Subspace Radio

Part 2 of my guest spot on The Shabcast, hosted by my friend Jack Graham (of Shabogan Graffiti and Xenomorph's Parodox) is now live!

Jack points out in the description and I second, that this is a bit of a disjointed one and mostly consists of him encouraging me to randomly leap from topic to topic in between audio and connection problems. I believe this installment looks more in-depth at my history with Star Trek, particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, my interest in aesthetics as a nonverbal language and philosophy and my concept of fanfiction as the way culture reappropriates its oral myths and histories that have been stolen from it by capitalism. Included in this is my gender studies influenced reading of slash fiction and my redemption and historical contextualization of the Mary Sue concept in regards to the 1970s female-driven Star Trek fandom. Dirty Pair of course remains a significant topic of conversation, primarily because I can never, ever shut up about Dirty Pair.

A few notes…

• The concept of the Singularity Archetype and the Glorified Body I use extensively throughout my recent Vaka Rangi work is pretty fundamental to how I read Dirty Pair, and is derived from the rhetoric of Jonathan Zap (in particular these two essays). As I discovered it rather late in the writing of volume three, it’s something I definitely need to flesh out and make a bit more central and clear in the revised edition. Zap has a tendency to be a bit too teleogical and reductive for my personal tastes, but I find his basic arguments and intellectual framework compelling.
• For those of you who didn’t see my original essays on the Mary Sue concept and slash fiction on Vaka Rangi, I’ve provided links for you all here. Furthermore, my essay on the first Dirty Pair novel, The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair, outlines how I feel Kei’s narration plays with the Mary Sue archetype and how her relationship with Yuri simultaneously inverts and elevates the structure of slash.
• If you missed part one of this interview, you can catch up here if you want.

You can listen to our conversation here. Thanks again to Jack for having me on, and to Kevin and James from Pex Lives for being so kind as to host us.