• About Me
  • Find My Music
  • Links
  • My CopyLefts (Please read in full).
  • On-Going Annotated Bibliography
  • Tarot And Voice
  • The In This Labyrinth Podcast

PhantomFemme.com

~ Phantom Of The Opera – Liberation Romanticism For a World In Crisis

PhantomFemme.com

Tag Archives: Phanship

My Music Finally Launched – Spirit And Voice!

21 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by Sarah Erik in Art, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Phantom of the Opera", ChristoPagan, music, Phanship, spirituality

So it finally happened! LOL I know, it seemed like it might never. But yep, I’ve finally got my music re-launched! The delay was caused by trying to work out the most accessible way to post videos of me doing my music online that can then be easily shared. And to my surprise, after quite a bit of trial and error, I ended up going with old-fashioned YouTube! It’s not perfect by any means, and honestly at first I didn’t think it would work for me. But I found Vimeo not that accessible either, and ultimately YouTube ended up being easier to post to and share from – which surprised me! And I was ultimately able to get it to give me a channel name that I like, and allow me to make sure I’m signed in properly and not accidentally in one of my other Google accounts, both of which were problems when I first started exploring it.

So now that that’s all sorted out, welcome to my new YouTube channel – Spirit And Voice! And it’s not only the new home for my music. Recall a while ago I mentioned really wanting to find a space to start sharing my spirituality? Well, I’ve decided to use the channel for that as well. Which makes sense, because my spirituality and my music are deeply intertwined! So the channel will be a blend of music posts and posts where I share the work in progress that is my Phantom-centred ChristoPagan spiritual practice. You can check it out at the link below!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3l3r0mI033oE36uoXpUsOA

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy that and find the stuff I post there interesting. Uh, and I hope this works! I’m trying posting by email for the first time because the new WordPress post-editor has some accessibility issues that are driving me up the wall! So let’s hope this works as a work-around.

And of course, blessed Winter Solstice to everyone, belated happy Chanukah, and merry Christmas!!

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

21 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by Sarah Erik in Phantom

≈ 1 Comment

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!!

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Recent Posts

  • Miscellaneous Updates.
  • My podcast has new hosting!
  • Launching The Zine At Last!!
  • Check out my new zine!
  • Song Of Hope – Lyrics

Recent Comments

John Gardham on Phanship on the #Trans Spectru…
Phanship on the #Tra… on Unlearning Christine
From Leroux to Stage… on What’s wrong with the…

Archives

  • March 2022
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • April 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • June 2020
  • March 2020
  • December 2019
  • June 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • November 2018
  • June 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016

Categories

  • Art
  • disability
  • Phantom
  • politics
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • Miscellaneous Updates.
  • My podcast has new hosting!
  • Launching The Zine At Last!!
  • Check out my new zine!
  • Song Of Hope – Lyrics

Recent Comments

John Gardham on Phanship on the #Trans Spectru…
Phanship on the #Tra… on Unlearning Christine
From Leroux to Stage… on What’s wrong with the…

Archives

  • March 2022
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • April 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • June 2020
  • March 2020
  • December 2019
  • June 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • November 2018
  • June 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016

Categories

  • Art
  • disability
  • Phantom
  • politics
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • PhantomFemme.com
    • Join 263 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • PhantomFemme.com
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
%d bloggers like this: