Introductions
Apr. 27th, 2010 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damned_colonial posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
queering_holmesPlease feel free to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your interest in this community.
Speaking for myself... I identify as a fan and as an amateur history nerd. Most of my fandoms -- at least, those that I am most deeply involved in -- are historical fandoms, and I enjoy learning and thinking about the history of the periods in which they are set. When it comes to history, I lean most towards social history, especially women's history and queer history, and I'm fascinated by the similarities and differences between Britain and its colonies during the colonial period. As far as Sherlock Holmes is concerned, I read the books and enjoyed them years ago but didn't fall head-first into the fandom until the 2009 movie came out. Since then I have been immersing myself in reading every related thing I can find, especially about homosexual subculture in late-Victorian London. (Previously, my main historical fandoms centred around the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.) I don't have an academic background but I enjoy reading and discussing scholarly texts with smart, interested people, and I'm hoping this community will give me more opportunities to do that.
Speaking for myself... I identify as a fan and as an amateur history nerd. Most of my fandoms -- at least, those that I am most deeply involved in -- are historical fandoms, and I enjoy learning and thinking about the history of the periods in which they are set. When it comes to history, I lean most towards social history, especially women's history and queer history, and I'm fascinated by the similarities and differences between Britain and its colonies during the colonial period. As far as Sherlock Holmes is concerned, I read the books and enjoyed them years ago but didn't fall head-first into the fandom until the 2009 movie came out. Since then I have been immersing myself in reading every related thing I can find, especially about homosexual subculture in late-Victorian London. (Previously, my main historical fandoms centred around the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.) I don't have an academic background but I enjoy reading and discussing scholarly texts with smart, interested people, and I'm hoping this community will give me more opportunities to do that.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 05:21 am (UTC)I am here, more or less by accident. I'm a radical feminist, and finally realized, hey, there might be groups related to feminism on DW, so search already! I did, and here you were.
Coincidentally, I have been re-watching the 1984 series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Season 1, with David Burke's Watson to Jeremy Brett's Holmes) and after watching four or five episodes in a week, began to think quite a lot about the intimate nature of the two characters' relationship as presented in the series. It's been probably twenty years since I read Doyle's novels and shorter fiction, although I read it avidly enough, even owning a single-volume complete works at one time.
I have also been a student of (medieval German) literature, an area more than rife with close, even intimate, relationships between men. I'd been wondering already this week, in between the scratchings of daily life, if there were parallels to be drawn between those older tales, the Victorian era Doyle, and the filmed versions.
I have also had unreliable narrators on the brain, lefaym, especially considering how much emphasis is placed, at least watching the television series, on Holmes' cocaine habit. It seems to me, though I took him for the hero of the series when I was a teen, that the actual characterization of Holmes isn't quite as uncritical as I'd once thought.
So. I'm in the right place, am I?