That's just awesome. There's only one thing I wanted to mention:
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
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.