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So here's my term paper for WMST 3100, Intro to Gay & Lesbian Studies. I know how fandom is, so I'm resigned to the fact that you will now commence writing in your lj's about how unutterably wrong I have gotten it all.
Anyway, many, many thanks to my twelve research subjects; you went above and beyond the call of duty, and it was hard not to make the paper just quote after quote of all the interesting and clever things you said. Enjoy reading for your quotes *g*
Also, okay, look! I'M SORRY for the "erotica" thing! It's an academic paper, okay, I thought it sounded academic. Far be it from me to diss anybody's porn. I like porn! I love porn! Girls like porn! Jiminy cricket, people. *g*
What If I Were Free?:
Queer Meanings and Identities for Women in Speculative Fiction Fandom
Speculative fiction as genre has always had a contradictory relationship with sexual orientation, at times embracing both liberation and conservatism. At its best, SF challenges its readers' experiences and assumptions by suggesting that all experiences ultimately depend on context; SF fans are attracted to the genre because of its exoticism and otherness, and they internalize the idea that these characters have different lives than their readers do because they are quite literally in a different world where the rules are different. SF fans talk about their genre as based on the question "What If?" But by saying that every story begins with a big What If, the necessary corollary is that if something changes in the world, there are repercussions that are felt down to the level of the individual lives and events that fiction covers.
Potentially, then, SF is a conceptual vehicle by which people can begin to imagine social changes that would have real impact on their lives. Hollinger calls this process "denormalization" (Hollinger 197-198), meaning that what at one time may have seemed to be natural law, so normalized by a reader's environment as to be inevitable, can become, through the process of examination that speculative fiction employs, a subject for inquiry and even challenge. Hollinger says that, "Science fiction would seem to be ideally suited, as a narrative mode, to the construction of imaginative challenges to the smoothly oiled technologies of heteronormativity."
Many of my research participants also experienced SF as a narrative device that can liberate the reader from the rigidly defined view of sexual orientation that dominates current social conversation in the public arena. Speaking particularly of her experiences with DC Comics, she says, "It would be equally *wrong* to me to write the vast majority of these characters as either totally straight, totally gay, or totally bisexual. There's a certain fluidity.... It *does* seem to work/feel/*read* better in SF/F contexts, where canon often demands the audience step out of the normative definitions of human relationships in *some* way, shape, or form." Another discussed her early reading of a fantasy writer well known for including non-heterosexual characters in her work, saying that she dates her experiences with queer texts, "from the time I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Heritage of Hastur at age 13 and figured out that all "homosexuality" meant was 'oh, these two guys/girls love each other (or just find each other really attractive), of *course* they want to have sex'--as opposed to being, you know, some totally other activity that no one would really explain to me."
In his article, "Homosexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy," James Riemer also notes that the strategy adopted by most SF writers who choose to write non-heterosexual elements into their work is to change the social rules of their fictional world to loosen or erase the social stigma that modern culture applies to sexuality that does not conform to a heterosexual norm (Riemer 146). He views this strategy as equalizing, placing the homosexual and heterosexual characters on an equal footing, with their sexual selves being relevant to their stories but not the central feature, in contrast to "mainstream homosexual novels," whose focus is the characters' sexuality as such (Riemer 160). This is an idea that will recur throughout this paper, because it recurred many times in the responses from my research participants, who also overwhelmingly seem to feel most comfortable with the presentation of queer material within texts as strictly personal matters for the characters having to do with their specific situations and relationships as opposed to any "identity" that other readers might choose to impose on them. When they describe their own sexual sense of self, they tend in the same direction: even those who have been extremely active in LGBT rights activism or have a background in LGBT studies (many of the participants) and who consider themselves "out" at almost every level of their lives (nearly all of them) resist any taint of essentialism. They tend to view their sexual responses as personal and individual matters, and only the intolerance and condemnation of outsiders as "political" issues requiring solidarity and collective response.
A few texts were mentioned as formative or significant in terms of dealing overtly with queer issues, and often those texts were viewed ambivalently. One participant said, "I remember the first time I read Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", and how it seemed to really *get* the polyamorous and bisexual nature of humanity as I understood it at the time, while simultaneously being so utterly sexist and homophobic." Several mentioned Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness as a queer SF text. That particular reading of the book is potentially problematic; as much as the fluidity of desire is a feature of that book, the more dominant feature is the aliens' physical fluidity as they literally change their sex. That queer readers can identify with LeGuin's characters while being so separated from their experience of sex and sexuality by biological necessity is a tribute to SF readers' ability to gain deep insight out of metaphor, but it is still not a book that overtly challenges heteronormativity for a fixed-sex species such as humans.
Another recurring writer, along with LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, was Mercedes Lackey, a prolific fantasy writer who has written about a number of self-identified gay male characters. Janice Crosby, in her survey of fantasy fiction's relationship to the women's spirituality community, also devotes significant attention to Mercedes Lackey, particularly to an early series of books and short stories featuring an intimate, though non-sexual, relationship between two female characters. "The bond between [Tarma and Kethry]," Crosby writes, "which is one of both sisterhood and a type of marriage, could be considered 'lesbian' in the broadest sense of 'woman focused'" (Crosby 79), and also suggests that the privileged nature of Tarma and Kethry's "alternative family" within the text is one that "supports single mothers and lesbian couples in their contemporary struggle for acceptance as family" (Crosby 75-76). At the same time, of course, their relationship is not a sexual one within Lackey's text, and in fact an essay by Lackey that prefaces a later collection of Tarma and Kethry stories specifically claims that she wrote Kethry as heterosexual and Tarma as asexual as a method of resistance to what she perceived as a glut of swords-and-sorcery fiction at the time (the first story in the series was published in 1988) with lesbian protagonists. None of my research participants seem to remember this abundance of lesbian swords-and-sorcery, but whatever Lackey encountered that made her feel that heterosexual women were under-represented in the genre, it adds a problematic element to queer readings of Tarma and Kethry.
The same problems of intent and audience reception would recur a decade later on television through Xena and Gabrielle, also inspired by the swords-and-sorcery tradition and also positioned as a mated pair though not sexually involved within the text. The television show Xena: Warrior Princess has engendered much more discussion in terms of its sexual politics than the novels of Mercedes Lackey, and the variety of interpretations of the Xena/Gabrielle relationship is no doubt one of the keys to the show's broad appeal and success. At the same time that it is championed for its "openness" to multiple readings, however, the fact that Xena and Gabrielle's relationship was never explicitly endorsed by the text as a sexual relationship, the ultimate result is that avowed homophobes could watch the same show that as a lesbian viewer without being drawn in to any analysis whatsoever of the basic homophobic assumptions about female friendships; many viewers bitterly resisted interpretations of Xena and Gabrielle that they felt "tarnished" or "slandered" the characters by labeling them as queer, and the show's silence on the matter in a sense colluded with these viewers by capitalizing on a large lesbian fan base in order to produce a text wherein the characters were carefully kept at least theoretically attractive to and, more importantly, available to men (Helford, 138-142). While clearly an outstanding marketing strategy, Xena: Warrior Princess' value as an example of a queer text is reduced substantially by the approach.
So although SF is theoretically open to radical restructurings of sexual norms, relatively few widely popular and accessible SF texts actually are clearly and unambiguously about queer subjects, adopting instead the strategy of reducing characters' sexual identity to one incidental facet of their lives (the strategy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels or Babylon 5's handling of Susan Ivanova), or of propagating a kind of quasi-queerness that mirrors real non-heterosexual experience partially but not entirely (by completely sexualizing it, such as Heinlein does, or completely de-sexualizing it, as with the Tarma and Kethry stories or Xena). Ironically, one of the worst offenders has been Star Trek, the franchise whose depth of world-building and vibrance of fan culture has made it the foundation on which SF media fandom was built (Bacon-Smith, 11). Star Trek's thirty-year-long resistance to the mere idea of incorporating a recurring queer character into the universe has been a constant thorn in the side of many of its fans, for whom the Trek slogan "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination" has been a fandom ethical precept from the beginning. Referring to one particular Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where a female main character separated from her alien lover because it had adopted a new body -- female, not male like the previous body -- one research participant gave the succinct summation, "Stupid writing completely inconsistent with the rest of the canon Trekiverse ... I expect an enlightened futuristic society to be evenly enlightened."
SF fandom itself is distinct from and has co-evolved with the SF genre; the first science fiction convention was held in 1936 (Bacon-Smith 9), and from that point on, the history of the genre and the history of the fandom have been unique and fruitful. "Fandom" is itself a broad term with multiple meanings; it can refer to the fan community surrounding SF or other genres of fiction (mysteries and romances both have fandoms), or surrounding a medium rather than a genre, such as comics fandom, anime fandom, or "media" fandom ("media" in this sense generally being used to refer specifically to television). Further subsets exist, each of which adopts the term "fandom" for itself, so that individual texts have fandoms (Harry Potter fandom or Stargate: SG-1 fandom), specific activities of fans have fandoms (costuming fandom or vidding fandom, which produces music videos out of media footage), and even subgenres of fanfiction have fandoms (I will particularly address slash fandom later in this paper).
It is crucial to understand that "fan" in this context does not mean simply someone who enjoys a particular genre. Fandom is a concretely understood experience, and though outsiders primarily identify fans as obsessive receivers and collectors of trivia (memorably mocked in a famous William Shatner Saturday Night Live sketch or by The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy), fans view themselves as characterized primarily by their interaction with their source materials. In the foundational academic work on fandom (focused on media fandom, which incorporates and widely overlaps with SF fandom), Henry Jenkins defines fans as "readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests, as spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture. ... Their activities pose important questions about the ability of media producers to constrain the creation and circulation of meaning. Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media" (Jenkins 24).
Those people who come to fandom from groups which are significantly disenfranchised from mass culture -- including feminists and queer women -- are therefore not only responding to the texts but to the experience of fandom itself as an outlet for their needs and interests. SF may contain the conceptual building blocks for dissent from the sexual status quo, but fandom is where people are actually engaged in the work of examining, refining, and claiming those concepts. Where some of my research participants were brought into fandom by discovering other people who shared an active and energetic love of the same texts that they did, others were brought in by fandom itself and developed the interest in the texts that was required to survive and thrive as a fan. One respondent detailed her childhood experiences of SF, but consciously separated them from her "fan" life, saying, "For me, being fannish is all about being part of that community. "Feral fan" is something of a contradiction. I definitely had all of the usual markers -- obsessive rereading/watching of canon material, textual analysis, fanfiction writing, mary sueism -- but none of it counted until it was shared." Another went even further, claiming never to have been "a fan of anything but fandom" and saying that "I don't even KNOW the canon for
most of the fandoms I read in. I'm a fan of fandom, the writing, the community, the occasional absurdity, and the porn."
Fandom in this sense, as a community of people with a shared history, habits, interests, and beliefs about their relationship with their source texts, bears a great deal of similarity to other conceptual and practical models that come out of feminist and lesbian experience. In her history of lesbian writing, Bonnie Zimmerman defines the lesbian community as "a space, or a group of people, or even a concept, within which the individual lesbian feels herself welcome and at home. ... It may be realized in a bar, a political group, a music festival, or a family," (Zimmerman, 121), and fandom is one other space -- or group of people, or concept, as the definition of fandom encompasses all three of those things -- where outsiders to mainstream culture can locate themselves comfortably. Zimmerman also deals with the relationship between producers and consumers of art, quoting a 1974 statement originally published in off our backs by a group calling itself the Collective Lesbian International Terrors, which says, "We are also training ourselves to respond [to oppression] in writing, to make up for the present lack of Lesbian literature and writing. This is a beginning step in demolishing the 'creative artist' or 'writer' mystique that separates and inhibits us, giving some the role of active 'star' while the rest remain the passive audience." The desire of the lesbian feminist community to be actively engaged with media and text closely mirrors the pride fans take in the products of their own creative interactions with text. Zimmerman says that, "The breaking of the long silence of lesbian speech has led to a flood of intense, immediate, intimate, and sometimes awkward written expression" (Zimmerman, 19). No one familiar with fanfiction can fail to recognize how applicable those adjectives are to the work that fans so often produce for one another.
Women's role in the fan community is the subject, directly or indirectly, of much of the study of fandom that comes out of the fields of ethnology and cultural studies. Camille Bacon-Smith's 1992 survey of fan culture specifically treats the female-driven aspects of the culture; she begins her book by describing her desire to "jump up and down and scream, 'Look what I found! A conceptual space where women can come together and create -- to investigate new forms for their art and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men have placed on women's public behavior! Not a place or a time, but a state of being -- of giving each other permission'" (Bacon-Smith, 3). What she is describing is exactly what Nina Auerbach describes in Communities of Women as "a furtive, unofficial, often underground entity...defined by the complex, shifting, often contradictory attitudes it evokes. Each community defines itself as a 'distinct existence,' flourishing outside familiar categories and calling for a plurality of perspectives and judgements" (Auerbach, 11). The difference is that Auerbach is discussing communities that exist only in fiction, and the fandom that Bacon-Smith studied exists in the real world. Even overviews of fandom that do not intentionally focus on the role of women, such as Jenkins's, has to engage with the degree to which fandom is shaped by women, which Jenkins does by positioning himself as both an insider and an outsider to fandom, "a male fan within a predominantly female fan culture" (Jenkins, 6).
Both Jenkins's and Bacon-Smith's studies focus on media fandom, which is intimately linked to though not identical with SF fandom. SF fandom is admittedly much more male-dominated, although not as male-dominated as the stereotype implies, and the erasure of women's experience of SF fandom from a cultural studies perspective mirrors the related erasure of the fan experience in general from the history of the SF genre. "Unlike its media counterpart," Merrick says, "studies of literary SF have neglected the processes of production and reception of the text, a rather surprising omission for a genre which has been so closely associated with and even shaped by its unique group of fans. Despite the importance of fans to the SF community, their influence and even presence is at best marginal in most critical accounts, even though the experiences of female and feminist fans have been an integral part of the development of feminist SF" (Merrick, 49-50). Although "the significance of the genre lies in its extratextual dimensions, such as fan readings, zines, cons, and the close interaction between publishers, editors, authors, and audience that epitomizes the 'SF community,'" the need for cultural histories of women's experiences in SF fandom, as opposed to the history of women SF writers and feminist SF texts, is still largely unfulfilled (Merrick, 58-59), which is why the work of academics like Jenkins and Bacon-Smith, among others, in creating an ethnology of media fandom is such an important resource for SF fans. The fact that many fans use "fandom" to refer to these two loci of fan activity more or less interchangeably, making no significant distinction between their role as media fans and SF fans, also means that studies of women's fan use of media culture are invaluable in approaching the topic of women's fan use of SF texts.
Although many aspects of fan culture and behavior have nothing in particular to do with sexuality of any kind, and in those arenas the queer fan may not feel that her experience is especially distinctive, in the circles and conceptual spaces where sex and romance are primary concerns, the relationship between one's queer perspective and one's fan perspective becomes incredibly rich and complex. Those spaces have always been accessible and visible within fandom; one of the most significant dimensions of the source material that female fans have traditionally worked to open up is the romantic and sexual dimension of the characters' lives which are often de-emphasized in commercial, mainstream texts. A relatively recent fannish term for this perspective is "shipping," a term adopted out of X-Files fandom, where it referred specifically to "relationshippers," or fans who focused their energy on the sexual dynamics between Mulder and Scully, but the activity predates the term significantly. When the "ship" involved is a queer relationship, fandom has not only a unique term for that perspective, but an entire community, even a sub-fandom organized around it: slash fandom.
Like shippers, slashers adopted their name out of a specific context -- Star Trek fandom, where the abbreviation K/S was used to signal that a piece of fanfiction "slashed" Kirk and Spock, redefining their relationship as romantic and/or sexual in nature. What seemed like a bizarre event to many people -- women investing their time and their creative and emotional energy in queered readings of two male characters -- proved sensational enough that it generated a fair amount of critical interest both inside and outside the fandom. Slash generally takes up at least a chapter all to itself in any book on fan culture, and has been generating essays since at least 1985, when an article by feminist SF writer and fan Joanna Russ, entitled "Another Addict Raves About K/S," exposed the insular and secretive world of Star Trek slash fandom to the attention of outsiders, somewhat to the chagrin of the slashers themselves. At that point in time, the assumption was that if such scandalous fan activity was known of by non-slashers, there would be some sort of repercussion, some reprisal by the larger fandom or even by Star Trek's producers. (In fact, it was not a completely unrealistic fear; as slash became more visible, there was resistance to it, although slash fandom as it exists today is so incredibly large and vibrant that complaints about slash are routinely ignored -- it is literally too big and too influential to put a stop to, even if a small minority of particularly conservative fans would like to do so.) The spring 2003 issue of Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture contained an article called "Fan/tastic Voyage: A Journey Into the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction," by Nay Thrupkaew, one of the more recent and higher-profile attempts to address the subject.
For most of my research participants, the point at which their sexual identity intersected with their fan activity was in slash. Traditionally, critical interpretation of slash has avoided making close connections between homosexuality and slash, preferring to view it as an essentially heterosexual function, since it normally consists of women fantasizing sexually about men; many slashers would no more see themselves as operating in a queer space than a heterosexual man might while watching all-female pornography. Two early observers of slash who had an impact on later critical studies were Diana Veith and Patricia Frazer Lamb, who went to some pains in their study to deny that connection, saying that, "These novels, stories, and poems are not about sex or gender; they are certainly not about male homosexuality as such" (Veith & Lamb, 254), and perhaps even more confusingly, "K/S narratives are about two loving equals; within their relationship neither is 'masculine' while the other is 'feminine,' stronger or weaker, 'husband' or 'wife.' These stories are not about two gay males and should not be categorized as examples of homosexual literature -- either male or female" (Veith & Lamb, 252-253). This has been one popular means of viewing slash fandom, conceptualizing it as a straight women's activity that allows women to imagine idealized relationships free of gender and power baggage that fans otherwise bring to heterosexual couples in the text. The cliche has been that within slash the characters are not gay, they are merely in love with each other; one of my research participants said, "Certainly I've never been a fan of WNGWJLEO -- hate it actually," in complete confidence that anyone who knows slash will be able to read that as an acronym for We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other. Jenkins quotes a fan in his book who wryly renames the convention, "I'm not gay, I just like to suck Spock's cock" (Jenkins, 220). That reading of the characters as firmly divided from any issue of sexual identity is a standard trope of fandom, something slash fans are so familiar with as to make it a cliche.
Slash fans who are also queer, of course, seem less likely to accept that understanding of the characters, and many of my research participants disavowed it, either in passing or quite strenuously, although at the same time some of them had some discomfort with using slash for "political" purposes, rather than as a genre whose primary duty was to serve fans' sexual and emotional interests. The "We're not gay" understanding of slash is less common in fandom now than it was fifteen years ago when a great deal of the foundational studies of fandom were being done; it tends to be considered passe by heterosexual as well as queer audiences. There has been an influence from the ideology of "queerness" itself, whereby fans are much more willing than before to subsume anything sexually non-normative under the generic umbrella of "queer," rather than to insist on dogmatic distinctions between slash as "examples of homosexual literature" or not. At the same time, although the concepts of "queer" or even of "homosexual" held at best a highly marginalized place in the history of slash, the connection is clearly there, both in the obvious manner, and in the underlying ideology of slash itself. Russ defined the central question of slash as by saying, "The 'What If' behind K/S is: What If I Were Free?" (Veith & Lamb, 254). Although for Russ the issue was gender and "freedom" means freedom from culturally imposed expectations that define lovers as holding different roles within their relationship based on maleness and femaleness (Kirk and Spock, being not-women, can share power within their relationship free of the pressures women face to abrogate their own power within relationships), what her insight contains is the seeds of modern slash fandom's more overtly and proudly queer sensibility. "What If I Were Free?" could just as much mean freedom from compulsory heterosexuality and the erasure of the reality of sexual desire outside of heterosexual relationships, and for many slash fans now, it does mean exactly that.
More significant, possibly, than the relative queerness of the art and fiction that slash fandom produces is the increasing queer perspective of the community itself. While after eight years of research in the 1980's, Bacon-Smith can say in her demographic data that, "my sole lesbian informant ... says that she has met only seven other lesbian women in fandom. I have seen only one fanzine, regularly published out of the U.K., which openly caters to a predominantly gay audience, and this is the only place where I have ever seen stories or poetry depicting lesbian relationships written by women in media fandom. I have never heard the sexual orientation of a fan discussed in either a positive or negative way in relation to a fan's writing or choice of reading material, nor have I ever seen it as an issue in the social interactions of the group" (Bacon-Smith, 321). One of my older research participants, who was participating in fandom during that time period, says, "First wave, when I was using fandom as a way to explore my own sexuality, I was very aware of the trope that slash fans were all straight women, and often accepted that as fact (whether it was or not, and I think there is reason to question that)."
The majority of research participants, however, entered the fandom years after Bacon-Smith's data was collected, many of them through the Internet, which has changed the character of fandom in ways that have yet to be fully examined. This younger generation has largely come to slash fandom already either queer-identified or sensitive to queer issues, and their experience of the slash community is the polar opposite of Bacon-Smith's description of a group of women, almost uniformly heterosexual, for whom sexual orientation is "never discussed" and "never seen as an issue."
One participant says, "I'm more out in fandom just because fandom is a sexualized space for me; my interaction here and my discussions and friendships revolve around a sort of shared platonic sexuality that makes all sexual things, including orientation, fair topics of conversation." Another says, "I feel pretty comfortable as a queer fan. I think it helps that I've been in "younger", "hipper" fandoms where being bi is chic -- even though I'm [lesbian,] not bi, it breaks up the heterosexual monotony." One succinctly says, "In fandom I assume everyone's queer unless they tell me differently, and I assume everyone's assuming the same thing about me." Almost all of them say that the environment of "their corner of fandom" is both sex-positive and queer-positive, a place where few limits are placed on whatever desires fans choose to claim, with social distinction being drawn not between hetero- and homosexual, but between fans who are comfortable with a wide range of sexual realities and those who are limited in what they can accept. One respondent says, "One of my favourite aspects of slash fandom is that it is straight chicks talking about sex. It seems immensely significant to me because the straight chicks I grew up with professed not to like sex or penises. Hanging out with porn-obsessed women suits me! I've never felt uncomfortable in media and slash fandom but then I don't hang out with anti-slash weirdos." Whereas heterosexual slash fans have traditionally understood the pairing of beloved characters to be the raison d'etre of slash fandom, fans with a queer identity seem more likely to conceptualize slash fandom as an arena for discussing sex and sexuality -- sometimes in terms of their philosophies about heteronormativity and queer theory, sometimes only for erotic purposes, often both at the same time.
The role that slash fills in expressing women's sexual fantasies is a particular issue for slash fans. Not one but three of my respondents specifically upbraided me for my use of the word "erotica" in the questions I gave them; their term of preference is "porn." One said, "Erotica is a pissant term used by people who don't want to be associated with porn," and another saw a veiled sexism in my use of the term in a question about female/female slash and its absence in a similar question about male/male slash. She said, "What, because they're girls it can't be porn {g}? Sorry, this is just one of those issues which annoys me.... it's like one of those, 'women don't sweat, they perspire/glow/whatever' statements, and I'm always just like, please, girls can fuck too." At the same time that many of my research participants expressly object to treatments within slash fandom of women that overemphasize their alleged relational and caring nature at the expense of being portrayed as "real women feeling real and urgent desire," they also adhere to traditional female sexual values in other ways by expressing a strong preference for pornography that is "in character," that is true to the personalities of the characters and their textual relationship with one another. What they want is "hot sex with strong characterization" or "strong, recognizable characterization, an interesting and tension-fraught relationship, and hot sex."
All of my research participants expressed an interest in and involvement with both male/male and female/female subjects within slash fandom, including the women who identified themselves strictly as lesbian. Traditional interpretations of slash have often advanced the idea that women in general are attracted to slash because it allows them to identify with and interact with male characters who are more dynamic and interesting than the female characters in source texts, and although all of my respondents had a long list of female characters in SF that they have great attachments toward, many of them also echoed this sense, particularly in childhood and adolescence, of being drawn to male characters by default, due to the relative weakness of available female characters. One said, "As a child, I think I imprinted on male characters because they were closest to being three-dimensional - most females (books and television/movies) seemed flat and boring, there to be rescued or be eye candy. This has stuck with me; I still tend to relate to male characters primarily," a sentiment which another phrased more succinctly as, "I identified strongly with boys in literature, as girl characters were crap." Other respondents, however, employed typically fan strategies of extracting positive meaning out of texts that may not inherently be positive or empowering; one Dr. Who fan said, "I had a pash for most of the Doctor's sidekicks particularly Sarah Jane Smith, Leila, first Romana and Ace. I was fairly devastated when the show was cancelled and there was no more Ace. While all these women were sidekicks and some of them spent more time screaming than anything else they were still out there, out in the universe having a life far away from mine." Most mentioned a number of recent female characters and female-centered texts; almost every reference to Xena or to Buffy the Vampire Slayer was prefaced with an "of course"; it was simply understood that I would recognize why a queer woman would single out those texts as objects of fascination. Though they did not have identical responses to those texts (some spoke fondly of "Xena and Gabs' true and immortal love," while one expressed discomfort at a fandom perception of Xena and Gabrielle that she felt was "too lesbian" and "not queer enough" -- some focused on Buffy's use of out queer characters and some on its metaphorical use of vampirism, magic, and the role of the outsider to speak to queer experiences; many identified the recurring character of Faith, semi-heroic and semi-villainous with an ambiguous sexuality, as pivotal for their perceptions of where queer women could fit in on television), there was a collective understanding from within slash fandom that these texts -- both shows that have been canceled some years ago -- have continuing relevance and meaning to queer audiences. One called Buffy the Vampire Slayer "very much a text about sexuality, about gender issues. Vampirism as queer, blurred sexual lines, unconventional sexual practices--the show was practically a primer on queer issues."
One idea that recurred when queer women spoke about their feelings about male/male and female/female slash -- an issue I had never seen addressed in formal criticism about slash fandom -- is that my respondents tended to view themselves as consuming and producing more male/male slash at least partially because their standards were so much higher for female/female slash. After discussing male/male slash and then turning to female/female, one said, "To some degree my answers here are close to those above (re m/m) although I suspect I might be a little more critical of [f/f] stories that don't feel realistic - even though I know they're fantasy, I also know they reflect familiar lives/lifestyles, and I want some recognition of that reality." Another said, "I am much more concerned with whether F/F stories deal with sexuality in a realistic way. It feels more personal. I think that's why I haven't written F/F up until now--it feels much more revealing to me as a person and a queer woman." The issue of realism, although not entirely absent in discussions of m/m slash, was almost a constant as queer women discussed their feelings about women's sexual relationships in fanfiction: "I think it's more important with f/f than with m/m that the sexuality be realistic," "I'm more inclined to study the SF/F setting and its effects when reading f/f slash, because it's more important to me that f/f be realistic," and "I do like F/F erotica, but I’m very fussy about it. Unrealistic M/M sex might not bother me, but unrealistic F/F is guaranteed to put me off" were all representative comments; other respondents mentioned being sometimes blase about "out-of-character" male/male slash if it at least served as passable porn, but expressed frustration and even a sense of betrayal when it came to female/female slash that didn't seem to leave room for their insights into what female sexuality was "really" like. Their need to identify with female characters in slash may be much more pronounced than their need to do so with male characters, meaning that they sometimes find female/female slash less satisfying, or at least less forgivable in its flaws.
In general the fans who participated in my research felt that they approached SF and SF fandom somewhat differently than heterosexual fans would, although they tended to stay vague as to how, uncomfortable with the idea of trying to describe or interpret the experiences of the "typical" heterosexual fan. Many of them found SF a genre that is comfortable for exploring sexuality issues, and all of them have found within SF fandom a community that is overwhelmingly affirming of their experiences and actively interested in their perspective. One person drew a specific parallel between her desires as a fan to have relationships with other fans and her desires as a lesbian to have a relationship with the LGBT community, describing the discovery of both the fan and LGBT communities as, "more a feeling of *recognition* than *revelation*. As with fandom (or, perhaps more accurately, fandom was also like this), the discovery of a community of people made me want to join in." Many of them spoke interchangeably from a reader's and writer's perspective, a common type of bi-location in fandom, where fans are assumed to be both consumers of texts and producers of other types of texts, whether those be specifically artistic or commentary on the meaning of the source material, and at the times when they spoke as writers, they evidenced a particular enthusiasm for the SF genre as a means of opening up alternative perspectives on queer issues. One said, "I think fantasy and sf provides a medium, especially for "queer" writers / readers to find a sort of "sexual utopia". It's a way to show what our world COULD be like, if only people would be open-minded enough to accept people for who they are," while many spoke fondly of particular fictional universes where they can write without binding the characters into dominant modes of modern thought on the meaning of sexual behavior and identity; one put a joking twist on the subject by saying, "SF/F can be used as a cheap way to get [characters] together - just put Spock into ponn farr [Vulcan mating frenzy] and Bob's your uncle - but it can also be an incredibly rich source of world-building ideas."
Possibly over and beyond any other response to fandom, however, queer women are empowered by the contact they have with other women in a setting where owning and interpreting female visions of sexual possibility is not only not restricted by taboo, but actively encouraged. Many of the respondents had a supportive circle of queer- and queer-positive friends outside of fandom, and many of them were also quick to remind me that many of their most supportive and understanding friends within fandom were heterosexual women. But nearly all of them still identified their experiences in fandom as queer experiences in fandom; fandom for them has been, among other things, an ongoing conversation with a particular relevance to their developing sense of sexual identity and understanding of what sexuality means. I imagine that all of them would somehow see themselves in the words of one fan, who says that, "The first gay people I ever met, I met through fandom (Rocky Horror), and it was in that community that I first began to feel that it was okay to be whatever I was: a big ol' geek with a voracious and queer sexual appetite. That feeling of validation has continued in media fandom, where I am not only okay, I am not even the biggest freak on the block anymore. The community of brilliant and open-minded women is the thing that keeps me in fandom whether I'm into a show or not. I have made real friends here, and I have been able to share myself wholly without fear of being attacked, shamed or misunderstood. ... And I've met plenty of queer heroes in fandom, women who are out and proud, women who are kinky and proud, women who are voracious and proud, women who are straight but not narrow. I feel that we are all part of the same whole."
Bibliography
Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, 1978.
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom & the Creation of Popular
Myth, 1992.
Crosby, Janice C. Cauldron of Changes: Feminist Spirituality in Fantastic Fiction, 2000.
Helford, Elyse Rae. “Feminism, Queer Studies, and the Sexual Politics of Xena: Warrior
Princess.” Fantasy Girls: Gender & the New Universe of Science Fiction & Fantasy
Television, ed. Elyse Rae Helford, 2000.
Hollinger, Veronica. “(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the
Defamiliarization of Gender.” Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices &
Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, ed. Marleen Barr, 2000.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, 1992.
Lamb, Patricia Frazer & Diana L. Veith. “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines.”
Erotic Universe: Sexuality & Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo, 1986.
Merrick, Helen. “The Readers Feminism Doesn’t See: Feminist Fans, Critics, and Science
Fiction.” Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture & Its Audience, ed. Deborah Cartwell,
1997.
Riemer, James D. “Homosexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy.” Erotic Universe: Sexuality
& Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo, 1986.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989, 1990.
Anyway, many, many thanks to my twelve research subjects; you went above and beyond the call of duty, and it was hard not to make the paper just quote after quote of all the interesting and clever things you said. Enjoy reading for your quotes *g*
Also, okay, look! I'M SORRY for the "erotica" thing! It's an academic paper, okay, I thought it sounded academic. Far be it from me to diss anybody's porn. I like porn! I love porn! Girls like porn! Jiminy cricket, people. *g*
What If I Were Free?:
Queer Meanings and Identities for Women in Speculative Fiction Fandom
Speculative fiction as genre has always had a contradictory relationship with sexual orientation, at times embracing both liberation and conservatism. At its best, SF challenges its readers' experiences and assumptions by suggesting that all experiences ultimately depend on context; SF fans are attracted to the genre because of its exoticism and otherness, and they internalize the idea that these characters have different lives than their readers do because they are quite literally in a different world where the rules are different. SF fans talk about their genre as based on the question "What If?" But by saying that every story begins with a big What If, the necessary corollary is that if something changes in the world, there are repercussions that are felt down to the level of the individual lives and events that fiction covers.
Potentially, then, SF is a conceptual vehicle by which people can begin to imagine social changes that would have real impact on their lives. Hollinger calls this process "denormalization" (Hollinger 197-198), meaning that what at one time may have seemed to be natural law, so normalized by a reader's environment as to be inevitable, can become, through the process of examination that speculative fiction employs, a subject for inquiry and even challenge. Hollinger says that, "Science fiction would seem to be ideally suited, as a narrative mode, to the construction of imaginative challenges to the smoothly oiled technologies of heteronormativity."
Many of my research participants also experienced SF as a narrative device that can liberate the reader from the rigidly defined view of sexual orientation that dominates current social conversation in the public arena. Speaking particularly of her experiences with DC Comics, she says, "It would be equally *wrong* to me to write the vast majority of these characters as either totally straight, totally gay, or totally bisexual. There's a certain fluidity.... It *does* seem to work/feel/*read* better in SF/F contexts, where canon often demands the audience step out of the normative definitions of human relationships in *some* way, shape, or form." Another discussed her early reading of a fantasy writer well known for including non-heterosexual characters in her work, saying that she dates her experiences with queer texts, "from the time I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Heritage of Hastur at age 13 and figured out that all "homosexuality" meant was 'oh, these two guys/girls love each other (or just find each other really attractive), of *course* they want to have sex'--as opposed to being, you know, some totally other activity that no one would really explain to me."
In his article, "Homosexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy," James Riemer also notes that the strategy adopted by most SF writers who choose to write non-heterosexual elements into their work is to change the social rules of their fictional world to loosen or erase the social stigma that modern culture applies to sexuality that does not conform to a heterosexual norm (Riemer 146). He views this strategy as equalizing, placing the homosexual and heterosexual characters on an equal footing, with their sexual selves being relevant to their stories but not the central feature, in contrast to "mainstream homosexual novels," whose focus is the characters' sexuality as such (Riemer 160). This is an idea that will recur throughout this paper, because it recurred many times in the responses from my research participants, who also overwhelmingly seem to feel most comfortable with the presentation of queer material within texts as strictly personal matters for the characters having to do with their specific situations and relationships as opposed to any "identity" that other readers might choose to impose on them. When they describe their own sexual sense of self, they tend in the same direction: even those who have been extremely active in LGBT rights activism or have a background in LGBT studies (many of the participants) and who consider themselves "out" at almost every level of their lives (nearly all of them) resist any taint of essentialism. They tend to view their sexual responses as personal and individual matters, and only the intolerance and condemnation of outsiders as "political" issues requiring solidarity and collective response.
A few texts were mentioned as formative or significant in terms of dealing overtly with queer issues, and often those texts were viewed ambivalently. One participant said, "I remember the first time I read Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", and how it seemed to really *get* the polyamorous and bisexual nature of humanity as I understood it at the time, while simultaneously being so utterly sexist and homophobic." Several mentioned Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness as a queer SF text. That particular reading of the book is potentially problematic; as much as the fluidity of desire is a feature of that book, the more dominant feature is the aliens' physical fluidity as they literally change their sex. That queer readers can identify with LeGuin's characters while being so separated from their experience of sex and sexuality by biological necessity is a tribute to SF readers' ability to gain deep insight out of metaphor, but it is still not a book that overtly challenges heteronormativity for a fixed-sex species such as humans.
Another recurring writer, along with LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, was Mercedes Lackey, a prolific fantasy writer who has written about a number of self-identified gay male characters. Janice Crosby, in her survey of fantasy fiction's relationship to the women's spirituality community, also devotes significant attention to Mercedes Lackey, particularly to an early series of books and short stories featuring an intimate, though non-sexual, relationship between two female characters. "The bond between [Tarma and Kethry]," Crosby writes, "which is one of both sisterhood and a type of marriage, could be considered 'lesbian' in the broadest sense of 'woman focused'" (Crosby 79), and also suggests that the privileged nature of Tarma and Kethry's "alternative family" within the text is one that "supports single mothers and lesbian couples in their contemporary struggle for acceptance as family" (Crosby 75-76). At the same time, of course, their relationship is not a sexual one within Lackey's text, and in fact an essay by Lackey that prefaces a later collection of Tarma and Kethry stories specifically claims that she wrote Kethry as heterosexual and Tarma as asexual as a method of resistance to what she perceived as a glut of swords-and-sorcery fiction at the time (the first story in the series was published in 1988) with lesbian protagonists. None of my research participants seem to remember this abundance of lesbian swords-and-sorcery, but whatever Lackey encountered that made her feel that heterosexual women were under-represented in the genre, it adds a problematic element to queer readings of Tarma and Kethry.
The same problems of intent and audience reception would recur a decade later on television through Xena and Gabrielle, also inspired by the swords-and-sorcery tradition and also positioned as a mated pair though not sexually involved within the text. The television show Xena: Warrior Princess has engendered much more discussion in terms of its sexual politics than the novels of Mercedes Lackey, and the variety of interpretations of the Xena/Gabrielle relationship is no doubt one of the keys to the show's broad appeal and success. At the same time that it is championed for its "openness" to multiple readings, however, the fact that Xena and Gabrielle's relationship was never explicitly endorsed by the text as a sexual relationship, the ultimate result is that avowed homophobes could watch the same show that as a lesbian viewer without being drawn in to any analysis whatsoever of the basic homophobic assumptions about female friendships; many viewers bitterly resisted interpretations of Xena and Gabrielle that they felt "tarnished" or "slandered" the characters by labeling them as queer, and the show's silence on the matter in a sense colluded with these viewers by capitalizing on a large lesbian fan base in order to produce a text wherein the characters were carefully kept at least theoretically attractive to and, more importantly, available to men (Helford, 138-142). While clearly an outstanding marketing strategy, Xena: Warrior Princess' value as an example of a queer text is reduced substantially by the approach.
So although SF is theoretically open to radical restructurings of sexual norms, relatively few widely popular and accessible SF texts actually are clearly and unambiguously about queer subjects, adopting instead the strategy of reducing characters' sexual identity to one incidental facet of their lives (the strategy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels or Babylon 5's handling of Susan Ivanova), or of propagating a kind of quasi-queerness that mirrors real non-heterosexual experience partially but not entirely (by completely sexualizing it, such as Heinlein does, or completely de-sexualizing it, as with the Tarma and Kethry stories or Xena). Ironically, one of the worst offenders has been Star Trek, the franchise whose depth of world-building and vibrance of fan culture has made it the foundation on which SF media fandom was built (Bacon-Smith, 11). Star Trek's thirty-year-long resistance to the mere idea of incorporating a recurring queer character into the universe has been a constant thorn in the side of many of its fans, for whom the Trek slogan "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination" has been a fandom ethical precept from the beginning. Referring to one particular Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where a female main character separated from her alien lover because it had adopted a new body -- female, not male like the previous body -- one research participant gave the succinct summation, "Stupid writing completely inconsistent with the rest of the canon Trekiverse ... I expect an enlightened futuristic society to be evenly enlightened."
SF fandom itself is distinct from and has co-evolved with the SF genre; the first science fiction convention was held in 1936 (Bacon-Smith 9), and from that point on, the history of the genre and the history of the fandom have been unique and fruitful. "Fandom" is itself a broad term with multiple meanings; it can refer to the fan community surrounding SF or other genres of fiction (mysteries and romances both have fandoms), or surrounding a medium rather than a genre, such as comics fandom, anime fandom, or "media" fandom ("media" in this sense generally being used to refer specifically to television). Further subsets exist, each of which adopts the term "fandom" for itself, so that individual texts have fandoms (Harry Potter fandom or Stargate: SG-1 fandom), specific activities of fans have fandoms (costuming fandom or vidding fandom, which produces music videos out of media footage), and even subgenres of fanfiction have fandoms (I will particularly address slash fandom later in this paper).
It is crucial to understand that "fan" in this context does not mean simply someone who enjoys a particular genre. Fandom is a concretely understood experience, and though outsiders primarily identify fans as obsessive receivers and collectors of trivia (memorably mocked in a famous William Shatner Saturday Night Live sketch or by The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy), fans view themselves as characterized primarily by their interaction with their source materials. In the foundational academic work on fandom (focused on media fandom, which incorporates and widely overlaps with SF fandom), Henry Jenkins defines fans as "readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests, as spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture. ... Their activities pose important questions about the ability of media producers to constrain the creation and circulation of meaning. Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media" (Jenkins 24).
Those people who come to fandom from groups which are significantly disenfranchised from mass culture -- including feminists and queer women -- are therefore not only responding to the texts but to the experience of fandom itself as an outlet for their needs and interests. SF may contain the conceptual building blocks for dissent from the sexual status quo, but fandom is where people are actually engaged in the work of examining, refining, and claiming those concepts. Where some of my research participants were brought into fandom by discovering other people who shared an active and energetic love of the same texts that they did, others were brought in by fandom itself and developed the interest in the texts that was required to survive and thrive as a fan. One respondent detailed her childhood experiences of SF, but consciously separated them from her "fan" life, saying, "For me, being fannish is all about being part of that community. "Feral fan" is something of a contradiction. I definitely had all of the usual markers -- obsessive rereading/watching of canon material, textual analysis, fanfiction writing, mary sueism -- but none of it counted until it was shared." Another went even further, claiming never to have been "a fan of anything but fandom" and saying that "I don't even KNOW the canon for
most of the fandoms I read in. I'm a fan of fandom, the writing, the community, the occasional absurdity, and the porn."
Fandom in this sense, as a community of people with a shared history, habits, interests, and beliefs about their relationship with their source texts, bears a great deal of similarity to other conceptual and practical models that come out of feminist and lesbian experience. In her history of lesbian writing, Bonnie Zimmerman defines the lesbian community as "a space, or a group of people, or even a concept, within which the individual lesbian feels herself welcome and at home. ... It may be realized in a bar, a political group, a music festival, or a family," (Zimmerman, 121), and fandom is one other space -- or group of people, or concept, as the definition of fandom encompasses all three of those things -- where outsiders to mainstream culture can locate themselves comfortably. Zimmerman also deals with the relationship between producers and consumers of art, quoting a 1974 statement originally published in off our backs by a group calling itself the Collective Lesbian International Terrors, which says, "We are also training ourselves to respond [to oppression] in writing, to make up for the present lack of Lesbian literature and writing. This is a beginning step in demolishing the 'creative artist' or 'writer' mystique that separates and inhibits us, giving some the role of active 'star' while the rest remain the passive audience." The desire of the lesbian feminist community to be actively engaged with media and text closely mirrors the pride fans take in the products of their own creative interactions with text. Zimmerman says that, "The breaking of the long silence of lesbian speech has led to a flood of intense, immediate, intimate, and sometimes awkward written expression" (Zimmerman, 19). No one familiar with fanfiction can fail to recognize how applicable those adjectives are to the work that fans so often produce for one another.
Women's role in the fan community is the subject, directly or indirectly, of much of the study of fandom that comes out of the fields of ethnology and cultural studies. Camille Bacon-Smith's 1992 survey of fan culture specifically treats the female-driven aspects of the culture; she begins her book by describing her desire to "jump up and down and scream, 'Look what I found! A conceptual space where women can come together and create -- to investigate new forms for their art and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men have placed on women's public behavior! Not a place or a time, but a state of being -- of giving each other permission'" (Bacon-Smith, 3). What she is describing is exactly what Nina Auerbach describes in Communities of Women as "a furtive, unofficial, often underground entity...defined by the complex, shifting, often contradictory attitudes it evokes. Each community defines itself as a 'distinct existence,' flourishing outside familiar categories and calling for a plurality of perspectives and judgements" (Auerbach, 11). The difference is that Auerbach is discussing communities that exist only in fiction, and the fandom that Bacon-Smith studied exists in the real world. Even overviews of fandom that do not intentionally focus on the role of women, such as Jenkins's, has to engage with the degree to which fandom is shaped by women, which Jenkins does by positioning himself as both an insider and an outsider to fandom, "a male fan within a predominantly female fan culture" (Jenkins, 6).
Both Jenkins's and Bacon-Smith's studies focus on media fandom, which is intimately linked to though not identical with SF fandom. SF fandom is admittedly much more male-dominated, although not as male-dominated as the stereotype implies, and the erasure of women's experience of SF fandom from a cultural studies perspective mirrors the related erasure of the fan experience in general from the history of the SF genre. "Unlike its media counterpart," Merrick says, "studies of literary SF have neglected the processes of production and reception of the text, a rather surprising omission for a genre which has been so closely associated with and even shaped by its unique group of fans. Despite the importance of fans to the SF community, their influence and even presence is at best marginal in most critical accounts, even though the experiences of female and feminist fans have been an integral part of the development of feminist SF" (Merrick, 49-50). Although "the significance of the genre lies in its extratextual dimensions, such as fan readings, zines, cons, and the close interaction between publishers, editors, authors, and audience that epitomizes the 'SF community,'" the need for cultural histories of women's experiences in SF fandom, as opposed to the history of women SF writers and feminist SF texts, is still largely unfulfilled (Merrick, 58-59), which is why the work of academics like Jenkins and Bacon-Smith, among others, in creating an ethnology of media fandom is such an important resource for SF fans. The fact that many fans use "fandom" to refer to these two loci of fan activity more or less interchangeably, making no significant distinction between their role as media fans and SF fans, also means that studies of women's fan use of media culture are invaluable in approaching the topic of women's fan use of SF texts.
Although many aspects of fan culture and behavior have nothing in particular to do with sexuality of any kind, and in those arenas the queer fan may not feel that her experience is especially distinctive, in the circles and conceptual spaces where sex and romance are primary concerns, the relationship between one's queer perspective and one's fan perspective becomes incredibly rich and complex. Those spaces have always been accessible and visible within fandom; one of the most significant dimensions of the source material that female fans have traditionally worked to open up is the romantic and sexual dimension of the characters' lives which are often de-emphasized in commercial, mainstream texts. A relatively recent fannish term for this perspective is "shipping," a term adopted out of X-Files fandom, where it referred specifically to "relationshippers," or fans who focused their energy on the sexual dynamics between Mulder and Scully, but the activity predates the term significantly. When the "ship" involved is a queer relationship, fandom has not only a unique term for that perspective, but an entire community, even a sub-fandom organized around it: slash fandom.
Like shippers, slashers adopted their name out of a specific context -- Star Trek fandom, where the abbreviation K/S was used to signal that a piece of fanfiction "slashed" Kirk and Spock, redefining their relationship as romantic and/or sexual in nature. What seemed like a bizarre event to many people -- women investing their time and their creative and emotional energy in queered readings of two male characters -- proved sensational enough that it generated a fair amount of critical interest both inside and outside the fandom. Slash generally takes up at least a chapter all to itself in any book on fan culture, and has been generating essays since at least 1985, when an article by feminist SF writer and fan Joanna Russ, entitled "Another Addict Raves About K/S," exposed the insular and secretive world of Star Trek slash fandom to the attention of outsiders, somewhat to the chagrin of the slashers themselves. At that point in time, the assumption was that if such scandalous fan activity was known of by non-slashers, there would be some sort of repercussion, some reprisal by the larger fandom or even by Star Trek's producers. (In fact, it was not a completely unrealistic fear; as slash became more visible, there was resistance to it, although slash fandom as it exists today is so incredibly large and vibrant that complaints about slash are routinely ignored -- it is literally too big and too influential to put a stop to, even if a small minority of particularly conservative fans would like to do so.) The spring 2003 issue of Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture contained an article called "Fan/tastic Voyage: A Journey Into the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction," by Nay Thrupkaew, one of the more recent and higher-profile attempts to address the subject.
For most of my research participants, the point at which their sexual identity intersected with their fan activity was in slash. Traditionally, critical interpretation of slash has avoided making close connections between homosexuality and slash, preferring to view it as an essentially heterosexual function, since it normally consists of women fantasizing sexually about men; many slashers would no more see themselves as operating in a queer space than a heterosexual man might while watching all-female pornography. Two early observers of slash who had an impact on later critical studies were Diana Veith and Patricia Frazer Lamb, who went to some pains in their study to deny that connection, saying that, "These novels, stories, and poems are not about sex or gender; they are certainly not about male homosexuality as such" (Veith & Lamb, 254), and perhaps even more confusingly, "K/S narratives are about two loving equals; within their relationship neither is 'masculine' while the other is 'feminine,' stronger or weaker, 'husband' or 'wife.' These stories are not about two gay males and should not be categorized as examples of homosexual literature -- either male or female" (Veith & Lamb, 252-253). This has been one popular means of viewing slash fandom, conceptualizing it as a straight women's activity that allows women to imagine idealized relationships free of gender and power baggage that fans otherwise bring to heterosexual couples in the text. The cliche has been that within slash the characters are not gay, they are merely in love with each other; one of my research participants said, "Certainly I've never been a fan of WNGWJLEO -- hate it actually," in complete confidence that anyone who knows slash will be able to read that as an acronym for We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other. Jenkins quotes a fan in his book who wryly renames the convention, "I'm not gay, I just like to suck Spock's cock" (Jenkins, 220). That reading of the characters as firmly divided from any issue of sexual identity is a standard trope of fandom, something slash fans are so familiar with as to make it a cliche.
Slash fans who are also queer, of course, seem less likely to accept that understanding of the characters, and many of my research participants disavowed it, either in passing or quite strenuously, although at the same time some of them had some discomfort with using slash for "political" purposes, rather than as a genre whose primary duty was to serve fans' sexual and emotional interests. The "We're not gay" understanding of slash is less common in fandom now than it was fifteen years ago when a great deal of the foundational studies of fandom were being done; it tends to be considered passe by heterosexual as well as queer audiences. There has been an influence from the ideology of "queerness" itself, whereby fans are much more willing than before to subsume anything sexually non-normative under the generic umbrella of "queer," rather than to insist on dogmatic distinctions between slash as "examples of homosexual literature" or not. At the same time, although the concepts of "queer" or even of "homosexual" held at best a highly marginalized place in the history of slash, the connection is clearly there, both in the obvious manner, and in the underlying ideology of slash itself. Russ defined the central question of slash as by saying, "The 'What If' behind K/S is: What If I Were Free?" (Veith & Lamb, 254). Although for Russ the issue was gender and "freedom" means freedom from culturally imposed expectations that define lovers as holding different roles within their relationship based on maleness and femaleness (Kirk and Spock, being not-women, can share power within their relationship free of the pressures women face to abrogate their own power within relationships), what her insight contains is the seeds of modern slash fandom's more overtly and proudly queer sensibility. "What If I Were Free?" could just as much mean freedom from compulsory heterosexuality and the erasure of the reality of sexual desire outside of heterosexual relationships, and for many slash fans now, it does mean exactly that.
More significant, possibly, than the relative queerness of the art and fiction that slash fandom produces is the increasing queer perspective of the community itself. While after eight years of research in the 1980's, Bacon-Smith can say in her demographic data that, "my sole lesbian informant ... says that she has met only seven other lesbian women in fandom. I have seen only one fanzine, regularly published out of the U.K., which openly caters to a predominantly gay audience, and this is the only place where I have ever seen stories or poetry depicting lesbian relationships written by women in media fandom. I have never heard the sexual orientation of a fan discussed in either a positive or negative way in relation to a fan's writing or choice of reading material, nor have I ever seen it as an issue in the social interactions of the group" (Bacon-Smith, 321). One of my older research participants, who was participating in fandom during that time period, says, "First wave, when I was using fandom as a way to explore my own sexuality, I was very aware of the trope that slash fans were all straight women, and often accepted that as fact (whether it was or not, and I think there is reason to question that)."
The majority of research participants, however, entered the fandom years after Bacon-Smith's data was collected, many of them through the Internet, which has changed the character of fandom in ways that have yet to be fully examined. This younger generation has largely come to slash fandom already either queer-identified or sensitive to queer issues, and their experience of the slash community is the polar opposite of Bacon-Smith's description of a group of women, almost uniformly heterosexual, for whom sexual orientation is "never discussed" and "never seen as an issue."
One participant says, "I'm more out in fandom just because fandom is a sexualized space for me; my interaction here and my discussions and friendships revolve around a sort of shared platonic sexuality that makes all sexual things, including orientation, fair topics of conversation." Another says, "I feel pretty comfortable as a queer fan. I think it helps that I've been in "younger", "hipper" fandoms where being bi is chic -- even though I'm [lesbian,] not bi, it breaks up the heterosexual monotony." One succinctly says, "In fandom I assume everyone's queer unless they tell me differently, and I assume everyone's assuming the same thing about me." Almost all of them say that the environment of "their corner of fandom" is both sex-positive and queer-positive, a place where few limits are placed on whatever desires fans choose to claim, with social distinction being drawn not between hetero- and homosexual, but between fans who are comfortable with a wide range of sexual realities and those who are limited in what they can accept. One respondent says, "One of my favourite aspects of slash fandom is that it is straight chicks talking about sex. It seems immensely significant to me because the straight chicks I grew up with professed not to like sex or penises. Hanging out with porn-obsessed women suits me! I've never felt uncomfortable in media and slash fandom but then I don't hang out with anti-slash weirdos." Whereas heterosexual slash fans have traditionally understood the pairing of beloved characters to be the raison d'etre of slash fandom, fans with a queer identity seem more likely to conceptualize slash fandom as an arena for discussing sex and sexuality -- sometimes in terms of their philosophies about heteronormativity and queer theory, sometimes only for erotic purposes, often both at the same time.
The role that slash fills in expressing women's sexual fantasies is a particular issue for slash fans. Not one but three of my respondents specifically upbraided me for my use of the word "erotica" in the questions I gave them; their term of preference is "porn." One said, "Erotica is a pissant term used by people who don't want to be associated with porn," and another saw a veiled sexism in my use of the term in a question about female/female slash and its absence in a similar question about male/male slash. She said, "What, because they're girls it can't be porn {g}? Sorry, this is just one of those issues which annoys me.... it's like one of those, 'women don't sweat, they perspire/glow/whatever' statements, and I'm always just like, please, girls can fuck too." At the same time that many of my research participants expressly object to treatments within slash fandom of women that overemphasize their alleged relational and caring nature at the expense of being portrayed as "real women feeling real and urgent desire," they also adhere to traditional female sexual values in other ways by expressing a strong preference for pornography that is "in character," that is true to the personalities of the characters and their textual relationship with one another. What they want is "hot sex with strong characterization" or "strong, recognizable characterization, an interesting and tension-fraught relationship, and hot sex."
All of my research participants expressed an interest in and involvement with both male/male and female/female subjects within slash fandom, including the women who identified themselves strictly as lesbian. Traditional interpretations of slash have often advanced the idea that women in general are attracted to slash because it allows them to identify with and interact with male characters who are more dynamic and interesting than the female characters in source texts, and although all of my respondents had a long list of female characters in SF that they have great attachments toward, many of them also echoed this sense, particularly in childhood and adolescence, of being drawn to male characters by default, due to the relative weakness of available female characters. One said, "As a child, I think I imprinted on male characters because they were closest to being three-dimensional - most females (books and television/movies) seemed flat and boring, there to be rescued or be eye candy. This has stuck with me; I still tend to relate to male characters primarily," a sentiment which another phrased more succinctly as, "I identified strongly with boys in literature, as girl characters were crap." Other respondents, however, employed typically fan strategies of extracting positive meaning out of texts that may not inherently be positive or empowering; one Dr. Who fan said, "I had a pash for most of the Doctor's sidekicks particularly Sarah Jane Smith, Leila, first Romana and Ace. I was fairly devastated when the show was cancelled and there was no more Ace. While all these women were sidekicks and some of them spent more time screaming than anything else they were still out there, out in the universe having a life far away from mine." Most mentioned a number of recent female characters and female-centered texts; almost every reference to Xena or to Buffy the Vampire Slayer was prefaced with an "of course"; it was simply understood that I would recognize why a queer woman would single out those texts as objects of fascination. Though they did not have identical responses to those texts (some spoke fondly of "Xena and Gabs' true and immortal love," while one expressed discomfort at a fandom perception of Xena and Gabrielle that she felt was "too lesbian" and "not queer enough" -- some focused on Buffy's use of out queer characters and some on its metaphorical use of vampirism, magic, and the role of the outsider to speak to queer experiences; many identified the recurring character of Faith, semi-heroic and semi-villainous with an ambiguous sexuality, as pivotal for their perceptions of where queer women could fit in on television), there was a collective understanding from within slash fandom that these texts -- both shows that have been canceled some years ago -- have continuing relevance and meaning to queer audiences. One called Buffy the Vampire Slayer "very much a text about sexuality, about gender issues. Vampirism as queer, blurred sexual lines, unconventional sexual practices--the show was practically a primer on queer issues."
One idea that recurred when queer women spoke about their feelings about male/male and female/female slash -- an issue I had never seen addressed in formal criticism about slash fandom -- is that my respondents tended to view themselves as consuming and producing more male/male slash at least partially because their standards were so much higher for female/female slash. After discussing male/male slash and then turning to female/female, one said, "To some degree my answers here are close to those above (re m/m) although I suspect I might be a little more critical of [f/f] stories that don't feel realistic - even though I know they're fantasy, I also know they reflect familiar lives/lifestyles, and I want some recognition of that reality." Another said, "I am much more concerned with whether F/F stories deal with sexuality in a realistic way. It feels more personal. I think that's why I haven't written F/F up until now--it feels much more revealing to me as a person and a queer woman." The issue of realism, although not entirely absent in discussions of m/m slash, was almost a constant as queer women discussed their feelings about women's sexual relationships in fanfiction: "I think it's more important with f/f than with m/m that the sexuality be realistic," "I'm more inclined to study the SF/F setting and its effects when reading f/f slash, because it's more important to me that f/f be realistic," and "I do like F/F erotica, but I’m very fussy about it. Unrealistic M/M sex might not bother me, but unrealistic F/F is guaranteed to put me off" were all representative comments; other respondents mentioned being sometimes blase about "out-of-character" male/male slash if it at least served as passable porn, but expressed frustration and even a sense of betrayal when it came to female/female slash that didn't seem to leave room for their insights into what female sexuality was "really" like. Their need to identify with female characters in slash may be much more pronounced than their need to do so with male characters, meaning that they sometimes find female/female slash less satisfying, or at least less forgivable in its flaws.
In general the fans who participated in my research felt that they approached SF and SF fandom somewhat differently than heterosexual fans would, although they tended to stay vague as to how, uncomfortable with the idea of trying to describe or interpret the experiences of the "typical" heterosexual fan. Many of them found SF a genre that is comfortable for exploring sexuality issues, and all of them have found within SF fandom a community that is overwhelmingly affirming of their experiences and actively interested in their perspective. One person drew a specific parallel between her desires as a fan to have relationships with other fans and her desires as a lesbian to have a relationship with the LGBT community, describing the discovery of both the fan and LGBT communities as, "more a feeling of *recognition* than *revelation*. As with fandom (or, perhaps more accurately, fandom was also like this), the discovery of a community of people made me want to join in." Many of them spoke interchangeably from a reader's and writer's perspective, a common type of bi-location in fandom, where fans are assumed to be both consumers of texts and producers of other types of texts, whether those be specifically artistic or commentary on the meaning of the source material, and at the times when they spoke as writers, they evidenced a particular enthusiasm for the SF genre as a means of opening up alternative perspectives on queer issues. One said, "I think fantasy and sf provides a medium, especially for "queer" writers / readers to find a sort of "sexual utopia". It's a way to show what our world COULD be like, if only people would be open-minded enough to accept people for who they are," while many spoke fondly of particular fictional universes where they can write without binding the characters into dominant modes of modern thought on the meaning of sexual behavior and identity; one put a joking twist on the subject by saying, "SF/F can be used as a cheap way to get [characters] together - just put Spock into ponn farr [Vulcan mating frenzy] and Bob's your uncle - but it can also be an incredibly rich source of world-building ideas."
Possibly over and beyond any other response to fandom, however, queer women are empowered by the contact they have with other women in a setting where owning and interpreting female visions of sexual possibility is not only not restricted by taboo, but actively encouraged. Many of the respondents had a supportive circle of queer- and queer-positive friends outside of fandom, and many of them were also quick to remind me that many of their most supportive and understanding friends within fandom were heterosexual women. But nearly all of them still identified their experiences in fandom as queer experiences in fandom; fandom for them has been, among other things, an ongoing conversation with a particular relevance to their developing sense of sexual identity and understanding of what sexuality means. I imagine that all of them would somehow see themselves in the words of one fan, who says that, "The first gay people I ever met, I met through fandom (Rocky Horror), and it was in that community that I first began to feel that it was okay to be whatever I was: a big ol' geek with a voracious and queer sexual appetite. That feeling of validation has continued in media fandom, where I am not only okay, I am not even the biggest freak on the block anymore. The community of brilliant and open-minded women is the thing that keeps me in fandom whether I'm into a show or not. I have made real friends here, and I have been able to share myself wholly without fear of being attacked, shamed or misunderstood. ... And I've met plenty of queer heroes in fandom, women who are out and proud, women who are kinky and proud, women who are voracious and proud, women who are straight but not narrow. I feel that we are all part of the same whole."
Bibliography
Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, 1978.
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom & the Creation of Popular
Myth, 1992.
Crosby, Janice C. Cauldron of Changes: Feminist Spirituality in Fantastic Fiction, 2000.
Helford, Elyse Rae. “Feminism, Queer Studies, and the Sexual Politics of Xena: Warrior
Princess.” Fantasy Girls: Gender & the New Universe of Science Fiction & Fantasy
Television, ed. Elyse Rae Helford, 2000.
Hollinger, Veronica. “(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the
Defamiliarization of Gender.” Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices &
Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, ed. Marleen Barr, 2000.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, 1992.
Lamb, Patricia Frazer & Diana L. Veith. “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines.”
Erotic Universe: Sexuality & Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo, 1986.
Merrick, Helen. “The Readers Feminism Doesn’t See: Feminist Fans, Critics, and Science
Fiction.” Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture & Its Audience, ed. Deborah Cartwell,
1997.
Riemer, James D. “Homosexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy.” Erotic Universe: Sexuality
& Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo, 1986.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989, 1990.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-12-02 08:26 pm (UTC)From:You definitely got The Job done here, chica, and I'd totally love to see more essays from you, however unofficial, on whatever thoughts the respondents gave you. Especially:
In general the fans who participated in my research felt that they approached SF and SF fandom somewhat differently than heterosexual fans would, although they tended to stay vague as to how, uncomfortable with the idea of trying to describe or interpret the experiences of the "typical" heterosexual fan.
I'm really curious about the discomfort, especially because I, obviously, share it. :D
no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 05:02 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-02 08:47 pm (UTC)From:please, girls can fuck too may be my new favorite quote.
Also: does this mean you'll be writing porn again soon?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 05:05 pm (UTC)From:In re porn: I have one more paper to write and then final exams (most of them not terribly stressful, but they do require a moderate amount of prep). Then I have 2 holiday stories due -- one Not Porn, and one Most Definitely Porn, Oh Dear Lord the Porntastic Porn! Then I'm on vacation, and can get back to my slow but steady pace of writing Mainly Porn. *g*
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-02 08:50 pm (UTC)From:Well-researched and without many of the tired angles that come out in a lot of papers. Go, you!
And yes to what Te said, too!
no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 05:07 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-02 09:09 pm (UTC)From:"Unlike its media counterpart," Merrick says, "studies of literary SF have neglected the processes of production and reception of the text, a rather surprising omission for a genre which has been so closely associated with and even shaped by its unique group of fans. Despite the importance of fans to the SF community, their influence and even presence is at best marginal in most critical accounts, even though the experiences of female and feminist fans have been an integral part of the development of feminist SF" (Merrick, 49-50).
If you're interested in more of this for literary SF, by the way, I strongly urge you to take a look at Justine Larbalestier's The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, which is pretty much exactly about that -- most focused on the letter columns in SF magazines in the 50s and the formation of and response to the Tiptree Awards in the 80s and 90s.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 05:07 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-02 11:28 pm (UTC)From:I'm pretty impressed, and hope the professor recognizes your excellence *g* - you did a terrific job on this
plus, it was fun to look for quotes I recognized as I read through
no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 05:08 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-03 10:28 am (UTC)From:So although SF is theoretically open to radical restructurings of sexual norms, relatively few widely popular and accessible SF texts actually are clearly and unambiguously about queer subjects, adopting instead the strategy of reducing characters' sexual identity to one incidental facet of their lives (the strategy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels or Babylon 5's handling of Susan Ivanova), or of propagating a kind of quasi-queerness that mirrors real non-heterosexual experience partially but not entirely (by completely sexualizing it, such as Heinlein does, or completely de-sexualizing it, as with the Tarma and Kethry stories or Xena).
Although Xena may be guilty of "marginalizing" the sexuality of it's characters when a strong segment of the audience (gay and straight) was probably hoping for more light to be shed on the subject, I don't think that making a character's sexuality less of focus in writing is undermining it, "de-sexualizing" it, or writing it off in any way. I don't define who I am by my sexuality, it's just one of the many facets of who I am -- there's alot more to me than which gender I prefer at the end of the day. And I think that liberty has to be given to fictional characters, and the writer's who craft them as well. Who they ARE is not all summed up by the "importance" of their sexuality, in fact, if I'm not reading porn, specifically, or a piece of writing that intends to explore sexuality, I think it SHOULD be incidental to the story, because I want the characters to be as "real" as possible.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-03 05:50 pm (UTC)From:Re my use of the word "de-sexualizing," I stand by it because it is literally what I mean. Without placing any value judgement on this fact one way or another: canonically, textually, there is nothing that tells us that Xena and Gabrielle's relationship was sexual. Nothing. We can watch it and say that it *seems* like it would have been, that there are *indications* that perhaps it was, but the way that Xena as a show survived was through plausible deniability. Lesbian sex? Where? We certainly do not know what you mean! *wink, wink, nudge, nudge* So the de-sexualization I was speaking of was the process of making Xena and Gabrielle's relationship the textual centerpiece of the show, but carefully airbrushing out anything that might force a resistant viewer to believe or accept that they were having sex. In a show all about their feelings for each other, no episode ever addressed the subject of whether or not one of those things they felt was lust. And that was deliberate, and, I think, both positive and negative in its consequences. In some ways it's neat to have subtext and to enjoy multiple readings, and on the other hand there are times I would have preferred the show to come right out and say, "No, they've never slept together and they don't want to sleep together," rather then go the way they went, because ultimately what it seemed to me to do was to behave as though lesbian sex was so invisible and unimportant that no one might even really care whether they were having it or not -- or if you cared, that was your business, and you could make up whatever answer you like because it didn't ultimately matter. Like I said, I at least have some good and some bad feelings about Xena's sexual politics -- which is a thing you get used to after you spend a while in media fandom *g*
As for the whole issue of being "defined" by your sexuality, I'm not quite sure how to answer that. Clearly I'm not only my sexuality either, and my relationships, even those that involve sex, are not entirely about sex. I don't think anyone would deny that. However, my issue with X:WP is about the dishonesty imposed on the text for political reasons; the show tried to pass this idea under the table to a lesbian fan base that Xena was actively bisexual, and then shot a hundred and fifty hours of footage about her where they kind of never got around to that part. To me, that's -- either they were shopping a lie to the fans and Xena *wasn't* into doing girls, or they deliberately kept that aspect of her life a secret where they didn't conceal anything else about her. She wasn't definable *only* as a murderous privateer, either, but they weren't scared to deal with the fact that was there, so why be scared of this?
To me, the idea that sexuality is only relevant when you're either having sex or thinking about your sexuality is -- just really not true. In my own case, at least, it's not *all* that I am, but that doesn't mean it just up and goes away when it's not the current focus of all my attention, either. You cannot possibly understand who am I, how I think, what I want, or what matters to me if you don't know that I'm queer. You can't. You would be wrong about me on a major, profound level that would impact your understanding of a number of things I've done and gone through in my life. That's always my fear when people say they want characters' sexuality to be "incidental" -- I don't think your relationship to your erotic, sexual, and romantic life is about a series of incidents. I think it's about how you have become the person you are, and I think that's true of everyone, regardless of orientation. With most straight characters, even if their sexuality is not the "focus" of the story, we do know something about their romantic history, we often get to know who they're attached to or attracted to now, and the text assumes that we'll translate that into other kinds of knowlege about the character. That's never called "defining a character by their sexuality" when the character is straight, you know? So why would it be if the character is queer?
you have *no* idea who i am, but
From:Re: you have *no* idea who i am, but
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-03 01:55 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-04 01:13 am (UTC)From:in terms of the difficulties/resistance/disinterest in reading/writing f/f...i think there are a lot of things still to be discussed/uncovered.
your critique of lamb&veigh made me realize how i use them constantly in a kind of shorthanded form...i always agree with their description that slash is not about gay men...and forget that they then falsely (i'd agree) argue that it is not about queer women either...
anyway, this particular issue has been close to my heart, though i tend to come to it from the 'other' side...a straight woman who is fascinated by the queerness of writing porn with/for other women, getting off on one another's fantasies...i think there are many layers of queerness in slashdom...and the queer characters are definitely only the first level.
thank you for sharing!!!
no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 05:16 pm (UTC)From:(no subject)
From:You quoted me!
Date: 2004-12-04 01:49 am (UTC)From:It's a wonderful paper. Of course, your conclusions are tremendously validating for me, so naturally I'm disposed to call it wonderful. Heh. But really...there's some fine and thorough work here, some very clear thinking. I am impressed.
Re: You quoted me!
Date: 2004-12-06 05:18 pm (UTC)From:Re: You quoted me!
From:the left hand of darkness
Date: 2004-12-04 04:03 am (UTC)From:Anyway, what really inspired me to come out of lurkerdom for you is that I *have* to argue with your dismissal of "The Left Hand of Darkness" as a queer text. Because to me, it's far more queer than almost any other well-known sf novel, way more than any of those "If We Were Free" worlds (which is a terminology I love, by the way, for that concept.) It manages to totally upset every concept of gender and sexuality we're used to, and tries to build what *should* be that "free" world. And yet, both of its main characters *are* queer, by both our standards *and* the standards of the world she's built. Genly is a "pervert" under Gethenian standards, openly and unabashedly so by necessity, and his *mission* is to get the Gethenian people to accept perverts-- even if he never consciously frames it that way, the Gethenians constantly do. And his ally Therem is a closeted queer; his entire character, and, I think, his support of Genly, is based on the fact that he is still in love with the one person who he can never be openly in a sexual relationship with without being cast out by society.
The fact that it's entirely possible to read the book, and only notice the obvious gender issues without picking up on the underlying *sexuality* issues is testament both to how great a book it is, and how good a vehicle sci-fi is for exploring these ideas.
Oh, and on another side note that's too late to do you any good, I'll add that most of the '70s sword-and-sorcery I've read is Fritz Lieber's Fafrd and the Grey Mouser books, and while I wouldn't call them *protagonists* exactly, many of the female characters have sex with each other, frequently, and often for the prurient benefit of the male heroes. I've been tempted to slash the guys just for *parity*.
Re: the left hand of darkness
Date: 2004-12-04 11:06 am (UTC)From:I like your reading of Left Hand. It's never occurred to me before to see Therem's love for his brother as closetedor queer, but now it seems obvious. The strength of the line drawn between the Aliens and the Gethenian perverts has always held me back from seeing Genly and his mission as queer-positive, though. It's as though he is preaching not acceptance of perverts, but merely the recognition of an alternative mode of normativity: alien maleness and femaleness are acceptable because they are attached to complementary cultural constructs of masculinity and femininity, but Gethenian perversion remains a state of constant sexual arousal that is unacceptable and dangerous to the somer population. The Gethenian perverts she mentions are always mad - mentally imbalanced to match their physical imbalance, perhaps.
Though Genly does come to accept his designation as one of them when he's imprisoned in Orgoreyn, and maybe even when he's alone with Therem... hmm, must think more about this.
seems to be a strong line drawn between the "aliens" and Gethen's home-grown "perverts" that works as a bit of a barrier to your reading for me, though
Re: the left hand of darkness
From:Re: the left hand of darkness
From:Re: the left hand of darkness
From:Ramblings from a stranger
Date: 2004-12-05 03:32 am (UTC)From:I've recommended your essay in my journal, I hope you don't mind.
I've been thinking a lot about the predominance of m/m slash, and the lack of femmeslash lately, and haven't come up with much in the way of satisfying answers. Your finding that queer women are more picky about f/f slash fic is new to me. I've heard from a few bisexual and straight female fans that femmeslash is not interesting to them because it's something they've done or can imagine. At the same time, there seems to be a significant number of people who want to see more femmeslash fics because they're interested in it, or just for the sake of parity. Personally, I'm a lesbian who mainly reads m/m slash and writes f/f. I don't read much femmeslash partly because there are few 3D female characters in Harry Potter, and partly because f/f relationships tend to be presented as happy, sappy, and rather boring, whereas there's more diversity in the types of relationships portrayed in m/m slash.
Thanks again for the wonderful essay!
Re: Ramblings from a stranger
Date: 2004-12-06 05:29 pm (UTC)From:I definitely got a lot of people talking to me about that issue of relatibility, so I think it may be a major thing going on (even though I'm like you, I hadn't heard anyone discuss it before this), but I wouldn't say it's the only thing going on.
The thing I hear most often is the bit about the lack of 3D female characters and relationships and all that, and I think it's true to some extent. But what interests me is that in apparently every other arena, fans are very, very good at taking characters who have like *three lines,* who are not even *meant* to be 3D, let alone succeed at it, and turn out these incredible epics about them. I remember in Buffy fandom, Devon and Oz were quite the rage for a while, even though Devon has -- okay, maybe ten lines in the series, and is presented as kind of a meathead. But the thing I love about fandom is, people brought their own toys to the party, and there were quite a few really *terrific* Devon/Oz stories in particular and Dingo-centric stories in general. Other fandoms, same deal, really. Is Skinner that fascinating a character, really, that complex? What about Chekov, you know? Why can't the marginalized female characters be treated like that more often by fans, what's the resistance to it?
I'm like Cathexys -- I think a lot of things are going on, and I don't think we really understand what half of them are yet.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-05 04:40 am (UTC)From:If I were your professor I'd pass you with flying colors. For the clarity if not for the subject.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 05:30 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-05 04:58 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 05:32 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-05 10:44 am (UTC)From:as an aspiring academic in film,theatre and media, I've chosen a similar topic for my diploma, so I know a lot of the popular culture texts you've quoted, or used, but you really did a terrific job in summing up fandom-studies over the past 20 years.
I agree with you that there absolutetly must be a study on how the internet changed fandom - I think the influence is very big and so far noone (as far as I know), has worked on that. (a book rec for you, "Brooker, Will: Using the Force. I think it came out in 2002 - can't give you the exact title, my girlfriend has my copy of it. Brooker's book has one chapter about Star Wars slash fandom, most significally Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan, which is a very interesting read, considering he isn't a "textual poacher", but a "normal" media fan).
As a queer fan myself, I found especially interesting what your research participants had to say about fem-slash, because I've discussed the same things and expressed the same reservations to my girlfriend, who's in the slash fandom as well. Ironically, my reservations tend not to only refer to slash fiction, but partly to lesbian fiction as well. Most fem-slash does indeed not feel realistic, or at least it doesn't relate to my own sexual experience (I mentioned to my girlfriend that I have the feeling most fem-slash is written by girls trying to find out about their sexuality and fantasizing about lesbian relationships, but that's a completely subjective assumption, of course). I've recently read Susan Water's "Tipping the Velvet" and it was a huge disappointment. Apart from the female main character being insufferable, the sex portrayed felt very unrealistic to me - there was one scene where the female protagonist acknowledges her love to her love interest, and after what felt like two kisses to the lips, they commence to fisting without even so much as touch a breast in the same "make-out session". I don't know about other people, but I don't see myself partaking in fisting with "the love of my life" right after our first kiss. Felt like the author thought "hmmmm, which sexual practice haven't I used so far?". Well, enough of that rant.
I haven't written fem-slash yet, but I want to, you can say my fingers itch for it, but I haven't yet found a pairing I'm really attached to. I write m/m slash though, and I find that it quite suits me, (I also like reading books about gay protagonists or watching films dealing with queer issues, not matter if gay, lesbian, bisexual or transsexual). In everything but the sex I feel very close to those homosexual male characters, because what they experience is also what I as a bisexual woman in a lesbian relationship (I can't tell you if I feel more lesbian or more bisexual, I don't think it really matters) experience.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-05 12:43 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-05 05:49 pm (UTC)From:femmeslash!
Date: 2004-12-06 08:52 pm (UTC)From:The thing that I'm most appreciative of in your paper is the inclusion of femmeslash and lesbians/bi writers and readers. I've noticed that in a lot of academic and non-academic writing on slash, there is a tendency to define it as m/m. In fact all discussion seems to center on m/m slash. I wonder if it has less to do with the smaller size of the femmeslash world and more to do with that (outdated as you've shown) portrait of slash writers as mousey heterosexual housewives. I'm sure it makes for more compelling and titillating thesis if you can out the kink of 'normal' American housewives and all the psychosexual/cultural implications of that transgression.
As a queer woman who writes and reads femmeslash, I must say it's nice to be included in the discussion. Although it does lead me to wonder if slash and femmeslash (the fact that femmeslash is a derivative term really says it all) aren't completely different spaces emotionally and culturally.
Anyway, I'm not an academic. Just a layperson who enjoys a good academic paper every once in a while. thanks again.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-07 02:34 am (UTC)From:Anyway, good work! Feel insired since I have to fish my own term paper this week. Not at all conneted to this subject, or perhaps just a lttle bit in a very farfetched way. I'm writing about the popular middlebrow fiction of the 1930s and how sisters seems to be a common theme in these novels. Now, how could I slash that? =)
no subject
Date: 2004-12-07 05:05 pm (UTC)From:Going to a yaoi panel at a convention and being able to say "cock" simply and repeatedly in front of a group of at least 50 young women, none of whom blushed or tittered when I said it, is absolutely one of the most empowering experiences of my life. It's this community where women rule. Some place that we are Free.
You deserve an A+. I hope you get it!
no subject
Date: 2004-12-07 07:07 pm (UTC)From:Nice job.
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Date: 2004-12-07 08:23 pm (UTC)From:I particularly liked the suggestions of fandom as a queer space more than a straight/lesbian/bi/etc. space; the coexistence of varied sexualities (of all varieties of fixedness and fluidity) within my little corner of fandom has always had great appeal for me, and this paper has helped me in the process of framing/contextualizing the ways in which I experience this.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-08 04:14 am (UTC)From:The f/f thing especially caught my attention. I entirely agree with the comments that a lot of things must contribute to the comparative scarcity of f/f. One thought that struck me, reading through this, is that part of the problem may related to the lack of female characters. Not the lack of good female characters, per se. As you justly point out, that doesn't stop us when the not-good character is male. But a lot of slash I've seen (not all, certainly, but a lot) relies on male friendships as a starting point. Friendships between men, and the flipside of the coin, rivalries, make for nice, juicy material. Female friendships, in my memory, are about as rare in the source texts as f/f is in the fan productions. Just another thought to throw in the pot.
I admit, the idea of fandom as a safe/welcoming place for women and their productions gave me a moment of cognitive dissonance. The fandoms I have been much involved in are all viciously contentious and vituperative, and 'empowering' is not the first word that springs to my mind when I contemplate them. On the other hand, that could be a mark of freedom right there.
At any rate, thank you for sharing this!
Good thought!
Date: 2005-01-09 07:08 am (UTC)From:That is a good possible explanation for why there isn't more femslash out there (well, in addition to the "most fanfic writers are women, and straight women want to have dicks in their stories" explanation). True, few stories out there focus on f/f relationships, sexual or otherwise. The way many stories are written, the male characters are allowed to exist for their own sakes and/or in interaction with other males, while the females (if they're there) are presented in relation with males. So when fans write stories, the tendency is to either present the females in relation with males (het fic), or leave them out altogether (m/m slash), because there's just little model for female/female interaction presented in the existing story material.
Like, look at LOTR (which I love, mind) - there are very deep, very important relationship between males, but we don't see, say, Eowyn with a female friend she loves as much as Sam loves Frodo or Gimli loves Legolas. We do see her loyal devotion to her uncle Theoden, her hopeless crush on Aragorn, and eventually her love for Faramir - all of them male.
And yes, that probably does say something about the society we live in...
Re: Good thought!
From:"chloe likes olivia"
From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 04:18 pm (UTC)From:I did wonder, though, why there was no mention of the work of Samuel R. Delany, who openly introduced gay (or queer) sexuality into his writing?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-13 10:52 pm (UTC)From:Because none of the people I interviewed mentioned him. I didn't want to take on the job of doing some kind of full-out survey of queer themes in the genre, since that wasn't the focus of my paper, so I only looked at authors and works that were specifically referred to me; the question was something about texts with queer themes and characters that you specifically remembered and connected with in some way.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 12:58 pm (UTC)From:It's thought provoking for me too because it isn't really my experience as a straight woman slash fan (phew). I don't read or write f/f because I have precisely no interest. I do like, and identify with, female characters in SF source material, I'm just not interested in them in fandom and especially not in Slash fandom.
In a way I think it's a shame that you didn't have a more varied participant base... I don't know what your focus was of course, perhaps you were seeking particular participants. I do think however it is only one of many aspects of fandom, even slash fandom.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 01:03 pm (UTC)From:Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed reading it.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 01:16 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 12:54 pm (UTC)From: