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~ Phantom Of The Opera as trauma magic for humanity in crisis!

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Monthly Archives: November 2018

Phanship on the #Trans Spectrum. #TransDayofRemembrance #gender #PhantomoftheOpera

21 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by PhantomFemme in Phantom

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Tags

"Coming Out", "Phantom of the Opera", "Trans Day of Remembrance", gender, Phanship, Trans

So I’m going to do a podcast episode on this at some point. But because today is Trans Day of Remembrance, I wanted to take some space to talk about my own gender journey. Because, although today is about remembrance, it’s also about breaking silence! And I suspect that I’m often read as a cis ally because I can (sometimes) pass for cis female. So I want to add my voice to those of other Trans-spectrum folks today speaking to and for our realities and existence! Because silence, stereotyping and erasure are part of what cause us to need a Trans Day of Remembrance. They’re part of what create the conditions that enable so much violence against Trans people, including poverty and hyper-precarity. And I’m one of those folks with the privilege of it being relatively safe to be out – which is definitely not the case for way too many people. So I sort of feel like I have a responsibility to do so! That great slogan from the AIDS crisis: “silence = violence”.

Part of the reason it’s taken so long for me to be out, though, is erasure. For the longest time, I literally didn’t have words for my experience of gender. And finding them has been a long (and I suspect on-going) struggle! This is partly because, growing up in the 80s and 90s, for most of my formative years, I had no idea there were options other than girl, which I was assigned at birth but increasingly didn’t fit in the traditional definition of, and boy which didn’t fit either! And then, even when I started to learn about Transgender, I didn’t know any Trans people personally, so what I knew came from media. And that gave me a very rigid, narrow picture of what Trans was – a straight-forward transition from your assigned gender to your felt gender, based on feeling that you were “born into the wrong body”. The only other models I had were androgyny/gender-blending. Basically, all the gender narratives I knew told me you had to choose girl, boy or neither. It took me a long time to find models of, and words for, moving back and forth between two genders. I’d heard of gender-fluidity, but, the way it had always been presented to me, it sounded like blending genders rather than moving back and forth between them. Indeed, it wasn’t till I heard a certain episode of the awesome Off The Cuffs podcast that I realized gender-fluid could mean that, and had an example of some one living it. And I was like “You can do that? It’s a legit thing? Really? Oh Wow!”.

And this lack of language, unfortunately, caused Phantom and my Phanship to inadvertently become part of this erasure of my gender. Though, I hate to say that! But it’s true. Because, of course, the story of Phantom is very much told in a cis, gender-binaried, hetero-romantic idiom. The masculine Phantom loves the super-femme Christine. So, as I’ve talked about in a previous post, without language to articulate an alternative, that set up a feeling that I had to choose. It’s only recently dawned on me that being/doing both, and/or moving back and forth between the two is actually an option. And in truth, I’m still figuring out how the hell that works, especially in terms of the love-story! Straight? Queer? Femme for femme? Masc for femme? POli so I can access both sides of the love-story? Yeah, I’m still confused on that score.

But of course, as a Phan, naturally I want to express my gender/s through Phantom! Because, just as Phantom has profoundly shaped and informed my Disabled identity, so too has it profoundly shaped my sense of gender – both desire and presentation. The first model of masculinity that really powerfully impacted me was the Phantom, especially of the ALW stage-musical, and especially as portrayed by Colm Wilkinson! And I learned how to do Femme from Sarah Brightman’s Christine, especially during Angel of Music and the Title Song as I perceived them! But to figure out how to do both, or to move between them, meant Queering the story in ways I’m only beginning to have the tools to do. In particular, the challenge, for me at least, is to Queer the story so that it becomes fully accessible to folks like me without sacrificing the romance – the “story of deep, dark, dangerous, passionate love” to quote a documentary on the Toronto production – that’s so central to Phantom, and is so much a part of what resonates so powerfully with us Phans!

And this latter work is critically important, because Phantom is a story about the terrible mental and spiritual consequences of exclusion and marginalization. But it also, as I’ve argued elsewhere, contains a powerful call to action to end that marginalization and exclusion, and to heal the trauma caused by it. So it seems to me that it’s critically important that we Phans not allow Phantom itself to contribute to the silencing and erasure of people on account of their colour and/or their lack of conformity to the gender binary! I’m heartened, though, that I’m starting to see this be done. In particular, I’ve finally started to come across well-written Phanfics that explicitly seek to “gender-bend” the story, and others that less explicitly take up other areas of intersectionality. But there’s a lot more need and room for further creative Queering!!

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So I’ve now joined my generation in being bitten by the podcasting bug!

06 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by PhantomFemme in Uncategorized

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Tags

"Phantom of the Opera", creativity, podcast, politics

LOL So once again I haven’t posted in ages! Again, sorry about that. But as usual I’ve been busy, and not only with school! Although, definitely with that. But mostly, I’ve started a new project!

So I mentioned a long while back that I was thinking of starting a podcast of my own. Well, I finally took the leap and did! LOL And as will surprise no one, it is, of course, on Phantom of the Opera. It’s called In This Labyrinth: The Phantom of the Opera In Erik’s Times and Ours, and it’s very much the kind of stuff I do here. Like here, I bring together my Phantom obsession and my passion for Disability-centred intersectional analysis. So so far, I’ve done episodes on how the Leroux novel and Lloyd Webber stage-musicals treat the concept of normalcy, the ableism in the Gerik (the 2004 movie of Phantom) based on the blog-posts I’ve done on that topic here and elsewhere, why I find the Title Song from Phantom so thoroughly awesome (again based on some of the analysis I’ve done here), how Phantom shaped my Disabled identity and continues to do so, and most recently on Phanship and obsession. And next up is one on the Phantom and/as Red Death in the Masquerade scenes in Leroux and ALW, and how those scenes put an unintentional? Disability-political twist on the original story by Edgar Allan Poe that they’re based on. So I’m really excited about that! I was, of course, hoping to have that one up by Halloween. LOL But keeping to schedule has been interesting! Though, of course, I keep trying.

I try to put an episode out twice a month. I thought about doing only once a month, LOL but I knew from my own experience with my favourite podcasts that, if I were the listener, having to wait a whole month between episodes would drive me up the wall! So I decided to do twice a month instead. But thus the delay in posting here. Because, especially on top of school and my teaching assistantship, that schedule can be a challenge to keep up with!!! In spite of that, though, I’m really loving doing it!!! And I’ve got lots more (hopefully) interesting episodes planned for the future. And I’ve even got them more or less scheduled into the new year! Though, of course, there’s room for flexibility. I’ve got a bunch of book and Phanfic reviews planned, plus episodes on the “good girl/bad girl binary” in Phantom, Phantom and economic precarity, mothers and fathers in POTO, and the similarities and differences between Phantom and the classic Beauty and the Beast legend (especially as depicted by Disney)! And I hope to do one on POTO and the famous Beauty and the Beast TV series eventually, especially since I gather there was, at one point, a significant overlap between the fandoms of the two. But believe it or not, I haven’t yet seen the series, so, alas, that’ll have to wait till I do! And of course, I plan to do episodes on race in Phantom, and on other aspects of how gender plays out in the various versions too. So stay tuned for all of that!

Additionally, I really hope to do interviews! Because, of course, while I bring my own perspective and experience, there’s a great diversity out there in the Phandom. And I definitely can’t speak for all of that! So I’d love to have Phans who come from perspectives other than my own – at intersections other than my own – on the show. That’d be very awesome indeed, and make it much more interesting for listeners!

Anyway, so that’s what I’ve been up to. Don’t worry, though, I haven’t by any means abandoned this site, my other writing or my music! LOL It’s just a bit hard to squeeze everything in. So don’t be alarmed if there are longer than usual delays between posts here and/or updates on that other stuff! Because, school kind of has to take priority, and beyond that, the podcast’s taking priority right now, too. But I definitely plan to continue with my other projects as time and energy permit!

If you want to check my new podcast out, though, which, of course, I sincerely hope you do, you can find the show’s website at the link above. And it’s also available on iTunes and Google Play now as well! So, if you like what you hear, and again I sincerely hope you do, I’d be ever so obliged if you could subscribe in iTunes and drop a rate and review. That would be enormously appreciated, as it will help more listeners find the show! You can, of course, also like/follow the show on Facebook, and on Twitter at @ITLPodcast. There’s also a Facebook group, in addition to the page, for sharing and discussion. So by all means join there too, and I very much hope you all enjoy the podcast!

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