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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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 10:30 pm (UTC)From:I am definitely uncomfortable with this theory that writing for others, even in a close community, is tantamount to some kind of sexual activity. Partly because "providing sexual pleasure to... women" is not even on my list of objectives when I write.
Basically, I think it's really presumptuous to assign such an... intimate motive to slash writers, such an intimate relationship between the writers and their readers. As I asked before, why slashers and not some other group of writers and readers? (Presumably the immediacy of two-way communication, but I could be wrong about that.)
I'm obviously nowhere in your theory, since I'm something of a gay man-type person, but I'm usually not under the impression that, "Exploring the subtext between two men who were this close to queer in canon" is an unusual motive to slash. :0/
Can we talk? Woman to woman--
Date: 2008-02-15 01:07 am (UTC)From:As for the ORIGINAL argument, I do not see my slash as having sex with ANYONE. I write sex scenes when they are conducive to the PLOT. You know, 'plot'--it's that thing most slashers ignore for a quick nut or some cheap feedback.
I write because I have a story to tell--it isn't about the sex and most GOOD slash writers will say the same thing. Mark writes G/B because he identifies with the characters, I write it because I grew up seeing gay teens and adults who thirsted for some kind of support, some book to read that showed two men or women can be in love and that showed that the feelings they had was NORMAL, denied that simple thing. I dedicate myself to writing solid, well thought out plots because I care about people like Mark who had to grow up feeling displaced because every book they read that had a gay character in it was either suicidal, homicidal, or batshit insane.
Now on a personal note, I suggest you learn to keep your mouth shut when you don't know what you're talking about and if you shoot your mouth off, learn to accept the fact that you're wrong and move along. I dislike people like you intensely and I'm going to tell you why; you pick on people too polite or too shellshocked by your ugly attitude because it gives you a cheap thrill. You pat yourself on the back like you've actually accomplished something. Well lady, and I use that term loosely, you are nothing but a bully and before you take me on, do your research. The only reason I am even bothering with you is because Mark happens to be my friend. I've known and written with him for ten years now and I guaren-damn-tee that if you accuse him of being anything but the decent, kind, loving, and absolutely fantastic writer and human being that he is all hell will rain down on you because every great fanfiction author you can name off the top of your tiny little brain--we're talking the best of the best--including myself, considers this man to be a personal friend.
In other words, you got something more to say, then say it to us.
---JA Ingram, formerly JA Chapman
Re: Can we talk? Woman to woman--
Date: 2008-02-15 01:45 am (UTC)From:Re: Can we talk? Woman to woman--
Date: 2008-02-15 03:36 am (UTC)From:I'm recusing myself from this entire thing. Mark, in my opinion you are right.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 02:14 am (UTC)From:I find this conversation confusing and interesting all at once. I can't imagine most people wouldn't be made a little uncomfortable if they were told someone got off on something they'd written, or intimate details about how turned on they got.
And frankly, I very well imagine most porn writers write either to
a-) explore character dynamics inside a sexual relationship and/or to further plot
or
b-) To get themselves off.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-22 01:49 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-26 02:54 am (UTC)From:I write porn, yes. I like people to say they found my porn hot, yes. (Who doesn't love a good, "...I'll be in my bunk" icon or comment on a fic entry? Come on, now.)
However, I write said porn for myself. Not so much to 'get myself off', but because it's something I felt like writing.
Recognition is always good- like most authors, I'm a complete whore for attention to my work, especially should it be of the positive kind- but the notion that someone is using my work for wank material makes me squirm uncomfortably. Let's not even get into how freaked I would be if someone told me about said wanking. Bleck.
I mean, sure, I'm not gonna be all up in arms about, "NO ONE MAY GET OFF WHILE THINKING ABOUT PORN I WROTE!" because that's just fucking ridiculous, and also way more hypocritical than I'm comfortable with. Someone wants to think about my fic while getting off? More power to 'em; I just don't want to hear about it, 'cos that wasn't my intent.
Urgh, now I'm all squicked out. It's kind of like the line I have in real life... I work as a waitress in a pub, and I'm fine with our usually-soused clientèle... 'complimenting my looks', let's say, with a certain amount of vulgarity being fine. However, when they start getting incredibly graphic or adding gesture to word, that's when I call a bouncer.
It's a line, you know?
(...God, can you tell today is my first day off in a week? I'm so incoherent and all over the place, it's not even funny. My apologies for rambling.)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-26 02:57 am (UTC)From:Do what you want, but man. It's. When you get off with a vibrator are you having sex with the guy who made it?
no subject
Date: 2008-02-26 03:19 am (UTC)From:And the line is big thing. Kind of shift-y too, I guess. Like, I can deal with people I know getting a bit more graphic about their enjoyment of my fic. Not terribly graphic- because, seriously? My best friends getting friendly with their sex aid of choice to the tune of something I wrote is pretty fucking high up on my Do Not Want To Think About, Ever Ever Ever list- but a complete stranger can't say the same things my best friend could, you know?
Like at work, the people I'm comfortable with- the head bouncer and the other waitresses and a couple of the bartenders- have more leeway. I beg Barry- our head bouncer- and Steve- one of the bartenders- for massages all the time, and have no problem with hugging them or them picking me up and twirling me around or goosing me or whatever. The customers do not get to touch unless I initiate it, be it pat or the shoulder or hug or whatever. The line, she is arbitrary.
Heh. I think I just veered off onto OT Lane; let me head back.
To answer your semi-rhetorical last observation/question: No, you are not. Also: Ew. Also also: Perfect way to sum up, with real world application, why the whole idea writing porn=having sex with people who read it creeps me out so damn much.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 03:20 am (UTC)From:I've seen similar arguments about the "queerness" of women slashers exchanging erotic fanfic with each other; I actually found them interesting as intellectual exercises, but I wouldn't endorse these theories as accurate descriptions at the level of individual experience. I certainly don't see my own readerly interactions with fan authors as sexual. And when I'm in the middle of reading a slash story, I'm not really thinking about the author at all. If anything, slash fandom strikes me as a strangely *innocent* space, despite all the porn and the frank discussions of sexuality in lj posts. It's like a never-ending slumber party.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 02:50 am (UTC)From:Is anyone seriously advocating these theories as accurate descriptions at the level of individual experience?
no subject
Date: 2008-02-21 03:33 am (UTC)From: