Queering Holmes: The Book... Zine... Journal... Thingy.

[damned_colonial]

When I started this community, it was because lotesse and I had been talking a lot about how frustrating it was not to find any books/journals/articles talking about the sorts of things we wanted to read about: Holmes and queerness and gender and subtext and context and yada yada. And as we were talking about it, we came up with the crackpot idea of starting our own Sherlockian Journal to talk about those issues, or maybe of trying to write something for Transformative Works and Cultures or talk them into doing a Sherlock Holmes issue, or... well, we didn't really know what, but something.

And then I remembered that my friend brainwane and her partner had done a project last year called Thoughtcrime Experiments. Basically they edited and self-published a short story anthology so that they would get to see the sorts of stuff they wanted in print. They wrote all about their process in an appendix to the book, with a step by step guide to doing a similar project yourself if you should want to.

We want to. But we weren't sure whether anyone else would think it was that good an idea or not, so I said, why don't we set up a DW community and see whether anyone else is interested in the queer aspects of Sherlock Holmes? Which we did, and here we are, and I think we can fairly safely say that people are interested.

So, now I guess I just wanted to raise the idea of a book/zine/journal/thingy on the same sort of subject area as this community, and using a similar process to the one outlined in the Thoughtcrime Experiments appendix linked above.

What do you think?

Comments

Come on, we were all thinking it ;)

[spacefall]

Provided someone is brave/foolhardy enough to take on the editing, I say go for it. I suspect everyone in this comm has been craving something similar for years ;). Holmes fandom has a long history of published books on this or that, and we can always pool our resources in terms of fannish rarities.

Would it be worth having a fannish rec-fest in the near future, or might it be better to avoid overlap so that we don't all end up writing about the same sad old topics? *coughSLURcough* There's plenty of Holmesian stuff out there, so it might be helpful to share sources of pr0n Holmesiana that others might find useful in addition to more historical piles-o-research? I'm thinking of things like journals, collections, commentaries, publishers, etc that might be useful if people wanted to refer back to earlier fandom.

Of course, many people wouldn't want to touch Holmesiana with a bargepole, but I think it is worthwhile to engage with existing fannish writing. One of the things that makes me grind my teeth is the argument that queer readings of the canon are necessarily shallow or naive. As someone who's read the stories top to bottom as well as many of the writings-on-the-writings, I say stuff that. From my POV, 'naive' is taking Holmes, Watson, or the writings out of their broader cultural setting in order to keep queer readings off the table. Where's the game in that? I call foul! ;) I can just hear the writers tutting now, saying that these people simply aren't aware of Holmes fandom/scholarship, and the many perfectly logical arguments against queer readings. To that, I reply 'Norbury' ;)

[marshtide]

Do think this sounds like a beautiful idea (I'm late saying this! I know! life is oddly manic considering I'm not actually employed), though I'm not sure I'd have the nerve to actually put together an article for that sort of thing myself. I feel very... under-read? underqualified? unintelligent? one or possibly all of those things. But I would love love love essays about queer interpretations of this stuff.