#writing an academic monograph

[jeannereames]

where would i be able to read your monograph? especially about the ‘you are nothing without me’ incident

The Protracted Reality of Writing Academic Shit 😂

First, and assuming the asker means my Hephaistion-Krateros book, the quick answer is: It’s still in process, not even close to being in print. In the meantime, a number of my articles are available on academia-edu.

Now, to explain why the book is “still in process,” let me explain the monograph writing progression. IME, the average person uninvolved in academia is often surprised by the sheer complexity and time involved. (After all, why would you know if you don't need to?)

Below, I talk only about academic monographs, although I’ve also edited academic collections, and of course, have published a number of articles. I started to tackle fiction publishing too, but that quickly devolved into a long-ass post (even for me), so I’m sticking only to the topic the asker requested. It's long enough! Maybe I’ll do fiction later, assuming anybody wants to read that. (If so, put it in an ask.)

To write an academic book in the humanities typically takes years. There are several stages just to produce the initial manuscript, never mind getting it into print. I’ll outline the general process below, using my current project to illustrate the steps. One thing I’ve found consistently among both students and non-academics is utter surprise at just how extensive research/writing is. New grad students often think writing a thesis/dissertation is akin to writing a really long term paper. Oh, no. You will write it, submit it, get critique and feedback, go research some more and revise it, get critique and feedback, go and research yet more and revise it again … rinse and repeat. How long? Until it’s cooked. There’s not a set timeframe. It will always take longer than you expect. Always. I’ve been teaching grad students almost 25 years. I have yet to have any require less time than they first assumed.

Writing a monograph (including the thesis/dissertation, which is a type of monograph) is one of the toughest forms of academic writing. Papers/articles are much easier, and not just because they’re shorter, although that’s some of it. They also generally have a simpler point. They’re proving ONE thing, like a string.

A monograph presents a coherent, complex argument like a rope woven from several strings (the chapters). It’s not an edited collection by multiple authors in a single volume (or two), or even a collection of various essays by a single author. Collections may have a general topic, like, say, Macedonian Legacies (the collection we did for Gene Borza), or the one I’m editing now, Macedon and It’s Influences. Just trying to figure out a decent order for the varied papers can prove a challenge in these. If some of the papers actually do bear on each other … bonus! But the papers aren’t necessarily expected to come together at the end in any cogent way. A monograph’s concluding chapter should, however, bring together the chapters into a solid conclusion, like the arch’s capstone, holding it all together.

Yet the researcher may not know the answer to that until done with much of the research. After reading everything, and considering it, she may wind up in a different place from where she started. Like any good, responsible research, the researcher must be prepared to follow the data and facts, not cram them into a preconceived notion. I’ve changed some of my ideas and goals for my current monograph, as I no longer think I can do the project I originally intended because the nature of the sources get in the way too much. But I have a more interesting project as a result.

The first phase is research: pretty much for any academic field, period. How this progresses, and how quickly, varies with the individual, field, and topic. Furthermore, some of us are planners (that’s me), others are pantsers (e.g., they dive in and figure it out as they go: by the seat of the pants). But we all start with a question or observation, then go out to track down information about it. In history, sometimes we just read the primary sources/archival material and see what we find. Something strikes us, so we go on to read more, which produces either refined questions or entirely new ones.

Right now, I’m finishing up the initial stages of the research. Then I’ll start work on the chapters, which, yes, I’ve outlined as a result of my initial research. But those chapters may (and probably will) morph as I write them. It’s during the writing phase that the other, “attendant” research comes into play: chasing down all the references in other secondary sources for smaller points. Rabbit-hole time.

My initial research tends to be more measured. I read a while, stop to think—sometimes do stuff like write replies to asks on Tumblr while my brain churns. 😉 Then I go back and read some more. But the writing phase is where I can lose all track of time while running down just-one-more-citation-then-I’ll-stop. The last time I looked at a clock it was 3pm and now it’s 9pm, I’m weak with hunger, I really have to pee because I’m drinking too much tea, and the cats are mad because I’ve not fed them in hours. 😆 It’s two really different types of research for me.

Anyway, for the initial (pre-writing) stage, there are really two substages. The first is what I think of as archival work: e.g., getting down and dirty with the original (primary) sources, including digging into the Greek and Latin to see what it actually says, and if there’s something noteworthy in the phrasing. At this point, I may not really know what I’m looking for, except in the broadest sense. For my current project, I collected every single mention of Hephaistion and Krateros in the original sources. For all five ATG bios, I read them front to back, tagging all sorts of things, plus large chunks of important other books (e.g., the first part of book 18 of Diodoros, the extant fragments of Arrian’s After Alexander, plus a couple bios, esp. Plutarch’s Eumenes, etc.) in order to get a FLOW, not just collect things piecemeal. There are some passages that may not name Hephaistion or Krateros specifically, but they would include them. Piecemeal will always be incomplete, like trying to see a clear image in a broken mirror (a mistake I made with my dissertation, in fact, but I was young).

Then I assembled all that collected data on huge sheets, arranged by author for each man, so I can cross-reference and compare. I also did a deep-dive across 4 days, grabbing everything in Brill’s New Jacoby (BNJ), so I can also tag the original (lost) author cited in our surviving sources, where we know who it is. Not actually that many, but it’s useful and can prove significant. I want to see where the same information, or anecdote, crosses sources, and how it changes.

All of that (except adding the BNJ entry #s to my big sheets) is now done. The next step is figuring out what it all means. For that—and where I am right now—involves historiographic reading/rereading of secondary sources on the ancient authors. What is Curtius’s methodology? Arrian’s? Plutarch’s? What are the themes of each? What is the story they’re telling? They’re not just cut-and-pasters from the original (now lost) histories; they have agendas. What are they? How do Hephaistion and Krateros fit into those agendas? How do the sources use them? This is, to me, the really interesting piece.

It's also why this book will not be just a cleaned-up version of my dissertation, but a completely new look at Hephaistion, and now Krateros too. I haven’t even consulted my old dissertation chapters. I started over from scratch. Sure, I remember my main conclusions, and as I write, I’m sure I’ll go back to check things, but the same as I’d check anybody else’s.

I’d hoped to start writing by May, but I’m not quite there yet, in part because, between the Netflix series plus helping to write/edit a grant that I didn’t expect to have to do, I lost virtually all of February. Now, about half of April has been eaten by home repair/yard stuff plus small family crises. That’s just the nature of a sabbatical, especially if you don’t have a spousal unit or SO to take care of everything for you while you just write. 😒

Now I hope to start writing by mid/late May. But as this 9th International ATG Symposium is looming in early September, plus I go back to teaching in the fall, I’ll have to knock off by the end of July, if not sooner. Ergo, not a long writing time. I can do some more during winter break, but I probably won’t have a draft done until next summer. If I’m lucky. It is just not possible, at least for me, to write while teaching! As I do plan to present at least one (startling!) piece of my research as the ATG conference, I have a concrete deadline for a subchapter bit. Ha.

So, what happens after a draft is done? Well, if one is smart, one finds a reader or three. One just to read it for sense, but (if possible) another specialist to start poking holes in the arguments, noting secondary sources one forgot, and to offer general pushback in order to refine it all. This assumes your friends/colleagues actually have time to look at it, as they, also, are teaching and writing their own stuff. (I’ll go after my retired colleagues.) At the same time, one may also begin seeking an academic publisher.

It’s important to match the project to what the publisher is already publishing. It can also help, but isn’t necessary, to have an in: somebody known to/trusted by the editor of one’s broad field (ancient history, in my case) who can vouch for the scholarship. Submitting means writing up a summary of the work, perhaps including letters from colleagues/readers, etc., etc. I’m not even close to this stage yet, so I’m primarily going by the experiences of friends. At this point, it starts to dovetail a bit with fiction publishing. You’re on the hunt and do some of the same homework.

Once a publishing house requests the manuscript, they’ll farm it out to 2-3 readers to evaluate. This is the “refereed” part, as the readers will be specialists in the field. The publisher, who can’t be a specialist in everything, may ask for a list of names for these potential readers.

As with academic papers/book chapters, the book will come back from these readers with a vote on publishability, plus suggestions for improvement. The basic choices range from, “Go back to the drawing board; this has major issues and here they are” (e.g., not ready yet for publication). To, “It’s got good bones but here are improvements on chpts X and X, oh, and go read ___ works you forgot,” (e.g., revise and resubmit). To, “this is pretty solid as-is but could use a few more things” (e.g., revise but ready for a contract). You will NEVER get a “Publish it right now.” 🤣 It’s hard to say how much time this revising phase will take, as it depends entirely on the level of revisions requested. This is why it’s often wise to find a reader or three in advance, to make this phase less lengthy. Yes, books do sometimes get turned down entirely, with no “revise-and-resubmit,” but more often it’s one of the three above. And yes, sometimes an author may be unwilling to make the requested changes, so finds a different publisher, with different readers, hoping for a more positive outcome. Sometimes, with the revising stage, there’s a non-binding contract involved, but this seems to be usefully mostly for younger scholars who need some sort of proof for their RPT (Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure) committees.

Once a publisher gets a manuscript they believe is worthy, the author receives a (real) contract and is provided with in-house editors to fix grammar, sense, etc.: copy- and line-editing. What would (in fiction) be called “developmental editing” is what the refereed part entailed. This is the simple part. Getting TO the contract stage is the tough part.

The publishing house will then schedule the book with a publication date and discuss things like page-proofs, cover art, permissions, formatting, etc., including indexing, which most publishers either don’t do, or charge a high fee for. It’s almost always cheaper to hire an indexer separately. I’ve already got mine lined up for the Hephaistion-Krateros book. But that can’t be done until it’s typeset and through page-proofs as one needs, yeah, the page numbers. Ha. From contract to the book hitting shelves can take a full year, or more.

So, with the exception of those folks who are just writing machines, the average monograph is c. 5+ years, at least in the humanities. This assumes the luck to get a sabbatical, not trying to do it all crammed into summers or breaks.

So yes, I’m still a couple years from this book seeing print. And that assumes there’s not a lengthy revise-and-resubmit process because my readers don’t like my conclusions.

[thatfrenchacademic]

I was chatting with a (slightly more) senior academic about writing our respective academic monographs (Hers: published, successful. Mine : WIP).

On the topic of the literature review, I mentioned how uncomfortable I was, during my PhD, with how aggressive I had to be with previous works, to justify the existence of mine. "Find the gap" often felt like "Hammer down until there is a gap". It's nice to be beyond that, I told her, to frame my research as building on previous literature, accepting that academia is collaborative.

"I can't pretend I am not standing on the shoulders of giants" I said.

She nodded, and gently but firmly answered:

"That's true. But now, you are the giant too. You know that, right?"

And that shit has been living in my head 24/7 ever since, and it's going to be what I say to every single young academic doubting themselves ever.

You ARE standing on the shoulders of giants, and you ARE a giant.

[anghraine]

I got good news on the academic front yesterday, and although I'm a bit ".......?" about it, it's very cool.

So now I'm thinking about how much fun I had back in 2011 (when I was an undergrad!) writing a fic where a sketchy academic in the distant future hatches a theory that Darth Vader was .............. *drumroll* Anakin Skywalker.

But also, while her monograph is daring and there's some good evidence for it, a lot of this scholar's research is pretty shoddy. The fic is not the original scholar's take but a(n also dubious) critical anonymous review of it.

Then, in 2017 (this would be after I got my MA), I was prompted to write a sequel, I think by @beatrice-otter. I wrote and posted the sequel in which a third scholar, this one actually willing to give her name, has done research in Tatooine for several years and condemns the first scholar's total lack of engagement with Tatooinian sources or knowledge.

I doubt I'll write more of that specific verse, but re-reading is like ... hmm, my career path is not exactly a shocking revelation.

[mindbrokengirl]

btw for any fellow itchio visual novel fans these are the games ive been playing in my bored and horny afternoons while YOU all are not posting enough (-_-) varying quality and cheesiness but i like them. please send me yours i adore gamified sex and body stats and etc.

Ruin Me: highest rec for a longer story focused game. love the little horrory mysteries, and the conceit about being an academic who writes porny theory monographs on the side and is easily provoked into ranting about the legitimacy of studying sex is so real. does make you take the dom role in the main story which is a little awkward for me but its cute enough that i dont mind too much, side stories mostly have you being the sub. protagonist is body and gender customizable from the start.

2. The Fixer: forcefem city!!!! they updated it so u can be a forcefemmed boy or a forcefemmed girl, this rules but honestly doesnt play into the story much. i am not going to justify liking this one to u guys. sometimes things are just better when they lean into maledom and objectification. lowkey took my online porn girl name from the protagonist.

May I Take Your Order: please play this game. im cheating this isnt porn. its guro porn kind of i guess. its my favorite video game of all time and its only like 15 minutes please play it. these two have lived in my head for years and i love them very very much. the author does actually have a genderfuck porn game but its in development so only on the patreon but thats a later problem right now u need to play this one.

Succubus Stories: cute! girly! sweet music to dumb down to! kinda repetitive but who cares! gameplay is 80% sex scenes! no but rly i love games that make the sex itself the thing that u have to strategize and do skill checks about and unlock new moves its just like real life!! im going to be unstoppable once i level up Cock Lust a few more times!!!!

[olderthannetfic]

I've done some reading challenges before and I think they can be fun if they have a purpose: for instance, something like the Read Harder challenge, ones that encourage you to read from different genres or read more diverse books, etc. I have a sort of evergreen challenge where I encourage myself to read more books written by authors from different countries, and keep a spreadsheet of which countries I've "read." (I also do this with other kinds of entertainment like movies.) But it's definitely true that some of them just seem to be for the gimmick and aesthetic, and for people who prize quantity over quality of reading in a sort of commodity-fetishism (as they're prizing books as markers of intelligence over the actual experience of learning and expanding your world via reading). Like when the challenges start to be things like "read a book with an orange cover" that's where I start to roll my eyes a bit, haha.

I will say that while I try not to be a snob about reading, it does drive me nuts when I've had people lord over how many more books they've read or how many more pages when they're reading beach reads and YA and other easily digestible stuff whereas I'm reading stuff that is heavier. One time when I was working some crappy minimum-wage job in college, I was reading this big omnibus of all Jane Austen's works (because I was taking a class on her where I was required to read those, not that I wouldn't read Austen otherwise lol) on my break, and one of the other employees asked me how many pages it was and I answered and he was like "pfft, that's nothing, I read all the Harry Potter books in a week and they're more than that!" And I wanted to be like.... yeah, me too, dipshit. I mean, I didn't literally read them in one week, but when each one came out, I devoured it within a day or two like a lot of people did, despite it being 800 pages. Because Rowling's prose is really easy to gobble up like that. Not that Austen is impenetrable or anything (I don't think she is and I think that's precisely why she remains so evergreen popular), but she does require more effort than *that*, particularly when you're reading her work for a literature class where you're expected to write a paper analyzing it, so you want to linger to make sure you really deeply understand it.

I've read academic monographs that were 150 pages long that took me weeks to get through, and I've read 800-page bestsellers that I ripped through in a few days. Pure page length does not determine how long it takes to actually read something. I mean.... in fandom we should all be aware of this, how many of us have devoured some 100k fic in a night or two? As someone who has written some of those academic monographs myself and therefore is familiar with how word count tends to relate to book page length, I can verify for you that that is the equivalent of devouring a novel in the same time frame. But it's a lot easier to do that when you're reading relatively invisible prose and are invested in your OTP getting together (or whatever) vs. if you're trying to digest someone's very dry and convoluted argument about Foucault.

--

I just read all of Scum Villain in about five minutes, yeah. And it was great, but nothing to brag about as an achievement.

I've got this friend who goes on about reading sooooo fast but then admits to often rereading to catch things that she missed the first time. It came up when I was explaining how seldom I reread or rewatch anything. I tend to remember it far, far too keenly after one time through, and it just doesn't hit the same a second time. I still read pretty fast, but not that fast.

I don't think it's snobby to roll your eyes at people who clearly don't grasp the difference between different difficulties of reading and—this is key—who are trying to wave their dick at you about how great they are. They started it!

The time I do roll my eyes is when people think you should read mega hard prose in order to learn, especially in order to learn vocabulary or get faster at reading. That's not what the science says. (Apparently, the fastest way to improve on that kind of thing is to read mass quantities of faintly hard-for-you stuff, not stuff that's hard hard.) But to learn how to decode confusing arguments? Yes, absolutely.

I do wish people would put a little more effort into unwinding their own tortured syntax on Foucault though.

[gender-trash]

hi!

not to be abrupt or vaguely out of the blue, but do you have any fun recent book/music recs? you seem like you like cool stuff and my to read/ to listen list is looking sad. or film/tv recs anything goes.

yeah absolutely, i am basically always delighted to rec books/music!!

books (fiction):

the goblin emperor: i read this for the first time recently and was just completely charmed by it. recommended if you like plotty court intrigue fantasy with a good-sized pinch of conlang. me @ maia (the protagonist/pov character):

the scholomance trilogy: not exactly a deep cut, at least among tumblr users who read fantasy, but on the off chance you haven't read it: it's good.

a tale for the time being: okay so i don't normally into litfic but once in a blue moon i'll pick some up and it'll obliterate me. alternates between the pov of a japanese teenage girl's diary and the middle-aged author-insert character in british columbia who finds the diary after the girl tosses it into the pacific ocean; plays with time in a fun way. subtle magical realism my beloved.

(and there's no such thing as an easy job has a similar subtle magical realism vibe, but is overall much less of a tearjerker. highly recommend.)

several people are typing: a guy gets isekai'd into his work slack; the story is told entirely via slack messages. this is a super quick read, and very funny. especially if you have a job that involves using slack.

the machineries of empire series: aauauahahahahgggh i need one of those mspaint drawings of a stick figure covered in blood to describe my feelings on this one. fucked-up science fiction (you... COULD call it lesbian space atrocities, i suppose!) that drops you in on the deep end trying to figure out what all these words mean and then you slowly figure out that it's technical terminology describing the torment nexus that powers society. killer shit.

song for the basilisk: admittedly i did not read this particularly recently but i will take any opportunity to rec it. patricia a. mckillip writes really good high fantasy (check out how many times she shows up in the mythopoeic awards list!) and, of all the books of hers that i've read, this is my favorite.

danmei (chinese boys-love novels) in english translation is like half of what i've been reading lately -- my all time favorite is the scum villain's self-saving system, which has eaten my entire brain (it's good in itself; it's great for chewing on in the form of meta and fan activity), but i also recommend guardian (the third and final volume of the official english translation is the book i most recently finished reading) and devil venerable also wants to know (no official translation but this fan TL is quite decent; i bound myself a physical edition, so i also have a typeset PDF i'd be happy to DM you if you're interested.)

books (nonfiction):

(going to be briefer here, since you specifically asked for "fun" books and my nonfiction taste is a little unhinged.)

one of my current reads is michael szonyi's the art of being governed -- this is an academic monograph about how military families in the ming dynasty handled their obligations to the state. during the ming dynasty, it was possible for families to designate themselves "military families", which was a tax-advantaged status but obligated them to provide one (1) man to serve in the army at all times (so if he dies or deserts, eventually the family back home would have to cough up another one). (and, by "serve in the army", often what is meant is "you are employed by the military to farm, which is more or less what you would have done back home anyway.")

if you're the kind of guy who reads patio11's bits about money or enjoys ssc book reviews, you will likely also enjoy dan davies' the unaccountability machine, which is a brief exploration for a popular audience of the (dysfunctional) system dynamics of large institutions like corporations and governments. very accessible and nontechnical, but with pointers to the Deep Lore if you subsequently want to seek it out.

the world of the shining prince: this is a book about what it was like, culturally, to be an aristocrat in the heian period. since i have never in my life come within either 1,000 miles or 1,000 years of being a heian period aristocrat i find this deeply fascinating. however, my friends and family have started laughing at me whenever i bring up information about the heian period. read at your own risk.

sei shōnagon's pillow book: sei shōnagon was a heian period aristocrat! she seems to have enjoyed it, but it is something of a shame that she died approximately a thousand years too early to make a tumblr account, because otherwise i feel she would have LOVED blogging. i'm reading the penguin edition (trans. meredith mckinney) and it is, fortunately, quite thoroughly footnoted, but i haven't read any other translations so i don't know if there is a better one out there.

music:

today what i was listening to on loop was the chainsaw man ost, which is a mixture of, like, the usual sort of j-rock you find in a shōnen soundtrack and slow-paced atmospheric stuff, and somehow it works really well together. recently i've also been listening to this playlist a lot because it's the playlist i made for a fic i'm currently writing.

other songs i've been listening to this summer, in no particular order:

sungazer is music theory youtuber adam neely's jazz band; lately they've been experimenting with hypertuplets and i'm super into it.

sometimes i find electric six's vocalist really irritating and sometimes it's exactly the juice my brain needed, and i have no idea what controls this. possibly the phase of the moon.

spotify recommended me this song and i listened to it on loop for like an entire work day and then clicked on the artist name to learn more, which i didn't. googled the song just now while making this post and apparently it was in a video game? the more you know.

i've been listening to irontom a lot this summer (and, um, a lot of similar music that i eventually stuffed in a playlist entitled "music with blown-out audio channels"). it's just, you know, the vibe.

(if that's not enough, here's my "summer 2024" spotify playlist. go ham!)

film/tv:

somehow, "watching things" is a skill it is possible to be bad at, and baby i'm winning last place.

the one tv show i've managed to watch in i think the past four months is chainsaw man, mentioned above. personally i really like well-animated shōnen with a cool soundtrack and i don't care that much about its other qualities; however, the protagonist is a dipshit teenage boy whose greatest life ambition is to touch a boob, so if this frustrates you you probably won't enjoy it very much.

i really really wish more people would watch legend of hei, a chinese animated film in the same corner of concept-space as studio ghibli. it's cuteeeeeee <3333

maybe someday i'll finally finish watching oh my general, a cdrama (free on youtube!) about a female general (ye zhao) who for reasons gets in an arranged marriage with the emperor's dipshit nephew (zhao yujin). this is peak fucking content because ye zhao is constantly saying gay shit by accident and swanning about being cute/badass in probably-historically-dubious armor. also as with all cdramas the costuming is completely off the shits.

[ivyblossom]

This is one of my favourite things Monty Python ever did: a world where scholarship is communicated via pop tracks instead of journal articles. Way more fun to quote, obviously. It's a legit commentary on the stylistic and contrived performance that academic writing is, it might as well be a produced track. You could write a monograph, sure, or you could put out a long-playing record!

The best part is that it's actual history they're sharing. The Python's academic backgrounds really shine through sometimes.

[yamayuandadu]

Ishkur, Baal, and others: a guide to the weather gods of Mesopotamia and ancient Syria

I received an ask recently which was difficult to answer in the conventional way: Is there any difference between Adad, Hadad, Ugaritic Baal, and Ishkur? What aspects would be specific to each? Was Dagan said to be the father of Ugaritic Baal or Hadad? Also, what sources would you recommend on the subject? After much consideration and multiple failed attempts to write a short response I decided to present the information in the form of a proper article. You can find it under the cut.

Recommended reading I’ll reverse the usual formula and start with literature recommendations. The most comprehensive treatment of this matter is quite literally a 1000+ pages long monograph, Daniel Schwemer’s Die Wettergottgestalten Mesopotamiens und Nordsyriens im Zeitalter der Keilschriftkulturen. Materialien und Studien nach den schriftlichen Quellen. It’s available for free, and remains reliable basically 99% of the time. I am aware reading hundreds of dense pages of academic German might be a bit much, but luckily the same author effectively wrote a two part abridged edition in English, The Storm-Gods of the Ancient Near East: Summary, Synthesis, Recent Studies. It is similarly available for free, see here for part 1 and here for part 2. Other literature which is worth checking out, and which I also utilized here, includes Lluís Feliu’s monograph The God Dagan in Bronze Age Syria and his article Two brides for two gods. The case of Šala and Šalaš; Alfonso Archi’s Hadda of Ḫalab and his Temple in the Ebla Period; and Shana Zaia’s Adad in Assyria: Royal Authority in the Neo-Assyrian Period. Furthermore, a new desertion which seems relevant was published recently, Albert Dietz’s Der Wettergott im Bild: diachrone Analyse eines altorientalischen Göttertypus im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr., but I did not have the opportunity to read it yet. To properly answer the rest of the questions, the historical and environmental context of the worship of weather deities has to be addressed first. Ishkur in Mesopotamia in the Uruk and Early Dynastic periods At the dawn of recorded history, in lower Mesopotamia weather gods did not enjoy particular prominence. This has a lot to do with the environment - the importance of weather deities typically stems from reliance on rainfall in agriculture. As through a solid chunk of Mesopotamia irrigation mattered more, there was no real need for a major weather deity to arise. Canals were often handled by local tutelary gods, for example Shara in Umma. The oldest attested weather deity in Mesopotamia is Ishkur, who pretty clearly already worshiped in the Uruk period, but his importance was comparatively minor. His two main spheres of influence were seemingly providing water for land which was not irrigated (for example the steppe) and presiding over the destructive side of the weather - not just heavy rainfall, but also dust storms. Ishkur was also the main god of the city of Karkar, which has not yet been located with certainty, but presumably is to be found close to Adab on the banks of the Tigris. The fact that the logogram read as “storm” also represented this toponym in the Uruk period already is how it was possible to establish that the city was already a cult center of Ishkur at this time, and presumably earlier. The same logogram was also used to represent Ishkur’s name, for obvious reasons. However, the etymology of his proper name is unknown. It might be a Sumerian word which fell out of use before the start of recorded history otherwise, or it might come from a substrate language; this is ultimately irrelevant and has no real bearing on the tangible early history of this god. In addition to Karkar Ishkur was worshiped in nearby Adab and even further south in Lagash, but that’s about it for the earliest sources. Worth noting that for example in Ur there was virtually no cult of any weather deity until the late third millennium BCE, and even then, in the Ur III period it was of no interest to rulers. We also do not know much about the circle of deities associated with him. Based on later evidence it is presumed that his wife might have been the goddess Medimsha (“possessing beautiful limbs”), and god lists indicate his sukkal (attendant deity) was the deified lightning, Nimgir, but that’s about it. Adad ("Hadda") in early Syrian sources

The situation was diametrically different in upper Mesopotamia and across northern Syria. In these regions agriculture did depend on rainfall, which naturally meant weather gods were present in many local pantheons for as long as evidence is available. The best early sources we have are the texts from Ebla, which are roughly contemporary with the Early Dynastic sources mentioned in the previous paragraphs. The Eblaites evidently recognized Aleppo as the cult center of a weather god, who they referred to as Adad - or rather by a cognate of this name, which can be romanized as something like “Hadda” or "'Adda", but you get the point. It’s a derivative of the root *hdd, “to thunder”, which appears in some capacity in virtually every single language from the Semitic family. The Akkadian spelling, which is firmly Adad, seemingly reflects the weakening of the h present in Eblaite and later in a number of other languages (Ugaritic, Aramaic etc) into a glottal stop. Despite the root *hdd itself appearing in languages spoken as far south as Ethiopia, weather gods with names derived from it were seemingly initially basically restricted to northern Syria and upper Mesopotamia. Therefore, this is another piece of evidence indicating there is hardly such a thing as a “Semitic pantheon”; languages are not religions. It is not possible to tell when his cult was originally established, and claims linking any neolithic object with worship of weather gods require a healthy dose of skepticism. What is clear is that he was already well established by the third millennium BCE. Interestingly, despite Adad’s high status in the Eblaite pantheon, his original cult center, Aleppo, was hardly a political power in its own right in the third millennium BCE. In that regard he resembles many of the other major members of the local pantheon, like Hadabal (formerly read as Nidakul; no etymological relation to Adad or Baal) or Dagan, whose cult centers likewise did not form kingdoms in their own right .

A map of ancient Syria, showing the location of Ebla, Aleppo, Mari and other nearby cities (wikimedia commons)

All we can tell about the associations between Adad and other deities in the Ebla-Aleppo area is that he definitely had a wife, Halabatu, possibly to be understood as “she of Aleppo”. This name likely later morphed into better known Hebat. There’s no real evidence for a link between Adad and Dagan at this point in time, and Alfonso Archi went as far as arguing Dagan was not yet regarded as a senior, fatherly figure in the third millennium BCE, but this is ultimately speculative. Adad was also worshiped midway between Ebla and lower Mesopotamia, in Mari. Local scribes were the first people on record to associate him with Ishkur, and utilized the logographic writing of the latter’s name to represent the former. Curiously in Ebla this convention was entirely unknown, even though in other cases logograms borrowed from Mesopotamia did see some usage in a similar context. Adad and Ishkur in Mesopotamia through third and second millennia BCE In the Sargonic period Adad started to spread to new areas. He is well attested as far east as Gasur (later Nuzi) near modern Kirkuk. Since no comparable evidence is available for the Early Dynastic period, it can be safely assumed that he was restricted to western areas earlier. However, how exactly his cult entered the east and the south remains poorly understood. A major development for Adad in Mesopotamia was the merge between him and Ishkur. Presumably it started developing right as the southern scribal culture started to expand into areas where Adad was worshiped, like Mari. The details of this process are poorly known, but by the Ur III period Adad and Ishkur were effectively the same god in Mesopotamia. The worship of Adad was subsequently promoted by kings of the Isin and Larsa dynasties, and by the Old Babylonian period he was recognized as a major deity. He acquired some new roles, being invoked as a god of justice and divination - perhaps these offset the environmental factors responsible for Ishkur’s lack of popularity? However, many sources also indicate that even as a weather god he was recognized in a positive, rather than exclusively destructive role, acting as a bringer of abundance. He also came to be known as the "canal inspector of the gods", ie. as a god of irrigation. Adad's family in lower Mesopotamia

Frans Wiggermann's drawing of a seal impression showing a weather god and his spouse; reproduced here for educational purposes only. In lower Mesopotamia, the composite “Ishkur-Adad” kept a genealogy most likely originally developed with Ishkur in mind. His father was Anu, the sky god. The relationship between them is hardly explored in myths, though an Old Babylonian flood myth has a funny passage where, to cite Schwemer, “Adad (...) is to bring about a famine for humanity through lack of rainfall, and (...) then has to be guarded in heaven by Anu because of his corruptibility”. Alas, the audience presumably didn’t think that giving him the role of a failson was funny, and this element is absent from later flood myths. There is apparently only one source from the south which directly refers to Adad’s mother, and it places Urash in this role. This is hardly unexpected. My impression is that among online hobbyists Urash gets the least recognition of all three of Anu’s wives, but honestly prior to the “antiquarian theology” rising in late sources from Uruk, literally mere centuries before the death of cuneiform, she was -the- wife of Anu, with Ki bordering on being a non-personified concept and Antu hardly mattering. If a deity was defined as a child of Anu chances are very high Urash was the mother, basically. In the Old Babylonian period the southern version of Adad also gained a spouse, Shala, a fellow weather deity. This goddess must be categorically distinguished from Shalash known from earlier sources, who will be discussed later. We do not really know particularly well where she came from. Today the most common assumption is that her name is Hurrian and can be translated as “daughter”. This would point at origin in some part of Upper Mesopotamia. Lluis Feliu suggests that she might have originally been the spouse of the Hurrian weather god Teshub in a tradition perhaps centered on hitherto unidentified cities on the Tigris, though while plausible, this is ultimately purely speculative. Shala is very sparsely attested in Hurrian context, but to be fair most evidence we have comes from the west of the Hurrian sphere, and not from the east where she theoretically would be present. Mesopotamian god lists indicate that Shala was equated with Medimsha, presumably in a similar manner as Adad was with Ishkur. There is no independent evidence for Medimsha being Ishkur’s wife beyond texts which equate them with Adad and Shala, but the conclusion she held such a status even before the conflation is widely accepted, and I see no real reason to dispute it. Adad and Shala also had a number of children. The best attested ones are Misharu (“justice”), originally an independent god perhaps integrated into Adad’s circle because his name sounds similar to the akkadian word for wind, and Usur-amassu (“heed his - ie. Adad’s - word”). There isn’t much of a reason to discuss them in detail here since they were not weather deities; Usur-amassu is a fascinating figure though, and while initially male, they are mostly notable due to switching gender in the first millennium BCE as a new courtier of Inanna/Ishtar in Uruk, without losing the connection to her parents.

Western views on Adad’s genealogy and marital status While Shala was firmly the wife of the Mesopotamian Adad in Babylonia and Assyria, and Anu was equally firmly his father, the situation was different over in Aleppo and around it. As I mentioned before, the weather god of Aleppo already had a wife in the third millennium BCE, Halabatu. While many deities worshiped in Syria in the third millennium BCE later vanished, she remained a member of the local pantheon under the shortened name Hebat, and her position did not change. To my best knowledge the eastern limit for her recognition as the spouse of the weather god was Mari. The west is more complicated, though she pretty firmly appears in this role in Alalakh. The complex case of Ugarit will be discussed later. The different circles of associated deities make it pretty easy to separate Mesopotamian and western traditions. I would argue that a formal distinction between the Mesopotamian Adad and the “Aleppine” original is attested in the god list K 2100 (no catchier name for now), which lists “Ilhallabu”, “god of Aleppo”, among Adad’s foreign counterparts. Mari is somewhat of an oddity in that western and southern traditions pertaining to the weather god of Aleppo and the Mesopotamian Adad probably coexisted there. The Mariote kings recognized the weather god of Aleppo, but we also have some evidence that his peer from Karkar had some presence in the kingdom. For instance, Shala appears in personal names, and a seal refers to Anu as the weather god’s father. However, it is possible that a distinct western tradition regarding his parentage was followed in this area. While we do not know if Dagan was regarded as the father of the weather god of Aleppo in the third millennium BCE, it does appear that a connection between them was recognized in the Old Babylonian period. A mystery which for now cannot be solved is whether Dagan became the father of the weather god because his Hurrian counterpart Kumarbi was, or the other way around. Until more textual sources dealing with the theology of northern Syria surface it probably will remain impossible to answer this question for certain. Regardless of how the weather god came to be Dagan’s son, his mother in this situation would be Shalash. Her name is accidentally similar to Shala’s, but she has a distinct origin. In a ritual preserved in the Mari corpus but originating in Aleppo, Dagan and Shalash both appear alongside Hebat, which is generally taken as an indication they were regarded as members of one family.

Weather gods of Kumme and Arrapha in Mari (and beyond): enter Teshub

A late Bronze Age relief depicting Teshub (center left) and his wife Hebat (center right) alongside their family and court (wikimedia commons)

A further Mariote curiosity are references to weather gods of Kumme and Arrapha, to whom kings also paid respect. Both of these cities were Hurrian, and it is quite likely that the deity designated by the logogram normally read as Adad was in fact Teshub in these cases. Teshub was seemingly also starting to approach on the turf of the original weather god of Aleppo in the Old Babylonian period, as Hebat already shows up as his wife at this time. Eventually he fully replaced him, becoming the new weather god of Aleppo due to growing Hurrian cultural influence in Syria, though he did not hold this title forever. After the bronze age collapse local Luwian princes referred to the weather god of Aleppo as Tarhunza, and eventually the old name returned, with Arameans in the first millennium BCE worshiping Hadad in Aleppo. It’s worth noting a Neo-Assyrian treaty invokes the god of Aleppo separately from the Mesopotamian Adad, which indicates in this period the two were also viewed as separate. As a further Assyrian curiosity it might be worth bringing up “Adad of Kumme”, more or less the last reference to Teshub; see here for more information, in addition to Schwemer’s monograph. It is agreed the pairing Hebat with Teshub was adopted by Hurrians from northern Syria based on parallels between him and the local weather god, but it is not clear if he had a wife earlier. There is a theory that Shaushka, who in later sources firmly appears as his sister, was originally his spouse, but I will admit I do not fully get the reasoning, it’s not like anyone sensible advocates that Utu and Inanna were originally a couple. Feliu’s Shala theory strikes as much more plausible: Shaushka is firmly unmarried, Shala is firmly the wife of a weather god.

Coastal novelties, or the rise of Baal in Ugarit

Detail of the Baal stele from Ugarit (wikimedia commons).

The overlap between the weather god of Aleppo and Teshub was not the only western development in the second millennium BCE. Thai was the creation of Baal. The title designated the western weather god from the Mediterranean coast to roughly the middle Euphrates, though it only replaced the basic name, Hadad, in coastal areas. While the epithet Baal -or rather its cognates -  already occurs in the third millennium BCE (for example in titles of Dagan), its use to specifically designate a distinct weather god was a novelty. While it seems the use of the title Baal to designate a god derived from Hadad was widespread on the Mediterranean coast, this phenomenon is best attested from Ugarit. Baal had the standard responsibilities of a weather deity there, but also acquired the unique role of a protector of sailors. Rather fittingly, in the Baal Cycle his enemy is the personified sea, Yam. We know there already was a myth dealing with the conflict between a weather god and the sea before in the tradition of Aleppo, but I do not think there’s any real consensus over what it entailed. I’m under the impression that since Dagan was ultimately the supreme deity, and there’s no real indication his relationship with his children was negative, it is not impossible that what unfolded was more similar to the various myths about Ninurta’s exploits, where the hero acts on behalf of his father. This is ultimately pure speculation, though. Baal was associated neither with Shala nor with Hebat. The latter was only worshiped in Ugarit as the spouse of Teshub, recognized as the god of Aleppo. Baal himself seemingly had no permanent spouse, though Ugaritic literature might point at informal links between him and Anat and/or Ashtart. Ugaritic tradition recognized Dagan as his father, in line with the views popular further inland, though the matter is pretty complicated as the supreme coastal god El could also be referred as his father. This remains a matter of heated debate, and the fact “father” was also effectively a generic honorific does not really help. Multiple nondescript minor goddesses were recognized as Baal’s daughters, though their mother is left unspecified. Pidray is by far the best attested, and a recent discovery indicates she was already worshiped by Amorites in the Old Babylonian period, presumably in relation to the weather god of Aleppo. Aramaic Ramman

The last distinct name which needs to be briefly discussed here is Ramman(u), which in Mesopotamia earlier on was primarily a title of the god Amurru, who can be best described as a divine redneck stereotype. However, in the first millennium BCE Arameans used to refer to their version of Hadad, worshiped in Damascus arguably effectively as a distinct deity. For more on this topic, which I am actually not very well-versed in, see here. Other Mesopotamian weather deities While Adad was obviously THE Mesopotamian weather god, a second figure of analogous character, Wer, was worshiped in the north and west. The origin of his name is uncertain. The first consonant behaves in wildly unpredictable ways which do not really match the phonology of any known language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia which might mean it originates in a hitherto unknown extinct substrate. Wer is relatively sparsely attested in literature, but in the Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh he is referenced as the master of Humbaba, something unparalleled both in earlier and later versions of Gilgamesh narratives. We never actually encounter him in the surviving fragments, but Enkidu basically hypes him up as if he was an overarching shonen antagonist:

This passage is sourced from Andrew R. George's edition.

There’s a back and forth argument in scholarship over whether Wer/Mer can be identified with Itur-Mer, the tutelary god of Mari. I personally lean towards the view that he cannot, and that the competing view is more plausible. Said alternative relies on the structure of the name, which seems to be theophoric; in the light of this peculiarity it has been argued Itur-Mer was a deified ancestor or culture hero simply bearing a theophoric name invoking Mer. For a detailed discussion of this god see here. In the Lament for Sumer and Ur, the destructive aspects of the weather are “outsourced” to a deity named Kingaludda, “director of the storm”. He is otherwise pretty much only attested in An = Anum, where he occurs far away from Adad’s section. He gets glossed as “evil god”, ilu lemnu. Another antagonistic figure related to the weather is Bilulu from the myth Inanna and Bilulu. The rainbow was deified separately from other weather phenomena under the name Manzat. She for the most part had no real connection to Adad and his circle, though it has been noted temples dedicated to Adad and Shala and to Manzat were juxtaposed in Chogha Zanbil in Elam in modern Iran. All three appear there presumably because they were worshiped in heavily Mesopotamia-influenced Susa. I wrote about her extensively in the past, both here and on wikipedia, so while she is one of my favorite minor goddesses I do not think there is a need to say more here. A mistaken assumption common in older publications and online is that Enlil, the standard head of the pantheon, was a weather god. For his character see this article and this monograph in particular. Another common mistake is interpreting gods poetically compared to storms or fighting using weather phenomena in a single myth or two as weather gods. These are just poetic topoi and there’s no real reason to assert Ninurta, Tishpak or Inanna had much to do with the weather.

[mediaevalmusereads]

God's Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible. By Esther J. Hamori. Broadleaf Books, 2023.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: Biblical studies

Series: N/A

Summary: The Bible is teeming with monsters. Giants tromp through the land of milk and honey; Leviathan swims through the wine-dark sea. A stunning array of peculiar creatures, mind-altering spirits, and supernatural hitmen fill the biblical heavens, jarring in both their strangeness and their propensity for violence--especially on God's behalf. Traditional interpretations of the creatures of the Bible have sanded down their sharp, unsavory edges, transforming them into celestial beings of glory and light--or chubby, happy cherubs. Those cherubs? They're actually hybrid guardian monsters, more closely associated with the Egyptian sphinx than with flying babies. And the seraphim? Winged serpents sent to mete out God's vengeance. Demons aren't at war with angels; they're a distinct supernatural species used by Satan and by God. The pattern is chilling. Most of these monsters aren't God's opponents--they're God's entourage. Killer angels, plague demons, manipulative spirits, creatures with an alarming number of wings (and eyes all over)--these shapeshifters and realm-crossers act with stunning brutality, each reflecting a facet of God's own monstrosity. Confronting God's monsters--and the God-monster--may be uncomfortable, but the Bible is richer for their presence. It's not only richer; the stories of the monsters of the Bible can be as fun, surprising, and interesting as any mythology. For anyone interested in monsters, myths, folklore, demons, and more, God's Monsters is an entertaining deep dive into the creaturely strangeness of the Bible.

***Full review below.***

CONTENT WARNINGS: descriptions of violence, mention of suicide

I picked this book up after it got a shout out on Dan McClellan's TikTok/YouTube channel. I've been diving into critical studies of the Bible and thought this would be a fairly good entry point.

Overall, I thought this book was incredibly accessible. Hamori summarizes the major stories she discusses so if you're not familiar with the Bible, it's still easy to follow her analysis. Hamori assumed a passing familiarity, but she's not writing to a specialist audience; of anything, she's writing to undergraduates or casual readers with an interest in diving into more academic interpretations of the Bible. As a former academic, I did want something a little more rigorous, but I am also not the intended audience, and that's OK.

Hamori also writes with a casual style that a lot of people might find enjoyable. Her prose includes a lot of glib humor and pop culture references, so it feels less intimidating than the prose in a textbook or academic monograph. Personally, I kind of wish the prose was a little more straightforward since I value the insights over the delivery method, but I also recognize this style might help a lot of readers connect with ancient texts.

Hamori's book also cites very few secondary sources (at least compared to a traditional monograph), and I think that's so casual readers and new students aren't overwhelmed by Biblical scholarship. It's fairly effective, though if you're looking to put Hamori's book in conversation with the broader field, you'll have to do your own digging.

In terms of the content, I very much appreciated the literary analysis and the historical insights that Hamori provides. Each chapter is devoted to a single type of monster, which means the organization is easy to follow, and within those chapters, Hamori is guided by a singular question: what does each monster reveal about God? I appreciated this guiding question because it meant that I wasn't reading a list of trivia facts about ancient beasties; instead, I was reading about each monster's relationship to the divine and how ancient writers would have thought of God based on these monster tales.

TL;DR: God's Monsters is a good introduction for students or readers with a casual (yet more academic) interest in the Bible. Though I personally did not vibe with the pop culture references and humor that characterizes Hamori's writing style, I can see how it makes this book more accessible, which it very much is if you're not used to reading academic monographs.

[beguines]

While the Historical Paul has been subject to a dizzying array of historical reconstructions, what is rarely questioned is the assumption that whatever Paul is historically reconstructed via these operations will serve as a foundational figure for ethics, morality, politics, and theology. Cut away some pseudepigrapha here, contextualize an embarrassing statement over there, build a few analogical links between his context and ours, and we will get a Paul that can ground our ethics. Of course, not everyone in the field is invested in Paul's continuing relevance, but I think most Pauline scholars are interested in him because, at some level, they are convinced that a properly historicized Paul has something to say to their corner of (post)modernity.

A good example of how this process works is Eric C. Smith's recent monograph Paul the Progressive? Smith, a historian of early Christianity, writes for a progressive Christian audience while drawing from the rhetorical techniques of historicism to transform Paul into a modern progressive ally: "After years of studying Paul within the academic field of biblical studies, I have come to see [Paul] as one of the most misunderstood figures of the Bible and the Christian tradition. . . . The Paul that is revealed in careful study of his letters is nothing like the person so many progressive Christians hate, and, in fact, he shares many progressive Christian values".

[ . . . ]

Take, for example, Smith's chapter on Paul and slavery. He is at pains to absolve Paul of criticism for the historical support that the apostle's archive has given to slavery, ancient and modern. His approach takes several steps, some of which follow his scholarly "ground rules." First, he subtracts from Paul any references to slavery that come from deutero-Pauline literature (notably Ephesians, Colossians, and the pastoral Epistles). This gets rid of the most baldly pro-slavery passages in the Pauline archive. Turning to the uncontested letters of Paul, Smith argues that Paul's advice to slaves in 1 Corinthians 7 to remain in their state is much more ambiguous than most modern translations suggest and that Paul might be encouraging slaves to take the opportunity to gain their freedom if the possibility presents itself. But even this reading of Paul's advice hardly counts as "progressive." Manumission was a regular part of ancient slavery, something many slaves could count on and expect. Manumission was also used by ancient slavers as an inducement to good behavior that ultimately served as a means of maintaining the system itself, a point made forcefully by Jennifer Glancy. Paul's advice to slaves, charitably read, was to work within the system as it was set up.

[ . . . ]

We might think that accepting the institution of slavery would disqualify Paul as a progressive, but this is where Smith's rhetorical moves subtly shift the goalposts. First, he compares his pared-down Paul with the worst excesses of the American slave system, which gives the impression that Paul was not that bad. Pointing to the explicitly pro-slavery statements in the deutero-Paulines, Smith concludes that "it was not Paul's writings that were to blame, or Paul himself, but it was the misuse of Paul, both deliberate and accidental," that put him on the side of slavery as an institution. Smith assumes that the Christian texts written after Paul in his name represent a betrayal of Paul's theological vision. He does not entertain the possibility that these later devotees of the apostle saw him as an ally in their support for the ancient status quo and not as a problematic progressive needing to be contained.

Second, Smith recontextualizes Paul so as to take away the blame somewhat for his acceptance of slavery. He does this by claiming Paul believed that the world would soon end, thus making him less likely to try to overturn accepted social institutions. Paul's world was one in which slavery was normal, and he should not be blamed for accepting slavery as a given. Finally, Smith can conclude that Paul was not a "slavery apologist," which is the question that frames the entire chapter. What is so rhetorically clever here is that the entire chapter sets the goalposts in the most convenient location for Smith: Paul is absolved of being a full-throated supporter of slavery. What Smith has shown is that Paul accepted slavery as normal; he even felt comfortable enough playing with the terminology of human enslavement in his own self-descriptions. This hardly strikes me as an argument that Paul ought to be reclaimed as a progressive.

Even Smith seems somewhat abashed at making such an argument: "With the help of modern biblical scholarship we can recover a Paul who is far from a slavery apologist, and who might even be an ally in the struggle for emancipation". Smith's tepid endorsement of a Paul who "might even be an ally" should force us to ask the question, At what cost have we paid for Paul's own emancipation from his entanglement with slavery? Smith has pared Paul down, recontextualized him, lowered the bar, and still can't produce a Paul who can say that slavery is wrong, full stop. What are we saying to readers who have lived with the historical weight of the Pauline archive's support of slavery when we ask them to welcome someone who only "might" be an ally in their struggle? This strategy is what Joseph Marchal has recently called "pinkwashing Paul," in which a progressive figuration of the apostle is offered, "while ignoring or downplaying his letters' ambivalences, complicities, and recapitulations of imperializing and sexual naturalizing trajectories." More to the point: Why is Paul's purity so important? Why does he have to be the hero of our historical work? Must we value (or revere?) the corpora we study?

Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul

[jeannereames]

Welcome new folks!

Hello to the new readers.

If you're new to my blog in the past month, and came here after seeing "Alexander: The Making of a God," or after reading Dancing with the Lion, part 1 (Becoming) and part 2 (Rise) (or are reading them now) ... I would be deeply appreciative if you'd rate both novels on GOODREADS and/or AMAZON when you're finished.

Also, if you haven't already found it and are interested, the books have a website ALEXANDER'S MACEDONIA with a fair bit, including reader guides, cut and extra scenes, vlogs, how to say the names--even a playlist (because of course Alexander would be into heavy metal, donchaknow).

Folks periodically ask if I plan to continue the series...yes, I hope to. But Riptide said they weren't interested in further installments when they initially bought it. So I'll need to find an agent and new publisher. High ratings on Goodreads and/or Amazon do matter. Agents and publishers look at them. So if you'd like to help me publish more books in the series, that's a concrete way to assist.

In the meantime, I'm working on an academic monograph tentatively titled Playing for Keeps: Hephaistion and Krateros at the Court of Alexander of Great. But academic books are sloooow. I'm also writing a 6-book epic fantasy series called Master of Battles (4 books are complete and I'm on book 5). So if you've wondered what I'm currently doing (other than answering Asks, ha), that's it.

[elwenyere]

Hello! The conversation about careening had me wondering--how do you like to do research for your stories? Are there any topics or sources you particularly enjoy delving into or including in your work?

Hello, my friend!!! What a wonderful ask: thank you for these great questions.

After reflecting, I think I could describe my process as having two general categories: as-needed research and broader worldbuilding research.

The first category is a part of almost every fic I write, and it involves things like sourcing locations, verifying timelines, tracking down character names, and (very often) looking up what it feels like to receive various injuries. If it's a Star Wars fic, at least one Wookiepedia visit is a given (the raw materials page is a frequent hit). And there are likely to be a few other general internet searches I repeat several times ("aviation terms," for example, or "New Orleans plant life," depending on the fic and fandom).

The second category covers the exploratory reading and viewing I do for fics that involve more worldbuilding because they extend further outside (or completely outside) canon. The Codywan Pirate AU has me doing all kinds of targeted searches for naval ranks and sailing ship terminology, for example, but I've also been browsing maritime museums for descriptions of what life on ships was like from day to day (look at this cool page about sailor libraries and sailing literature!) and for images that give me a visual sense of the environment. I also love looking at digitized resources through academic libraries. When @festiveferret and I were collaborating on Citation Needed, an MCU professor AU in which history prof Tony is writing a monograph about weapons development during WWII, I used the online special collections at University of Massachusetts - Amherst to learn what the primary documents (enlistment records, ration cards, etc.) featured in the fic would look like. (Ferret then did incredible edits for the epistolary portion of the fic: this post has the collected documents.)

In a couple cases it's actually been the research that has come first and inspired the fic. The initial ideas for Separation, for example, which is a Top Gun fic that leans into the context of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s, came from prep that I'd been doing for a queer literature class, so I was listening to music by queer bands in the period, reading poetry and essays about queer life in NYC and San Francisco (including this piece that discusses Nan Goldin, Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, "The Fall of 1992" by Randall Mann, and Alexander Chee's essay "After Peter"), and watching the documentary How to Survive a Plague, about the ACT UP movement. Much of that research informed the choices I made in writing the fic, even if it doesn't all appear directly.

Finally, I should confess that I am pretty self-indulgent with my fic research: I spend a lot of time studying and tracking things down when it's a subject I find interesting and/or when having more information will allow me to texture the choices I'm making in ways I personally find compelling; but I am also very unfussed about leaving other things vague or about fudging some details in service of the story. It's not at all out of the ordinary for me to spend 30 minutes looking up the names of camera models that hit shelves in 1991 and then write a sentence that says "when he gets off the carrier in mid-July, he goes to the mall" without specifying which carrier or which mall, because I couldn't be bothered to figure out the military logistics involved. This is one of the joys of writing fic for me: freedom to pour energy into those areas where research helps get me closer to things I want to discover and describe.

Thank you again for the terrific asks, my friend!!! This was very fun to write. <3<3<3

[libraryben]

Teaching Trans History

Reading List and Resources

This non-exhaustive reading list is intended to offer practical tools and resources to academics wanting to include more trans history in university-level teaching. It was originally compiled for a 2023 workshop in Teaching Trans History aimed at skillsharing with colleagues in the University of Oxford History Faculty.

'Introductions to Trans History' includes texts written for a very general audience that would work well as an entry point for anyone (including students) who is new to thinking historically about gender. 'Historiography and Historical Methodology' includes review essays that orient scholars to the state of the field in trans history today. 'Trans Studies and Trans Theory' offers a partial snapshot of our sister field of trans studies, including some foundational canonical texts and some that are especially relevant to the relationship between trans studies and trans history. 'Case Studies' includes articles and monographs in trans history, organised in roughly chronological order, many of which we have had previous successful experiences teaching at undergraduate and at master's level across a range of fields, periods, and cultural contexts. 'Pedagogy, Policy, Politics, Experience' includes writing by trans academics about their experiences teaching trans studies and trans history, as well as policy reports about the experiences of trans people in the academy.

Dr Jack Doyle & Dr Emily Rutherford

University of Oxford LGBTQ History Faculty Network

October 2023

[ghnosis]

here is my entire Contextual Review document if you'd like it - warning it is 40 pages.

Abstract  

“’Tis the Night of the Witch: Supporting Difference within Dark Fan Communities”  

Though attractive due to its counter-cultural nature, heavy metal can be sonically “challenging” (noise metal, thrash), and/or ideologically challenging, featuring grotesque and misogynistic lyrics and prioritizing a cisgender, heterosexual, male gaze. In contrast, the Swedish contemporary metal band Ghost embraces the queer/female gaze through lyrics explicitly referencing female empowerment and overt gestures toward leftist progressive politics.  

This thesis explores queer fan readings of Ghost and the online community surrounding the band. Many Ghost fans go beyond passive listening - they create extensive fanfiction surrounding the story and world of Ghost, actively writing themselves into a Satanic clergy absent of real-world connections to church burning, fascism, or violence associated with some extreme forms of metal. This fanfiction is often explicitly sexual in nature, and is winkingly acknowledged and encouraged by Tobias Forge, the band’s founder. The Satanic Ministry depicted in queer Ghost fanfiction is a Carnivalesque, topsy-turvy world in which Satan is good, God is bad, and anything “deviant” is to be celebrated.  

The project will employ an autoethnographic approach, drawing on and adding to feminist literature on identity, sexuality, and conceptions of the self as subject. The thesis is supported by data drawn from one-on-one interviews with Ghost fans on the microblogging site Tumblr, as well as data drawn from Ghost fans’ posts on the same site. 

REST OF THE THING UNDER THE CUT

Introduction 
 

Research Question  

How do “deviant” fans read the band Ghost? 
 

Subquestion 1: How are Ghost fans different from other heavy metal fans? 

Subquestion 2: How does this queer fandom intersect with the broader subcultures and genres of metal?

Subquestion 3: How is the Ghost fandom community different from other fandom communities? 

Subquestion 4: How do queered Tumblr fan practices impact Ghost fan practices? 

Research Question: How do “deviant” fans read the band Ghost? What informs this reading? 

This research investigates the contemporary metal band Ghost’s fan community on the microblogging site Tumblr, and the ways in which band founder Tobias Forge acknowledges, supports, and encourages queer readings of his work. The thesis defines “deviance” via Gloria Anzaldúa: “[d]eviance is whatever is condemned by the community.” (Anzaldúa 2021: 75) Though heavy metal is sometimes a celebration of deviance, with lyrics celebrating horror, death, and the macabre, there is a limit to the types of deviance that are “allowed.” Queer fans are often sidelined or made invisible: academic writing on metal began in the early 1990s (Weinstein 2000, Walser, 1993), contemporaneous with much queer theory (Butler 1990) - however, it was not until 2015 that a monograph examining queerness in heavy metal (Clifford-Napoleone 2015) was published. 

In her monograph on the history of queerness and heavy metal, Amber Clifford-Napoleone questions the way Judas Priest is remembered in metal history in the wake of singer Rob Halford’s coming out in 1998 (29 years after the band was founded). Does a musician have to identify personally as queer to be “read” as queer by their fans? Tobias Forge has not made a practice of discussing his own sexuality and is in a committed “straight” relationship, but early participant interviews posit Papa Emeritus IV, the latest incarnation of his on-stage character, as queer. Unlike Halford’s direct adoption of leather as a winking nod to the queer leather community, Forge does not directly refer to queer community portrayals in his characterization of Papa Emeritus. What, then, leads to fans’ queer reading of the character? 

This thesis investigates Ghost’s anonymized performance, and its potential for a new kind of fandom. Band members’ identities were not revealed for the first eight years of Ghost's existence (2010-2018); frontman Papa Emeritus and his backing band of Nameless Ghouls wear masks and elaborate costumes on stage and conducted interviews in character. Early interviews implied that the band had been commissioned by Satan himself, and that the identities of the band members were irrelevant to this unholy message (slavghoul 2020). 

Though the Ghouls are referred to as “nameless” en masse, and wear nearly identical costumes onstage, fans give each musician a unique nickname and characterization. The Ghouls do not speak onstage or in interviews – their characterization is entirely developed based on onstage presence/body language and existing “fanon:” “a series of details and characteristics that are shared by most...[fanfiction] stories, but that have no factual basis in the original media text.” (Stasi 2006: 121, Kaplan 2006: 136). Fans develop fanon as a community; one fic writer may interpret onstage behavior as evidence that a Ghoul is queer, which then provides evidence for a second fic writer to interrogate and expand that interpretation. 

How are Ghost fans different from other heavy metal fans? 

Historically, the metal community has lionized a wide variety of societal deviants, including murderers, domestic abusers, and Nazis. Further, metal aesthetics borrow heavily from the specific deviance of 1970s gay culture - Rob Halford of Judas Priest famously co-opted the leatherman look for his stage persona (Clifford-Napoleone 2015: 36). But queer identity does not seem welcome in metal space. Sociologist Deena Weinstein, one of the first scholarly researchers of metal, refers to an “attitude of extreme intolerance” towards specifically gay male identity (2000: 105), though she is careful not to label the entire subculture homophobic. Robert Walser, writing in 1993, briefly explored the divide between glam metal and other subgenres, citing an interview with Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante identifying the use of keyboards in metal as “gay.” (Walser 1993: 130). Anthologies like Black Metal Rainbows, conferences like ISMMS 2023 (“No Outsides”) or monographs like Queerness in Heavy Metal Music problematize this exclusive inclusivity: where is the space within metal for those “condemned” (Anzaldúa 2021: 75) within both societal and metal community? Why denigrate queerness in a genre that elevates other societal ills? 

While “traditional” metal fans often focus on the musicians’ virtuosity and technical prowess, Ghost fans are interested in the imagined inner lives of the musicians, and the differing versions of masculinity on display within their performances. This ties Ghost fandom less to metal fan practice and more towards queerer and more “female” modes of engagement with media: namely, women’s writing relationships: fanfiction. This type of musical fandom can be tracked back to Elvis (Hinerman 1992, Wise 1986) or the Beatles (Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs 1992). Boy bands of the early 2000s such as *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys inspired fanfiction (Busse 2005, 2016). Halberstam questions their allure – “at least part of the appeal of the Backstreet Boys depends on the production of seemingly safe and almost unreal masculinities... a safe alternative to the misogyny and mistreatment” of real-life relationships. (Halberstam 2005: 178). 

The fanfiction Ghost fans write most closely resembles “bandom:” fanfiction about emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy.  Bandom provided a “safe space” for teenagers of the 2000s to explore ideas of sexuality (queer and straight) and dating with men they would never really date, men they felt would “understand” them because of the constructed self-images band members presented online (Hagen 2015), and the lyrical content of songs. Billie Joe Armstrong, Gerard Way and others of their pantheon discussed anti-anxiety prescriptions, progressive politics, loneliness, and queer sexuality openly (in a way that A-list celebrities of the early aughts did not), creating space for deviant fans who had given up on fitting in to fit into a new space. Similarly, the masculinities on display did not reflect the predominant sociopolitical climates of their times. 

Bandom, like most slash (fanfiction describing the imagined relationships between two male characters) arguably springs from lack of female representation in media:  “...there’s nobody but the two men... to justify the sexual display, so the concept of slash arises.” (Green, Jenkins, Jenkins, 1998: 17) Musical fandom, in this sense, is no different. Erotic fanfiction about Ghost appeared almost immediately on the microblogging site Tumblr. The band plainly acknowledged and encouraged this highly sexual reading of their work as early as 2012, when the now-defunct “Ghoulish Perversions” Tumblr was linked directly on the official Ghost Facebook page. (https://www.facebook.com/thebandghost/posts/297668790339417). Ideas of sex as currency in music are not new to Ghost (Fast 1999, Roach 2018, Wise 1990, Frith and McRobbie 1990), but the sexuality represented by Papa and the Ghouls suggests a more equal exchange than historical “cock rock” (Frith and McRobbie 1990: 319) implied. Ghost’s lyrics directly reference female sexual pleasure, Forge’s in-character banter as Papa Emeritus, and the onstage relationships between male Ghouls and female Ghouls (indeed, perhaps the inclusion of female musicians at all) invites a different reading of this male musician/female “groupie” dichotomy (Frith and McRobbie 1990, Vasan 2010, Fast 1999, Savigny and Sleight 2015).  

“There is a void in my guts that can only be filled by songs,” Jessica Hopper writes in her introduction to The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, (2021: xvi), then maligns the genre that spawned bandom in “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t.” (ibid 257) Sonically heavy music with lyrics suggestive of teenage heartbreak and rage appeal to societal outsiders, but emo’s lyrics “proved this is a genre...made by and for boys.” (259) Emo is by no means the only genre to draw clear definitions of in- and out-groups; the 2017 collection Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them spans genre and music history, from doo-wop to Taylor Swift. Questions of gender exclusion often arise in metal studies; scholars like Rosemary Lucy Hill, Laina Dawes, Jasmine Hazel Shadrack,, and Sonia Vasan have made careers interrogating women’s participation in and engagement with metal. This thesis asks: Are Ghost fans, like media fans before them, using fanfiction to reclaim space within a genre that pushes deviance out? How is Ghost’s positive response to that fanfiction lending credence to queer readings? Centering the marginal, queer response to Ghost builds on feminist academic work on fanfiction and women’s participation in genre (Jenkins 2013, Busse and Hellekson 2006), filling a crucial gap: What does it mean for queer fans when the Satanic anti-pope onstage celebrates their queerness? What does it mean for young trans men to see a more relatable masculinity on display? Ghost is uniquely positioned to answer. 

How does this queer fandom intersect with the broader subcultures and genres of metal? 

Ghost faces “controversy regarding genre adherence” (Thomson 2021: 50) within the metal community. This is not in and of itself unusual; Robert Walser attempted to make sense of genre coherence in metal in 1993, using the band Rush as an example of metal-not-metal: Rush’s music “...meets the criteria of the definition of heavy metal held by most outsiders but fails the standards of most metal fans.” (1993: 7) Similarly, Ghost appears in publications that deal with hard rock and metal (Metal Hammer), routinely tours with bands that the metal community accepts and welcomes (Metallica, Amon Amarth), and plays metal-focused festivals (Hellfest). But detractors use words like “try-hard,” “corny as hell” and “thirsty” (Krovatin 2018) to describe the band, and even positive interviews sometimes question “whether Ghost belong in our world at all” (Alderslade 2019). This hostility raises several questions: Is Ghost’s primarily-female audience (slavghoul 2020) damning in a genre whose audience historically skews white, cisgender, and male (Walser 1993, Savigny and Sleight 2015, Vassan 2010, Dawes 2013)? Are the people who call Ghost “gay” (s_g 2022) simply following a tradition of linking anything of low social value to femininity and queer identity (Pascoe 2011, Halberstam 2005, Benshoff 2015)? A vocal subculture has sprung up on the social media site Tumblr who deliberately reads Ghost as queer in a positive light – a sort of metal “protest exegesis.” (Faxneld 2017: 12) It is this subculture, its participants, and related phenomena that this research explores. Through interviews with Ghost fans and autoethnographic exploration of the fan culture, I seek to understand which elements of Ghost’s backstory and stage performance read “queer (positive)” to queer fans. It is possible that Ghost is serving as a “gateway” to heavy music, a bridge between pop culture, Top 40, and extreme music, mirroring 2010s queer and female interest in pop punk. It is possible that Ghost fanfiction is a unique space of queer joy, a niche of rebellion in an otherwise hostile environment – a worthy rebellion in the contemporary era.  

Are genre-specific elements like Ghost’s lighter sound (analogous to pop punk versus “true” punk) making the band (and by extension, the genre) attractive to newcomers? Or are deviant fans attracted to Ghost’s Satanic stylings, critique of organized religion, and critique of Protestant/Catholic social mores? How does existing scholarly work on genre, gender, and metal (Vasan 2010, Hutcherson and Haenfler 2010) engage with these ideas? This research explores Ghost fans’ experiences in fandom space, seeking to understand queer contemporary subculture and queer readings of metal. What do queer Ghost fans like about Ghost, and why? What can this tell us about fostering and supporting queer joy in the 2020s? 

How is the Ghost fandom community different from other fandom communities? 

Fanfiction, fan art, costume, and roleplay are methods to “inhabit and explore” (Jenkins 2013: 19) the world of a beloved media property, expanding its “archive” - fan texts are situated within the world of the original text, yet stand apart.  The online environment allows fans a greater level of access to media creators (and vice versa) than ever before, with mixed results: situations like Anne Rice’s attempts to litigate against fanfiction writers speak to a troubled historical relationship between fan and creator, one in which there are “correct” and “incorrect” interpretations of a piece of media. When authors, showrunners, or film directors keep strict hold of their material, there is less room for fans to interpret media on an individual or community level. 

Most fanfiction can be separated into two modes: fanfiction about fictional media (i.e. Star Trek) or “real person/people fic (RPF):” fanfiction about living celebrities (Arrow 2013). These two modes do not often converge: while it was possible to meet Leonard Nimoy at a convention, Spock exists only in the imagination. While it may be morally “appropriate” to write about salacious adventures between two fictional characters, writing fanfiction about two living men, with real lives (and access to the internet) raises questions of parasociality. But Papa Emeritus is at once tangible and intangible: fans can purchase meet and greet packages to take photos with and speak to Papa, but Tobias Forge now conducts interviews out of character, sharing his own interpretations of Papa as a person outside of Forge. The thesis follows Roach (2018) in delineating RPF fandoms as an “independent” (168) area of academic study, apart from fictional media fanfic. The research queries the liminal position of Ghost fic as at once RPF and not-RPF: is Ghost attractive to fic writers because of this liminality? Musician Brian Warner performs under the stage name Marilyn Manson, but Brian Warner and Marilyn Manson are not portrayed as two distinct people the way Forge and Papa Emeritus are; the abuse allegations by five women against Warner/Manson are reflections on both “people.” While it is possible for Tobias Forge to commit a crime, Papa Emeritus exists in fleeting moments, usually onstage, and is therefore unlikely to behave poorly. Does this make him “safer” for modern fans to relate to? Further, each Ghost album introduces fans to a “new” Papa Emeritus. Each Papa is played by Forge, but each Papa has different characterization and personality. Does Papa’s shifting identity support a varied fan reading? How is Ghost fanfiction at once similar to and different from band fanfiction that came before, and what does this mean for fanfiction as genre? 

Why is Tumblr the social media of choice for queer Ghost fans? 

One aim of the research is to question the role Tumblr itself plays in queer Ghost fan self-expression. Tumblr scholars Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abadin describe Tumblr as a “silosocial” (2021: 12) platform; a platform on which users cloister themselves within specific shared interests – in this case, the band Ghost. Each silo holds its own “shared practices, vernacular, and sensibility” (13). Tumblr advertises itself as a “welcome back to weird,” (Tumblr iOS App Store) a “beautiful hellsite” (Tiidenberg et al. 2021: 210) on which new users can find “fandom, art, [and] chaos.” (Tumblr iOS App Store) Tumblr, unlike most other modern social media, is not linked to users’ legal names, and the site’s features “welcome multifaceted self-presentation" (Tiidenberg et al. 2021: 13): users can create any number of “side blogs,” separate spaces to discuss one fandom or area of interest. In the below image, three of my blogs are listed: my main/personal blog (which has been redacted), my primary side blog, Ghnosis, and a third side blog for video game content. All three blogs share the same following list, but have different lists of followers based on which users are interested in which content. Users choose blogs to follow based on content, not on the identity of the blogger. (Tiidenberg et al. 2021: 13) In this way, users interested in a queer reading of Ghost can easily locate and follow others interpreting Ghost through a queer lens. 

The research queries the role specifically Tumblr-style silos play in offering a carnivalesque reading of the band’s Satanic messaging. The definition of carnival and carnivalesque I employ derives from Mikhail Bakhtin, writing on Rabelais’ oeuvre. (Bakhtin 1984: 7-17) Carnival is “of the people” and is rooted in “folk humor.” ( ibid. 4) Tumblr, with its language of social justice and meta-humor (Tiidenberg et al. 2021) is a carnivalesque space in contemporary internet, where real-name or video (real-face) content reigns supreme. Bakhtin’s carnival is not merely an event to attend and watch; the people “live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.” (Bakhtin 1984: 7) Ghost fans, by writing themselves communally into the Satanic clergy, choose to “live in” this world whose “very idea” makes room for them: Satan is good, God is bad, the deviant is a cause for celebration. Bakhtin further links Carnival to the Church and the Church calendar, as well as to “ancient pagan festivities” (ibid. 8) and the cycles of birth, death, and time. Ghost’s albums describe the rise and fall of civilizations and of Satan himself, while their short video “chapters” depict the rises and falls of previous Papas, up to and including their births and deaths. Bakhtin defines a “peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’... the ‘turnabout...’” (ibid. 11), a queer logic. “No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images...” (ibid, 3): the language of the carnival “mocks and insults the deity” (16) while dealing with the body, typically the belly or “lower stratum.” (18) Bakhtin argues that the folk humor of the carnival degrades: “lowering...all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” to the “sphere of earth and body” (19). The carnival takes the highest element of medieval life (the Church) and lowers it to the earth, the belly, the bowels, and the sexual organs. So too can no dogma, authoritarianism, or seriousness coexist with Ghost’s silly Satanism, or Tobias Forge’s debasement of the Catholic Church in songs like “Idolatrine.” If fans are only “out” (as Ghost fans, as queer, etc.) on Tumblr, is this because Tumblr itself functions as carnivalesque space, a place to take one’s mask off, to revel in low culture?  

2b. Aims  

Investigate the social and creative values of Ghost Tumblr fan subculture using autoethnographic experience and textual/thematic analysis of Tumblr posts related to Ghost, as well as responses to semi-structured interviews with other Ghost fans.

Gain a deeper understanding of queer music fan identity by bringing together existing literature on queer identity/deviance (Anzaldúa 2021, hooks 2015, Benshoff 2015, Halberstam 2005), fanfiction (Busse 2005, 2006), and heavy metal fandom (Dawes 2013, Black Metal Rainbows, Vassan 2010, 2011).

2c. Objectives  

This research aims to view the band Ghost and the Tumblr community that has sprung up around them through a queer carnivalesque counter-reading, prioritizing deviant and “outsider” ideas of fan participation in heavy metal music. 

Feminist and gender studies explore the individual within the context of the social, investigating the marginalized without the frame of “wrongness” of the privileged. Peggy McIntosh, in her seminal 1990 text “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” describes whites (privileged members of society) as thinking of themselves as “morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal.” (ibid. 2) Gloria Anzaldua, Cathy Cohen, Jack Halberstam, and Judith Butler equate queerness with deviance, an oppositional position: “’Queer’ also provokes different assumptions and expectations. In the ‘60s and ‘70s it meant one was from a working-class background, that one was not from society...there is still more flexibility in the ‘queer’ mold, more room to maneuver.” (Anzaldúa 1991: 252). The Ghost fan embodies that which American society defines as other, that which even other heavy metal fans deem inappropriate and incorrect (Clifford-Napoleone 2015: 381). The Tumblr Ghost fan declares, via Tumblr posts, their queerness, their deviance, their intense interest in sex with the band’s demonic creatures. Ghost fans’ deviance strays from black metal church burning and goregrind shock value; the carnivalesque spirit of queer joy marks their fandom as unique. Tobias Forge looks out on his audience and sees “wiggling” and “dancing,” not moshing or fighting. (slavghoul 2020) 

Harry M. Benshoff, defining queerness in relation to horror films, calls queer “what opposes the binary definitions and proscriptions of a patriarchal heterosexism... queerness disrupts narrative equilibrium and sets in motion a questioning of the status quo and... the nature of reality itself.” (Benshoff 2015: 119) This carnivalesque approach is also exemplified in Cathy J. Cohen’s idea of queer politics including even “heterosexuals on the (out)side of heteronormativity,” (Cohen 1997: 452). Queer does not necessarily have as much to do with sexuality as it does an “unruly, defiant, and angry” (Benshoff 2015: 119) form of activism, which encompasses not only same-sex relationships but also addresses “issues of race, gender, disability, and class.” (ibid.) Queer, deviant identity “revels in the discourse of the loathsome, the outcast...” (Sue Ellen Case, “Tracking the Vampire,” cited in Benshoff 2015: 119) Are queer Ghost fans using Tumblr as the only place in which they can perform this revelry safely? 

Deviant identity is not merely reserved for those who are “actually” homosexual – Benshoff draws a lineage between the late 19th-century homosexual Decadents (Benshoff 2015: 132-133) and the “ostracized high-school student and loner” (Benshoff 2015: 133) of 1970s and 80s films. (ibid) The Breakfast Club’s John Bender (played by Judd Nelson) is certainly no homosexual, but he is a “long-hair” who is feminized as he is ostracized, much the way Marilyn Manson, Gerard Way, or other such deliberate deviants are. Though the masculinity embodied by 1980s stoners or 2000s emo icons certainly differs from Halberstam’s boy bands, they raise questions of queered/deviant masculinities.  Do Ghost fans read Tobias Forge, as a leather-clad metalhead, as deviant in the same ways they are, despite his apparent straight sexual identity? Or are they linking Forge’s open respect for Satan as figure with homosexuality in a positive light, as Per Faxneld connects the Decadents directly with Satan? Is “queerness” really an attempt to categorize another “unreal masculinity?” 

To exist within a body deemed non-normal by society – a raced body, a fat body, a female body, a disabled body, a queer or trans body –  is to understand on some level that your body, your very existence, is up for public discussion and invites public commentary at any time. (Young 1990) Discomfort regarding trans or intersex bodies is discomfort with a body that is difficult to incorporate into societal roles (Fausto-Sterling 1994). Does Ghost facilitate a reclamation of the trans body, the disabled body, or the fat body as a site of pleasure for the person within that body? Does this play into carnivalesque rules of what is valuable or beautiful in society? 

2d. Gap in existing research, original contribution to knowledge 

Do public (via the internet, or via signs at concerts) expressions of deviant, explicit, queer sexual desire for Papa Emeritus or the Nameless Ghouls function as a publicly-staked claim in one’s own sexual pleasure? Is out-loud expression of a sexual appetite that cannot be satisfied through chaste heterosexual sex a form of “protest exegesis,” (Faxneld 2017: 12), a king-for-a-day dichotomy flip of decades of music in which the sexual power is in straight men’s hands? The Ghouls and Papa caress the microphone, their guitars, gesture seductively at the audience, continuing a lineage of musicians symbolically making love to the audience (Fast); but how is this performance read by the audience? How do Ghost fans feel about the band’s outspoken appreciation for queer and trans identity?  

The texts to be examined belong both to the fans (Tumblr discussion, fanfiction) and to the band (music videos, official merchandise, YouTube skits). When the subject of Ghost fanfiction comes up in interviews, Forge uses words like “fantastic” (s_g 2022) that the band belongs to the fans as well as to him, and the “text” of the band itself seems to adapt to incorporate this view. Forge noticed that his fans were more female-presenting than expected (slavghoul 2020, ghost-band-aids 2020), and that they had a ravenous appetite for Papa and the Ghouls. Over the decade the band has been performing rituals, the stage show has become more and more explicitly sexual, with the band members swapping robes and hoods for sculpted masks and tight pants, “put[ting] more emphasis on carnality.” (ghost-band-aids 2019) Each Papa is more explicitly sexual than the last, though he has always been a sexual figure – an interview with Metal Hammer UK from 2012 features Papa Emeritus I referring to himself as John Holmes, “the 13-inch-cocked porn star,” in a mix that also includes Hitler, the Pope, and Dracula (Doran 2012). 

Are Tumblr posts about Ghost only about Ghost? Is it possible that they rely on and refer to Tumblr “subculture” (Tiidenberg et al. 2021: 117-128) itself? Through years of belonging to this community, I have noted certain patterns appearing in fan works. Some posts are about queer identity, some are about religion, some are about a sense of community and belonging, some address neurodiversity. Through a combination of autoethnographic examinations of my experience in fandom as an ADHD/OCD/queer woman, as well as through a grounded theory framework (consisting of interviews and categorization of naturally-occurring data (Tumblr posts)), I will investigate these patterns. The research aims to bring to academia what Tumblr users have been saying for years – that there is something queer and neurodiverse about Ghost, and it is useful to explore when contextualizing modern ideas of deviance and belonging. 

Theoretical Contexts 

This thesis draws on an interdisciplinary body of scholarship to interrogate an under-examined area of contemporary subculture: queer Ghost fans. Existing work examines ideas of deviancy/belonging and its relationship to queerness (Anzaldúa 2021, 1991, Benshoff 2015, Butler 1990, Cohen 1997, Halberstam 2005), queer methods of “reading” traditional media (Benshoff 2015, Petrocelli 2023, Halberstam 2005) or questions what is meant by “community” in extreme music. (Dawes 2015, Riches 2015) This research uses all three areas to ask: why Ghost, why now? 

Contemporary Context: Metal Studies 

The work of metal studies scholars such as Jasmine Hazel Shadrack, Laina Dawes, Rosemary Lucy Hill and Sonia Vasan on gendered and raced participation in metal fandom forms one basis for this research. Metal studies’ intersections with religious studies (Metal and Religion Conference 2022, Unger 2019, Spracklen 2020) and specifically with Satanism (Thomson 2020, Swist 2019, Weinstein 1991) inform the culture in which Ghost exists. Amber Clifford-Napoleone's Queerness in Heavy Metal Music (2015) provides a queered history of the genre, including textual and subtextual analysis of the work of artists like Rob Halford (Judas Priest) and Joan Jett, and the “meanings” of their queered performances for fans. Robin Wood and Harry M. Benshoff’s work investigating queer readings of horror films and the monstrous homosexual lends support to my argument of heavy metal and queerness – an area Clifford-Napoleone did not broach in her text. Catherine Hoad investigated heavy metal fanfiction in a 2015 paper, but her research investigated RPF (real people fic), not character fic.  

Gloria Anzaldúa’s ideas of oppositional queer deviance and her work navigating “borderlands” forms a great deal of the vocabulary and specific definitions of queerness this work employs. Additionally, the work of queer and feminist theorists like Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Monique Wittig, and Luce Irigaray help define ideas of queerness without biology. Ghost fans define their queer identity as revolt: J Halberstam’s arguments for “low culture,” Harry M. Benshoff’s idea of disruptive queerness, and Cathy J. Cohen’s idea that queerness is a “fundamental challenge to... heteronormativity” (1995: 445) help flesh out these conceptions of joyous queer rebellion. In this vein, Per Faxneld’s discussion of Satanic feminism, particularly his definitions of counter-readings, and Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the Carnivalesque as a low-culture parody “pressure release” form my ideas of Ghost as queer and trans joy.  

Historical Context: Fanfiction Studies 

Fanfiction studies, particularly the work of Henry Jenkins, Abigail Derecho, and Mafalda Stasi form some of the “language” of fandom this thesis takes. Outside of fanfiction studies, Anzaldúa’s ideas of queer reading and writing lend themselves neatly to fanfiction, as does Trinh’s (1989), Cixous’ (1976), and Irigaray’s (1985) ideas of marginalized/women’s writing. Henry Jenkins provides a tidy religious link via the origins of the word fanatic (the genesis of the term ‘fan’): “certain excessive forms of religious belief and worship.” (2013: 12) This is particularly apt in the case of Ghost fans; Ghost’s Satanic stylings and framing of their concerts as “rituals” seem to bring the older religious definitions back to the fore. This is not unusual in metal: Walser's 1993 text Running with the Devil addresses mysticism and the occult in early metal, while witches and Satan remain popular figures in metal song titles and theming. This research seeks to understand the religious, carnivalesque element of Ghost fan identity, a conception of Ghost and of self that I have begun to define as a Ghnosis. This is a portmanteau of Ghost and of the concept of Gnostic knowledge, as informed by Hans Jonas: “knowledge of God,” (Jonas 1958: 34) or in this case, of Ghost. This Ghnosis mirrors the Gnostic idea of a more personal experience of God, unmitigated by an authority figure within the Church. Further, it mirrors William’s interpretation of the Gnostics as working to investigate multiple meanings and contradictory elements of Christian texts (Williams cited in Faxneld 2017: 11), and Halberstam’s conception of queerness as “consciously cultivated multidisciplinarity.” (Halberstam 2003: 363) 

Tobias Forge is clearly making some Ghost lore up as he goes along, leaving the problem of a linear narrative to the fans – and specifically, the theorist fans – to solve. How do fans piece the Ghnostic puzzle together, given vague and contradictory “canonical” information? What informs their reading of the Satanic Abbey and its inhabitants as queer or queer-friendly? Is it formed from individual interpretation of songs, concert footage, and concert experience? Do Ghost fans recognize themselves in the fic they write and read, or in some of the band’s cast of characters? Do they feel seen or known by Tobias Forge, or more likely, by Papa Emeritus? How do fans make sense of the seemingly random (and sometimes contradictory) “story” Forge is telling about Ghost? What is Ghnosis, and how are fans developing it?  

Theoretical Context: Carnivalesque queer Ghnosis 

The Gnostics were labeled as heretical because they opposed the structural power of the Church. If any given person could find their own personal version of God, what use would most people have for religious officials? Per Faxneld argues that Satanic feminism is a “protest exegesis,” (Faxneld 2017: 11) a counter reading of common Christian mythology. Faxneld follows Kurt Rudolph, who traces this idea to the Gnostics. I read both Faxneld and Bakhtin, as well as Ghost fans themselves, through Jonas’ and Pagels’ ideas of Gnostic thought, and through a queer lens. Ian Barnard, writing on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, articulates the ways she plays with language to “inver[t]... hierarchies (from queer/mestiza = degenerate to queer/mestiza = transcendent:” (Barnard 1997: 39) this is the way in which Ghost fans use the word “queer.” Queer is not a slur; it is a transcendent, freeing space. Anzaldúa writes of borderlands: physical, psychological, sexual, spiritual. For Anzaldúa, “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other..” (Anzaldúa cited in Barnard 1997: 39). The Ghnostic space, the Ghost Tumblr space, is such a borderland. Ghost fans bring together those raised on AC/DC and those who found sanctuary in musical theater, those who reject Christian teachings of taboo by deliberately celebrating them. The carnivalesque relates to the body, specifically the lower stratum, in opposition to holy sacredness. It revels in the taboo and the low culture. Carnivalesque space allows laughter; at the world, at prescribed doctrines, at those in power, forming a “pressure release” for an “oppressed, frightened, bound” community (1984, p.95). “In hell, Harlequin turns somersaults, leaps & skips, sticks out his tongue, and makes Charon & Pluto laugh.” Like queerness, the Bakhtinian grotesque “present[s] a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life.” (62) Carnival space is a pressure release. Ghnosis means being in on the joke. Metal detractors call Ghost’s music “gay,” mock the band’s use of corpse-paint-like makeup without obeying sonic rules of black metal, but Ghost fans recognize the topsy-turvy playfulness of the act. Bakhtin reiterates that the carnivalesque is “of the people” (141-160) - Ghost is not metal for metalheads, they are metal for queer weirdos. 

Bakhtin describes the carnivalesque as a “...brilliant parody of the medieval doctrine of faith, as well as of the methods of defending and teaching it: through quotations from the Scriptures, intimidation, threats, and accusations of heresy.” (227) Ghost parodies the Church in a similar manner; songs like “Con Clavi Con Dio” or “Year Zero” deliberately play on common Christian/Catholic prayers or liturgies, making them silly and demonic. Early interactions between Ghost/Tobias Forge and fans play on ideas of the threat of hell: early MySpace posts from the band were signed with variations on “burn in hell.” For those raised in the Church and who experienced it as punitive, Ghost’s lyrics offer a different kind of inverse salvation.  

Ghost’s music and album imagery (drawn by Polish artist Zbigniew M. Bielak with direct and extensive input from Tobias Forge) plays on the carnivalesque lower strata. Infestissumam’s album art features a Satanic pope leering over a child in utero, “a daughter to fall for a son.” Prequelle, the beginning of the story of Cardinal Copia, seems to flirt with Bakhtin’s ideas on the carnivalesque mouth: the cover (figure A, below) prominently features the gaping mouths of rats, themselves denizens of the “lower stratum” of society. From out of these gaping rodent mouths came Cardinal Copia (figure B), an “amusing and comic protagonist” in the Ghost canon. Unlike previous Papa(s) Emeritus, Copia (at the time of his debut) was not a full anti-pope. He is considerably sillier than previous Papas, depicted riding a tricycle through the halls of the Satanic abbey, performing balletic leaps, or spending time in his bedroom drinking juice boxes. Copia is an underdog, a nepotistic farcical mama’s boy. 

Methodology 

This thesis employs a feminist autoethnographic research design, drawing on models of enquiry developed within cultural and media studies. The core of the research is based in grounded theory ethnographic methods – grounded theory asks “What’s happening here?” (Glaser cited in Charmaz 2006: 20) Radical feminist work can only be achieved when it is done as a collective; when the margins are examined and moved towards the center, when it reframes the conversation to prioritize the lens of the excluded. My interest is to elevate the voices of those often maligned in heavy metal culture – the queer, the deviant – and prioritize their reading of Ghost. By examining my own experiences and those of the Ghost fans I interview, I am able to cross-reference my results and my own perspective, giving priority to the phenomenon (Charmaz 2006: 22) of Ghost fans themselves and letting the data collected lead the work. Ghost fans will help tell me “what’s happening here,” and the literature review places it within the academic conversation. This research is iterative and cyclical; as a grounded theory project, it returns to the data repeatedly to search for emerging themes. The narratives formed by the data guide the shape of the research; each one-hour interview I conduct is primarily a narrative of the Ghost fan’s experiences in life that led them to Ghost. Tumblr as a social media is based on narrative; users’ posts, small snippets of their lives or opinions, act as naturally-occurring data. Posts are artifacts, archival records, and written private records, which I will analyze narratively and thematically. By reblogging a post, I add it to my own archive while simultaneously spreading news or information to my followers (Tiidenberg et al. 2021: 116), establishing rapport with the rest of the community.  

 Data collection strategies function similarly to “natural” use of Tumblr as a social media. Users have two main functions upon viewing a post: “liking” it saves it to a hidden personal list of likes, while “reblogging” it allows users to add commentary, shares the post with a new group of followers, and creates a new web link to that post. Upon reblogging a post, users can add further narrative to the post, or classify the post under a “tag” (“user-generated, but machine-readable descriptive labels” (Tiidenberg et al. 2020: 27)). These tags are “uniquely multifunctional” (ibid): in my case, they are used for community outreach (tagging a post “#the band ghost” adds it to Tumblr’s collection of posts under that tag, possibly sharing my post with more people as well as providing a broad categorical framework for my research findings (via tags like #dissrelated, #fanart, or #tourvideos.)) The act of deliberate tagging transforms what would be casual scrolling into research: initial, thoughtful, coding and categorizing. There are three general categories of tags I use when coding a post: 

“Community” tags: tags that the Tumblr Ghost community uses. These expose my blog to more Ghost fans and help categorize otherwise miscellaneous posts (ex. #thebandghost, #shitghosting) 

Descriptive tags: tags describing what the post refers to (ex. #ghoulettes, #copia).  

Content tags: what form does the content in this post take? (ex. #tourvideos, #tourgifs, #fanart, #headcanons)  

“Research” tags: Posts that refer primarily to my research (conference appearances or publications, field notes, diaries). Posts like these help me hash out ideas while keeping myself and my research transparent to the Ghost community I am a part of. (ex. #dissrelated, #getting a PhD in Ghost) 

Tags shift and change as themes emerge in the research. Perhaps, as I talk to fans, post content (fan art versus tour videos) may not matter as much as the themes in the art (what are the tour videos depicting? Why is that a significant moment for fans?). I will return to tags periodically to assess their continued use. 

In the above image, the green arrow indicates that the post was reblogged from another blog (username redacted). The blue arrow indicates the first text added to the post (often the original poster’s narrative). The purple arrow indicates additional commentary added when another user reblogged the content. The orange arrows are my personal tags, coding these images under “terzo” (fan slang for the third Papa Emeritus, here an example of in vivo coding (Charmaz 2006: 55)). In vivo codes, per Charmaz, are “symbolic markers of participants’ speech and meanings.” (ibid). Fans use nicknames like Terzo to distinguish each Papa Emeritus from his predecessors and specify each Nameless Ghoul. Preserving the character names rather than the musicians seems, from early interviews, to create a dividing line between “actor” and character. In vivo coding often takes place during the interview – in order to understand participants in their own words, I need them to define concepts like “edgy” or “theatrical.”  

In keeping with grounded theory methods, I revisit my data frequently, re-examining it and the chosen tags/codes. I conduct 10 interviews per month, usually clustered towards the beginning of the month. I then move to initial, line-by-line coding of the interview transcripts. Charmaz calls line-by-line coding an “early corrective” (ibid 51) in grounded theory: paying close attention to line-by-line coding “forces [the researcher] to look at the data anew,” without tying participants’ ideas to the literature or forcing data into a preconceived idea. Initial coding also prepares me to adjust my interview strategy or return to previous interview participants for clarification, focusing the inquiry. 

This research takes an iterative, exploratory approach to data, following grounded theory guidelines for “probing beneath the surface and digging into the scene.” (ibid. 23) As more interviews are conducted, more categories, codes, and subcategories may emerge. Returning to data repeatedly throughout the process helps create rich, “thick” data (Geertz 1973 cited in Charmaz 2006: 14): conclusions arrived at through the research will be formed from my own field notes, interview participants’ personal accounts, and extant data: memes/narratives found by scrolling Tumblr. “Thickening” data requires working towards a “detailed and dense description” (Latzko-Toth, Bonneau and Millette 2017: 201) of participants’ experiences of the Ghost fandom: “What rewards do various actors gain from their participation?” (Charmaz and Mitchell 2001: 163) Why might Papa Emeritus III come across my Tumblr dashboard more times than other Papas? Are fans talking about Terzo in interviews? How? How do the posts I reblog and the ways fans talk about Terzo relate? What can we learn from these fan discussions? 

Data and data gathering strategies  

I exist at multiple places on the participant-observer spectrum with each post. My own writing, my own fan art, and my sincere, excited responses to fandom “events” place me as a complete participant in the subculture. Other decisions I make, such as the decision to order a hand-sewn Ghost plush from a fan in Italy, place me in the role of participant-as-observer: the plush is a tangible example of my research, as well as a tangible example of fans’ devotion (someone wrote a sewing pattern, sewed plush, and sewed them of a sufficient quality to sell them for $30 USD). My blog also functions as advertisement for and information on my research: potential interview participants can scroll my blog and get a sense of “me:” what university I study with, what conferences I may attend, or snippets of my academic writing. I continually revise and update my posts asking for participants; the more interviews I conduct, the more I develop an idea of what Ghost fans need to hear in order to feel safe, as well as what information might be extraneous for them. Interview participants share my blog with their friends, potentially garnering new interviews for me and new perspectives on Ghost and queerness. 

Tumblr has a feature called "Asks,” through which users can (anonymously or otherwise) submit questions to bloggers. This feature allows me to exist fully as a researcher without requiring a potential participant to reveal their identity, as in the below example.  

When I am conducting interviews, the grounded theory focus may sometimes position me more towards compete observer: sometimes, participants may refer to ideas I understand as a Ghost fan, but in the interest of not speaking for Ghost fans, or not making speculative assumptions, I need to ask clarifying questions that place me somewhat outside of fan space. In the following interview excerpt, I ask a participant to explain what is meant by “Swiss Ghoul is good to the ladies.” Having seen Ghost live, as well as being immersed in the Ghost milieu, I can assume that the participant is referring to the way Swiss Ghoul interacts sweetly with the Ghoulettes. Asking for clarification feels a bit awkward, as though it is removing me from Ghost fandom. As I conduct more interviews, framing clarifying questions without removing myself from the fandom space becomes easier. 

NG19: Swiss first grew on me when I saw how he treated Aurora on stage! Aside from his antics it felt comforting to see how good he was to the ladies, again connected to my upbringing and the women around me not typically being treated well.  RJ: what does it mean to be good to the ladies?  NG19: He always has great chemistry with them on stage. I like how sweet and playful he is with them, given that female band members can be overlooked and ignored so often. I also liked the moments where he'd kneel down for her. It's unusual and exciting to see a woman shown that kind of respect and attention. 

During the interviews themselves, I move across the participant/observer spectrum. Some participants use a style of syntax that is more formal than is typical of Tumblr; they sometimes refer to the highest degree of education they’ve completed. Ghost fans interviewed to date seem extremely interested in being “helpful” to me, or making sure they are providing good data. Getting them to relax, to speak to me as just another Ghost fan, is a balancing act. In vivo codes formalize this process. 

Qualitative Interviewing 

My call for interviews asks for “queer Ghost fans” as a starting point. By advertising via tags like #thebandghost, I am seeking specifically fans who have a “hyperfixation” on this band. It takes a specific sort of fan to care enough about a property to create a sewing pattern for a plush toy. It takes a specific sort of fan community to care enough to purchase such a plush toy. Who are these devoted Ghost fans? Some content I reblog (such as the painting of Copia showing his top-surgery scars to the ghouls, itself a reference to Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-1602)) is aesthetically pleasing, but also refers to my research: is there something worth investigating from a religious and queer perspective in the Ghost fandom? Is this type of art a one-off, or is it emblematic of a wider pattern?   

What forms does this research take? How does the research fit into the community of Tumblr? Is it disruptive? How do you balance existing within and without the Ghost community?  

“Data are produced from social interactions and are therefore constructions or interpretations... the significance of data depends on how material fits into the architecture of corroborating data.... In other words, qualitative data and information are always already interpretations made by participants as they answer questions or by researchers as they write up their observations. Neither research participants nor researchers can be neutral, because... they are always positioned culturally, historically, and theoretically.” (Freeman, de Marrais, Preissle, Roulston, and St. Pierre 2007: 27 cited in Teddlie & Tashakkori)  

Interviews begin with a question about identity markers (chosen by the participant, with clarification from the researcher if requested) and inviting participants to tell me about how they found Ghost. Questions dealing with thematic content (fanfiction, queer readings, the concert experience, perceptions of “heavy” music) stem from the conversation. A conversational, informal tone is more important to me than rigidly standardized responses; follow-up questions depend on the direction the participant takes the conversation. Ghost fans frequently self-identify as autistic or anxious; making them comfortable to share with me is paramount. 
Each time I conduct an interview, I finish by asking the participant to share my blog/my call for interviews with their followers, expanding my reach. Word-of-mouth (snowball sampling) is the primary way I gain new interview participants; the success of my research quite literally depends on the trust and rapport I earn from other Ghost fans. All interview participants are homogenous (they are all Ghost fans active on Tumblr). Pilot interviews included non-Tumblr Ghost fans and the data produced more noise/less consistent results. I attempt to place more emphasis on following the data than looking for “ideal” participants – I used words like “women” at the beginning of the research and quickly found that although many participants were assigned female at birth, they no longer identify as women. By keeping my parameters fairly open, I can continue to follow emergent trends I find through interviews, rather than assuming I know where the data will take me. Is being assigned female at birth part of the socialization process that leads one to be a devoted Ghost fan? Or will other, more important elements emerge as I continue to conduct interviews and return to the transcripts to categorize and code? 

Interviews are text-based.  While I may be missing some data by using this method (body language, tone, use of filler words), text-based interviewing allows me to perform more interviews (transcription is done for me, I can easily keyword search across transcripts), perform in vivo coding as the interview participant is typing a response to the next question, and allows me to, crucially, make Ghost fans comfortable. Tumblr is a heavily textual social media site; this is how Ghost fans are used to communicating. Text-based interviews also allow participants more anonymity. The only personal information I collect is an email address, solely for communication; I have no way of connecting information shared back to the individuals involved. Participants do not need to worry about the way their voice sounds, or their pronunciation in English. My participants can safely continue to occupy positions of liminality: “out online, closeted in real life.” In copying and pasting the text of the interview from Tumblr to a Word document, I conduct initial coding on the interviews, quickly skimming for emerging themes, and giving agency to the participants. Some participants choose to provide additional context or correct their typos in the transcript after the interview has concluded. As new themes emerge, I return to older interviews to re-code and re-examine the data. Trends in data move forward and backward in significance as they are reiterated or ignored in subsequent interviews. 

Autoethnography: diaries, field notes, analyses, theory applications 

An autoethnographic approach based in grounded theory methods makes my research largely feel “natural” to casual use of Tumblr, and helps me center my research in Ghost fandom and the cultural experience of each new Ghost fan I talk to. My observations are largely nonreactive and covert: If a user notices that my blog (titled ghnosis) reblogs their post, they will not necessarily navigate to my blog to look at it or see it as out of the ordinary. The name relates to Ghost, as most Ghost blogs do – many flavors of “ghoulette,” “ghoul,” or “sister of sin” appear in Ghost-related blog titles. If a user chooses to navigate to my blog, they will see my pinned post and recognize that I’m a researcher. The act of reblogging posts is a part of the Tumblr ecosystem, so even though it’s ostensibly a direct interaction, it’s well within the way the site works. Most posts exist to be reblogged. 
 

In general, I try to follow unspoken Tumblr rules – using descriptive tags rather than adding textual content directly to a reblog, not reblogging personal posts, keeping my Ghost blog focused on Ghost and relegating more “personal” content (including, usually, selfies) to a separate blog. The functions of Tumblr (adding narrative/field notes to a post, tagging/categorizing/coding) are complements to grounded theory practices, and joining the two makes my research much less disruptive to the Tumblr Ghost community. Reflexive journaling on myself as researcher (biases, methodological decisions, the PhD process in general) functions both as field notes and journal, but is also a transparent effort to build trust and rapport with the rest of the Ghost community. Interview participants will sometimes ask to be kept in the loop on my research process – they recognize that academic work has a much longer turnaround time than other online forms of writing, but they are excited by the idea that someone is writing their thesis on Ghost and are excited to be a part of that work. Some interview participants send links to posts related to neurodiversity/queer identity and Ghost fandom, or fan art they think I might be interested in. Sharing milestone achievements (such as passing ethics review or conference panels), “aha” moments, or preliminary data (the below example is tongue-in-cheek, though others are more serious) keeps interview participants informed on my work, and may help others feel comfortable conducting an interview with me. In the below screenshot, a user who conducted an early interview with me (and remains one of the strongest supporters of my work) responds to point 2 of my post.  

In the below diagram, the white circle with the black dot inside represents my original post asking for interview participants. Each black dot represents a reblog. As participants reblog my post, it moves further away from my direct circle (at time of writing, I have 171 followers), pushing the post outside of my followers to new groups of Ghost fans. Healthy rapport with previous interview participants makes my research more successful in that it literally spreads my call for participants to new Tumblr silos. 

Ethics and risk  

Engaging with autoethnography brings to bear my own experiences, though where necessary I will follow Choi’s ethical concerns with regard to her own autoethnography, cross-referencing my recollections through participant interviews and ensuring I have permission to share anecdotes or stories that are not my own, or where they intersect with my own. I have examined Tumblr’s Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, and Privacy Policy, and do not believe my research will violate these, nor will it violate meta-Tumblr notions of privacy and the sanctity of Tumblr space. Casey Fiesler (2019, 2016) has produced a great deal of writing on feminist ethics and online communities for academics, and Tiidenberg et al’s text on Tumblr itself (2021) is a wealth of information on sharing Tumblr content without violating users’ privacy or sense of Tumblr as protective, liminal space. Katrin Tiidenberg has produced ethics guidelines for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) as well as an individual article (‘Research Ethics, Vulnerability and Trust on the Internet’ 2018) to found my understanding of an internet ethics of care. I am committed to ensuring the protection of a community I consider my own. Viviane Namaste’s “Guiding Principles for Critical Feminist Social Theory” (part of her piece ‘Undoing Theory,' 2009) are crucial to me when examining lenses that are beyond my experience. Namaste posits three areas of specific focus for theory when it relates to “everyday women [and]… their lives” (ibid 27): relevance, equity in partnership, and ownership.  

Although Tumblr users are open about their experiences of queer identity, neurodiversity, and other “protected characteristics,” and certainly have a sense of privacy on a maligned and “forgotten” social network, I am not interested in connecting specific sentiments to specific usernames. I am interested in giving credit and attribution to Tumblr users when they are interested in being attributed. Throughout the course of my research, I will, to the best of my ability, work with the Tumblr community to define us in our own words. My primary goal is to ensure that “the knowledge produced will be useful to the people and communities” (Namaste 2009) that I am studying; as a member of the Ghost fandom, and as someone seeking active participation from the rest of the community, I am writing as much for them as for myself.  

My ethical duty to the Ghost community is to attribute intellectual property where it was necessary and wanted by the original posters and to ensure that everyone knows, to the extent possible, what I am doing as a researcher, why, and how it might impact the community. I give back to this community by helping place various Ghost lyrics and lore within the wider occult/esoteric community, and I write and share my own Ghost fanfiction on the same blog I use to ask for research help. I am a member of this community, I am not ashamed of kink or the fic I write, and it is not my intent to shame or make a spectacle of anyone else’s fic.  

As of 6 April 2023, this project has received RIEC ethics approval.  

As of 4 October 2023, this project has received RIEC ethics approval on revisions.  

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[qqueenofhades]

I'm about halfway through my History BA and I have a question (I pinky promise I'm doing more research than just asking tumblr academics their opinions), but this is also me assuming you did college in both the US and the UK so forgive me if I guessed wrong and am confusing you with someone else. How does graduate school in either country compare? I'm still stuck between whether I want to go for my master's or straight to PhD so obviously I'm quite a ways away from making any important decision, but considering that I'm studying British history (primarily), it felt natural to consider getting my degree(s) abroad. Are there like, any major differences you're aware of that made university vastly different, or are they more similar than I'm thinking?? Was one situation flat out preferable to the other?? If you even have strong opinions about it at all

That is me, yes. BA in the US with one year in the UK; MA in the US; PhD in the UK; now the co-director of a US MA/PhD program, so I have an appreciable amount of experience with graduate and postgraduate education in both countries. Here are the main ways in which they compare/what the experience is like in both:

In the UK overall, the experience is much more self-directed. I only had taught coursework for the first year of the PhD; the rest of it was spent in research and writing. So compared to the American system, where you take 3 years of coursework first (such as the PhD program that I currently manage) and then write the dissertation in the last year or two (hence the designation ABD, or All But Dissertation), you're thrown into the deep end from the start. I didn't have comprehensive exams, which might be a plus if that's something you have anxiety about, but the tradeoff was that I had to complete the dissertation proposal and first full-length sample chapter in the very first year, rather than waiting for year 3, and to have that be the basis on which I was evaluated/approved to continue to the full PhD degree. If you know what you want to work on and have solid supervision, this can work out and it certainly allows you to develop your topic in depth from the start, but if this is the kind of thing that gives you heart palpitations, there is that. The bright side is that you will come out with a thesis that will need less revision to be suitable as a monograph, because you've done a higher and longer amount of work upfront. I.e. I published my PhD thesis as a monograph with a major academic press within a year of graduating, which is generally rare in the US system.

As such, the US PhD experience is overall more directed/structured and leans toward more coursework than research. The research is obviously a big part of it in a way that American undergrads rarely train in (unless they go to a fancy liberal arts writing-intensive school for undergraduate, like I did), but as noted, the dissertation is central in the UK PhD system in a way it isn't (or at least not as much) in the American system. You have pros and cons for both systems, and sometimes I wished that my intensively research-centric PhD, where it was all on me to do the research, write the research, and have something to present to my supervisors on schedule for each meeting, had more taught coursework or formal/structured contact time. You have a committee in the American system, i.e. three or four academics who will oversee your defense, whereas in the UK, at least in a history program, you only have two aside from your degree supervisor: an internal reader (within the institution) and external reader (from outside the institution). While this means fewer people whose approval you need to wrangle, my viva (final defense) ended up being a Goddamn Ordeal because my external reader, despite being a friend of my supervisor, was really not suited to read a dissertation on the subject and I don't think should have been picked for it, then was extremely unprofessional about her notes/reviews/suggestions. (My supervisor likewise apologized to me for that, so yeah, It Was Bad. Academic Trauma Ahoy.)

Master's programs in the UK are also incredibly intense; they are generally one year compared to the usual two years for most US programs, and you have to complete the coursework AND write a thesis in that time, which is not something that I really recommend for maximum sanity. (Then again, if you're getting an advanced degree in history, that might be out the window.) However, if you are working on British history, then yeah, it makes the most sense to be based in a UK university, since the archives that you will need to consult will be, obviously, far easier to access than if you need to try to cram it all into one overseas academic research trip on a postgraduate student's budget. In that case, it might make sense to just apply to a master's/PhD program in the UK upfront, to smooth the transition/amount of moving around/financial misery you will have to endure. However, word to the wise that there WILL be financial misery, especially as an international student at a UK university. The Tories have yet again jacked the visa and NHS application fees (which you will have to pay upfront for every year you intend to be there) through the roof; your tuition will be much higher (though as noted in previous asks, don't go anywhere unless they pay YOU to do it) and it is difficult to get any part-time work outside of teaching or other opportunities directly related to your degree, which are subject to the uh, totally great pay rate for junior academics. (Sarcasm. That was sarcasm.)

Basically, yeah: it depends on what kind of student you are, how much initiative you like to take, how much structure you need or don't need, what sources you anticipate needing to consult and how you're going to do that, if you're comfortable starting the dissertation right away and being ready to present a finished chapter at the end of year 1, and whether you want your graduate/postgraduate experience to focus primarily on independent research or taught courses. There are no exactly right answers to these questions and you will obviously have to think about what suits you best (along, of course, the money aspect). Good luck!

[el-smacko]

This take is so annoying. If you want to read less technical writing you should read an article or a book instead of a paper or a monograph. The problem with academic accessibility is not in the vocabulary of academic writers, it’s in the gatekeeping institutions. Your problem is not with a poorly paid university professor being targeted by the government for telling the truth, it’s the government and school system that deliberately tries to keep people un- or undereducated so they keep voting for people actively working against their best interests.* It’s like how bureaucracy has a reputation for being inherently evil but the real problem is that it’s either underfunded or operating on a malevolent government directive.*

(*US perspective, seems relatively fine most other places.)