truepenny | Q&A 17, with the follow-up to the follow-up from Q&A 16

Q: A number of your gay or bisexual male characters (Felix and Gideon in The Doctrine of Labyrinths, Isolfr in A Companion to Wolves) have Issues about anal sex. They fear being penetrated or refuse it entirely, and in the case of Isolfr, even after he supposedly gets over his fear we learn that he avoids sex with his two wolfcarls.

The depiction of anal sex (especially between men) in fiction is something I've been thinking a lot about since I read China Mieville's interview in the March 2008 issues of Weird Tales. Mieville argues that anal sex tends to be represented as violent, depraved, and even as a sign of evil. I'm wondering what you think about this question and why you've made the choices you made about how you portray anal sex between men.

A: I have not read the Mieville interview, so I can't comment, aside from wondering what he's been reading lately. But to answer your question:

Point 1: Isolfr is neither gay nor bisexual. He's straight.

Point 2: Felix's hang-ups aren't about anal sex per se. They're about control, and his experience has been that if he's the one on the receiving end, he's generally NOT in control. Frequently, in fact, he's in a nonconsensual situation of one kind or another. And I think fearing and/or rejecting nonconsensual situations is actually pretty psychologically healthy. (Notice that in The Mirador, he has no problems letting Isaac Garamond fuck him. That's because he (Felix) is in control of the encounter.)

Gideon's issues come from the culture he was raised in--as so many of everybody's issues do--in which the question of "submitting" to anal penetration is inextricably entangled with questions of power (both magical and otherwise) and abuse.

I think the representations of anal sex in my work need to be considered in the broader context of representations of sex in my work--which mostly is fraught and contentious and uncomfortable, one way or another. Mildmay, you'll notice, has his share of hang ups about sex. I use sex, very often, as a way to talk about power: the power imbalances and power dynamics between two people and what that says about them and their backgrounds and all sorts of other things.

This question arose twice, in two different conversations, so I figured I should, you know, answer it.

What is revenge tragedy?

Revenge tragedy is a genre of plays that flourished in England between about, say, 1580 and 1642. The prototype of the genre is Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1582). Revenge tragedy is characterized by its Senecan aesthetic (blood and rhetoric, with or without love), its metatheatricality (self-awareness, and the tendency to comment on itself as theater: revenge tragedies love plays-within-plays, like Hamlet's Mousetrap) and by a plot arc which may or may not be followed, but which is always palpably present. There has been a wrongful death, which the law cannot or will not redress (e.g., Claudius kills the elder Hamlet, but since he promptly becomes king, nobody's going to prosecute). The revenger, who loves the victim (whether in a parent-child or sibling relationship or as a lover), sets out to GET REVENGE on the murderer. There is a lot of what we now call collateral damage. (In Hamlet, for example, Hamlet kills Polonius, which causes Ophelia's madness and death; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get caught in the machinations between Hamlet and Claudius; Gertrude drinks the poison Claudius means for Hamlet; Hamlet kills Laertes and is himself poisioned. Notice that Claudius, his target, is the last person killed.) The stage ends up strewn with corpses--and that's frequently a literal description. The revenger inevitably ends up mirroring his antagonist, becoming every bit as bad. Answering murder with murder merely causes more murder, like a contagious disease (disease and corruption imagery is everywhere in revenge tragedy, as is madness: Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy goes mad--Hamlet fakes madness--the B-plot of The Changeling is set in a madhouse--in The Revengers Tragedy, the characters remark that there's no way to tell if they've gone mad, because the world they live in is insane). Murder doesn't solve anything and creates more injustice than it ostensibly corrects. The Spanish proverb is, He who seeks revenge must first dig two graves, but in the English Renaissance, you needed a bigger grave than that.

As I said to

jonquil, I wrote my dissertation on revenge tragedies because I love them. So if you have questions or things you want to talk about, the comment thread of this post seems like an excellent place. (Caveat: if it looks like you're trying to get me to do your homework for you, I'm unlikely to give you a useful answer.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

txanne.livejournal.com

What do you think of the Revengers Tragedy version set in outer space and starring C. Eccleston? I've been wondering if it's worth the Netflixing.

From:

jonquil.livejournal.com

Yes, yes, a THOUSAND times yes. It is not as faithful as it might be, but there are superb performances from Christopher Eccleston, Derek Jacobi, and Eddie Izzard. The milieu is just right.

Also, not set in outer space. Set in a very dystopian England after some unnamed catastrophe.

Q&A 17, with the follow-up to the follow-up from Q&A 16

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