Tabitha Carvan

This was a lovely read about love and finding joy (through pop culture). I’ve unfortunately never had enduring love toward any stars (actors, musicians, etc) the way the author does, but I loved her discovery and journey into finding out why she loves Benedict Cumberbatch. Her appendix of extraneous information alone is worth the joy of this book. It was fun to remember how I first heard about BBC Sherlock (my 19 year old cousin rhapsodizing about it) and went down the rabbit hole of discovering more; Sherlock fic is actually how I found AO3 back in January 2012, and for that I’ll be forever grateful.… (altro)

Ah, that intense fannish energy and its sometimes disturbing demands. This is a book about that! It is about how good it is to find self-actualization, and sometimes but not necessarily community, in something you love because you love it. It is breezily written and talks a lot about shame and the barriers to allowing yourself big love, as one of the things a self-regarding individual might do with their time, in particular if they didn’t feel like they constantly had to be actively “mom” or otherwise self-monitoring for acceptable femaleness. “What would we do if we were free?” is a big feminist and fannish question, and Carvan spends a lot of time with variations of that question. E.g.: “Women mature out of their pleasures. Men, on the other hand, get to hang on to theirs, turning them into lifelong passions, or even better, a career. Then they get to make cute jokes about how they never grew up.” On the devaluation of “girl stuff,” she notes that in her day job as a science communication writer she interviewed a researcher who has proved that 71% of studied songbird species include singing females, not just singing males, but ornithologists still routinely think that song is a function of maleness. Also pointed me to this fantastic essay on the Male Glance, the counterpart to the Male Gaze that leads to immediate dismissal of girl stuff. http://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2018/03/male-glance… (altro)