theravendiaval
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“Nice boots, Tinker Bell!”: Steve Rogers as an allegory for the impossibility of performative masculinity.
There’s nothing new about the consideration of male superheroes as icons of masculinity. Superman representing the pinnacle of wholesome, idealised masculine power, or The Hulk as an allegory for the angry, repressed male id. And these types of masculinity are not innate or inevitable. Masculinity, like all gender roles is a socially constructed performance.
But performative masculinity has a tension to it that performative femininity does not, because performing itself is seen as innately unmasculine. You cannot learn to be a real man, you are or you are not. You can’t make one or learn to be one. Because our story about masculinity is that it just is. It is an ur state of being. The most natural way for a human to be.
Steve Rogers came out of a bottle.
And Steve Rogers’s weapon is a shield. Steve does not attack, he defends. Steve Rogers is the only Avenger who does not thrust forward with a phallic weapon. From Loki’s staff to Clint’s arrows, Black Widow (who pairs so well with Steve because she is a phallic woman) has guns, Tony essentially is a giant penis (sorry, friends, that’s all I see), and of course no one would even pretend that Thor’s hammer isn’t Thor’s penis.
But Steve has a shield. And a shield isn’t particularly feminine. It is not a cup or a sheath or a hole. It is just anti-phallic.
And that is Steve. the non-phallic man. Because you can’t make a man in a machine. Only a strange kind of monster.
Keep reading
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Irish Language and Steve Rogers: a meta
Disclaimer 1: This is my opinion re: Steve and Irish, and some historical background on Sarah and Steve and their relationship to the Irish language. Write as much Irish-speaking Steve as you want, have fun.
Disclaimer 2: I am a medievalist by training and the true love of my life is prehistoric (as in Neolithic) Britain and Europe.
I have a degree in Celtic Studies (the history, languages, art and literature of Ireland and Scotland from prehistory-20th century) and I learned just enough about modern Irish history / the Irish diaspora to make this face when Steve speaks Irish in fic:
[GIF of David Tennant raising a sceptical eyebrow at someone]
I was like, why am I making that face at Irish-speaking Steve? He is Irish-American, after all. So I went and poked the internet, and some of my Celticist friends, and dug up some historical context for Steve speaking or not speaking Irish in the 1920s and 30s in NYC.
First, historical background!
1. Irish vs Gaelic vs Gaeilge, wtf?
Gaeilge is the name in Irish for the Irish language, which is anglicised to Gaelic. Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge) is spoken in Ireland, and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) is spoken in Scotland and bits of Nova Scotia. For a long time, the elites in both countries spoke Classical Gaelic (Scottish Gaelic: Gàidhlig Chlasaigeach; Irish: Gaeilge Chlasaiceach), which was the language of literature and law and most written material from the 13th to the 18th centuries. Over time, they changed enough to be different languages.
So we’ve got two different kinds of Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic is usually referred to as Scottish Gaelic or Gàidhlig. Irish is generally, nowadays, called Gaeilge or Irish, since it’s the language of the country of Ireland. That’s the quick and dirty version. This is all still under/up for debate, as far as I can tell, and will probably continue to be a topic of contention for a while yet. If you’re interested in the state of Modern Irish and Scottish Gaidhlig, look into Language Policy in Scotland and Ireland. Plenty of people still don’t see why Gàidhlig/Irish shouldn’t just be wiped off the map and replaced with English, since they’re “dead” languages, anyways. (I have met these people. I have dated these people. I am related to these people. We don’t talk politics much.)
Language is never a neutral thing, is what I’m saying. Especially Irish at the turn of the century. Which, hey, is smack when Steve is growing up. Let’s look at that.
2. Potted History of Ireland (it matters!)
The English have been settling in Ireland since 1170, and there were legal distinctions between English-speaking settlers and Irish-speaking natives from at least 1366 (the Statutes of Kilkenny) [wiki link, but the only other thing I found that’s not behind a paywall was the literal statutes], but the real cultural change that impacts Sarah and Steve Rogers began when Henry VIII and Elizabeth I confiscated land from Irish citizens and gave it to English-speaking Protestant “settlers”. This marked the beginning of 300 years of concentrated efforts to control and eventually destroy Irish language and culture.
(Seen Outlander? Yeah? Yeah. Different country, same language, same shit.)
The Irish Catholic Diaspora by Lawrence John McCaffrey gives a quick overview (Google books link) of Anglo-Irish relations from 1170-1801. McCaffrey kind of skims over Cromwell’s Irish campaign, which to this day makes Cromwell one of the most hated men in Ireland.
Most Irish remember him as the man responsible for the mass slaughter of civilians at Drogheda and Wexford and as the agent of the greatest episode of ethnic cleansing ever attempted in Western Europe as, within a decade, the percentage of land possessed by Catholics born in Ireland dropped from sixty to twenty. In a decade, the ownership of two-fifths of the land mass was transferred from several thousand Irish Catholic landowners to British Protestants. The gap between Irish and the English views of the seventeenth-century conquest remains unbridgeable and is governed by G. K. Chesterton’s mirthless epigram of 1917, that ‘it was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it’.
(- John Morrill (2003). “Rewriting Cromwell: A Case of Deafening Silences”, Canadian Journal of History. December 2003.)
Catholics and (most) Irish-speakers were relegated to the poorest land on the west coast of Ireland, which is where the modern Gaeltacht (Gaelic-speaking area) is located today.
So we have, from 1170-1800, concentrated efforts by successive English governments to suppress and destroy native Irish culture and, by extension and necessity, the Irish language. And then the famine hit.
The English had spent 250 years suppressing the Irish language by the time the Great Famine hit, and the effects of the Famine were catastrophic. A million and a half people died, a million more immigrated, and those two and a half million represented the demographics who were most likely to still be speaking Irish as their mother tongue: poor, rural, from westward counties. And that was all 50-ish years before Sarah was even born, so by her heyday, primary speakers (defined as people who spoke Irish as a first language and used it daily) were a decided minority, mostly middle-aged or older. You can find stats gathered during the Gaelic revival that show the low incidence of fluency in the relevant period (1890s-1910s for Sarah) and U.S. census data showing the same pattern stateside among immigrants. (from @bangawang‘s post here, which has more general information on Steve and Irish)
[source, source, source, source, wiki overview]
Irish-speakers were on the back foot. Entire communities were basically destroyed over a few centuries, and those who had survived Elizabeth and Cromwell and their successors moved to America and Canada in order to survive the blight.
This was not Sarah’s generation- these would have been her grandparents. So, by the time Sarah’s grandparents are alive, the Irish language in Ireland has taken a serious hit. And then it gets just a little bit worse.
This is a really fun movie I’m going to recommend to you.
[Image of a woman being thrown to the ground by a group of Black and Tans]
3. Sarah’s Childhood
So, uh, look at that table there. The right-hand column is the percentage of Irish-speakers in Ireland per the census. By the time Sarah was born (assuming she was ~20 when Steve was born, we can guess that she was born in ~1898, give or take a few years.)
14.5 percent of the population speaks Irish according to the census. Now, I don’t know the exact methodology cenus-takers used to arrive at this number, so there may be some leeway for numbers one way or another, but no matter how you slice it, that’s a really really low number of Irish-speakers left around.
On top of the brain drain, as it were, Sarah would have been going to a National School. National Schools were founded in 1831, in an effort to provide a non-denominational “British” education to Irelands’ new British subjects. It was believed that if children from all denominations learned together then they could live in peace as adults. [source] The Belfast Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8 (Mar. 31, 1809) had this article outlining the basic tenets of these schools:
(excerpt)
Irish language was not taught or spoken at these schools, and was only grudgingly included, for advanced students, after years of campaigning from the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. Patrick Keenan, the Head Inspector of the schools in 1856, is quoted as saying:
“We are quietly but certainly destroying the national legend, the national music and the national language of the country.”
This was the case right up until the 1920s, so- until after Steve was born. In 1904, Commissioner Professor G. Fitzgerald wrote to Irish academic (and future President of Ireland) Douglas Hyde: “I will use all my influence, as in the past, to ensure that Irish as a spoken language shall die out as quickly as possible.”
(Buachalla, Séamas Ó. “Educational Policy and the Role of the Irish Language from 1831 to 1981”. European Journal of Education 19.1 (1984): 75–92. Web…)
So you can see why I raise an eyebrow at Sarah just casually speaking Irish and at “first-language-Irish” Steve. This was not a language you just learned or passed on… nonchalantly? There’s a lot of politics attached to speaking Irish and passing it down to your family. That’s not to say that Sarah didn’t speak it, or that she didn’t teach it to Steve, but the odds are stacked against it even without her moving to America.
On the other hand, maybe she teaches it to Steve to make a statement. Maybe it’s a matter of pride for her. But if that’s the case, it helps to understand all the history and politics attached to that decision, and how it might impact Sarah and Steve even in 20′s and 30′s Brooklyn.
You want your Irish-speaking Sarah to be politically aware and proud of her heritage and culture? Go for it!
But first let me recommend that you at least watch The Wind That Shakes The Barley.
Have some cheekbones.
[GIF of Cillian Murphy, tied to a post, playing an Irish Nationalist]
It’s a Ken Loach movie set during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), and it gives you a decent feel for the world Sarah would have left behind her when she emigrated.
(By the way, a car bomb went off in Belfast two days ago. It’s been attributed to the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. So this isn’t some old dead conflict.)
I’m not covering the entire Irish Independence movement in this meta, it’s outside my scope, but if you want to use it as a reason for Sarah to have Irish and teach it to Steve, read up a little, watch some movies, try to gather some context for it. Please.
4. A Letter From America
When Sarah arrived in New York, she would not have been completely cut off from Irish-speaking society, assuming she spoke Irish. There’s plenty of evidence for Irish communities in Brooklyn and other parts of New York, so she would probably have been able to live and move among her countrymen, but this doesn’t automatically mean she’s going to pass Irish on to Steve (or, I reiterate, speak it herself).
@fidelioscabinet nicely sums up my basic theory about Sarah and Irish in Brooklyn:
I suspect class plays a part in this among emigrants as much as anything; if you’re working on maintaining and building skills to survive in a new country, teaching your children a language of limited utility may seem like a dangerous and unaffordable luxury if you’re already fighting to stay afloat. (Yiddish had far more speakers in New York than Irish would have in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s easy to find old pictures of storefronts with signs in Yiddish but I don’t know of any in Irish, although there are examples in Italian and some others as well.) [source]
Nancy Stenson, in her article,“’beagáinín": The Use of Irish Among Immigrants to the United States”, points out that English was the prestige language in America- what you had to speak to get ahead in pretty much any meaningful way (as it was in Ireland, before Sarah left). She concludes that
“Maintenance was not a priority; survival was… The result was a rapid loss of Irish language among native speakers in the United States that proved, in most cases, irreversible.”
Furthermore, Gillian Ní Gabhann’s article on the Gaelic Revival in America suggests that
Many emigrant groups identified their language as a symbol of national identity and carefully maintained it on arrival. The Irish did not. An Gaodhal suggests many complex reasons for the change in language, ranging from indifference and insecurity to economics. Emigrants left an Ireland where Irish was associated with poverty and shame. Certainly, such concerns may have been a factor in language changeover, but the evidence points to a more complex range of emotions. [source]
Sarah has no economic incentive to teach Steve Irish, which won’t help him get ahead in America. Assimilation will get him much further in life. This is an America where eugenics is having its heyday and Steve is a Catholic disabled immigrant. Having Irish might not have been an outright impediment for Steve, but it served little to no use outside of his home and maybe his immediate community, depending on which parts of NYC he was living in.
@bangawang adds:
And then there’s what happens when she gets to America, even if she spoke Irish every day when she was back at home. The atmosphere in the U.S. was actively hostile towards immigrants, and the pressure to assimilate was enormous. Irish-Americans did organize politically around their identity, but Irish-Americans weren’t and aren’t a politically homogenous group, and what those politics were is significant; it wasn’t always what people today might extrapolate from recent history.
Nowadays the progressive view is that holding onto your culture is a matter of personal dignity, but that doesn’t translate 1:1 to the political landscape of a century ago, even given the anti-immigrant violence and forced assimilation of those days. The idea that Sarah would have consciously maintained an Irish-only household because she held leftist beliefs doesn’t necessarily mesh with historical trends, just as “liberal” and “conservative” have altered their meanings over time. It sounds perverse to us, but back then pride in your community often meant pride in how American you could be, and honestly, I like thinking about those implications for Sarah and Steve. It’s a game that immigrants are still being made to play, but with the board shifted. [source]
There was a Brooklyn Philo-Celtic society, among other Irish-Language Groups in NYC, but it seems that, to the frustration of their founders, they were mostly attended for entertainment purposes by local people.
(Ní Bhroiméil, Úna. “The Creation of an Irish Culture in the United States: The Gaelic Movement, 1870-1915”.New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 5.3 (2001): 87–100. Web…)
Basically, it seems that Irish-Americans after WW1 were more concerned with their identities as Catholics and (respectable, white, assimilated) Americans than they were with conserving their Irish language.
This isn’t to say Steve can’t grow up speaking Irish, but there’s a lot of cultural and historical context attached to that idea and it’d be good to see it explored before (or when!) Steve decides to call Bucky Mo chroí/Mo stóirin/mo ghile mhear.
In Ireland, we don’t say ‘I love you’, we say ‘an bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithris’ which means ‘you will forever have my heart’. I think that’s beautiful.
[Gif of Bucky squeezing Steve’s shoulder from CATWS]
Important final note: if you got something useful to add to this post, add away. I’m literally a medievalist with Strong Opinions. Also, if someone wants to write me fic about Steve trying to connect with his heritage from 2016, please. Please do that. Yes.
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I still think about her; she who could’ve been the best thing to happen to the MCU and to Steve Roger’s story
Instead I got another Tony Stark film cause they wanted to make money
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how they could have kept cap 3 civil war w/o turning it into avengers 2.5
-do not open the film with action. the captain american movies have always been incredibly human. keep the pattern tfa & tws set; open with a moment//moments that add to steve rogers’ character
- scratch the tony narrative Completely. i’m sorry to any tony fans but seriously, get that out of there. follow steve’s perspective and steve’s perspective only, the exception being for plot-driven scenes only
-given us more steve. he felt like a secondary character to his own film. how could that have been remedied? replace any time alotted by tony flashbacks and character insight with Steve flashbacks and character insight. give me steve watching the mother who had cared for him his whole life, breathing her last breaths in his arms, consumed by sickness. give me a quiet moment with sam, heartbroken and apologetic after two years of unsuccessfully searching for what, a ghost? give me steve helping a old woman carry her groceries into her apartment, and have her recognize him. have him spending the rest of the day with her, unguarded.
-exploit thaddeus ross’ moral depravity; he is not just some hardass trying to push politics. the project he led illegally experimented on prisoners, he lied to bruce banner (and the misinformation is what led to bruce being turned into the hulk), he personally swore he’d kill bruce and hunted him to endlessly bruce saw no other option than to try to kill himself
-highlight the worst part of the accords. remind the audience that nefarious interests have infiltrated the government before. show us a flashback where steve’s actions were manipulated by a hydra controlled shield & the negative consequences. show us that the government does not always follow the moral highground.
-let us have more time where steve interacts with bucky. let them have an actual conversation.
-give us more sam wilson, someone who connected with steve and saw him as more than captain america when no one else would
-make us feel as desperate as steve feels. let us know just will happen if steve doesn’t come out on top this time. give us the hopelessness, make us be sided 100% with steve with no reservations because this is His story, without a single doubt, this is his struggle. we are rooting for steve no matter what as he fights an unjust world that would have killed his best friend without sure evidence, that would have imprisoned him, that would have dictated his every move and treated him and those like him as weapons and pawns
there should have never been sides. it should not have been open for interpretation. it should have just been the story of a man who keeps fighting for what he believes in and stands up against any bully, even if it means pitting him against the whole world, and yet, and yet,…. he still triumphs and refuses to be put down
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In case you needed it, here is Sebastian Stan validating writing fanfiction.
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“did chris evans actually jump that high to grab onto that helicopter in civil war?”
friendly reminder that chris vaulted with ease over chris pratt after just telling him less than a minute before that he would be able to clear him if he only put his head down.
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The Grand Infinity War Theory
My current theory for Avengers 4 and Dr. Strange’s plan has come down to the following points you need to pay attention to.
1. Gamora’s soul is bound to the soul stone. She was bound because she was sacrificed in exchange for the stone.
2. After The Snap, Thanos found himself at a quiet, orange colored, watery place, where he briefly speaks to Gamora as a child. This place was inside the soul stone, and it was Gamora’s soul. Note that the color fits.
3. Everyone who became dust and Gamora’s soul can be saved. Other manual deaths may be permanent.
4. Dr. Strange has seen the one possible future where the heroes succeed. Strange is planning to set up everything so that this timeline occurs.
5. Likely on Titan, Dr. Strange travels into the past via the Time Gem and recruits Heimdall, The Hulk and possibly Loki.
6a. The Hulk is crucial for the victory timeline, and he must do something at the right moment. For this reason, Heimdall sacrificed himself to send Hulk back to Earth, and Hulk refuses to show himself until the time is right. If Loki was recruited as well, his job was to ensure Thor’s survival, because he is crucial for the victory timeline.
6b. Note that Dr. Strange had Heimdall send Hulk to himself on Earth, so Strange knew beforehand that someone had sent Hulk, and he may have realized later that it was himself. This is how he knew what to do.
7. Dr. Strange sacrifices the Time Gem at to correct moment to save Tony, because Tony is required for the victory timeline, saying to Tony: “It was the only way.”
8. Furthering point 7, all the major technicians (Rocket, Tony, Bruce, Shuri) are still around. They may be required to combine their brilliance in order to beat Thanos.
9. For each infinity stone, a character sacrificed themselves or someone they loved, at least attempting to do so. These sacrifices usually happened in the presence of a particular stone. It may be that these sacrifices make different characters the real masters of the stones.
Power Gem: Groot sacrifices himself out of love (Guardians vol. 1)
Space Gem: Loki for Thor
Reality Gem: Quill -> Gamora (attempted in presence of the gem)
Soul Gem: Gamora -> herself (for Nebula, but not in presence of the gem)
Mind Gem: Wanda -> Vision
Time Gem: Strange -> unclear at this point (maybe himself & his duty)
Even with Dr. Strange’s sacrifice being unclear and Gamora not being in the presence of the soul gem, all of this is a pattern, and pattern implies purpose. This leads me to consider that these characters, when working together, have full control over all the stones, and the stones may refuse Thanos even if he wields them.
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I know we’re all suffering over Infinity War or whatever, but you know what my major takeaway was re: Steve and Bucky? It’s that Bucky has been awake for a while and Steve has been visiting Wakanda on a regular basis. I’m fully serious about this; I’m not attempting to “fix” a problem with canon by making a fluffy headcanon. This is the first blush impression I got from the movie, and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Why?
We joke about Steve’s “depression beard” a lot, but actually, Steve looks really good in this movie. That guy has been eating a lot of fruit, moisturizing, and getting his beauty sleep. Bucky also looks shockingly healthy and relaxed compared to the last time we saw him. They both seem to be physically and mentally healthier, which doesn’t point to Bucky being freshly de-iced and still processing the worst of his shit. It also doesn’t point to Steve working himself to death and being forcibly separated from his best friend.
Steve seems to have a friendly and relatively informal relationship with T’Challa, which suggests to me that they’ve spent some time together. The other Avengers don’t appear to be very familiar with Wakanda, but Steve knows exactly where he’s going and what he’s doing.
On top of that, the Avengers seem to have more than adequate funding and appear to be working, but they no longer have the backing of the US government or Stark Industries. Where did they get the resources to do this? Where are their missions coming from? Sure, they’re likely doing their own supervillain hunting and probably some residual Hydra mop-up, but I’m guessing they’re being bankrolled by T’Challa and probably doing a fair bit of collaborative work with Wakandan intelligence. Steve would feel the need to repay T’Challa’s kindness, but what do you get the man who has everything? If you’re Steve, probably loyalty and black ops missions.
When Steve and Bucky greet each other, it feels warm, but also routine, suggesting that this isn’t their first contact since Civil War. This is a greeting you’d expect between two people who last saw each other maybe one or two weeks ago and text each other pictures of what they ate for lunch, not two people who have a lot of unresolved shit and haven’t spoken in years. The tension and sadness you see at the end of Civil War is absent in Infinity War.
Finally, the relationship between Wanda and Vision establishes that it’s possible for Avengers to go off alone for a day or two without any significant notice or concern from the others. Clearly it’s not unheard of for them to take short breaks to do personal stuff.
My take on all this? Bucky’s been up and about for a fairly long time, doing some Wholesome Farm Labor, babysitting some Charming Wakandan Children, and generally getting better. Steve and the Avengers have been running whatever missions come up, and when there’s a break in the action, Steve comes to Wakanda, says hi to T’Challa, and spends a day or two with Bucky. Maybe he takes the opportunity to finally get a full 8 hours of sleep in Bucky’s little hut. I’m just saying; they both look way less tired in this movie. Those are the faces of people who have taken some quality naps together.
So everybody’s healthier and happier than expected! Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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Now here we have some of Bucky’s deleted scenes…
Look at him! So pretty and lost 😢
You can watch the full scene here, it happens while Steve is the “dancing monkey” 😢
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Ohhh and there’s also this ones from The Winter Soldier…
AND CW… because this was was only in the trailer 😕
WHY MARVEL WHY????
I’ll leave this cute scene of the boys on their double date… and remember when Seb has said that he would like it if they had shown more about the double dates
And recently Chris said, “I wish we could have kind of explored more is Cap in his element in the 40’s, you know, back when you know, him and Bucky were kickin it and you know, really get the Howling Comandos”
… (my stucky heart 💞)
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Look, Marvel didn’t have to devote screen time to Bucky’s healing. They didn’t. They could have dethawed him in Infinity War without ceremony and given it a throwaway line about a fully successful deprogramming. They could have done that.
But they took actual screen time to show the transition—him waking up to curious and laughing children in a soft, peaceful, domestic setting. He steps out of the hut in loose-fitting robes (not binding leather), and there’s no sign of the metal arm. That weight is gone and he seems perfectly natural without it. He’s clean and he looks comfortable and at ease.
And Shuri asks him how he is.
And he says,
“Good. Thank you.”
…
GOOD.
GOOD. THANK YOU.
And Sebastian Fucking Stan delivered those lines like the knife to the heart he knew they were. He delivered them like he delivered, “I know. But I did it,” and “But I knew him.”
No one else could have delivered those lines. Period.
And my heart is so full and happy for Bucky because this is the first peace he’s had since Zola got his hands on him in Azzano. For once, a scientist getting their hands on him meant that he was healed—he was put back together instead of being torn apart.
I hoped we’d have a scene like this at the end of the movie, but I didn’t even dare to dream it would be so soft and understated. At least for a little while, Bucky gets to be safe and whole. It’s such a gift.
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MARVEL
link // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHUrAvKNF8s (collab w/ djcprod)
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