"Something Mighty Queer," 2024 Online Midwinter Seminar (Mythopoeic Society)
Proposals for Accepted Presentations
This post has been substantially updated to add another session proposal: Rory and I, and Cameron and Nick will be presenting our papers at the Mythopoeic Society’s 2024 Online Midwinter Seminar: “Something Mighty Queer” (17th–18th February 2024). Dates and times TBD (I will edit that information in when I have it).
The OMS is completely online, and registration is only $20.00 if you’re interested (I registered before I knew my proposal was accepted because even if it wasn’t, I so want to attend)!
(Plus I learned how to do Tables of Contents (TOCs) in longer Substack posts and this is my first attempt! *points up to the nifty list that will let people go directly to one of the three sections of the post*!)
Asexualities, Aromantics, and Autists in Epic Fantasy by Tolkien and Goddard
Rory Queripel, “The Mariner (and his wife): Rethinking Aldarion’s (A)sexuality”
“Aldarion and Erendis” (Unfinished Tales) is a rare example in Tolkien’s work of a marriage gone severely awry. Many readings of the tale apportion blame to Aldarion, who is seen as “unwilling” to make the marriage work (Fitzsimmons, 2015), cruel and unfeeling towards Erendis, who herself is characterised as resentful and unaccepting (Rosenthal, 2004). However, these readings rely on an assumption of a cisheteronormative and, more importantly, allosexual relationship between the couple.
This paper proposes an alternate view of Aldarion and his role in the story, suggesting the possibility that he is asexual and/or aromantic (i.e., he does not experience sexual and/or romantic attraction in ways considered societally normative), and is therefore constrained by a system of marriage and duty that is anathema to him and to which he does not connect in any personal way.
By queering Aldarion’s (a)sexuality, this paper seeks a reading more compassionate towards both him and Erendis, understanding them as people wronged by societal expectation and ‘normality’ as characterised by the couple’s “failure” to reach a balance between their gendered characteristics (Rawls, 2014). While Aldarion may not be exonerated from the harm his decisions have caused, this view shifts the blame from him personally to an amatonormative system that makes a villain of him, as well as Erendis and those around them.
Works Cited
Fitzsimmons, Phillip. "Tales of Anti-Heroes in the Work of J.R.R. Tolkien." Mythlore, vol. 34, no. 1, article 6, 2015. Link.
Rawls, Melanie. “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien,” Mythlore, vol. 10, no. 4, article 2, 1984. Rpt. in Croft and Donovan, 2015, pp. 99-117. Link.
Rosenthal, Ty. "Warm Beds are Good: Sex and Libido in Tolkien's Writing." Mallorn, vol. 42, 2004, pp. 35-42. Link.
Robin Anne Reid, “Wide Seas Islander, Asexual, & Autist: The Intersectional Mythopoeic Characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang”
Victoria Goddard’s Nine World Series (consisting of seven interlaced sub-series containing, as of the writing of this proposal, twenty longer works [novels and novellas] and four collections of short stories) is a tour de force of mythopoeic worldbuilding, genre-blending, and queer characterization. I completely agree with Alexandra Rowland that “You [all] Should Really Be Reading Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds Series.”
In this presentation, I analyze how Goddard’s intersectional characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang, a co-protagonist and point of view character in the “Lays of the Hearth Fire” sub-series, queers a number of the major conventions of epic fantasy while creating a strongly mythopoeic work of fantasy that writes back to Tolkien’s legendarium.
Cliopher/Kip’s intersectional identity as a Wide Seas Islander, an asexual, and an autist meets the sixth of Alexander Doty’s definitions of “queer” as:
those aspects of. . . textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or transgendered understandings and categorization of gender and sexuality—this is a more radical understanding of queer, as queerness here is something apart from established gender and sexuality categories, not the result of vague or confused coding or positioning (6-7).
The narrative foregrounds the importance of Kip being a Wide Seas Islander, a national identity dismissed by most of the Last Emperor’s court as “primitive,” even barbaric, and establishes the specific parameters of his asexuality in At the Feet of the Sun. Characterizing him as an autist is my interpretation of a number of his characteristics and behaviors as described in the series.
Works Cited
Doty, Alexander, Flaming Classics, Queering the Film Canon. Routledge, 2000.
Rowland, Alexandra. “You Should Really Be Reading Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds Series.” Tor.com. Oct. 20, 2021.
Reading, Rending, and Queering the Web of Story with the Lens of “Con-creation” and Process Theology
Cameron Bourquein & Nick Polk
Recent scholarship has addressed the connected problems of Tolkien as “Author/Author(ity)” and the exclusivist readings of Tolkien’s work that follow this construction (Chunodkar, Emanuel, Reid). This “constructed Tolkien” seems to parallel common readings of his Legendarium’s own Creator God, Eru—understood as the monolithic “Author” of Ea. Yet “subcreation” within Tolkien’s narrative and extra-narrative works is routinely exhibited not as monolithic but rather as (literally and figuratively) multivocal (and hence inherently queer).
In this paper Cameron will propose that the Legendarium can be read through the lens of “con-creation” (the total choice-making activity of all rational beings) both internally (as events in the Secondary World) and externally (as both a text and a pseudohistory in the Primary World). This approach levels the playing field between all actors in—and readers of—“The Drama,” providing a queer (non-normative) approach to creativity (and interpretation of creativity) when compared to “orthodox” doctrines of creation. Nick will further argue that con-creation resonates with process theologies of creation, particularly Jacob J. Erickson’s Irreverent Theology and Catherine Keller’s creatio ex profundis. Both emphasize the participation of a multiplicity of creatures in divine creativity, shaking off a monolithic determination of creation
Works Cited
Chunodkar, Sonali. “Ilúvatar as a Reader/Listener-God: A Barthesian Interpretation of Sub-creation in Tolkien.” Secondary Believers, Secondary Worlds: Tolkien and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. Tolkien Society 2024 Online Seminar. Abstracts.
Emanuel, Tom. "'It is 'about' nothing but itself': Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author." Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 3, 2024. Link.
Erickson, Jacob J. “Irreverent Theology: On the Queer Ecology of Creation.” Meaningful Flesh: Reflections on Religion and Nature for a Queer Planet. Punctum Books, 2018. Link.
Keller, Catherine. The Face of the Deep; A Theology of Becoming. Routledge, 2002.
Reid, Robin Anne. "A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds to Donald Williams's ‘Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged “Conflicting Sides” of Tolkien's Singular Self," Mythlore, vol. 40, no. 2, article 14. Link.