Looking At the Geek Life

It all began with my baseball-shirt-clad half-orc in our D&D game.

When I was 16 I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons: after school, on weekends, on vacation, sometimes even during study periods at school. I like coming up with weird characters; one was modeled after an El Greco painting and had super-long limbs; another was essentially Wolverine from the X-Men. And then there was Okarris "Casey" Thunderbreath, made up for a late night dungeon crawl that turned into a mini-campaign.


Sadly, right after that first adventure the DM took me aside and told me that "Casey" would have to lose his baseball gear (Cap of Holding, Vorpal Bat, Cleats of Striding and Springing) for regular orcish wear.



I protested his ruling. One of my companions had a ray gun; another had a malicorn whose horn had been replaced with a repeating crossbow. My character was certainly not as powerful as theirs! The DM tried to soothe me, saying that I could keep the items, but that they had to change into a Bag and an Axe and Boots. "But why?!?!?" I keened. He shrugged. "Because they don't fit," he replied, with a sheepish tilt of his head.

What I had come up against was something I could not name for a number of years: a cultural norm. What I thought was perfectly fine had crossed some line of decorum or imagination. Things like rayguns were acceptable because there were some in White Plume Mountain, and fusing an improbable weapon to a magical beast made sense, but not a ballplayer's jersey, even if it was made of mithril and was dragonfire-proof. What I wanted to do was too disjunctive.

Since I began writing this column, I have tried to talk about "the social life of speculative fiction" in several different forms, from the personal impact of the written word to the larger tropes and practices that are a part of that aspect of geekdom. But I haven't really talked about what that life is, or how it can be thought about. As an anthropologist and recovering academic it would be easy to zoom off into The Realm of Theory (like The Realm of Faery, but even more fantastical and full of artifice), but instead I want to talk about what this idea means and why I think it's both enlightening and cool to ponder.

For six years I taught a freshmen seminar on this at Cornell University. I called the course "Fanboys, Phasers, and Fealty: The Anthropology of Imaginative Subcultures." I wanted to show the students how intricate and, frankly, awesome geek subcultures were, how they interacted with all sorts of imagined worlds to produce creative communities. I wanted them to understand why people became S-F fans, or historical re-enactors, or LARPers, and what was satisfying to these people about their pursuits. I took some basic anthropological ideas and used them as lenses to view these groups of people, hoping that the students would learn a lot about how cultures work and learn about something fun at the same time.

Its effectiveness was limited; it was, after all, a class selected by most students based on mandatory attendance and how well it fit into their academic schedule. It was eagerly taken by geeks, who produced the best papers and discussion topics, because they knew the groups being studied. And a few times during each teaching of the course, I would talk about Trekkers or SCAdians or manga enthusiasts and it would click; the students would get a brief insight into why people loved this stuff. What clicked, time after time, was telling them about the life being lived.

In talking about the social life of any given subculture or group of people, you often have to talk a lot about what holds them together, what concepts and social structures bring them together and serve as a framework for their interactions. Since the students came from the same general background as the people being studied, they filled in a lot of blanks and found nothing special. And just telling them about RPG rules or how sequential art worked or how the pulps gave science fiction its start meant little. They had to see those things together to view the social life that I wanted them to notice.

The social life of SF is in words and ideas being exchanged, in the images and stories were share and reproduce, and in recognition of some commonality. It also depends on a certain blurring of accepted cultural behavior. For example, I always showed the quasi-documentary Trekkies in my classes, not to make Trek fans look weird or to make them objects of ridicule, but because there are moments when you see the fans being themselves. The scene at the Klingon language camp is a good example, as the person who looks "weirdest" turns out to be the one who contributes the most to the others learning Klingon. The examples of costuming at cons and the relative normalcy of such dress gives the viewer a sense of lived cultural norms. When it becomes odd is when some of the movie's subjects take this out of context and extend it to their everyday lives.

Oddness itself is relative, and I think it has also become increasingly elastic. People can wear T-shirts with SF logos and slogans, but wearing a Starfleet uniform gets you looked at funny by passersby. Cultural norms again, ideas of what fits in what situation and what does not. Another great example of this comes from a recent CNN article on Dragon*Con. The writer pigeonholes the con as "Geek Pride Week" and some sports fans, often decked out in their own outrageous fan garb, refer to the costumed attendees as a "freak show." But how out-of-place would someone look at Boskone wearing the regalia of Dodgers' sports garb and face paint? Cultural norms at work. Maybe it would work if they wore a half-orc costume underneath?