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marythefan and I have had this running argument over the relative queerness of slash, and here's the thing. I was entirely wrong, and she was entirely right. Now, with the fervor of the convert (the very lazy, conflict-avoidant, cognitively muddled convert...), I want to try to make this idea clear to people like me, who think it sounds like bullshit at first. Hopefully it will take somewhat less effort than moving in with each one of you individually and talking for five years. *g*
There's this thing, this community and tradition, that is slash fandom. But there's also this thing, this somewhat less organized but no less creative and articulate and engaged group of people who are queer media fans. (By this you may wonder whether I mean "queer fans of media" or "fans of queer media." That's not an easy question to answer, but I'll try to get back to it in a second, okay? Stick with me for the moment.) It's a big Venn Diagram: there's slash space and queer space, and then a whole lot of people (like myself) who identify as both, who are entrenched in both perspectives and both communities. And many (most?) of us discovered and entered both communities simultaneously, which is why I think it's so easy for us to assume that the two groups are identical. They aren't.
It's easy to see from one direction, really. The world is FULL of queer people who are science fiction geeks and comic book geeks and pop culture junkies, but who don't give a hot damn about slash fandom. We all know that -- I mean, surely we all know that! Some of them just think it's kind of an oddball thing to be into, some think it's fine and dandy but not their cup of tea, and some of them are pretty suspicious of slash for a multitude of reasons. But they are definitely NOT slashers, and they more often than not don't really understand or appreciate what slash is. They are outsiders to what we do as slashers. They know that, and we know that.
What's harder, it seems like, for some slashers to recognize is that it's exactly the same from the other angle. Being a slasher doesn't mean you necessarily have the slightest insight into, or interest in, the queer community. The acafan and meta-heavy wing of slash fandom has been saying this for some time: that slashers don't necessarily write about queerness, they write about things that relate largely to straight femaleness. Actually, I added in the "necessarily" -- that's often left out of the position statement, which I think is vastly more correct if you include that one word. There ARE slashers who write about queerness -- both straight and queer slashers who do so. Some slash does that. Just not *all* slash.
So, if a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) has been spilled over what slash is -- what does it mean, separate from that, to have queer fandom? Essentially, I would say it's a space within Fandom that looks at texts for what they say about what it means to be queer. Sometimes that means queer subtext -- sometimes it means queer characters -- sometimes it means texts that challenge social norms about sex and gender in ways that are relevant to queer experience. But in order to do any of this, to participate in a legitimately queer fandom...I'm not going to be the border police and say, yes, you have to be queer -- but you have to have some legitimate, real sense of what "queer experience" could mean. In the majority of cases, yes, that's going to come about because you identify as queer yourself; it's normally going to be lived experience, not the vicarious experience of the ally.
I can already feel the objections some people are going to make to this. Queer people disagree with each other all the time! Gay men have experiences and concerns that are different from those of lesbians! Bisexual people have experiences that are different from both! Bisexual people who live within the queer community have a different perspective than bisexual people in heterosexual marriages! Transgendered people are a whole separate thing! Race! Class! Nationality! Religion! Individual difference! Okay -- yes. "Queer experience" is a false singular; the reality is, of course, "queer experiences." And that's what makes queer fandom fun and exciting -- if we all agreed on what images and media and positions spoke most clearly to us, there'd be no point in talking about it at all. Diversity, huzzah!
However, for the most part, what you can say is that people who identify as queer do so because they feel like their lives are different than they would be if they were straight. People who *don't* believe that are very unlikely to take on the label of queer or be very interested in queer analysis. How different? In what way? How should we use that difference as consumers and producers of media? What are the political uses and limits of the idea of difference? Those are the conversations that go on in queer fandom. That's what we talk about.
Those are not questions that are about slash. Slashers, on an individual level, may participate in queer fandom, and they may bring what's going on over there back into slash. In fact, I think that's been happening at a good clip for the last ten years, leading to an immense surge in fresh, interesting voices in slash that largely weren't there Back In the Day.
Slash is largely about pleasure. That's not to denigrate it as merely porn or merely entertainment: pleasure, particularly female pleasure, is a powerful and politically-charged concept. We still live in a society that is profoundly ambivalent about female sexual pleasure: we're fascinated by it and we resent and fear it as well. For women to take full responsibility for who they are as sexual beings is not unimportant, and for women to insist on varieties of romantic fantasy and erotic stimulation that speak to *them,* not to the people they've been informed they should be -- that matter. Slash matters.
But queerness isn't about female pleasure and female pleasure isn't about queerness. It's just that there are a lot of us for whom the two are related in various ways, and a lot of those very people have been hugely influental in shaping *both* the slash community and the queer fannish community, so that there's a constant flow of ideas and dialogue between the two that can even obscure the fact that it's a conversation *between* rather than a conversation *among* or *within.*
Hopefully this provides some context for some of the things I've said lately, both here and incathexys's journal, about my discomfort with the way the slash community often deals with gayness -- the OMG, THAT'S SO GAY! discourse. Because, look, here's the thing: slashers invented slashiness. Not y'all personally, but the current generation of slashers inherited a tradition and shaped it and refined it and evolved it, and we who are slashers, who are within that community, are the sole and unequivocal arbiters of what "slashy" means. Not that we always agree with each other -- again, half the fun! But it would be flatly ridiculous for someone to come in from outside the slash community and tell us what's slashy and what's not. We know slash. That's our turf as slashers.
Queerness is the turf of queer fans, not of slashers. You know who gets to say what's so totally gay? Gay people. Not that they will always agree with each other! Not that they will always *disagree* with what straight people think. But the thing is, people who are saturated in queerness and spend our lives thinking about the queer issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO GAY.
Doesn't that just make sense? I mean, I have Jewish friends and have studied Judaism and truly admire the religion and the culture in many ways -- but as much as an ally as I consider myself, I would never in a bazillion years blithely assume I could announce what was a so very Jewish way to think, act, be, believe. And if I did, if I wrote in my livejournal about how X character's actions were just, my God! SO JEWISH, you know?!? -- particularly when the character isn't canonically Jewish, but just pings my shiksa sense of what "Jewishness" means...I would expect my Jewish readers to look askance at me. It would be, at best, a weird thing to say, and at worst, an immensely insensitive thing to say. Even if they agreed with me that there was something Jewishy about that moment, I think they'd be justified in wondering wtf I was thinking when I said that.
That's how I often feel when I see people who are entrenched in the slash community but not in the queer fan community making similar statements about queerness. I get that slash fans are generally natural allies; I adore many of my straight sisters in slash fandom, and I believe that most of them truly are innocent of homophobia. But it makes me feel weird to listen to people who are allies, who are interested, but who are outsiders who possess privilege in this situation, pretend to operate from a position of insiderness. It's kind of patronizing, just like it would be if I charged around having all the answers about what, say, Asian-Americans were really like. I might be right in many cases, or I might be dead wrong -- more likely, it's oversimplifying to say yes, I got it right or no, I got it wrong. But whatever, the point is, I wouldn't do it because it's an inappropriate position for me as a white American to take. If I want to talk about Asian-Americanness -- say, because I'm writing a CSI story about Archie or a Buffy/Satsu epic -- I would listen a lot more than I talked. I would try to be faithful to what I heard people whose experience it actually was saying.
That so many slash fans believe that advice can't possibly apply to them -- freaks me out, actually. Being a slasher is not a Gay Ghetto Pass. It's one thing to say, you know, for the purposes of my stories, I don't need to know about queerness, because these characters aren't "really" queer, they're "really" reflections of my experience, on which I am an expert. I have mixed feelings about that statment, but I can appreciate the intellectual honesty of it.
My sense of compromise grinds to a halt when slash fandom claims the authority to parse not what is slashy, but what is gay. If you care about queer experience, do what other power majorities do when they want to learn about and be involved with a minority group: listen, listen some more, and when you speak, speak from a position of someone who is a guest in other peoples' reality, not from a false sense of insiderness or queer credibility. If you don't care about queer experience, that's okay, too. Just don't say that you do. Don't pronounce about gayness as a lark if the reality is that gayness is irrelevant to what you care about as a slasher -- which is slashiness.
marythefan and I have had this running argument over the relative queerness of slash, and here's the thing. I was entirely wrong, and she was entirely right. Now, with the fervor of the convert (the very lazy, conflict-avoidant, cognitively muddled convert...), I want to try to make this idea clear to people like me, who think it sounds like bullshit at first. Hopefully it will take somewhat less effort than moving in with each one of you individually and talking for five years. *g*There's this thing, this community and tradition, that is slash fandom. But there's also this thing, this somewhat less organized but no less creative and articulate and engaged group of people who are queer media fans. (By this you may wonder whether I mean "queer fans of media" or "fans of queer media." That's not an easy question to answer, but I'll try to get back to it in a second, okay? Stick with me for the moment.) It's a big Venn Diagram: there's slash space and queer space, and then a whole lot of people (like myself) who identify as both, who are entrenched in both perspectives and both communities. And many (most?) of us discovered and entered both communities simultaneously, which is why I think it's so easy for us to assume that the two groups are identical. They aren't.
It's easy to see from one direction, really. The world is FULL of queer people who are science fiction geeks and comic book geeks and pop culture junkies, but who don't give a hot damn about slash fandom. We all know that -- I mean, surely we all know that! Some of them just think it's kind of an oddball thing to be into, some think it's fine and dandy but not their cup of tea, and some of them are pretty suspicious of slash for a multitude of reasons. But they are definitely NOT slashers, and they more often than not don't really understand or appreciate what slash is. They are outsiders to what we do as slashers. They know that, and we know that.
What's harder, it seems like, for some slashers to recognize is that it's exactly the same from the other angle. Being a slasher doesn't mean you necessarily have the slightest insight into, or interest in, the queer community. The acafan and meta-heavy wing of slash fandom has been saying this for some time: that slashers don't necessarily write about queerness, they write about things that relate largely to straight femaleness. Actually, I added in the "necessarily" -- that's often left out of the position statement, which I think is vastly more correct if you include that one word. There ARE slashers who write about queerness -- both straight and queer slashers who do so. Some slash does that. Just not *all* slash.
So, if a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) has been spilled over what slash is -- what does it mean, separate from that, to have queer fandom? Essentially, I would say it's a space within Fandom that looks at texts for what they say about what it means to be queer. Sometimes that means queer subtext -- sometimes it means queer characters -- sometimes it means texts that challenge social norms about sex and gender in ways that are relevant to queer experience. But in order to do any of this, to participate in a legitimately queer fandom...I'm not going to be the border police and say, yes, you have to be queer -- but you have to have some legitimate, real sense of what "queer experience" could mean. In the majority of cases, yes, that's going to come about because you identify as queer yourself; it's normally going to be lived experience, not the vicarious experience of the ally.
I can already feel the objections some people are going to make to this. Queer people disagree with each other all the time! Gay men have experiences and concerns that are different from those of lesbians! Bisexual people have experiences that are different from both! Bisexual people who live within the queer community have a different perspective than bisexual people in heterosexual marriages! Transgendered people are a whole separate thing! Race! Class! Nationality! Religion! Individual difference! Okay -- yes. "Queer experience" is a false singular; the reality is, of course, "queer experiences." And that's what makes queer fandom fun and exciting -- if we all agreed on what images and media and positions spoke most clearly to us, there'd be no point in talking about it at all. Diversity, huzzah!
However, for the most part, what you can say is that people who identify as queer do so because they feel like their lives are different than they would be if they were straight. People who *don't* believe that are very unlikely to take on the label of queer or be very interested in queer analysis. How different? In what way? How should we use that difference as consumers and producers of media? What are the political uses and limits of the idea of difference? Those are the conversations that go on in queer fandom. That's what we talk about.
Those are not questions that are about slash. Slashers, on an individual level, may participate in queer fandom, and they may bring what's going on over there back into slash. In fact, I think that's been happening at a good clip for the last ten years, leading to an immense surge in fresh, interesting voices in slash that largely weren't there Back In the Day.
Slash is largely about pleasure. That's not to denigrate it as merely porn or merely entertainment: pleasure, particularly female pleasure, is a powerful and politically-charged concept. We still live in a society that is profoundly ambivalent about female sexual pleasure: we're fascinated by it and we resent and fear it as well. For women to take full responsibility for who they are as sexual beings is not unimportant, and for women to insist on varieties of romantic fantasy and erotic stimulation that speak to *them,* not to the people they've been informed they should be -- that matter. Slash matters.
But queerness isn't about female pleasure and female pleasure isn't about queerness. It's just that there are a lot of us for whom the two are related in various ways, and a lot of those very people have been hugely influental in shaping *both* the slash community and the queer fannish community, so that there's a constant flow of ideas and dialogue between the two that can even obscure the fact that it's a conversation *between* rather than a conversation *among* or *within.*
Hopefully this provides some context for some of the things I've said lately, both here and in
cathexys's journal, about my discomfort with the way the slash community often deals with gayness -- the OMG, THAT'S SO GAY! discourse. Because, look, here's the thing: slashers invented slashiness. Not y'all personally, but the current generation of slashers inherited a tradition and shaped it and refined it and evolved it, and we who are slashers, who are within that community, are the sole and unequivocal arbiters of what "slashy" means. Not that we always agree with each other -- again, half the fun! But it would be flatly ridiculous for someone to come in from outside the slash community and tell us what's slashy and what's not. We know slash. That's our turf as slashers.Queerness is the turf of queer fans, not of slashers. You know who gets to say what's so totally gay? Gay people. Not that they will always agree with each other! Not that they will always *disagree* with what straight people think. But the thing is, people who are saturated in queerness and spend our lives thinking about the queer issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO GAY.
Doesn't that just make sense? I mean, I have Jewish friends and have studied Judaism and truly admire the religion and the culture in many ways -- but as much as an ally as I consider myself, I would never in a bazillion years blithely assume I could announce what was a so very Jewish way to think, act, be, believe. And if I did, if I wrote in my livejournal about how X character's actions were just, my God! SO JEWISH, you know?!? -- particularly when the character isn't canonically Jewish, but just pings my shiksa sense of what "Jewishness" means...I would expect my Jewish readers to look askance at me. It would be, at best, a weird thing to say, and at worst, an immensely insensitive thing to say. Even if they agreed with me that there was something Jewishy about that moment, I think they'd be justified in wondering wtf I was thinking when I said that.
That's how I often feel when I see people who are entrenched in the slash community but not in the queer fan community making similar statements about queerness. I get that slash fans are generally natural allies; I adore many of my straight sisters in slash fandom, and I believe that most of them truly are innocent of homophobia. But it makes me feel weird to listen to people who are allies, who are interested, but who are outsiders who possess privilege in this situation, pretend to operate from a position of insiderness. It's kind of patronizing, just like it would be if I charged around having all the answers about what, say, Asian-Americans were really like. I might be right in many cases, or I might be dead wrong -- more likely, it's oversimplifying to say yes, I got it right or no, I got it wrong. But whatever, the point is, I wouldn't do it because it's an inappropriate position for me as a white American to take. If I want to talk about Asian-Americanness -- say, because I'm writing a CSI story about Archie or a Buffy/Satsu epic -- I would listen a lot more than I talked. I would try to be faithful to what I heard people whose experience it actually was saying.
That so many slash fans believe that advice can't possibly apply to them -- freaks me out, actually. Being a slasher is not a Gay Ghetto Pass. It's one thing to say, you know, for the purposes of my stories, I don't need to know about queerness, because these characters aren't "really" queer, they're "really" reflections of my experience, on which I am an expert. I have mixed feelings about that statment, but I can appreciate the intellectual honesty of it.
My sense of compromise grinds to a halt when slash fandom claims the authority to parse not what is slashy, but what is gay. If you care about queer experience, do what other power majorities do when they want to learn about and be involved with a minority group: listen, listen some more, and when you speak, speak from a position of someone who is a guest in other peoples' reality, not from a false sense of insiderness or queer credibility. If you don't care about queer experience, that's okay, too. Just don't say that you do. Don't pronounce about gayness as a lark if the reality is that gayness is irrelevant to what you care about as a slasher -- which is slashiness.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 07:39 pm (UTC)From:I liked your essay, and I really tried to understand all the facets of your thesis; if I'm a little off, please feel free to correct me. Also, please overlook any misused terminology -- I freely admit I'm an outsider to both slashiness and queerness.
At the risk of offending you (or anyone else), I think you're worrying too much about the "genuineness" of experience. There's the old writing cliche that you should write what you know, but that can't ever be taken literally. Without writing what one doesn't know, some great works of fiction would never have been created (e.g., pretty much all sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fiction is largely made up by the writer).
It almost seems, by your argument, that only a queer writer could write something that captures the essence of what it is to be queer. (You know who gets to say what's so totally gay? Gay people.) Extending that logic, I could then counter that no gay person could ever write a story that effectively captures the essence of what it is to be straight; because while gay people may live in a world that is largely straight, they'll never have to face the struggles of forming a relationship with a member of the opposite sex (for something that's ostensibly necessary to propagate the species, one might think it should be a tad bit easier to form a working relationship between a man and woman). But I would never agree that a gay could never write a story that captures the essence of a hetero relationship, and I find it borderline offensive that you're suggesting the opposite is true.
So I have to question the major premise of your essay -- that slashers can authoritatively say what's slashy, but only those who are queer can authoritatively say what's queer. On many levels, I agree with that wholeheartedly. But rather than get overly protective in their attempt to own their own world view and minority status, wouldn't it be wiser for those in the queer part of your Venn diagram to acknowledge that, hey... just because someone isn't gay doesn't mean they'll never understand at least some aspects of what it is to be gay. Some things about the human experience are universal -- the need for companionship, the pain of rejection, the joy of new relationships, the fear of being surrounded by hostile out-groups. I simply think you prioritized the differences between the groups without properly contemplating the similarities. And by drawing a line in the sand and saying, "Slashers, we like some of your writing, but don't ever think you'll fully understand us," is every bit as offensive and misguided as any slasher who says, "I write stories with gay relationships, and therefore I understand what it is to be gay."
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 07:48 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 08:04 pm (UTC)From:For example:
But the thing is, people who are saturated in queerness and spend our lives thinking about the queer issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO GAY.
Let's move past whether or not this has to do with writing (since only part of my response was specific to writing). As I wrote, the major premise of the essay seems to be that slashers can authoritatively say what's slashy (presumably when discussing the writing genre of slash), but only those who are queer can authoritatively say what's queer. And again, as I wrote, I think that completely dismisses the fact that gay/straight, black/white, rich/poor share so many universal experiences.
The logic of the sentence I just copied, above, can be extrapolated to say, "But the thing is, people who are saturated in heterosexuality and spend our lives thinking about the hetero issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO NOT GAY." And I can't be the only one who has a problem with the logic in that sentence.
But if this whole LJ entry (and a years-long running argument) was simply in response to the merit of non-queers being able to say, "oh my God, that is so gay," then forgive me. I read a greater substantive issue into the entry. I'll just go away now. Still... it was a damned good LJ entry. It's been awhile since someone not on my flist inspired a reply of that length.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 08:30 pm (UTC)From:My immediate problem with the logic of that sentence is that it's not an equivalent situation. Heterosexuality is a majority culture. And a minority culture that's surrounded by and part of a majority culture - and has to know how to navigate it - can speak about that majority culture in a way that those in the majority aren't able to speak about the minority.
In essense, your theoretical statement makes no sense because queer people are saturated in heterosexality and perforce must spend our lives thinking about het issues, right along with heterosexuals.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 09:54 pm (UTC)From:My immediate problem with the logic of that sentence is that it's not an equivalent situation. Heterosexuality is a majority culture. And a minority culture that's surrounded by and part of a majority culture - and has to know how to navigate it - can speak about that majority culture in a way that those in the majority aren't able to speak about the minority.
*nods* Think about the average gay person. Odds are that they have straight parents, straight friends and co-workers, maybe straight siblings. By the time they're teenagers they will probably have watched thousands of hours of tv and movies featuring only straight relationships. Depending on their appearance, they may have to deal with most people they meet assuming they're straight until told differently. As a minority constantly surrounded by straight people and heterocentric media, yeah, how could they *not* know more about straight culture than the average straight person knows about gay culture?
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 08:46 pm (UTC)From:But this is not about writing so much as it's about the way people react to things on TV or in films or other books, and the things they point out as being slashy or as being gay. So saying that a moment between two characters pings you as slashy is one thing, but saying that a character's hairstyle or whatever is proof positive that he's gay is something else entirely.