#lit crit

Robert: Duncan! Why the fuck are you living with our former prison warden?

Duncan: oh, hi Robert! normal reasons.

Robert: Vivian. I'm worried about your brother living with his former prison warden. I'm very concerned for him. Even though there was nothing gay between us. despite being former cellmates. hey, are you even listening to me?

Viv: *internal monologue* I have a simple gold ring from my Tragic Past, which was given to me by a chivalrous butch lesbian. But don't worry! it was not given as a lover's token! i am straight, not bisexual. there was no narrative reason not to make me bisexual, but here i am. the most interesting thing about my love life was that i had a prolonged affair with a married man whom i am slowly losing interest in.*

Robert: wrapped up in your own little world, just like your brother. god you look like him.

Viv : hm? OH MY GOD THERE SHE IS

*Viv darts across the street to the cinema. she has a brief conversation with Kay, returns the ring, and thanks her for protecting her and getting her the medical care she desperately needed w/o going to jail*

Viv: oh my god, what a relief!

Robert: so you really weren't waiting for a date?

Viv: no, just someone who did me a favor once

Robert: will you date me? please please please please please please please

*across town, as Duncan waits for Robert, realizes he's being stood up, and dreads saying 'good night' to his old prison warden.*

Duncan: hang on. i don't have to keep living with this old Christian Scientist weirdo and being sexually harassed by him every night.

Duncan: *walks to Robert's in his pajamas and raps at the window. Robert helps him in through the window after Robert's landlady has gone to bed*

Robert: oh, shoot, I didn't come by because I ran into your sister! she let me kiss her goodnight :3

Duncan: yay!

THE END! that's the end of their storyline. is the 'happy ending' for these characters supposed to be that Viv stops seeing her married boyfriend, and starts dating her little brother's former cellmate instead? If Robert dates Vivian, establishing a social bond w/ Duncan outside of 'former cellmate', is that supposed to make it less weird for them become roommates? (Since Duncan's current, unappealing options are living w/ his homophobic relatives, or keeping his current lodgings by playing house with someone who's exploiting him / guilting him into sex?)

if Vivian and Robert get married, and let Duncan live with them in some cramped apartment--is that supposed to be the ending?!?!?!?!

(i would read that sequel. it would be extremely fucked-up, but at least in a more interesting and fun way that a lot of the plotlines in this book)

Im not going to write a whole paper on it, but viewers see Sarah struggling with a monologue at the beginning of the movie. At the end, the final line is what she uses to dispell Jareth and take Toby back. Jareth, who wants to control Sarah in exchange for "being her slave" is viewed through this lens as an exploration of her own sexuality. If she submits to her own desires, her desires will also reward her. In contrast, there is Toby, who is the consequence of those real world actions. If she has sex and gets pregnant, she could have a baby and then have the responsibility of taking care of that child. If she gets married, as Jareth's presence is there to remind her, she could be taken care of as a woman and a wife.

However, the line she uses to break free of Jareth's power and the labyrinth is "you have no power over me." This is where Sarah becomes someone who knows how to wield their sexuality. This is Sarah who won't let the fact that she's a woman hold her back in the world.

That science fiction mirrors, fractures, twists, estranges, and comments upon contemporary and historical events is not a new assertion, yet direct connections between the lived realities of disabled and Mad people physically and epistemically isolated from the “real world” and the “unimaginable” practices of science fictional medical abuse are seldom made. Yet, when we strip the pages of their accouterments, nominally speculative works tend to depict existing practices of medical, carceral violence—kidnapping, forced institutionalization, denial of food and water, filicide and its enablement, and more—visited upon predominantly disabled and Mad (or Maddened) people, yet done largely behind closed doors, within segregated environments, or within situational locations in which there exists unique justification for said violence: they are lab rats, genetic freaks, alien races, hardened criminals. They become narrators whose perspectives, however committed to justice, are a priori unreliable, whether as a result of pre-existing pathology or via the paradoxical assertion that the long event of institutionalization itself has rendered them worthy of confinement. In Failure to Comply, the relentless “unreliability” of the narration—not to mention, the unreliability of genre—creates a sense of claustrophobia that it is difficult to escape. Both create a confusion of place which mirrors the carcerality of those institutions which conceal, condemn, and (in so doing) create the Mad. If genre is a ward, whose fluorescents beat steadily, routinely, in eventing my path, then anti-genre is no-place. It is the no-place where non-things are felt by non-people in a series of non-moments. Silence is a powerful tool within what Smilges (Queer Silence 26) names as a rhetorical matrix of words, gestures, expressions, and other modes of communication, including refusals to do so. And yet silence, when mandated, disappears: The asylum is a great silencer, performing a disappearing act, the first and most primary being the disappearance of itself. The asylum, itself a partner and microcosm of the settler colony (Coleborne; Whitt), invents the real by removing contradiction, squeezing steadily until the plate of possible realities has been thinned to one great, terrible event.

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