Exploring Sexuality and Queerness in Australian Fantasy: Nevernight’s Mia

Posted on 27. May 2021 by anikaklose
The Nevernight Chronicle by Australian author Jay Kristoff consists of the three novels Nevernight (2016), Godsgrave (2017), and Darkdawn (2019). The fantasy trilogy (which is very much not YA due to very graphic depictions of sex and violence) follows the story of Mia, who joins the Red Church, an order of assassins, in order to enact revenge upon the men who killed her family. What follows are a lot of plot twists and dark turns sprinkled with some romance on top. The novels break with a traditional writing style by adding ‘historical’, fun-fact-footnotes and overall sassy commentary. 

When I first read Nevernight at sixteen years old, I was, to be quite honest, a little taken aback by the protagonist Mia. In contrast to the many female protagonists speculative fiction offers now, she certainly defies a well-developed stereotype. Of course she does not stand alone, as for example Suzanne Collin’s Katniss clearly showcases, but there is still something special about Mia that I would like to bring to your attention. 

“You think I should have saved myself, is that it? That I’m some gift to be given? Now forever spoiled?” (Kristoff Nevernight 11)

As much as society has changed, female protagonists are still often bound to a very particular set of rules and norms. If we just take a look at the several Disney princesses, the moral is still the same: Female protagonists have to be obedient, sweet, controlled, and can generally only go on adventures if a capable man is at their side (Wheelan 176). Even though Disney may disguise it by putting a frying pan into their modern princess’ hands, the message is still the same (Brave being an exception here):

“[M]en have power and agency, women who are submissive and obedient are rewarded with marriage, and disobedient and powerful women are punished for their attempts to defy the patriarchal status quo” (Hohenstein 92).

The same pattern also occurs in literature time and time again; the most obvious example here Bella Swan from Twilight. Adolescent women’s bodies are still depicted as simultaneously dangerous and desirable, which results in their presentation as creatures who’s bodies and sexuality must be controlled by explicit as well as implicit rules (Day 75).

Kristoff, however, throws all of these stereotypes and demands over board with his protagonist Mia and offers girls and women another perspective on the female body. Mia defies pretty much every regulation ever put on the female protagonist: She is violent, aggressive, short-tempered, swears quite a lot, and her sexual encounters are openly displayed (If you are in search of more characters like Mia, I suggest Korra from The Legend of Korra or Lyra from His Dark Materials). The exploration of her desires is no longer bound to warnings or eventual backlash of (sexual) empowerment (Day 75).

The take on a teenage girl having sex for the first time is emphasised clearly, as the scene is paralleled with her first murder in order to symbolise a loss of innocence in two ways (Kristoff Nevernight 5-11). Right from the start, the reader notices that Mia has conviction and agency, which allows her to decide for herself when it is time to have sex. Furthermore, the narrative makes no heightened fuss about the decision, quite the reverse; it is depicted as the most normal thing.

The importance of this representation is the lack of fetishisation of female purity and the social construct of virginity. If you need an example, just look at Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina; the whole four seasons are essentially about when Sabrina will finally lose her well-guarded virginity. Does any woman need this narrative in 2021? No.

Mia defies society’s expectation and demands by choosing her first time to be with a sweetboy (aka sex worker) – which sixteen year old does that? Mia, because she chose to do so. And no, this does not promote teenagers to go for sex workers, but the importance of choice. Her actions clearly illustrate how her sexual encounters cannot and should not be controlled by society, because these rules and regulations do not apply to her, as it is her choice alone. The emphasis on choice is very reminiscent of Arya Stark and her first sexual encounter in Game of Thrones, who just like Mia breaks free from gender roles and the boundaries that come with it.

Why is this relevant? Because Jay Kristoff’s trilogy allows women to have physical agency, to experience desire and act on it without being vilified like in the femme fatale trope – sex is no longer a taboo topic. Moreover, the overcoming of this cultural conditioning enables girls to gain power necessary to “become women, leaders, and heroes” (Day 76).

“[…] I thought about my life and where it’d been steered and understood I’d never really had a say in any of it. And I wanted something that could just be mine. My choice. […] So I chose her.” (Kristoff  Darkdawn 267)

Just as Kristoff resists the convention regarding the depiction of the body, he also explores the queerness of his protagonist in Godsgrave and the following novel. While there is no limitation to what authors can write about, but there is certainly a risk of getting it wrong whenever straight people decide to elaborate on these relationships.

While we are certainly seeing an increased portrayal of queer characters in several forms of media, it is still far away from the norm, especially when it comes to protagonists. More often than we like to acknowledge, queer representation is reserved for the side characters with minimum importance who ultimately die. This can get easily problematic when the only queer characters simply serve no other purpose than being killed off.

When looking at queer representation and canon relationships in other media, one will notice their high mortality rate and tendency for the very contrast to a happy ending. Prime examples for that are The 100, Holby City, Flores Raras and several others; the list is quite long. The message behind such storylines is quite simple: Queer relationships should not be treated equally, because they cannot be maintained either way. Another issue which just came up again is the erasure of queer representation in, again, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: A queer relationship was suddenly turned back into a heterosexual one, because one woman was apparently a man in disguise. Portraying same-sex relationships seems awfully difficult, even though it is not, as Kristoff’s novels clearly showcase.

Mia underlines how queer representation is done right. When she falls for Ashlinn, who previously murdered her boyfriend Tric (Kristoff Nevernight 369), the arising controversy is not caused by their gender, but by Ashlinn’s previous deeds. Tric, when coming back from the dead, is highly disappointed in Mia and feels betrayed, but Mia remains true to her feelings and shuts any attempts of Tric getting back together with her down (Kristoff Darkdawn 266f.). Thereby Kristoff also lets go of the overdone love triangle trope and allows the readers to experience actual (satisfying) queer representation.

Even though he apparently does not believe in happy endings, Mia and Ashlinn do get one in a broader sense (they die, but then come back like Tric and get to spend the rest of their undead existence together; it is complicated). When taking the other queer relationship of Mia’s father into consideration who died for his affections for his lover, it is extremely important to balance these two events out. Because of that and Mia’s refusal to get back together with Tric, the queer narrative serves to normalise these relationships and stack them up as equally valid, important, and well rounded.

In addition to that, great successes like the Nevernight Chronicle help to spread more awareness of queer relationships and the support that is so desperately needed. Storylines like one mentioned from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina only add to the vilification and avoidance of the LGBTQ+ community and narratives, even if it was not intended. When portraying marginalised groups, ignorance is no longer tolerable, which is why it is crucial to put thought into the narrative presented to the audiences. 

Works Cited 

Day, Sara K. “Sexual Awakening and Social Resistance in Young Adult Dystopian Novels” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, by Sarah K Day. et al. Ashgate, 2014. E-Book, pp. 75-94.

Hohenstein, Svenja. Girl Warriors. Feminist Revisions of the Hero’s Quest in Contemporary Popular Culture. MacFarland & Company, 2019. E-Book.

Kristoff, Jay. Darkdawn. HarperVoyager, 2019. 

Kristoff, Jay. Nevernight. HarperVoyager, 2016.

Whelan, Bridget. “Power to the Princess: Disney and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Princess Narrative.” Kidding Around. The Child in Film and Media, edited by Alexander N. Howe und Wynn Yarbrough. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 167-192.

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Lost in Translation? Interpreting and Identity in Suki Kim’s The Interpreter

Posted on 26. May 2021 by anikaklose
The Interpreter (2003) is the first novel by Suki Kim, who was born in Korea and immigrated to the US with her parents at the age of thirteen. The plot revolves around the interpreter Suzy Park, also born in Korea and immigrated to America, who lost contact to her parents after she ran away with a married man. She later finds out her parents were murdered, but the case is not solved, which leads Suzy to investigate the murder herself. Aside from the murder mystery, Kim’s novel touches upon themes like depression, hybridity and multiculturalism.

The character of the interpreter in any kind of fiction certainly became more prominent in recent years, especially in Speculative Fiction. Examples include Ted Chiang’s Arrival, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree. However, interpreters are also often used in crime fiction, which is the case in Suki Kim’s novel. Just like the name of the novel’s title already suggests, interpreting is one of the central issues of Kim’s work. The question of what interpreting has to do with detective narratives and its use might arise if you are, just like I was, unfamiliar with the concept. Is interpreting a mere plot device? Is it of any significance at all to the character of Suzy? If you want to find out, please do keep on reading!

As Suzy narrates the story, her profession as an interpreter is of high relevance time and time again. So let’s take a look at how and why Suzy uses her interpreting skills throughout the novel. When Suzy first mentions her job, she says: “The interpreter, however, is the shadow. The key is to be invisible. She is the only one in the room who knows the truth, a keeper of secrets” (Kim12). Invisibility and the illusion of transparency is also discussed in Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility and underlines the translator’s ability to intervene (1).

These aspects of intervention and manipulation can also be found in Suzy’s interpretations, which is why she can be called an untrustworthy interpreter. Ingrid Kurz, a scholar researching infidel interpreters in fiction, clarifies that the first and most important task of an interpreter is conveying the speaker’s message as truthfully and clearly as possible (206). Any other possible outcomes caused by the interpreter are generally considered as infidelity – regardless of intention. Examples include wilful manipulation or betrayal, a lack of skills, or siding with an underprivileged speaker (cf. Kurz). In Suzy’s case, she herself says she often “finds herself cheating” (Kim 15). In a flashback, Suzy interprets for the first time in the novel and sides with a Korean man who fell victim to a cultural misunderstanding: 

“[…]‘Surely,’ the lawyer insists, ‘the injury must not have been severe if you even refused medical attention!’ But Suzy knows that it is a cultural misunderstanding. It is the Korean way always to underplay the situation, to declare one is fine even when suffering from pain or ravenous hunger. This might stem from their Confucian or even Buddhist tradition, but the lawyers don’t care about that. […] The witness gets all nervous and stammers something about how he’s not a liar, and Suzy puts on a steel face to hide her anger and translates, ‘I was in shock, and the pain was not obvious to me until I got home and collapsed.’”

Kim 15f.

Suzy is well aware of the controversy attached to her decision, because a revelation would very likely cost her her job(16). What this scene very well illustrates, is how Suzy is caught between her professional/legal commitment and her personal/moral commitment. Kurz underlines this with the common observation of people with the same ethnic heritage viewing the other as an ally, just as it happens here.

But this is not Suzy’s only intention, as she also willingly misinterprets at court to gain information about her parents: “’Can you describe to me again the ways in which you hire and fire your workers?’ […] Five years ago, you said, you worked for people who are dead. Can you describe to me what happened to them?” (Kim 95). In this situation, she is not helping the underprivileged, but she is manipulating the testimony in order to investigate her parents’ murder further. This demonstrates a usurpation and abuse of power that clearly violates the law and emphasises Suzy’s infidelity. Lastly, it also underlines how Suzy’s need for personal gain leads to her unreliability and therefore connects to her parents’ decision to provide information about fellow Koreans to save their own necks.

Even though interpreting is certainly a tool for Suzy’s detective work, another concept that is central to my argumentation is that of hybridity. Very roughly speaking, the idea of hybridity deals with the “merging of disparate identities” (cf. Burger and Mattila). In relation to Suzy and her actions throughout the novel, one could consider her a hybrid detective, as she is not only the investigator, but is to an extend invested in criminal activity herself. Furthermore, she is also frequently moving between a privileged and poor life, which is by her immigrant parents and her simultaneously going to an Ivy League college (and then dropping out of it). However, the idea of disparate identities also shows in her interpreting skills, since Suzy is constantly torn between to languages or two identities, which connects back to her multicultural upbringing.  As Eco puts is, “translation is always a shift, not between two languages, but between two cultures” (192). This impression can be backed up by Suzy:

“Being bilingual, being multicultural should have brought two worlds into one heart, and yet for Suzy, it meant a persistent hollowness. It seems that she needed to love one culture to be able to love the other. Piling up cultural references led to no further identification. […] She was stuck in a vacuum where neither culture moved nor owned her. Deep inside, she felt no connection […].”

Kim 166.

As underlined by the quote, Suzy’s sense of identity is constantly challenged, which leads to her identity crisis caused by a missing sense of belonging. Therefore, her skills as an interpreter are not only a mere plot device to help her investigate her parents’ murder, but are also crucial to her character as a whole, as interpreting offers an intro-perspective into her mind and the issue of multiculturalism. Just as Suzy links the job of the interpreter to invisibility, she and her cultural understanding of herself become invisible and hollow. In the end, interpreting is essential to protagonist and plot and the key to Suki Kim’s work.

Works Cited

Burger, Bettina and Lucas Mattila: “Hybridity and Doubling in Suki Kim’s The Interpreter.” YouTube, uploaded by Lucas Mattila, 25 November 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw93CsFBNuI.

Eco, Umberto: Experiences in Translation. University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Kim, Suki. The Interpreter. Picador, 2003.

Kurz, Ingrid. “On the (In)fidelity of (Fictional) Interpreters.” Transfiction. Research into the Realities of Translation Fiction, edited by Klaus Kaindl and Karlheinz Spitzl, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014, pp. 205-220.

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. Second Edition. Routledge, 2008.

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Getting Started

Posted on 24. May 2021 by australianfantastic

The Initial Idea

The idea of creating a student-led blog as part of our Australian Speculative Fiction project came up fairly early on. Requiring students to write blog posts seemed to be an ideal way to encourage them to engage more intimately with the material and create a platform where students’ ideas could be shared. An added benefit was that the blog could prepare them for one career trajectory which English literature graduates may find fulfilling employment within.

Blogging can be an excellent way to transmit the knowledge we gain at university to a broader public – and it can also be a lot of fun! That’s why we expected students to be as excited about the project as we were, and we were certainly proven right. So – we were ready to go. The only thing missing was a platform, but that would be easy – get a WordPress website, use the Centre for Australian Studies website as our platform… simple.

You’d think so.

You’d think we would have been ready to start this blog as soon as the course began (summer term 2020).

Ideally, this would have been a straight line from the first conception to the actual blog.

A bit like this…

Getting There

Unfortunately, though, initiating a blog is a little bit more complicated than just coming up with an idea and getting started, especially if students are going to be involved. As soon as we got talking to our legal department and data protection experts, we realised that what we assumed to be just a small hurdle was actually the tip of the iceberg.

Since the blog is primarily, albeit not exclusively, intended for use as part of a course – in our case “Exploring Australian Speculative Fiction” and its accompanying Praxismodul “Blogging Australian Speculative Fiction”, there are a number of precautions we need to take:

  • Make sure students know that they are signing up for a public blog – it has to be voluntary after all!
  • Make sure that there is an appropriate Impressum and ways for people to contact you
  • Make sure that there is a suitable data protection declaration and that there is a data processing contract between the university and the platform you plan to use

Data, in case you’re wondering, can be the nickname or even the email address your students are using to register – even if they’re not public, even if that’s literally the only thing that is being processed… you still need a contract.

Getting a contract can be a lengthy process, so we knew it wasn’t going to happen in the summer term 2020.

However, we persisted. We kept in contact with both the legal and the data protection people, and eventually found the HHU blogfarm to be the perfect outlet for the course blog – as it is already associated with our Heinrich-Heine-University!

In the end, our journey looked a little bit more like this:

Looks confusing? Well it was…

But we got there in the end!

The Blogging So Far

That does not mean, however, that our previous two iterations of the course (still called “Charting the Australian Fantastic” at the time) had to make do without blogging. Luckily, our e-learning platform ILIAS also has a blog option – it isn’t public, but it has some other advantages, namely that our students managed to get some useful peer feedback before even considering publishing on a public blog, so we will probably keep the blog function as a way to pre-prepare blog posts for publication going forward.

We made sure to have suitable practical elements in each version of the course despite the lack of a public platform. For example, we conducted some thought experiments in Zoom meetings with our students to talk about what you would need to open a blog and even generate revenue from it. Our experiences with the legal requirements and preliminary preparations really helped us to explain the realities of blogging to our students.

The first term of blogging proved to be a success. Students proved to be engaged and interested. One of them even managed to snatch an interview with an Australian fantasy author! (Jay Kristoff!)

In the second term, we had the idea of introducing a student editorial team, consisting of Samantha Saur, Melissa Teschen, and Anika Klose, who all did tremendous work. This allowed the three volunteers to gain more experiences when it comes to the editorial process – a field of work all three are interested in – and it made for an even higher quality output. Our editors went above and beyond in getting their peers organised and even came up with a well-structured and organised publishing plan that ensured the blog posts were in a very logical and narratively sound order! A recommendation to our fellow lecturers, though – if you do decide to start blogging as well (and as long as you’re from the HHU’s English department, you’re very welcome to do it on this blog) and want to bring in a student editorial team, DO take into account the amount of work this means for the students and adapt their course work requirements accordingly!

The Blogging Going Forward

So thanks to our previous ILIAS-blogging, we already have a decent-sized corpus of student blog posts at the ready. We have sent emails to all of the previous participants, offering them spots on our new public blog – those are the blog posts that will mostly fill the coming summer months until the winter term, when we will start a new Praxismodul course where students will be able to post here throughout the term.

In addition, we are offering this blog as a platform to students who have been inspired by their classes and wish to elaborate on any given topic in a public space – without the pressure of graded term papers. So far, we have the section “Thoughts on Translation”, which may be of use to our MA students in the Literary Translation Degree as well as the section “Further Courses and Topics” – arguably the most flexible section.

We’re looking forward to your contributions – and we hope that you’ll follow this blog with as much interest as we do!

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Introduction

Posted on 6. March 2021 by australianfantastic

So, what is this?

Speculative Australia is a student-driven blog engaging with all manner of speculative fiction from Australia: from fantasy fiction to gothic tales. It aims to provide academic insights into the genre while maintaining accessibility to readers outside the literary field – to achieve this goal, the editors, Bettina Burger, David Kern and Lucas Mattila, curate the blog posts both in terms of their academic rigor and their general readability. They have been assisted in their research by their research assistants Jill Bommans, Tiana Matanovic, and David Mocken. Going forth, research assistant Anika Klose and voluntary editors Melissa Teschen and Samantha Saur will help with editing individual posts.

The blog collects the most interesting and well-written blog posts from the course(s) in relation to the project, but it is also open to submissions from previous participants in our courses as well as other HHU students with a fascination for Australian speculative fiction. If this is something of interest to you, please contact us at: australianprojectnrw@gmail.com

What are we talking about?

The blog strives to cover the field in all its variety and potential. In the course of our research, we have looked at ‘traditional’ fantasy novels (such as Sarah Douglass’ BattleAxe (1995), one of the first Australian fantasy novels on the international literary market) and discovered that even the most medievalist fantasy may still contain kernels of ‘Australianness’. But we are also engaged with more unusual works in the field of speculative fiction, inviting blog posts on films, comics, television shows, youtube content and experimental forms, as well as lesser known short stories and novels – an independent  short film used in the courses, “Waterborne”, even contains a Zombie Kangaroo, so there is certainly a lot to choose from! 

What do we hope to achieve?

We are hoping that this blog will spark a broader interest in Australian speculative fiction from casual readers and researchers alike. To this end, the blog will contain reviews on Australian horror novels, science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, utopian and dystopian stories as well as visual narratives and more. In addition, we also welcome posts that delve deeper into individual concepts and raise questions with regards to Australian speculative fiction writing. While we will likely never find a definitive answer, we hope to approach the question of what makes Australian speculative fiction writing ‘Australian’, but we also deal with narrower yet equally interesting issues. Why are there so many Australian female writers of fantasy? How do Australian works uniquely engage with latent, historical presences and how can they model new forms of transcultural entanglement? How do Indigenous authors influence the speculative fiction genre? How are gender and sexuality portrayed in select Australian novels? Which visual cues are used in graphic novels and comics to denote Australianness, if any? How do the various cultural backgrounds of contemporary Australia influence its speculative fiction? How does landscape feature in various Australian speculative narratives? 

Join us in our speculative journey into a wide and exciting field of writing – be it as a reader or contributor!

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