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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: 2008-02-13 06:48 pm (UTC)From:I think the parallel that makes it easiest for me to understand is how irritating I used to find it, back in the dark ages when I was an undergraduate, when a gay male friend of mine used to take for granted that because he was gay and male he couldn't be sexist, he could speak for women, he got a default feminist pass, and everything that went along with that. Because, just, no. Yes, he experienced gender and sexuality based discrimination and assumptions in the world, and yes, he had to deal with men sexually and romantically. That did not give him a feminist pass.
Hell, I don't even claim queer cred, even though I do identify as queer, because I live such a heteronormative life that I don't experience any substantive discrimination, and I'm not part of the community.
(Your Jewish example works for me, too, because I remember trying to explain to somebody how Matt Parkman on Heroes is obviously Jewish in so many ways (though not canonically so), and yet Charlotte Charles on Pushing Daisies and Matt Albie, both canonically Jewish, just *aren't* played very Jewish. And I couldn't, because it's a very internal, difficult to describe thing, and doesn't come down to stereotypes but my internal vibe -- and as you say, I'm sure I completely disagree with practically every other Jew out there, because that's what it's like to have opinions about these things, but still, my arguably controversial-if-anyone-else-cared gut feeling is an insider's gut feeling.)
Slash *can* be gay, but isn't necessarily. I think that necessarily you added is really very valuable.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 06:52 pm (UTC)From:And I like how you separate the two, because I think they are different things, though, I suppose some of the problem is that more and more fans *are* writing slash as queer rather than slash as feminist.
I said a few times yesterday (not wholly tongue-in-cheek) that in the olden days of WNG that problem never occurred (now there were other, related problems, like colonization, of course), but the assigning identity rather than reading subtextual relations didn't happen in the same way...
So, while I think you can theoretically separate queerness and slashiness, I think it's harder to do in discussions or stories, because the two do intersect quite a bit. Moreover, I'm not sure that caring about gayness is necessarily sufficient to make someone not be a slasher first at times...this is much too messy a field in identity politics, theoretical interests, and fannish actions...
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 06:52 pm (UTC)From:This was gorgeously articulated, and *absolutely* needed to be said.
thank you.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:06 pm (UTC)From:Oh, that's a good example, too! Gay men frequently make fantastic allies in women's struggle against misogyny...but that still doesn't make it appropriate for them to ignore the realities of male privilege and presume to interpret women's experiences. Excellent.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:09 pm (UTC)From:I wonder, though, if context might not be as important as the individual's queerness/understanding of queer experience. This is the internet after all, and when I see someone expounding on how gay such-and-such is, I don't necessarily know anything about the person at all, so how can my discomfort be related to their "queerness"? In such a case, I have to relate my discomfort to the use of terms indicating queerness within a slash context rather than to the insiderness or outsiderness of the speaker. I don't think such a statement would be any more acceptable coming from someone who is known to be queer and/or who has demonstrated a propensity to discuss or think about queerness.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:16 pm (UTC)From:I'm also more aware of the spectrum of queer/slash, because like you I've been back and forth over the years: slash is queer! no, feminist! no--wait, there are feminist queer people, and-- Never mind, I'll come in again! There are a lot of stories that really are about the/a queer experience, and there are a lot more that are about a female experience, and probably the ones I like best are the ones that live on the knife's edge between the two, where metaphors happen and a fantasy of personhood and agency and self-actualization shimmer like a vision for everybody concerned!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:18 pm (UTC)From:Reading that post from six years ago, what amuses me is that I now think both our claims are wrongheadedly utopian: for all the reasons I mentioned at the time, I think she was wishfully projecting when she said "slash is feminist," and I was wishfully projecting when I said "slash is queer." It's not always easy to see the fandom you have behind the spectre of the fandom you want and need.
You know, re: WNGWJLEO -- I do kind of miss that! I was never so much with the raining hot death on that trope as a lot of people were, I guess because I interpreted it (naively, perhaps) as positing "gay" as a social construction, which jibed exactly with the received wisdom of my feminist and queer-studies academic background. I was taught -- and mostly still believe -- that "being gay" is an identity that has to be invented and accepted, and is something different from "experiencing homosexual desire" or "having sexual relationships with people of the same gender." By those terms, it's TOTALLY possible for, say, Jim Ellison to not see himself as the possessor of a gay identity, even if he sees himself as Blair's soulmate, spiritually and emotionally and sexually. I even thought that was kind of a clever, subversive critique of our cultural binary: are you GAY or are you STRAIGHT, which one IS IT, dammit?! I realize in retrospect that it wasn't always (wasn't often? wasn't ever?) being deployed in quite that way and wasn't normally being read in quite that way...but I enjoyed it on those terms! But yeah, I think fandom as a community so roundly rejected that trope that hardly anyone in their right mind would court the open scorn of their audience by producing that kind of story now...which as you said elsewhere, probably does lead to the sense that in order to be taken seriously, they have to at least come off like they're interested in gay identity -- whether or not they genuinely are.
And hell, yes to intersection. These are two communities that have both nourished and fed off of each other in many, many ways -- it reminds me of the feminist community and the lesbian community. They ARE different and it's a fool's game to confuse them...but it's naive to think the distinction between them is clear and uncontrovertible. They are profoundly entangled and always have been.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:20 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:24 pm (UTC)From:Yeah, that's true. I mean-- it's, like Hth says, some of us enter both fields at once, and it makes the waters really murky. I have a history of same-sex relations that dates back to my teens and yet, I have lived a mostly straight life for so long that when things started changing, which coincided with fandom discovery for me, I still continued to feel in my guts that I am a slasher first and a queer person second. It's just, in terms of psychic paths and habits, I guess, and in terms of priority as I wade in fandom, slashiness and slash and my pleasure do come first, and queer politics and/or identity come second. I recognize that in me *now*, but I'm not sure I have always known this for the unconscious prioritized list that it is, and I'm not sure it will always remain that way either. These things fluctuate a lot, and deciphering them internally is a really hard task.
posts like this are very precious for that exact reason! :-)
(stops babbling, goes back to work).
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:28 pm (UTC)From:So, I may even be going one step further in not just distinguishing MSM and gay identity (which is how I tend to read WNG as well unless it's truly homophobic) , but also in the queer theory potential of identity as partial construction (which flies in the face of a lot of gay studies, of course).
So, yes, weird how WNG could be read as queer and today's more gay centered slash as relying on older notions of identity construction... [and i'm totally generalizing here and clearly there's much really cool queer identity construction going on in non-WNG (referencing once again my favorite example, thingswithwings' story which to me is anti-WNG ans all about queer communities and identity construction) and a bunch of really bad homophobic crap in WNG.,..and yet :)]
And I'm not sure I'd have found it quite as quickly had you not mentioned it...though I've cited it more than once over the years :) And I think we're totally entitled to change our minds and complicate our arguments..for me LJ id thought in process. If I had all the answers I'd blog :D
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:29 pm (UTC)From:And it's true, on the internet, you don't always know who is speaking from what position. But at the same time...sometimes you do. I mean, I've been in the slash community for twelve years now, and not everybody around here is unfamiliar to me! I can often bring to bear other information about how invested and knowledgeable the speaker is about queer issues, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It's a "community" in part because we're not all strangers! And particularly the people who do a lot of talking, their backgrounds and interests and interpretive lenses start to be known.
I do think -- and this might be an intellectually sloppy position, but it feels just, intuitively -- that there are things that REALLY ARE more acceptable coming from a queer person than from a straight person. I mean, I think *The Big Gay Sketch Show* on Logo is fucking hilarious, but if I suddenly learned that the writers and performers were all, in fact, straight people? It would lose a huge amount of its humor value and suddenly feel very uncomfortable to me -- it would be people in power picking on the Other, rather than the queer community getting pleasure out of its own foibles. And that's different, as far as I'm concerned.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:29 pm (UTC)From:And the slash=gay literature which I've heard on and off since I came into fandom, no no no no no. Although, again, there may be some overlaps between some texts (but then gay literature is also problematic a term though necessary).
So....it's all much more messy and complex and fascinating with lots more to write and write about in future, happy sigh!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:30 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:40 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:41 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:41 pm (UTC)From:Sometimes, I think it is a matter of that kind of imprecision. Sometimes I think there's other, less innocent stuff going on as well. Mostly, though, I'm not at all convinced that every slasher who sees this kind of language used -- regardless of the OP's intent -- understands that "gay" is being used in a way that doesn't mean, um, "gay." *g* I think it's perfectly easy for fans -- especially younger fans who haven't logged decades in dialogue with queer people the way people like you and I have! -- to look at that kind of discourse and absorb it as "things I have learned about the gays." I think there's often this blithe assumption that everybody knows the words I say don't mean what they normally mean in this context -- like Humpty Dumpty, we keep trying to say that the word means what we choose it to mean, nothing more or less! And like Alice, I'm saying, wtf, that's crazy! That's not how words work! (I'm paraphrasing, obviously. *g*)
slash is queer! no, feminist! no--wait, there are feminist queer people, and-- Never mind, I'll come in again!
Heeee! Yeah, it's a strange morass, made all the weirder because, as I said in the post and upthread to Cath, there *is* so much truck between the two perspectives, and so many people whose perspectives are informed by both. I compared it to being a lesbian and being a feminist: not the same thing, but you're CRAZY if you think that in this culture, your experiences in either commuity are not deeply shaped by the history of the other one.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:46 pm (UTC)From:Are priorities really changing? I guess I will understand what you mean better when I read more, cos I have not, sadly, had the time to read the comments in your post at all yet. I have it open, but... work! argh!
(you can tell my brain is all jumbled when i take five times the amount of words i should need to say something. eek)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:46 pm (UTC)From:-coming out
-the experience of losing friends or being ostracized for being gay
-AIDS (though less so now than ten years ago)
-gay culture—whether that be the West Village club scene or San Francisco or just the presence in the film or book of fag hags and gay bars
All of these things are features of actual gay experience. I can remember only a handful of slash stories that have ever included any of these. Gay fiction which you'd pull of the Gay/Lesbian shelf at B&N has a completely different feel from slash. Slash stories far more often (or at least, those I read, which shows my preference) follow the line of a standard heterosexual romance. Look at the popularity of all the Harlequin challenges. This, I think, is because many slash fans love the tropes of standard het romances but are put off by the often anti-woman underpinnings, so slash is a way to escape the negative associations but still preserve the enjoyed heterosexual cliches. Plus, you know, hot guys.
All this has been said before, of course, so, just, yes. I agree with you.
(Also, Dan Savage mentioned slash on his Savage Love podcast a few weeks ago, much to my glee, but in the context as a non-threatening way for a straight married woman to explore her sexual imagination. He then said he didn't get it.)
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Date: 2008-02-13 07:48 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:49 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:52 pm (UTC)From:What I can't do, however, is ever think that the things I made up in my head are necessarily true and give me some special insight or expertise into these things in the real world. That's the step I think some writers fall down on.
Well, except for gay samauri lizards. I *am* an expert on those.
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Date: 2008-02-13 08:05 pm (UTC)From:I think I need that icon and then we need to make ones for every other group to use in every other argument like this.
This is my other gay discussion icon.
Date: 2008-02-13 08:08 pm (UTC)From:Part of my reasoning her is that the people I have encountered who make those kinds of statements are almost entirely unknown to me, partially because I have not made the effort to find out more about them/spent more time reading what they have to say after seeing them making those kinds of statements. For all I know they could be queer, but that's not going to change the fact that I think they've said some very tacky things.
I do think it is an issue of both innacurate language and insufficient knowledge, as you say, but I'm hesitant about implying that queerness or queer investment are going to automatically give someone that knowledge or sensitivity. Obviously there may be a greater impetus towards it for queer and queer-invested people, but it's not a free pass from saying stupid stuff. (I'm perhaps overwary of generalisation lately, though, and that's probably feeding into a lot of my reasctions here: for example, I'm kind of flinching and wishing for qualifiers every time you mention fanfic expressing straight female experience in this post.)
And then again there's the issue of that usage being sort of trendy in certain groups, so people will become used to it/adopt it without really thinking about what it would mean outside of the context of the particular group making it trendy.
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Date: 2008-02-13 08:10 pm (UTC)From:Of course, I am pretty sure that I once argued that Sentinel slash was less queer than Sentinel gen, so my opinions could be suspect. :)
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Date: 2008-02-13 08:12 pm (UTC)From:Yeah, sometimes I think that is the problem. In other cases, I think the issue is that fanfic writers are assuming "everybody knows" that the things they write are Fantasyland versions of reality and not Actual Reality (ACT UP! Fight AIDS!) *They* may know that what they imagine doesn't give them insight, but it's hard for readers to know the difference between "just go with me, this is crazy fantasy play time!" and "here's this thing I'm really saying because it's a totally reasonable thing to say." Those of us who aren't psychic are perpetually caught in, "wtf, is she *joking* or *serious* or what?"
Well, except for gay samauri lizards. I *am* an expert on those.
Well, YEAH! (But I get my gay samauri lizard ghetto pass, don't I? Seriously, some of my best friends are gay samurai lizards! Check the list, okay...?)
Also -- happy birthday, princess! *hug*