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icarusredwings · 1 month ago

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Why the fuck did I even write this. WHEN did I write this? #cleaningoutmyqueue

Carly at 4 am:

Thinking about one night, Logan waking up to Wade cross-legged, rocking back and forth as he's patting Evelyn.

"Shhh.. shh, it's alright.. you're okay, baby girl."

Immediately, he wants to just go back to bed because it is too early to deal with this bullshit though he sighs heavily and asks anyway.

"What's wrong with the baby?"

"Shhh.. shhh.. she won't stop crying. Can't you hear her?"

"Oh..." He realizes that there's tears running down his face. He's rocking, patting, and patting more, as if desperately trying to soothe her though Logan knew self consciously he was only trying to soothe himself from something.

Call it what you will, but they have come a long way from other destructive ways to self harm then rocking a baby doll. And if Wade wanted to rock his baby then so be it. But it didn't actually look like he *wanted* too rather then was struggling to let go of her. Struggling to put her down.

Ever since he had that damned dream that there was a universe where he had a daughter, his whole train of thought changed completely, now playing papa to cope. Cope with loss that he didn't even know he had, cope with the idea of 'holy shit this is so easy and yet my parents couldn't do it properly... they mustn't have loved me enough'. To cope with the fact that despite having all these kids in class- They would never be his.

Sure, he's snatched up Laura and Gabby faster then Logan even mentioned being their step father, but it wasn't the same. He had the same dream over and over again about a baby girl. HIS baby girl.

Now here he was, half asleep, patting on auto pilot, and crying because his silent babydoll was sobbing in his head, a dream lingering into reality.

"Shhh... shh.. Evelyn please.. go to sleep for papa.. im sorry.. I know.. It'll be okay. You have wolvie. He's kinda like a mama?" He whispers to the toy, whose batteries were taking out ages ago because of an actual cry button that would randomly go off, sending Wade into even worse frenzies.

Recently 'Evelyn' has been having issues on not having a mom and it almost felt.. real.. the way he described her pain. As if the other universe was dipping into theirs. It kind of concerned Logan just how dearly he took care of this doll, carrying around for hours and once even brought her to work.

He'd wrap her up and carry her, bounce her infront of the chalk board, show coworkers his baby, most being extremely puzzled as who let Wade adopt a baby- only to realize that she wasn't a real baby at all. Few, such as Yukio, Rouge, Kurt, and Jean held or bounced the baby as if it were an actual baby.

Rouge at first took her without even realizing, but saw how happy it made Wade and continued, Yukio ofc took her and was extra gentle, Kurt, who was used to sunday school kids handing him random stuffies and babys autimatically began to bounce her. Meanwhile Jean knew it was a doll and took it anyway, complimenting Wade on how beautiful his baby was. "Isn't she!?" He said to her and she smiled.

Later she had said to Logan something about how the baby was improving his mental state- Not alot- but enough to keep him in the 'Sane' category for awhile. She also mentioned how when Rachel was born she would let Wade hold her, despite Logan telling her that was a terrible idea, afraid of what might happen. No, Wade would never hurt a baby on purpose but he was terrified of Wade trying to take someone else's kid or being a bit too rough.

He already saw him drop evelyn twice- and she was hard plastic. He didn't want to imagine what would happen if she hadn't been.

Honestly? It was heart breaking to watch. To see the man he loved so desperate for a child of his own though both agreeing that he wasn't in the right mental state for a baby and probably never would be. He was good with older kids. 5 and up, but new borns and toddlers needed more work then just playing, feeding them once in a while and carrying them around.

The best thing about Evelyn is that he couldn't forget to feed her because she didn't actually need to eat. She couldn't get be kidnapped and held hostage or even killed by people who really didn't like him. She couldn't get hurt if Logan accidentally stabbed her in his sleep.

But sometimes, this play wasn't enough. Sometimes, something in his head just wouldn't let him put her down, wouldn't let 'her' stop crying.

With a pop of his back, Logan sat up with a groan. "Give her here." He put his arms out for his daughter, hard plastic or not. If Wade thought she was theirs, then she was. Oh, well. It's not like it hurt much. If anything, she's helped greatly with his nightmares. This being said, the ones about her though were worse, but Logan would trade one bad dream a week for every night.

Wade gave him the baby, hesitant as Logan started patting. "Shut up little one. Your dads got work in the morning." He muttered to the doll, though Wade looked nervous. "Y-you're not patting her right, and you have to have your hand up-"

"Aye! I can pat her how ever I want. Huh? You like when I pat you?" In reality these questions were more towards Wade, trying to find the correct responses.

"She's still crying. You're being too rough!"

"What? Im patting the exact same way you were."

"Nu uh, that's too hard. You're gonna hurt her!"

Deep down, Logan knew this fear only stemmed from Wade himself being afraid of hurting her, but it still hurt to hear that he thought Logan would hurt the babydoll. (Unlike Mr. Drop her head on a bathroom sink and on concrete).

Grunting, He hands her back, rolling his eyes. "Well then, what does 'she' want?"

"She wants a mom" He whined, nuzzling the doll and kissing her head.

Logan was about to say "shes got a mom," but not really, Vanessa thought she was kinda creepy and only held her when Wade asked but was awkward. This made sense, seeing as she was going to give Wade a baby before things changed. Now that she thought about it, they weren't really in the best of the situation to have a baby back then either. Just.. dumb love, I guess. The fact that whenever she saw him play with kids, it made her hormones explode... (Logan understood this feeling a bit too well around August)

"Evie baby, please! Shhh.. shh. Why are you crying so much?!" These are the parts that worried him, just how frustrated he got with his own head.

"What's all this ruckus? Dont you know what time it is?"

Logan blinked, glancing to his husband. "Why didn't you lock the door?? Carly you need to knock."

"Nonsense. I heard trouble, and where there's trouble, there's Howlie."

"What?" Her logic seemed flawed. Wouldn't she want to stay away from him if he were trouble? Though- then again- were talking about a 86 year old jewish veteran amputee from Poland. Not much scared her. Including walking in on them- which she's done multiple times with little care, gathering laundry and then leaving as if nothing happened.

"... do you think she saw us?"

"Why is there so many clothes on your floor? Who raised you to be like this? Hogs?" She said.

"... I honestly think she dosn't give a fuck."

"I aspire to give that little of a fuck one day." Wade would say.

It made Logan cringe and shiver to think about. Ugh. He couldn't imagine how much she had seen of them and how she would pinch his cheeks not even 10 minutes later. God, she was so.. weird! But even in her wandering mind, he couldn't imagine putting her back in that nursing home. Besides- now Al had someone to be crotchety with and sit on the couch complaining about stuff with. She had even started taking Al with her to Synagogue despite her always saying it was bullshit, She enjoyed the time out of the house.

"So what is problem?" She asks, a hand on her hip, her leg lazily put on in a flowery nightie.

"Evelyn is crying, and it's stressing him out." Logan tells her, still watching as Wade paced and patted her bum.

"She wants her mom but she dosn't have a mom." Wade explained, bouncing a bit more as he shushed her.

"Oooh, let me see. Give me little Eve. I take her." She offers, used to Wade's antics by now. That or she was losing it and thought the doll really was a baby. Either way, Wade looked hesitant again. "Are you sure? J-just don't be too rough. Logan's too rough."

"Snitch." Logan grumbled, giving him a playful fist as if saying 'Snitches get stitches'.

"Come now, D'aawww mój anioł. Did that mean man hurt you? Awww, I know, laleczko. Sheyneh meydeleh." She coes, patting her back gentle enough to satisfy Wade into finally sighing of relief.

"So.. what was wrong with her?" Logan asks, seeing his husband finally settle down and flop himself against the bed in an exhausted "Fmph".

"You ain't got any tits sugar." Carly smiles, innocently. "Babys like busty chests. And that's just what you aint got."

Wade gasped, covering his mouth and giggling. "No way, you just said that. Loagies tits are the best!"

He scoffs, smirking. "At least mine are real."

"Perhaps she prefers plastic over flatness."

Wade then gasped again. "Oh, you did not just say that. Wolvie you gonna let her get away with that?"

Logan let out a snort. "Yeah. Sure. What am I supposed to do? Beat up a grandma?"

"You know, raddish, your papa is quite a coward. Even in war was cowardly. Won't even fight an elderly lady with a missing leg." She says to the doll, leaving to take her back to her room to 'watch' her for the night.

Shaking his head softly, Logan couldn't help but chuckle, feeling young again from the banter. Boot didn't change a bit. And it seems she never would. "No way, I've seen guys get sent to medic way too many times over that leg!"

"If you dont want Boot up your ass, don't talk from it!" She calls, the door clicking.

Giggling, Wade sprawls out in the bed. "Was she always this sassy?"

"Oh, im pretty sure she gets sassier with age.."

"Like good cheese."

"Sure, bub. Like good cheese." Pulling him close, he locks him in his arms, not wanting him up again until their alarm went off in the morning.

".. You're a good dad, Wade." He whispers, nuzzling into him, yawning.

"I love you too, peanut.."

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campgender · 9 days ago

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Cold War Hollywood cinema & the threat of the femme to the binary

Conclusion to Cold War Femme by Robert J. Corber (2011)

transcript under the cut

“[…] It didn’t want her to leave, and her poor bedeviled mind wasn’t strong enough to fight it. Poor Eleanor!” But Theo rejects this interpretation and provides an alternative construction of Eleanor’s desire, which does not deprive her of sexual agency: “Maybe not ‘poor Eleanor.’ It was what she wanted, to stay here. She had no place else to go. The house belongs to her now, too. Maybe she’s happier.”

In this way, the movie indirectly challenged the discourse of female homosexuality that circulated in American society during the Cold War era. In associating Eleanor’s sexuality with the supernatural, the movie suggests that it defies explanation. As a feminine woman who has made a lesbian object choice, her desire cannot be attributed to a pathological identification with masculinity. Rather, it requires an explanation that acknowledges her diference from the butch Theo.

The movie’s deviation from the Cold War construction of the lesbian surfaces more fully in its refusal to contain Eleanor’s desire. In the Cold War era movies tended to adopt one of two strategies for containing the threat the femme allegedly posed to the dominant social order. Some movies, like All About Eve, masculinized the femme’s identity by drawing on an older model of sexuality to mark her as a lesbian. In suggesting that the femme’s femininity rendered her lesbianism invisible by disguising her identification with masculinity, these movies assimilated the femme’s desire to the Cold War discourse of female homosexuality, which attributed the development of lesbian identities to a pathological rejection of femininity.

Other movies, like Marnie, contained the femme’s desire by ultimately realigning it with the institutions of heterosexuality. Rather than attribute the heroine’s perverse sexuality to a rejection of femininity that glossed over the diferences between her and the butch, these movies instead rendered her lesbianism “artificial” by attributing it to a traumatic childhood experience. Also drawing on an older model of sexuality, these movies assumed that the feminine woman who made a lesbian object choice was less deviant than the masculine women who did and thus could reorient her desire.

In adopting these strategies, Hollywood cinema refused to acknowledge the femme’s diference from both the butch and the straight woman. The Haunting adopts a diferent strategy: it kills off its heroine. It thereby indirectly validated the new system of sexual classification, which privileged object choice over gender identity. Eleanor’s femininity neither masks an identification with masculinity, nor indicates that she can be incorporated into the institutions of heterosexuality.

Unlike many of the heroines we have encountered in this book, Eleanor’s attempt to realign her sexuality with the law fails. She displaces her desire for Theo onto Dr. Markway, whose paternalistic interest in her she mistakes for love. But in so doing, she replaces an accessible object of desire with an inaccessible one. She does not realize that Dr. Markway has a wife (Lois Maxwell), until she shows up unexpectedly at Hill House to inform him that newspaper reporters are on his trail and to persuade him to abandon his experiment, of which she disapproves.

Mrs. Markway’s appearance precipitates a crisis in which Eleanor imagines that she wants to take her place in the house. Mrs. Markway disappears into the house after being terrifed by a supernatural experience in the nursery, the “cold, rotten heart” of the house where she has insisted on spending the night, and she gets lost searching for her husband. Eleanor increasingly takes on Hill House’s “sick” and “deranged” identity, indirectly confrming the perversity of her desire. In one of her voice-overs, which punctuate the movie, she remarks that she has begun to disappear into the house “inch by inch.”

When Dr. Markway insists that she leave the house while he and the others remain behind to search for his missing wife, she exclaims, “I’m the one who’s supposed to stay. She’s taken my place.” But Hill House cannot incorporate the normative Mrs. Markway, and it ejects her. By contrast, Eleanor’s death in the fnal scene insures that she retains her place in the house as a “kindred spirit.” Eleanor crashes her car into the tree when Mrs. Markway—who in a fluttering white nightgown looks like a ghost—frightens her by darting across the road, and she swerves to avoid hitting her. Despite her normative gender identity, Eleanor cannot be incorporated into the dominant social order.

But even as it acknowledges Eleanor’s diference from both Theo and Mrs. Markway, The Haunting provides a psychoanalytic explanation of her “abnormal” sexuality. Eleanor’s history bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Abigail and her paid companion. After Hugh Crain dies abroad, Abigail continues to inhabit the nursery, which suggests that his death arrests her development by preventing her from resolving the Oedipus complex.

She dies an old woman in the nursery when her companion has a tryst with one of the local “farmhands” on the veranda and fails to hear her when she knocks her cane against the wall. The tryst emerges as a violation of the companion’s homosocial bond with her mistress. After Abigail’s death, the companion lives on in the house in “complete solitude,” and haunted by her role in her mistress’s death she eventually commits suicide by hanging herself from the railing of the circular staircase in the library.

Abigail’s death has the same impact on the companion as her father’s death had on her. It arrests the companion’s development by turning her away from heterosexual romance. This representation of the companion’s relationship with her mistress reinforces the association between lesbianism and the supernatural in the movie. The nursery emerges as a site of perverse female desire, Hill House’s “cold, rotten heart,” which explains Mrs. Markway’s terror when she attempts to occupy it.

The representation also provides an explanation for Eleanor’s deviant sexuality by drawing a parallel between her and the companion. Eleanor feels guilty about her mother’s death and increasingly identifes with the companion. Like Abigail, Eleanor’s mother pounded on the wall of her room when she needed her. The night she died, Eleanor ignored her pounding and went back to sleep. Eleanor’s identification with the companion suggests that her guilt about her mother’s death has arrested her development; hence her desire for other women.

Tis treatment of Eleanor’s sexuality suggests that the feminine woman who made a lesbian object choice posed an even greater threat to American society than the Cold War construction of the lesbian indicated. In the Cold War era, Hollywood movies tended to promote lesbian panic by underscoring the femme’s ability to pass as a “normal” woman. Reinforcing the association between lesbianism and communism in Cold War culture, these movies attempted to show that the femme’s resemblance to the straight woman enabled her to spread her “abnormal” sexuality throughout society while escaping detection.

By contrast, in insisting on her diference from the butch and the straight woman, The Haunting attempted to show that the femme threatened to destabilize the binary construction of gender and sexuality. As her choice of the paternalistic Dr. Markway as a father substitute indicates, despite her identification with femininity, Eleanor cannot resume her Oedipal journey, which her relationship with her mother has interrupted.

Nor does her death in the fnal scene contain her “monstrous” desire. Her closing voice-over confirms Theo’s belief that Hill House now belongs to her, as well as to the other female ghosts who haunt it. Echoing Dr. Markway’s opening voice-over, Eleanor informs the viewer, “We who walk here walk alone,” as an image of Hill House appears on the screen.

In this way, The Haunting showed that in trying to repress the femme’s diference as a subject of desire, the Cold War construction of the lesbian had failed to counteract the threat she posed to American society. At once similar to and diferent from the butch and the straight woman, the femme continued to haunt the normative construction of American womanhood.

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