More Strands of the Web
upcoming presentatations relating to the Book!
A midnight spider!
When I went to choose the regular picture of a web I’ve been using from “Stock Images” for posts relating to this project, I realized there were NEW pictures (or pictures coming up sooner in the group as I scrolled down), and I ask you—who could possibly resist this beautiful midnight spider!
But then, right next to it in the scroll, was a lovely shining net attached to beautiful pink flowers in a meadow, and I’m OH YES! I love that one too! So you get both because I have a terrible time choosing only one.
I am very much leaning into the spider and web imagery for this project (which if I have to be official about it I will describe as a feminist monograph on women and Tolkien [not women IN Tolkien, mind you! because it’s more about the reception than it is about his text although of course it’s all connected—IN THE WEB!].
After getting the anthologies off to my editor, I was going to pull together my atheists, agnostics, and animists monograph which I’ve been working on (and off) since 2019, mostly via presentations at conferences, but with one publication.1 But, as some of you may remember, the Web project charged into my life and took over. The first posts in the Web Project were posted last summer, but during the fall things really took off especially when (for example) J. D. Vance started spouting his misogynistic junk about “childless cat ladies.”2 Those are the moments that inspire the need for the dark/midnight spider persona. Little does he know!
Ahem. Anyway! Here’s some updates on a publication and two conference presentations I’ll be working on that relate to the Web project (all my presentations are coming out that way I’ve noticed!).
March 31 2025 is the due date for an essay I am writing for a themed journal issue on Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien’s Legendarium. The (working) title is: “Here, There, Maybe there? Oh, Yeah, HERE! (But Never Back Again): An Asexual Autist’s Meander,” and it’s a weird experimental kinda thing that I now feel totally unleashed and happy about writing because I am retired and don’t give a fuck what the higher-up administrators say about my scholarship! Not that I ever did, very much, but a bit.
This essay will focus on reception of Tolkien’s work by A-spec readers (blending autobiographical information as well as data from Archive of Our Own) in the context of the intense love and community I found in the LiveJournal LOTR slash fandom (2003-2009-ish) which was very much a feminist-queer (all the rainbows!) having our way with Tolkien's characters (and also with the actors’ celebrity personas in “Real People Fic” (RPF) which has a much longer and complicated history than most realize as this excellent article in Fanlore discusses and documents!
Working Bibliography
Canning, Dominique A. "Queering Asexuality: Asexual-Inclusion in Queer Spaces," McNair Scholars Research Journal, vol. 8 , article 6, 2015, pp. 55-74, https://commons.emich.edu/mcnair/vol8/iss1/6
Dattaro, Laura. "Gender and Sexuality in Autism, Explained." Spectrum: Autism Research News, 18 Sept. 2020, https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/gender-and-sexuality-in-autism-explained/.
Dattaro, Laura. "Largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender diversity." Spectrum: Autism Research News, 14 Sept. 2020, https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/.
Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics, Queering the Film Canon. Routledge, 2000.
LaFontaine, David. “The Fellowship of the Tea Club.” Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 27, iss. 4, July/Aug. 2020, pp. 25-29.
LaFontaine, David. “Sex and Subtext in Tolkien’s World.” Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 22, no. 6, Nov./Dec. 2015, pp. 14–17.
LaFontaine, David. “The Tolkien in Bilbo Baggins.” Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 23, iss. 6, Nov./Dec. 2016.
Reid, Robin Anne, Alexis Lothian, and Kristina Busse. "'Yearning Void and Infinite Potential': Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space.” English Language Notes. Queer Space Special Issue, ed. by Jane Garrity, vol. 45, iss. 2, Fall/Winter 2007, pp. 103-111. A collaborative experiment in a note format (rather than formal essay) that has a web version (the full text is online in LiveJournal [http://slashroundtable.livejournal.com/]; the print version is the shorter one.
Rosenthal, Ty. "Warm Beds are Good: Sex and Libido in Tolkien's Writing." Mallorn, vol. 42, 2004, pp. 35-42.
Scarlett, Alice Olivia. "Asexuality is the Queerest Thing." Stonewall. News, 27 Oct. 2020, https://www.stonewall.org.uk/about-us/news/asexuality-queerest-thing.
From April 16-19, I’ll be at the annual Popular Culture/American Culture International Conference (in New Orleans, LA, this year), running the Tolkien Studies area (TSA) (for the last time!). I posted information about all the presentations and activities of the TSA earlier.
So I have to write my presentation for that on the topic of “A ‘Tolkien’ of One’s Own: Women Making Their Own ‘Tolkiens.’” (Link leads to the earlier post where I shared that abstract and Working Bibliography submitted back in September (another world/time!)!3 The conference is in mid-April, so this presentation will be overlapping with the A-spec essay.
AND, just as I thought I was safe, some of my friends announced an absolutely fantastic theme for the Tolkien Society’s 2025 online seminar this summer (July 25-26). The theme is “Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments,” and it’s free too! So, well, I couldn’t pass that one up.
Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis
This presentation uses stylistics (applied linguistics) to develop an intersectional analysis of gender and race focusing on how the grammar of (selected) female bodies is raced and entangled with Middle-earth. Drawing on previous stylistic scholarship I have done on The Lord of the Rings which has focused on the agency of Middle-earth (2007); on female bodies and femininities (2013), and on the complexities of Tolkien’s constructed narrative voices (2009, 2024), I propose using stylistics (based on M. A. K. Halliday’s functional grammar) to develop a phenomenological and stylistics analysis of how Tolkien’s narrative voices entangle female characters and Middle-earth, resulting in a racialized (White) gendered (feminine) world. I draw on Sara Ahmed’s work on the phenomenology of Whiteness as “an effect of racialization, which in turn shapes what it is that bodies “‘can do’. In this paper, I offer a phenomenology of whiteness as a way of exploring how whiteness is ‘real’, material and lived” (150). I plan to focus on two characters as a proof of concept: Goldberry and Galadriel, focusing on the narrative descriptions of their first appearance and of the descriptions of their power: Goldberry on the hill, saying farewell, and Galadriel at her Mirror.
Working Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory, vol 8, no. 2, 2007, pp. 149–168, DOI: 10.1177/1464700107078139
Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Revised by Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen. Hodder Arnold, 2024.
Henderson, Dylan L. “‘A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 6, 2023, pp. 87-106, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/6/.
Larsen, Kristine. "Medieval Organicism or Modern Feminist Science? Bombadil, Elves, and Mother Nature." Tolkien and Alterity, edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 95-108. The New Middle Ages.
Redmond, Sean. “The Whiteness of the Ring,” The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood, edited by Daniel Bernardi, Routledge, 2008, pp. 91-101.
Reid, Robin Anne. "Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)?: Female Bodies and Femininities in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, McFarland, 2013, pp. 98-118.
Reid, Robin Anne. "Mythology and History: A Stylistic Analysis of The Lord of the Rings," Style, vol. 43, no. 4, Winter 2009, pp. 517-538.
Reid, Robin Anne. "'Tree and flower, leaf and grass': The Grammar of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings," Fantasy Fiction into Film, edited by Leslie Stratyner and James R. Keller, McFarland, 2007, pp. 35-54.
Reid, Robin Anne. "'Within Bounds That He Has Set': A Stylistic Analysis of Cities and Strongholds in The Lord of the Rings," Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien's Legendarium, edited by Cami Agan. Mythopoeic Press, 2024, pp. 134-159.
So, at the moment, those are on the top of my list. I won’t hear whether the stylistics analysis is accepted for the conference for a while, but that’s OK—it’s going to be part of the larger project, and there are other conferences if it doesn’t fit with the the 2025 theme/program. I’ll still be attending the sessions I can (the time difference means that they start at about 2:00 AM my time, sigh) because the theme is fascinating.
SPUN DAYLIGHT
Reid, Robin Anne. "How Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists Engage with Tolkien's Legendarium," Tolkien and Diversity: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Summer Seminar 2021, The Tolkien Society, edited by Will Sherwood, Peter Roe Series XXII, Luna Press, 2023, pp. 52-85.
And, oh yeah, there’s the whole complete and total fucked up thing about women and pregnant people dying (maternal and infant mortality rates going up even though a bunch of states are not tracking them anymore) since Roe v. Wade was crapped on by the bought and paid for Federalist gang. . I am turning 70 this year. I remember life before Roe v. Wade which was passed on January 22, 1973, the year I graduated from high school. I remember how many girls I knew, or knew of (it was a class of about 250, if I remember correctly) had to take time off for a few months, or had to get married, or left school and *never came back.* Multiply that nationally because all making abortion (and related reproductive rights care because they are now claiming all forms of contraception except the rhythm method is are “abortions”) illegal only results in women dying: it doesn’t stop abortions.
PCA/ACA has about 1700 presenters/attendees these days—we’re nowhere near the size of the biggest of academic conferences, but it’s enough to have approximately 40 programming tracks running simultaneously from Wednesday morning - Saturday afternoon! It takes a while to organize!
These both sound amazing!!