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m a r g i n a l i a   u p o n   D e v i n   P r o c t o r ' s  " O n   B e i n g   N o n - H u m a n "

The dissertation is freely available ("open access") on ProQuest. Page numbers are those actually shown at the bottom of the page and differ from the PDF page numbering.

p. iv
Thank you, elf at the PantheaCon Party for making me question my assumptions.

At first I was shocked to think that Devin had slipped in to the annual 'Kin-Meet event that the SF Bay Otherkin Meetup did at PantheaCon some year or other and I hadn't noticed, but it later becomes clear that though he was at the con in 2016 with the original plan of attending, I had asked him not to, he was not actually at our event, and had met this elf elsewhere at the con. This is a weird thanks, because while he may have questioned his assumptions, given the conclusion of this dissertation, apparently his answer to the question was "they're fine" and it did not result in any actual change or understanding.

p. 2
[...] “a collective noun for an assortment of people who have come to the somewhat unorthodox, and possibly quite bizarre, conclusion that they identify themselves as being something other than human” (Windtree 2016).

The citation is What Are Otherkin on Otherkin.net. This, like most of the articles on the current Otherkin.net, are actually considerably older than their 2016 datestamps. When Jarandhel Dreamsinger took over the site's operation from Tirl/Malcolm/Rannirl, he imported the content into a new Wordpress backend and the dates of that site-building are what are now seen on the articles. This particular piece actually goes back to the earliest version of the site. It can be seen under the slightly different title What is an Otherkin? with the text in an earlier, shorter form, in the Wayback Machine capture from April 24, 2001, and in a version closer to what was quoted here on April 18, 2003.

p. 44-45
...in February of 2013, I contacted the organizer of a local Otherkin meetup group (an elf) to see if I could attend the next meeting. I mistakenly mentioned my academic interests in videogaming in the email, and after a few days, got a response email explaining how the Otherkin are not role-players and I probably"would not find what [I was] looking for." Even so, the organizer said, "they're public events so anyone can attend as long as they're not disruptive." Following that lukewarm invitation, and after a couple of cancellations and re-schedulings, I attended my first Otherkin meetup: myself, an elf and a vampire—both of whom I now consider friends—talking over dinner at a local Chevy's Fresh Mex franchise.
Between 2013 and 2018, I continued to meet up with Otherkin. There were only a handful of local meetups, semi-monthly over the next year-and-a-half, before they fizzled in the face of life's other demands, but my elf friend (who asked not to be a named part of the project) and the vampire, Ezcoatl, introduced me to a number of face-to-face and Internet-based avenues through which I could talk to and hang out with Otherkin.

In 2013-2015 he would likely have been in or around D.C., to judge by his MA American Studies from George Washington University in 2013 followed by an MA Anthropology in 2015 at the same. The location combined with the details of being an elf and a vampire led a friend of mine to speculate that this might have been the Northern Virginia Otherkin Meetup.

p. 64
I’m literally in a field, at a Pagan sanctuary in a North American mountain range, and I’m alone. ... I am here to attend The Gathering, a twice-yearly Otherkin camping event.

From the photographs, it's clear he was at Four Quarters Farm and "The Gathering" must refer to Walking the Thresholds and Crossing the Thresholds; though I am not at all sure exactly what was still occurring between 2014-2016 as he cites a few pages later (see next item). Whatever there still was, was breathing its last, certainly not the big Thresholds events of the late 90s and early 00s.

p. 69-70
Over the three Gathering events I attended between 2014 and 2016, I came to know the key group members: two couples—one with a few young kids—and a man who was more or less in charge of things. All three men were self-identified elves and traced their relationship to the community back to the “eleven [sic] realities” webring of the 1990s. One had even been a Silver Elf at one point (see Chapter 2). Surprisingly, neither of the women identified as Otherkin, although both were open to alternative understandings of the Self. ... I found out near the end of my second Gathering that the key members all live on the same street in the same town, so The Gathering itself was essentially just a camping trip between friends and the occasional random others (e.g. me).

Since this is Thresholds, the "man who was more or less in charge" is almost certainly Rialian (Devin may not be naming him for reasons of academic ethics, but it's hardly hidden knowledge). Thus I find the 2016 date rather confusing, since to my knowledge there had been no events at 4QF that year. Rialian's late wife Helen's memorial was that year in August, and was sort of a de facto substitute event because of the number of 'kin and 'kin-adjacent that were there, some of whom (myself and my husband included) had been attendees at Walking the Thresholds from 1999-2005. 2015 I believe was a year of great disorganization for Rialian dealing with Helen's illness and death, so if there were Thresholds events going on, probably their execution was more in other hands than his own.

An Elven Realities webring did exist, but I wonder if Devin was misunderstanding a reference to Elven Realities the eGroup/Yahoo group, which was certainly much more important as a community focus. In fact mailing lists as a whole are curiously nearly absent from this paper, given their importance to the community in the late 90s/early 2000s. There's little beyond a passing mention on p. 156 ("Between 1998 and 2004, they established some 71 Otherkin related online mailing lists", citing Scribner's Otherkin Timeline) and Yahoo as a platform is nowhere named.

I do not understand the statement about "had even been a Silver Elf at one point". Pedantically, he can't be because that phrase is the collective name used by two specific people: Zardoa and Silver Flame; but taking it to mean that he was a member of their group when they were a vortex of the Elf Queen's Daughters, or perhaps that he had lived with or otherwise been closely associated with them at some point, it kind of makes it even more puzzling what this person's identity was. I am not personally aware of anyone in the modern online community members with that sort of connection other than the Silver Elves themselves -- if nothing else, it would make this person signficantly older than the community average and they would stand out.

p. 72
Notably, in this second section I will argue for an ontological understanding of Otherkin identification based on the experience of the Otherkin themselves—a position that takes Otherkinity seriously on its own terms, rather than rationalizing or pathologizing. In this ontological experience, Otherkin bodies act as open-bodied platforms, mediating their virtual other-than-human Selves.

...ur... ur doin the thing. Rationalizing. Right there.

p. 78 (footnote 27)
Some draw very distinct lines between Faerie, Sídhe, Tuatha de Danaan, and Elves. See, for instance, (Arethinn 2017).

The citation is Sidhe, Faery, and Tuatha (and Also Some Elves) on this website. The page has changed since he viewed it on October 27, 2017 (as stated in the bibliography), so what he saw was probably something like this version captured in May 2017.  I do not know why he dated the page to 2017 when at the time it bore the date 2014 both as an internal reference in the text and as the last-updated date in the footer. Never minding that, though, I think he got the wrong end of the stick here. The prefatory couple of paragraphs is precisely about how while I consider them distinct, there are similarities and overlaps, making hard lines is difficult, and that this is ultimately why I did not try to separate the categories on the page.

p. 80
One of the more provocative identifications is Fictionkin or Mediakin—people who identify as specific characters from fictional works (see Chapter 5). For example, rather than identifying as a Hobbit, a fictionkin might identify specifically as Samwise Gamgee, the Hobbit.

Of course specific characters are fictionkin, but so are non-specified members of fictional races. A Hobbit, so named (rather than something more generic like "halfling"), is fictionkin per se, although they might not use the term for themselves.

p. 80
A subset of fictionkin, Otakukin, identify specifically as characters from Japanese Anime and Manga series.

I suppose you could now consider this category a subset, but in terms of community history it's actually the parent of today's fictionkin.

p. 105
I had initially planned to come to PantheaCon [2016] to attend the Otherkin suite party/meetup that night—the largest of its kind on the West Coast—

?? While that might be factually true (if we are not including events like Faerieworlds that are not by or specifically for otherkin, nor furry cons), I have never said anything like this. I wonder if he misread the statement I often make in the announcements (and which might have been on the event page itself at the time) that PantheaCon was the largest indoor Pagan convention.

p. 107
That evening, as I sat in my Motel 6 room on the other side of the highway watching President Obama eulogize Scalia on television, I thought of the Otherkin meetup, and mortality, and justice, and how close I was to a singular opportunity at valuable data. What would Scalia do? I decided I would just go to the meetup. I put on shoes, braved the underpass to the hotel, and pressed the floor’s button in the elevator. When the doors opened, I could hear voices coming down the hall from the suite and felt a wave of shame. This was wrong. I continued up to the 10th floor, and the Absinthe Party.

Damn right you best beat cheeks, if your attitude is "to hell with being explicitly told not to come to a private event" and "WWASD?" (of all things to use as a moral guide!).

p. 108
Down the hall [from the Green Fairy suite] was a smaller, but equally raucous party. ... On my way out, I ran into an elf I met at my first Gathering. I figured I could make up for earlier mistakes and told him I was an anthropologist researching Otherkin. He did not remember me, but sighed deeply and asked, “Are you ‘kin?” I admitted I was not, but that I found the Otherkinity to be “a fascinating way of being-human-in-the-world,” to which he responded, “Then that’s the problem. You’re never going to get anywhere because you’re coming at the topic from a misconception. We’re not human.” Then he politely excused himself. On the walk under the highway back to the Motel 6, I wondered if it would have been any worse had I just gone to the meetup. I vacillated between Scalia and Bowie, my Jacob Marleys for the evening, pulling me in equal parts toward bitter hopelessness and determination. Was the elf right? Was I starting from a misconception? I was sure there was a tacit understanding of biological humanity overlaying ‘kin identification. But how would I figure this out if no one would ever let me come to the meeting?

I suspect this party suite was Hexenfest's. I have confirmed who the the unnamed elf is here by asking him if this was him; and good on him for that remark.

And yes, it would have been "worse", in the sense that you'd have gotten even less than this advice, if you'd crashed our party, because I would have greeted you at the door like everyone else, found out who you were, and told you to leave.

p. 114-115
For Kelty, a recursive public is “a group of individuals who, more often than not, only associate with each other because of a shared concern for the conditions of possibility of their own association (i.e., the Internet)” (2005, 205). ... Thus, these recursive publics, such as Kelty’s “geeks,” are brought together not because of a common literary or political interest, but to negotiate the definitions and ensure the existence of the group itself. The Otherkin, I argue, fit firmly into this category, as their online discourse so often revolves around defining and clarifying the notion of Otherkinity (a key facet of Laycock’s “nomos”).

This is interesting and, I think, apposite (sadly). Definitely so now, especially if you look at Tumblr. I think it was less the single most dominant feature in earlier times, but it's also true that on Elven Realities, TirNanOc, and Elfinkind alike (to name some major fora) there were anything from discussions to flamewars on topics like "so what are elves really anyway? what characteristics do you have to have to 'count'?"

p. 115
The Otherkin depend on a foundation of metaphysics and mythology to exist as a possible way of being-human-in-the-world.

*sigh* So right after (in the progression of this paper, anyway) your moment of questioning whether you might have got it all wrong to start with... your conclusion is "nope, it's fine" and go ahead with your "being-human-in-the-world" anyway. Why not just "being-in-the-world" -- which, by the way, does appear several times, both in quotes and in your own use?

p. 116
I was attending PantheaCon, perhaps one of the largest corporeally situated Otherkin publics.

("Otherkin publics" roughly means "people aware of the existence of Otherkin".) Despite the flyers, I doubt the majority have still yet even heard of us; even those who saw them may not have understood what they were looking at.

p. 117
When I was first discovering the Otherkin thing it was less about—Yes, you had people who very literally believed they were blahblahblah thing, but there was a much more sort of personal mythology feel about it, and that’s the thing that always really resonated with me. And as time went on it felt more and more like it was people trying to literally prove that Otherkin exist in a literal manner in the same way that for example transgender people exist.

(Quote from Lupa; emphasis mine.) Gee, no kidding.

p. 142
In a discussion between Zardoa and Arwen (another Silver Elf) about whether Elves can indeed perform magic, Zardoa wonders, “Not that we have to accept everything Tolkien writes about us, but who really has done a better job?”

No, Arwen was one of the Elf Queen's Daughters, as you apparently know because you say so on p. 145 (see next item). This and the mystery man from Thresholds being a "former" Silver Elf make me wonder if he's mistaking the name for a type, as people sometimes do, or the nature of the group (properly only Zardoa and Silver Flame, as already mentioned).

I suspect the "discussion" referred to here may be from one of the books of Correspondence Between the Silver Elves and the Founders of the Elf Queen's Daughters.

p. 145
Two founding members of the EQD, under the names Arwen and Elanor (two Elven characters from LOTR)...

Bzzt. Elanor is an Elvish word (the "star-sun", a small yellow flower), but the character who bears the name is one of Samwise Gamgee and Rosie Cotton's children.

p. 153
In early 1990, a University of Kentucky student known online as R’ykandar Korra’ti—who had previously been in contact with the Silver Elves—posted a plan to start an email listserv for people who identified as Elves on the Usenet site alt.pagan and a few other newsgroups. Korra’ti says, “Before there was a list, there was a fair amount of private email going back and forth between myself and people who had responded to my newsgroup posts ... There was also a little group of us partly online but mostly offline going back to the 1986-1987ish timeframe” (Scribner 2012, 25).

Dara is not among his "interlocutors"; the quoted material is from the Otherkin Timeline. I don't know where he got the idea she had been in contact with the Silver Elves prior to starting Elfinkind Digest. For one thing, it contradicts the archives of Elfinkind Digest itself -- the below, from issue #49, is some two and a half months after the first digest was sent on March 26, 1990:

Date: Friday, 8-June-1990 18:56:50
From: R'ykandar Korra'ti <phoenix@ms.uky.edu>
Subject: A California group does not impress.

     I recently received word of a group calling itself "The Silver Elves" in California, and sent letter with a SASE to find out what they were about. This was some time ago (some weeks); I got a reply back today.

So I don't think this is true unless 1. she just forgot she had contacted them prior to this time (which I doubt) or 2. by "some time ago (some weeks)" we may infer the aforementioned 2 1/2 months or more, beyond the beginning of the list. I can't actually find evidence of posting about the group on alt.pagan in "early 1990"; the first I found was 9/24/1991, in which she states it "has not been posted about in public before" (although she has "Elfinkind unite!" in her sig block prior to that).

As an aside, having myself subscribed to the Silver Elves' letters for a while in the 90s, getting oneself their mailing list does not really constitute "being in contact" with them, unless maybe one has an unusual closer correspondence going on. (I'm far more "in contact" with them now than then, by virtue of being a member of a couple of Facebook groups they run.)

p. 153
The listserv became Elfinkind Digest, which still runs today.

Assuming "today" is the completion of this dissertation in February 2019 (see footnote 85, p. 269), no, by quite a bit; the final digest was dated a year prior, February 2, 2018. Perhaps this bit was written earlier on and not re-checked.

p. 155
Changeling was the third in a series of pencil and paper role-playing game released by White Wolf Gaming Studio, which also included Vampire: The Masquerade (1991), and Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1992).

Incorrect. It was the fifth; Mage: the Ascension and Wraith: the Oblivion came after Werewolf.

p. 183
Nefertari: You mentioned Ezcoatl and House Midnight - that alone puts you above the random griefer :)
Devin: I’ve been meeting up with her at local Otherkin meetups for a while now.

I don't know who the vampire "Nefertari" may be, but I suspect "House Midnight" is House Eclipse, which is in D.C. (Cf. item from p. 44-45, above.)

p. 321-322
If Reddit can trace its roots to USENET and 4chan, then Tumblr finds its ideological base in LiveJournal, a blogging platform popular in the mid 2000s, “particularly beloved by teenage emos looking to spill their souls out to a sympathetic Web” (Dewey 2014).

...O.o  Maybe in spirit, but a lot of Tumblr users have seemingly never, or barely, heard of LiveJournal or of the features of that sort of platform, being too young or maybe not even born when it was really in its heyday. People 18-24 on Tumblr in 2018 were born in 1994-2000; to have had an LJ account in, say, 2005, at least assuming they weren't lying about their age, they would need to have been born no later than 1992. (Anecdotally, suggestions to move to Dreamwidth after whatever Tumblr's latest transgression is are typically met with blank stares, and people on Pillowfort seem uncomfortable or unfamiliar with features that have more similarity to LJ than to Tumblr.)

p. 322
After a crackdown on content (see note 13) users fled from the LiveJournal, many resettling in Tumblr.

("the" LiveJournal? I feel like he never had an account there himself.)

Note 13, p. 36, is totally irrelevant to this; he may mean note 79, page 234, which talks about the Warriors for Innocence and "Strikethrough" on LiveJournal in 2007.

p. 329-330
Perhaps the most recognizable [initialism], nsfw, stands for Not Safe For Work, and refers to anything pornographic. In Tumblr, banning nsfw content serves three purposes: 1) it effectively makes the blog and “all ages” space free of adult content, 2) it avoids the “triggering” content that some of the more graphic Tumblr porn can include, and 3) it prevents that blog from being spammed with pornbots, the algorithmic ads for porn Tumblelogs that have become a problem on Tumblr (see note 11).

(Emphasis mine. As with the previous item, note 11, p. 32, has nothing to do with this topic. It is discussed on p. 322, but there is no related footnote there.)

....Bro, do you even Tumbl? Nothing prevents porn-bots; nothing. Certainly not the mere act of putting a string like “Do not interact if aphobe, terf, map, nsfw, or ddlg.” in a blog description or info post.

p. 353
We discovered that Otherkin is a “human kind,” like “homosexual” or “lycanthrope,” but only recently made available as a way to be-human-in-the-world by elven collectives inspired and awakened by the virtual space of Tolkein’s Middle Earth.

....*siiiigh*

p. 361

Omni: We apologize for the shit we cause XD
We’re only hooman

In hindsight [...] this assertion of humanity makes perfect sense: humanness is a necessary part of being Otherkin. As Lady [Many Tails] once had to remind an unruly group chat: “Those with Otherkin identities are and should always be understood as HUMAN!” To deny the physical fact of the human body would be to deny empirical scientific proof, undermining all other arguments for Otherkinity. Further, it would be to deny their own Otherkinity: a wolf in
the body of a wolf is just a wolf, not a therian. An elf in an elf’s body is simply an elf, not Otherkin. The human body is part of the construction. The elf at the PantheaCon party was wrong.

Aaaaand, *facepalm*
The indented bit is a quote from the end of a Facebook chat transcript, which he had mistakenly left open to the other participants for several days after he thought it was done, who quickly started joking among themselves. They pitied Devin, in his attempt to write a dissertation, that their arguments and silliness meant he would probably come away having learned little or nothing.

To me as an insider, the spelling in "we're only hooman", which is often used in dersisive comments about humans, marks it as a joke. It is not an "assertion of humanity" except inasmuch as it acknowledges we (broadly speaking) have human "wetware" and so are subject to its failings; it is an assertion of personhood if anything -- that all sentient beings, if they are not superintelligent or omnipotent or what have you, do dumb things sometimes.

Without more context I cannot say for certain, but I read the same in the quote from "Lady Many Tails": it pushes back against the disturbing ideas sometimes seen from anti-kin that if we're going to claim to not be human, then we are waiving "human rights" and they are free to treat us as cruelly as they see fit: if you are not-human, other-than-human, you are not still an equal person; you can only be sub-human. (Which raises some questions about what such people think is appropriate treatment of animals, not to mention hypothetical non-human sapient beings such as intelligent aliens...)

A wolf in a wolf's body is just a wolf, yes; but for example, there are and have been those among the Otherkin who say their bodies are elves' bodies because an elf is in it, QED (which might perhaps be thought circular, but then, go not to the elves for counsel, for they shall say both no and yes!). To say that no serious Otherkin claims a physical or body origin is a "no true Scotsman" problem. While there have been statements on Tumblr to the effect that the community wholly rejects, and has always wholly rejected, anyone who describes themselves as "physically Otherkin" or who even has ideas of a genetic cause or factor in being Otherkin, which I think are (among other causes, probably) partly backlash against "p-shifters" and a product of the quest for legitimacy through "scientistic" means as described in this dissertation, the fact is that such ideas repeatedly recur and have even been held by a variety of folks who are/were moderators of major Otherkin spaces like Elfinkind Digest and Otherkin.net (that is, not solely fringe members). It can take various forms, such as cataloging physiological oddities and concluding one is in a genetic minority that might have admixture from non-Homo-sapiens; family legends of a changeling or Faery ancestor, or being "Fae-touched" that is then passed down in a bloodline; a conjecture that Otherkin may have some gene or group of genes that is not a cause in itself in the way that genes cause eye color but makes the incarnation of a non-human soul easier or more likely; ideas about changes in gene expression rather than their presence or absence; or just "I am an Elf here and now" (a view possibly more common amongst the Russian/Slavic "modern elves" that generally do not intersect with the North American/UK Otherkin community, but not absent here). See, for example, "genetics" mentioned as a possible reason to call oneself Otherkin on the older "What is an Otherkin?" article or "appeal to biology" in the later "What are Otherkin?".

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last updated 5/26/2020