as much anymore and maybe because Endgame is supposed to the final ending and the resolution to the arc of this centuries-old character, I feel like something is irreparably broken.

Let me start by saying that there is nothing more I want than Steve to be finally happy, to get that happily ever after he so deserves. But how can what constitutes happiness for him be so fundamentally different from everything he stands for? Steve has always been about doing the right thing; if that is what Captain America has stood for it’s because that’s what Steve was before he even became Captain America, that’s precisely why he became Captain America. So why would he choose an ending that is such a massive cop-out? Not escapist just because he should learn to let go of the past or have any responsibility to the present, but because why and how would he choose his interests over his best friend’s, and even his canonical love interest’s (which is what they keep reducing Peggy’s brilliant character to)? I am not saying this as a Stucky shipper, I admire and adore Peggy, and I even think that Steve and Peggy would make a healthy happy couple (and it was more mutual respect and admiration than only romantic affection between them anyway). But Peggy did move on, she had a family, children, the whole heteronormative completion that mainstream media obviously champions and reinforces every single time (cough cough a Black Widow rant is coming soon). Is Steve really the kind of person who knowingly undoes that for his own sake?

And where does his responsibility to and his relationship with Bucky stand in all this? Time and again (in every single one of his solo movies), Steve has shown that he is willing to go to unimaginable lengths for Bucky; yes as a friend, but that friendship is real, friendship doesn’t have to be less than any romantic investment. Steve willingly goes behind enemy lines for his friend and actually becomes Captain America in the process, Steve chose to die rather than fight his friend, Steve willingly fights his new family and the world for that friend, and Steve willingly gives up the shield and being Captain fucking America for that friend. That’s how much that friendship means to him. Steve Rogers has admitted that Bucky is his home. Then why would he abandon that friend after years of torture and trauma in an unfamiliar world he knows can be devastatingly alien and isolating to someone from the past, someone like him. Steve has always been the man out of time, but he finally has someone with that “shared life experience” (canon line) he always craved for. He could have moved on, found a way to live, found a way to be happy in the present.

And all of that doesn’t even involve the whole time travel nightmare that gives me a headache on top of all that heartburn. Will Steve really just keep his head down through all his years in the past to prevent the messing of the timelines and to abide by the rules of time travel? Does that mean Steve is the kind of person who knowingly turns away from fighting against evil, including the knowledge that the organisation he gave his life for is infiltrated by Nazis, that his best friend happens to be a prisoner of war and a brainwashed assassin at their mercy, about so many other big bad things that will be coming, which will inevitably affect the future course of reality? I choose to believe that Steve cannot just turn away. Even if it means that it fucks up the timelines and creates alternate realities—a fact which doesn’t really bear sense with him rejoining the present reality in the film’s context but that is one of the many many problems within the time travel trope in the film’s premise and otherwise.

But what I ultimately come back to is this: Is Steve-I-can-do-this-all-day-Rogers and Steve-I-am-with-you-till-the-end-of-the-line-Rogers really someone who just abandons ship at the end and takes the easy way out. You know those hypothetical games where you get asked, “if you had a time machine and you could choose to leave all your problems and just go away at this this cost, would you?” What do you think Steve Rogers answer to that would be?

The difference between one and the other/ A tale of two cities

The thing is that in Delhi, every time I got my heart broken I could go to Safdarjung tomb, a place I chose from the many options of old historic pathos that this city offers. I could sit in one of those lattice projections where they would feed the pigeons (I am sure there is a beautiful Urdu word for it) with the filigree of light through the edges of the structure. I can choose any point in Delhi, and it has many, that I love, where I could just up and go and inhabit and let seep into my soul and my memories.

The thing is I could brag that Lucknow is so art-culture rich, so nawaby and full of history, but if my heart breaks here (and oh doesn’t it, just thinking about this), I could not go and sit near one of the pillars in the imambara or a corner of the residency, or discover the broken ruins of a long lost testament of love and royalty, even if, and even though, Lucknow has many.

And perhaps that is the difference that matters after all; not much, not by large, and not the biggest either out of why I would choose one over the other. And I know this: that even now, if I go home to Lucknow, I cannot mend a broken heart here in a filtered piece of history.

 

 

Daredevil Season 3: Review

I did a review of Daredevil season 1 when it came out. In fact, that was my first blog post. And perhaps for some reason, the reason being an excuse to take up writing here again, I post this after a very long time. I shall write other posts about what I was up to in the meantime (hopefully soon), but perhaps this is easier to do.

Instead of the pros and cons structure, I thought I’d do a theme breakdown this time. Also, I am going to completely omit season 2 from the analysis because I feel that this works better as a continuation of the first season, and while I watched the second season, I don’t find it redeemable enough for me to remember it or want to.

So here we go:

1. Religion and Morality

So religion and morality have been a primary force behind the construction of this superhero identity and character, and continue to be one of the major themes that the show seeks to deal with. Vigilante stories often bring up the question of good and evil, especially since superheroes are so largely defined as being good because they don’t kill people, even the bad ones. Like many other (brooding) superheroes (*cough cough batman*), this question comes to haunt matt Murdock aka Daredevil as he battles with the repercussions of Wilson Fisk, the murderous enemy he so painstakingly put behind bars, being out as a failure of the systems in power. It is greatly interesting in Murdock’s case because though the show forgets it most of the time (why won’t you show more law scenes? Whyyyy), he is a lawyer. He is someone who chose to be a lawyer, who wanted to be a lawyer, and who believed in the institutions he served. Of course, he also finds out first hand that the law and all others institutions fail at times, and fail in the larger run, hence becoming Daredevil, part-time. This season is also interesting in that he almost gives up the identity of Matt Murdock, choosing to “die as Daredevil, rather than live as matt Murdock”, but I shall cover that to a greater extent in the next point. What we have is a superhero who is willing to give over to the darker extreme of the alter ego he created to help people because he is so lost. Religion has seemed to fail him, and his relocation in a Church’s living quarters for most of the season, is a fantastic visual transformation of his dilemma. Because even as he rages against God and battles to forsake him (catholic version, so we’ll stick to this pronoun), while literally living in a Church, under its protection and rehabilitation.

As an ex-student of a Catholic school, the church scenes were some of the most defining and fascinating scenes for me. I don’t know how to explain it but it’s an experience thing (there is a fanfic quote lingering in my memory somewhere, “…the way Catholic school made atheists out of some students.”); the intensity of experience through visual, ornamental and symbolic imagery has an almost oppressive quality in churches. The season is littered with powerful scenes like Daredevil listening to the city sitting next to the giant church cross, fake Daredevil unleashing violence in a church and a priest killed with his body sprawled on the altar. One is reminded of tv debates that marvel at terrorist activities in religious places while acknowledging that the most people killed are killed in the name of religion.

Throughout the season, Matt struggles with finding a larger good, a defining value, and his faith is shaken by some shocking revelations. In my review of the first season, I had mentioned that he is a Catholic who carries around the “devil” in his name and it’s like Matt wants to own up to the devil because he believes the devil did some good as opposed to god. That’s some quite narcissistic touché moment right there; in an early scene, when a woman tells him “thank god for you” after he saved her, he replies, “God didn’t save you, I did.”

I don’t think Matt really resolves the issues of religion, though he does resolve the issues of morality, by the end of the season, though perhaps not entirely satisfactorily. But my review is getting too long already, so I shall hold off now.

2. Mental Health and Illness

So another great thing of the Marvel Netflix series is their portrayal and treatment of mental health issues. I hope I shall do a Jessica Jones review sometime as well, but till then forgive me and bear with me while I expound on the manpain. It’s just really well done, okay?

So as I said earlier, the season begins with a broken Matt Murdock who has abandoned everything, in Matt choosing to die as Daredevil, he is literally committing a cardinal sin (of despair), and the devil therein is truer than ever. And that’s where it’s such a compelling take: Matt Murdock is suicidal. Matt Murdock is depressed. And angry, and hopeless, and lonely. The Church and its people also work as the remnants of a caring society, a sick society, but nevertheless one that preserves, and tries to make up for its mistakes. Father Lamton and Sister Maggie, as representatives of Catholicism, admit to their failing, and hope to restore the stability of faith in Murdock’s life. As an institution, I don’t have a lot of faith in the church or in religion, but it is one support system that is being offered in the show. And most importantly, to show the effects of violence and traumatic experiences is as central to an experience of superheroes as it is invisible onscreen.

Next, we have to talk about Dex. Special Agent Ben Poindexter is brilliantly done with a good villain origin story. Grows up without parents or any family/friends, with a borderline personality disorder, kills his baseball coach as a child in a fit of rage, develops psychopathic tendencies, has OCD, needs a fixed point of stability in his life, because in the words of his therapist: ‘his moral compass isn’t broken, it just works better with a North Star to guide it”. Now here is where it gets a little shady. They do a good job with the therapy depiction, it does help Dex to a large extent, and the fact that he descends into becoming Bullseye with zero compunction for killing lots of innocent people, can be seen as a result of the failure of those institutions to save him, his failure to be able to seek help again, and other things. I don’t know why I was reminded of the kids who go on killing sprees in schools. What I find important as a point of contention in the depiction of mental illness here is this: is Dex’s villainy an end result of mental illness or is it an institutional failure or even a personal one (in him – he could be a born psychopath, in Kingpin – who murdered Julie who was his North Star for a bit, but who he creepily stalked and unhealthily fixated on)?

Sister Maggie – so spoiler alert, but in the latter half of the season we find out that Maggie is Matt’s mom and she had him right before she was supposed to take her vows. So she fell in love and had a son, and then felt super guilty for committing a grave sin, and breaking the vow of chastity etc. you know the catholic spiel. But it is interesting in when Maggie explains it to Karen. She mentions “post-partum” and how back then people didn’t really know much about it and she just went through this whole guilt and negative emotional wave through her. She could not have that child. She could not love that child. She abandoned her son. She went back to god. It is amazing that a show like daredevil talks about post-partum depression, and even better that it is through a nun. That is literally the definition of good and righteousness in pro-life Christian America. I don’t want to go too deeply into it, it’s not like it ever tries to say that Matt was not wanted at birth, but there is a definite understanding and acceptance on part of the Church, which takes Maggie back.

Also, speaking of things I was happy about: Daredevil was back in the normal black mask, black tee getup. Granted the stupid suit was there with the fake Daredevil, but still. Matt buried that suit for a reason. I hope it remains buried forever.

Okay, I can’t really think of other themes but there are some characters and plot points I want to talk about. So really, this is a terribly structured review and an excuse to let out my thoughts and feelings.

1. Ray Nadeem – so we have a new character this season, one who is not in the comics. He gets a good amount of time and centrality to the plot, so I would like to say he progresses from the token brown representation. However, there are a few things that stop him from being a good representation: a) His backstory is super generic and senseless. His family is supposed to make him likeable and good and tragic but throughout I’m just left wondering why Mrs. Nadeem is so mad at him, and why is it so important for him to give his son the true markers of an American life: a swimming pool in their backyard (aw, first world poverty). b) the cultural representation is frankly poor. If their Hindi is terrible, why do they break into it at crucial points to convey seriousness, if it’s that poor, you are clearly not well-versed in your native tongue which is okay, so you don’t have to use it for “representation of ethnicity” purposes. Rahul Nadeem is a very inter-religious name (also, it’s like two first names but that can happen so letting that go), I am going to assume that it’s just a very secular name and not read religion into their family at all (hindu wedding in the picture, mother sits silently in her house wearing a saree, what is going on). c) They kill him. Well, this is, of course, the main reason why one can feel that the representation is flawed. Nadeem gets killed, and for no good reason, I feel. Yeah, he gets a dying video out that becomes the primary reason to indict Wilson, within the system and in the collective public; but I don’t think his death alone could enable that. He could have done it alive. Nadeem feeds into a long line of POCs who die, especially in all white casts, and it is impossible to not notice that line.
2. Julie – just like it is impossible to notice the line behind women who die for villains to facilitate men’s tragic stories aka the women in refrigerators trope literally brought to life (oops death) on the show. Julie is as mentioned, Dex’s point of obsession and stability for a while. She even chooses to help him out after learning of his stalking because he admits to having a problem and asks her for her help. Then she just gets offed by Kingpin so he can keep his pet villain unstable. In a wonderfully disturbing visual, Dex drives with her dead refrigerated body when he goes to kill Kingpin. I hope that the body gets discovered by a large number of people and comes to haunt the story writers.
3. Karen Page – I loved Karen from the first season, and like the heteronormative dork that this heterosexist media industry has turned me into, I had shipped Karen and Matt for a while (season 2). I’m glad that while Karen continues to deeply care for Matt there is nowhere it turns to romantic affection (this season), and we get a whole season with no romantic arc at all. Not only is the entire season romance-angst free, but Karen Page is not a mere love interest. Additionally, we finally get to learn her backstory, which is quite well done in one entire episode devoted to the brilliant actor. I did feel that one particular story arc where Karen goes to provoke Fisk and put a target on herself was extremely idiotic but imma look past that.
4. Fisk and Vanessa – everyone loves the portrayal of Wilson Fisk and I’m finally getting to see that as well. But for me, it’s best when you see him around Vanessa. She doesn’t get much of a role, but I think it’s interesting to have a villain who is so clearly in love, and who is brought down in a way because of it (“love is a prison” Fisk says at one point). Also, his mixed reaction when Vanessa takes a part in his operations and orders the hit on Nadeem. I hope we get to see more of her in season 4, I’d much rather have a female kingpin (of course I would), although I am happy to have a completely different villain arc as well; assuming there is a season 4.

JNU

Sometimes, nature sounds in JNU just like it used to in my ancestral village. I swear I must have cuckoos in mind, otherwise, the wide array of wildlife and flora in campus is not really reminiscent of it in any other sense. If someone asks me to explain what freedom tastes like, I don’t know if it’d be enough to say that it is taking walks at three at night unthinkingly, having chai at any of the nocturnally oriented dhabas with people, being told attendance in classes is mandatorily non-mandatory, the absence of curfews or the ease of moving in and out of rooms, the campus, spaces.

Is it that lazy dismissal of the morning alarm, choosing to skip that lecture you chose to opt for in the first place or turning up late for class with the generous air of someone doing the world a huge favour by turning up at all? Well, not that that is very healthy or respectable, but it is uni. Is it the camaraderie of after-conference parties where things repeat as if on a loop but you’re willing to be the hamster on the wheel if you’re getting free booze for all your running? Is it the comfort of all-female spaces, the solidarity that begins and burns in fast, linking through shared experiences and moments of being?

Is it running into your professor at a Pride parade, or sharing your thoughts on parental and political oppression over a smoke? Is it the emphatic conversations between students and the male prof on the woes of menstruation and the concept of manufactured consent? Or trying to explain BDSM as an example of subculture, with a straight face in a lit theory class?

Or is it passing by India Gate while running barefoot from the police in the first actual protest that you participate in? Is it knowing that you will not be judged inside, and knowing that no matter what, you will be judged outside so might as well give them a story to really take back home (unless they’re paying you and you can’t afford to lose your job aka learn to keep your mouth shut)? Is it discussion and debate and critique, is it that shaking of the head like a cynical warlord and proclaiming, “this place and its people are flawed, but goddamit, I want back in.”

Dealing with (College) Rejection

Who am I kidding, this is not some kind of enlightening post that will make you feel better about rejection at the end of it. I am still vacillating between feelings of self-loathing or universe-loathing, there’s basically a lot of loathing (I really like that word).

So, if anyone’s ever talked to me, which is people who don’t really visit this blog, given that this blog has maybe two views per post on an average, and believe me there are many posts with zero views, so I don’t even know who I am writing this for, other than the little soul dying inside me or the ever-hopeful one that makes these insane scenarios that work out, like some prospective university person reading this and taking pity over my heartfelt rant and giving me admission, (shit my sentence structure sucks, no one will give me admission at this rate), or if you’ve read a few posts here, you’d know about my love for fan fiction, and how I am part of a few active fandoms.

I have been trying to get admitted to a funded PhD programme so that I can work on fandom spaces, and fan produced content, and its revolutionary potential, but have been widely unsuccessful so far. So the thing is I have thought deeply about what went wrong. Is my area of research not interesting enough? Are there already too many people doing what I have outlined in my proposal? I have tried to posit my research questions stressing intersectionality in queer politics and the convergence of politics and love but eh maybe that’s nothing new with respect to fandom studies. And I have thought about changing my research area entirely because there’s not a lot of faculty with interest or expertise in this area and I should propose something that a lot of people can relate to, or find worth giving money to. But the thing is I love fandom in both personal and critical ways, and I really do believe there needs to be wider engagement and more scholarship on the subject and I just want to be part of that process. I have even thought about giving up on the idea of research as a future career option entirely because it’s not lucrative in my country and I am unable to make it outside. But every time I read a cfp, I start outlining points in my head, when I read fanfics, I notice things that need to be talked about, and most importantly, when I am doing research work and writing forth as inspiration hits, I love it so much that I can actually imagine the idea of doing work that you love. I know that’s hard to come by and I don’t want to be the one to give up on stories that I feel are important. After all, fans have to put up with the hardest of shit and non-acknowledgement in any of the work they do too, and they do it entirely for non-profit and pleasure.

I cannot sustain that academically, but I also realise there’s a flimsy chance of getting a studentship that is aimed at several people, with greater experience or qualifications. I can only make my personal statement too much about my (non-existent?) accomplishments at one time, and entirely about poor third world queer person of colour who needs your money at the other one, and regret not achieving a balance or not doing enough to get across how badly I want this and how good I promise I can be, but oh well.

The human mind is a weird thing (and here, you know how I can never be a creative writer ever), it can hope when there is no hope, so I can construct images of a beach town and the people I meet, how maybe I can finally meet a guy who is not a (privileged) asshole, maybe finally get over that person who took up the first half of this blog, maybe finally prove to the family how not going doing engineering or civils worked out for me very well, maybe prove to myself that there is some worth in me, after all.

 

(Image source: http://www.reddotad.com/stream/central-college-brochure/)

Lipstick

I have a funny relationship with lipstick. See, the thing is, I adore lipstick. I love the different colours available, and how you can just paint your lips and transform your face. It’s a simple thing and you’ve got most of your make-up done and you can just project whatever look you’re going for. For a long time, okay, who am I kidding, to a certain degree, even now, I am almost shy about the project of applying lipstick. You see, it brings attention to your face; you cannot ignore lipstick when it’s there, especially if you’re going for a properly applied state. So, for a long time, I would just slightly dab and spread some, giving colour to my otherwise transparent lips (transparent in that weird – let’s imitate the rest of your skin, or go lighter or darker than that – thing that lips tend to do) without looking like I had put on lipstick.

Putting lipstick on, enough to get acknowledged as such, is a complicated arena. Make-up is still looked down upon, and it shares a complex relationship with both body positivity and body image. I have come long way from my childhood notions about things like that, when a firm love for reading and frolicking (we will not go into how seriously fucked up that word sounds, suffice to say, it’s not a sex thing, here), pitted me in a i-don’t-wear-makeup-and-i-think-its-shallow camp. There was this stage when I thought that putting on make-up was for women who wanted to appeal to men based on their looks, and that I was above such “bimbo” stuff, but secretly, the non-make-up role was also aimed to appeal to people (and therefore, men), in a reverse psychological way, like see, I’m so much better than all these other women who care more about their appearance than world affairs or whatever. Ugh, patriarchy, I tell you, it is the worst.

As a feminist, I like the fact that I can wear make-up, without the rigmarole of everything being about men and/or the male gaze. As a conscious feminist, I am also aware that it is unfair to use make-up to divide women along the lines of girls who like it and girls who don’t, the stupid princess/nerd divide, or any other number of divisions and categories we create in order to make women feel bad about however they choose to be. And yet, there is this feeling, that putting on lipstick (okay, so I just went from make-up to making lipstick equivalent to make-up), makes it like you’re putting too much effort, liable to make you feel too conscious, as well as too “superficial” for an intellectual person. There’s this feeling, that if I put on lipstick for occasions which are not necessarily for “outside” activities, it brings attention to the fact that I am engaging in superficial appearance things which have nothing to do with whatever casual or intellectual activity I am choosing to be a part of. This is especially a factor when I am around other women who do not usually wear lipstick, or weirdly, men. The last thing I want is to change any aspect of myself in order to please a man, I mean, ugh no. At the same time, I don’t know if it’s an unconscious conditioned response in me to take care of my appearance, in that fine line of not too much effort as to be obvious or to show that I care about someone else’s opinion, nor too less to not look better in a way a little lipstick is bound to make me.

The best time is therefore when I can unapologetically wear lipstick. So when you have occasions, like a party or a dinner, I can go all out and underline my lipstick as many times as I want. I can wear dark red and plum and yikes, even dark brown. I can put on confidence like a second skin, I can be the sexy siren who gives no fuck about what others think of me, or revel in being exactly what they don’t expect of me. Lipstick makes me feel pretty, somewhere that is surely problematic also, definitely because it also makes me feel “feminine”, but as long as I am aware of all the complicated feelings around gender performativity and body positivity, as long as it is something that first of all, makes me feel better, while being conscious of how it can be used a negative paradigm in a sexist and consumerist culture – maybe it’s okay to leave lipstick rings around the butt of my cigarette, and not think of what that person who shares that cigarette with me, is gonna think of me wearing lipstick.

 

(Image source: 191 best images about Pop Tart on Pinterest | Roy lichtenstein)

Fandom Loves the Stealth Suit

“You’re keeping the outfit, right?”

(Bucky Barnes, Captain America: The First Avenger, 2011)

What is the most recognisable thing about Captain America? Is it the shield? Or is that logo that is so easy to replicate on any memorabilia and is most often found on teenagers’ t-shirts? The Captain is equally ridiculed and remembered for wearing the American flag as a uniform, and if that doesn’t take the whole uniform kink up a notch for a lot of us, then both mens.com and Bucky Barnes have got the wrong idea. (Yeah, mens.com is a porn site and yes they’ve got Captain America fucking in that patriotic uniform of his. But that wasn’t the point of this piece; if I knew porn was gonna take over my first paragraph I might have…wait, did I mention, he’s fucking Bucky in that uniform? I know it can only happen in porn parodies, but one day we’ll get there…).

The point was about the Captain American fandom and how it loves the stealth suit. Now, if you’ve seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), you’d know that the suit that Cap’s wearing in that movie is way better than the one he wore in the first one, or god forbid, that monstrosity in The Avengers (2010). Fandom would obviously never miss the difference in all the uniforms, and therefore, one of the things that has been stressed in fan fiction, and greatly visible through fan art, is the stealth suit and how much better it looks on Cap than the more flag-gy one. The stealth suit literally implies that it’s created for the purpose of covertness, considering that the operations that Captain America is involved in the “future” require more stealth and less nationalist display, unlike what the uniform was meant to inspire during a more “real” war (though really?, but no, not going into another long aside). Dark blue with no flashy stars and stripes, the stealth suit is more like a bluer version of any other supersuit available but definitely way better than Daredevil’s suit (I might have an aversion to supersuits in general, I guess), screaming less chorus girl (I mean this in a non-sexist way) and more spy. This suit basically makes Captain America less America, and jfc (yes, I have learnt to swear like a white person), is that a revelation or what? Because really, if you think about it, that’s basically all that is different and appealing about this suit.

One of the fanfics I read made this brilliant point about how the Captain America uniform is entirely composed of these bright primary colours which could get a man beaten up for wearing them, especially in the age that the superhero is coming from. The State, in a way, is then redirecting the violence that it often sanctions towards its marginal subjects, aka the “homosexuals”, by appropriating it towards its militaristic ends. What I’m trying to (avoid) saying is that the Captain America uniform is gay af, and the way a lot of people make peace with what discomforts them about the uniform, is by having nationalism “sell” it. Patriotism takes over homophobia to make it okay.

Fandom’s absolute favourite thing is to, therefore, defile that flag, rupturing both the myth of nationalism, and also obviously celebrate non-normative desires (by gay sex, that’s it, how do you think that uniform is defiled). Defiling that uniform is probably right before shouting god-bless-america while orgasming, if you’re having sex with Captain America. So the stealth suit might be more sexily appealing, less nationalistic and less comic, but the fun is really in saying fuck you to America, by fucking.

(Image source: 36.media.tumblr)

To Stevie and Buck, with love

So, last year was not very good for me. Let’s take a moment to recall what year it was and then everyone can just let out a collective sigh of remembered anguish. Well obviously, it wasn’t just the external historico-political processes that made that year horrendous but also let’s say certain things in the personal life as well. Anyway, so this one day I wake up and everything is suddenly better, is suddenly okay. At around the same time, a friend asks me to rec her Stucky fics even though I wasn’t really into the Captain America fandom at the time. And, here’s the embarrassing part, from what I’d seen of the Avengers, I actually kinda shipped Steve and Tony. But long story short, I read Stucky fics to be able to rec and absolutely and devastatingly fell in love with Steve/Bucky.

“The Stucky Library” had a pretty good role in the falling in love process as it presented every ask and tag you’d want very neatly. Oh, you want actor!Steve or bartender!Bucky, well here you go. Oh, you really want to see what that metal arm can be used for, well here’s a kink tag for specifically that. But above all, it was the prolifically comprehensive, responsible, beautiful writing that got me hooked. I started with the “period-typical homophobia” tag which captured Steve and Bucky during and before WWII and how things would have been back then. I loved pre-serum Steve getting into fights over the right issues and Bucky helping out because of course. In my headcanon, Bucky is gay (all that skirt-chasing, please) and Steve is bisexual (because Peggy has been dealt with wonderfully in the fandom) but I’m not too particular about which way they label in the fics. On top of it, the war fics just contained this brilliant pathos and sentiment that made me appreciate everything so much more. My favourite fanfic just about changed my life. You know how theorists define an “event”, that moment when history splits, what Althusser calls the “problematic”, anyway I am getting ahead of myself. It just had that kind of effect with the way it dealt with emotions and history itself. Tracing Steve and Bucky’s stories across decades, it presented this picture of longing and desire and unfulfilled love and trauma and loss and everything, everything and I felt.

If fanfiction gives you the story you want to read, it helps you learn so much more, explore realms of pleasure you didn’t know existed before. At one point I remember thinking that I felt better because the unfairness of Steve and Bucky’s love ever being realized was so unfair and painful. And I don’t just mean how in canon it will never happen, how people will never see them as queer or in love or whatever, but how in a way they really will never get their happy ending (I was going to say how they will never exist but of course they do, don’t you see, exist in the fictional standing for the real way) until the world is a much better place. And this very shattering realization made me feel better about my own little inadequate bubble of love and longing.

This post got way out of hand and really is not the love letter I have to write to Stevie and Buck, so I shall write them some more another time. For now, I just want to say that Stucky had a great impact on me in a year where the only good thing that happened was my love for them. But perhaps there is a lesson there, even in the worst of times, you shall discover…