This Is Never Going To End, Is It?
Jan. 19th, 2010 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eumeliaYes more on the Slash Debate. Yes, more.
I'm rapping my fingers at the screen here, getting irritated by the reiteration, upon reiteration that I'm seeing.
I've read the latest metafandom and linkspam and once again, I'm seeing cluelessness, carelessness, privilege and more identity erasure.
Stop it. Just, stop.
I've decided to stop talking about m/m, because as a genre is appeals to me about as much as Mills & Boon romance, or Harlequin novels - even though that is the place in which I see most of the crimes of "misinterpretation", I can't talk about it.
Is this really about freedom of expression?
Is this really about being allowed to write?
BTW, I have read a few entries by gay men who in so many words are saying that women shouldn't write salsh or m/m - um, yeah, right, way to go guys, that's a way to build solidarity. And that's what's missing, I think.
Solidarity.
One of the things I love about fandom is that we all love something. We're all part of a community that reads a book, watches a show and sees something special.
I'm not an automatic slash fan, btw. I don't have my slash goggles glued on. I much prefer my "slash" canon - even if it's only hinted at at first (like Angel/Spike, my first slash couple, I'll never forget you, or forgive you).
One of the things about slash is that it takes a text and queers it. It's not actually a queer text to begin with - I can see why Kirk/Spock works, honestly, I do. But all in all, they're just BFF's, along with Bones.
I found it much more likely for the Doctor and Donna to be doing it in the TARDIS, rather then the Doctor and Rose (who he worshipped and put on a pedestal) or the Doctor and Martha (who he treated like shit, but that's another rant) - why, you ask? Well, there was no awkward romancing between the two of them - they really enjoyed hanging out together - why is that not "slash"?
Slash re-contextualises mainstream media and reinterprets the text.
Is this what the poet meant? Very likely not.
That doesn't matter.
The creator's opinion on their own work only matters if you want to know what they thing about it - it's in my experience as a slasher, as a lit student and as someone who has met authors I admire, that from their perspective they simply do not see what we see.
Nor can they, they have an utterly different back story to why people do what they do within the story.
The only thing we readers have, is what happens. We don't even have why things happen as they happen. We just have them as they happen.
Yes, there is nothing but the text and within it there is subtext and outside it there is metatext - we do not live in a vacuum, everything we read and write has a political bend some more explicit than others. More accurately, some political bends are perceived as more explicit than others, because the content is such that it doesn't sit in an invisible category, a cultural default - hence why a movie like like Notting Hill is in the Rom-Com category, but Imagine Me and You will be under the LGBT category.
These categories will be the death of us. Messing them up is something that slash enables us to do when it comes to reading mainstream media.
Art, of which the craft of writing is included, that muddies and messes with gender has a complicated history.
That topic is now making the rounds when it comes to writing slash and queer identity.
Slash as drag.
The history of Drag includes both transgressive art and men policing women's sexuality.
Bringing Drag into this debate, we have to then take into account the fact that we are giving this debate an essentialist spin when it comes to what it means to be a man and to be a woman.
Slash is not like Drag. Not metaphorically. Not actually. The equivalent of a Drag Queen is a Drag King - hey, can you guess who gets more spotlight?! That's right...
Why?
When it comes down to it, even men who perform femininity are considered better or more worth talking about, than women who perform masculinity.
The context of men performing in Drag has not always been gay culture, but it has always been parodic (no one said parody wasn't serious business).
Slash is not parodic in its portrayal of masculinity. If it was, the debate would be different.
I'm speaking here as someone who is friends with Drag performers and I've seen the behind the scenes cattiness of it.
In today's Drag Culture, the misogyny is so ironically real. As mentioned, seeing it go on behind the scenes made me want to rip someone's wig off.
The misogyny is something else I'm seeing in this debate that very few are willing to acknowledge - it's not just men policing women's sexuality, or women venerating the imagery two men going at it evokes.
It's coming from every single direction.
Men policing women's sexuality a reality in our society, it doesn't matter what your orientation is. Drag has a role in that.
Women co-opting gay men as an accessory to their own lives is not a new phenomenon either, either as it is presented....or how it does in fact happen more often than not (I cannot express the disgust I felt when a friend told me he was introduced as "My Gay Friend" by someone) and it can be conceived that slash and m/m are an extension of that.
This is all happening in the context of debate. A debate that relaunched into this pandemonium because there was an appropriation of culture and identity by those who, other than consume and create it, do not in fact have to live it and claiming that by reading slash and m/m, they're LGBT allies.
Which, no, you aren't, by default.
Slash and m/m may, in some way, help you sorta get the notion that we exist and do things and live, but we're the one in our skins.
The debate then became a whole lot of huffy people saying: "You can't do this and that in your writing of m/m" and the other people going "oh, yeah, watch me!".
Turf War as I mentioned.
I've written else where, in a different debate on the subject, that slash enables me to be the man I can't be. I can't be a man for various reasons; none of them have anything to do with the absence of a penis, nor with the cultural role of being one.
Gender is a finicky thing.
It is a prison that forces us conform in ways that doesn't always suit who we are.
I do not walk the world as a man would, gay or straight. In the stories that I read I can be that man.
Perhaps this is just me and my weird view of the world and of stories.
But when I've finished the story, I'm not a gay man. I'm not a girlfag, which do seem to take that identity to heart as their own.
As I discussed previously, the silencing of queer women's identities and in fact erasing identities in order to better compartmentalise the debate into "Gay Men" vs. "Straight Women" without taking into account that queer women seem to be the major contributors to slash – proves to me that yet again, the intersection of sexism and homophobia strikes again and stories about female queer relationships are ignored as less important because it's not about the men and of course, well, women write it so that isn't appropriation.
Bah! I say.
The reason no one is talking about Femmslash is because the misogyny I mention. The reason Femmslash is considered a more niche corner of fic writing fandom and not as "subversive" as slash, is because "Lesbian Porn" is spoken about in an utterly different context and obviously the two conflate.
Yeah, not.
Fan fiction, not just slash, not just erotic, is subversive by its very nature - how dare we take a page and continue the story once the book is closed. How dare we go, "Epilogue? What Epilogue?". How dare we imagine a world in which Bruce's parents lived and Krypton was never destroyed?
How is that small potatoes compared to the metatexutal value of slash?
I'll tell you how. We do not have gay stories that are mainstream.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bookshop wrote a brilliant post tackling that very subject, so I won't get into it
Lesbian stories are always shown to be fleeting (Tosh, I weep for thee. Willow, it happened too soon after you got back together) and they will always be titillating for the audience because Lesbians are there to be looked at, right? It's okay to show two women kissing, after all, they're not having real sex - there's no cock. They're just waiting for it, of course.
The Lesbian thing, you know as an identity, really needs to be acknowledged. It has a lot to be with men policing sexuality – in the 1970's there was a big divide between the Gay Lib movement and the Women's Lib movement, which left a lot of queer women out to dry – the AIDS crisis brought a more cohesive front against a conservative climate that would have those deviants silenced.
Back to our stories.
The mainstream fears stories in which queer people are simply who they are and the story isn't, in fact, about why they're fucking.
It's one of the reasons I hate Brokeback Mountain and Lost and Delirious (I know, queer girl blasphemy).
The story is palpable because, due to the nature of the characters, they can't be happy or together.
The mainstream fears the stories in which there are two cocks and no cunt in sight.
So… now what?
Personally, I want my solidarity back!
I'm rapping my fingers at the screen here, getting irritated by the reiteration, upon reiteration that I'm seeing.
I've read the latest metafandom and linkspam and once again, I'm seeing cluelessness, carelessness, privilege and more identity erasure.
Stop it. Just, stop.
I've decided to stop talking about m/m, because as a genre is appeals to me about as much as Mills & Boon romance, or Harlequin novels - even though that is the place in which I see most of the crimes of "misinterpretation", I can't talk about it.
Is this really about freedom of expression?
Is this really about being allowed to write?
BTW, I have read a few entries by gay men who in so many words are saying that women shouldn't write salsh or m/m - um, yeah, right, way to go guys, that's a way to build solidarity. And that's what's missing, I think.
Solidarity.
One of the things I love about fandom is that we all love something. We're all part of a community that reads a book, watches a show and sees something special.
I'm not an automatic slash fan, btw. I don't have my slash goggles glued on. I much prefer my "slash" canon - even if it's only hinted at at first (like Angel/Spike, my first slash couple, I'll never forget you, or forgive you).
One of the things about slash is that it takes a text and queers it. It's not actually a queer text to begin with - I can see why Kirk/Spock works, honestly, I do. But all in all, they're just BFF's, along with Bones.
I found it much more likely for the Doctor and Donna to be doing it in the TARDIS, rather then the Doctor and Rose (who he worshipped and put on a pedestal) or the Doctor and Martha (who he treated like shit, but that's another rant) - why, you ask? Well, there was no awkward romancing between the two of them - they really enjoyed hanging out together - why is that not "slash"?
Slash re-contextualises mainstream media and reinterprets the text.
Is this what the poet meant? Very likely not.
That doesn't matter.
The creator's opinion on their own work only matters if you want to know what they thing about it - it's in my experience as a slasher, as a lit student and as someone who has met authors I admire, that from their perspective they simply do not see what we see.
Nor can they, they have an utterly different back story to why people do what they do within the story.
The only thing we readers have, is what happens. We don't even have why things happen as they happen. We just have them as they happen.
Yes, there is nothing but the text and within it there is subtext and outside it there is metatext - we do not live in a vacuum, everything we read and write has a political bend some more explicit than others. More accurately, some political bends are perceived as more explicit than others, because the content is such that it doesn't sit in an invisible category, a cultural default - hence why a movie like like Notting Hill is in the Rom-Com category, but Imagine Me and You will be under the LGBT category.
These categories will be the death of us. Messing them up is something that slash enables us to do when it comes to reading mainstream media.
Art, of which the craft of writing is included, that muddies and messes with gender has a complicated history.
That topic is now making the rounds when it comes to writing slash and queer identity.
Slash as drag.
The history of Drag includes both transgressive art and men policing women's sexuality.
Bringing Drag into this debate, we have to then take into account the fact that we are giving this debate an essentialist spin when it comes to what it means to be a man and to be a woman.
Slash is not like Drag. Not metaphorically. Not actually. The equivalent of a Drag Queen is a Drag King - hey, can you guess who gets more spotlight?! That's right...
Why?
When it comes down to it, even men who perform femininity are considered better or more worth talking about, than women who perform masculinity.
The context of men performing in Drag has not always been gay culture, but it has always been parodic (no one said parody wasn't serious business).
Slash is not parodic in its portrayal of masculinity. If it was, the debate would be different.
I'm speaking here as someone who is friends with Drag performers and I've seen the behind the scenes cattiness of it.
In today's Drag Culture, the misogyny is so ironically real. As mentioned, seeing it go on behind the scenes made me want to rip someone's wig off.
The misogyny is something else I'm seeing in this debate that very few are willing to acknowledge - it's not just men policing women's sexuality, or women venerating the imagery two men going at it evokes.
It's coming from every single direction.
Men policing women's sexuality a reality in our society, it doesn't matter what your orientation is. Drag has a role in that.
Women co-opting gay men as an accessory to their own lives is not a new phenomenon either, either as it is presented....or how it does in fact happen more often than not (I cannot express the disgust I felt when a friend told me he was introduced as "My Gay Friend" by someone) and it can be conceived that slash and m/m are an extension of that.
This is all happening in the context of debate. A debate that relaunched into this pandemonium because there was an appropriation of culture and identity by those who, other than consume and create it, do not in fact have to live it and claiming that by reading slash and m/m, they're LGBT allies.
Which, no, you aren't, by default.
Slash and m/m may, in some way, help you sorta get the notion that we exist and do things and live, but we're the one in our skins.
The debate then became a whole lot of huffy people saying: "You can't do this and that in your writing of m/m" and the other people going "oh, yeah, watch me!".
Turf War as I mentioned.
I've written else where, in a different debate on the subject, that slash enables me to be the man I can't be. I can't be a man for various reasons; none of them have anything to do with the absence of a penis, nor with the cultural role of being one.
Gender is a finicky thing.
It is a prison that forces us conform in ways that doesn't always suit who we are.
I do not walk the world as a man would, gay or straight. In the stories that I read I can be that man.
Perhaps this is just me and my weird view of the world and of stories.
But when I've finished the story, I'm not a gay man. I'm not a girlfag, which do seem to take that identity to heart as their own.
As I discussed previously, the silencing of queer women's identities and in fact erasing identities in order to better compartmentalise the debate into "Gay Men" vs. "Straight Women" without taking into account that queer women seem to be the major contributors to slash – proves to me that yet again, the intersection of sexism and homophobia strikes again and stories about female queer relationships are ignored as less important because it's not about the men and of course, well, women write it so that isn't appropriation.
Bah! I say.
The reason no one is talking about Femmslash is because the misogyny I mention. The reason Femmslash is considered a more niche corner of fic writing fandom and not as "subversive" as slash, is because "Lesbian Porn" is spoken about in an utterly different context and obviously the two conflate.
Yeah, not.
Fan fiction, not just slash, not just erotic, is subversive by its very nature - how dare we take a page and continue the story once the book is closed. How dare we go, "Epilogue? What Epilogue?". How dare we imagine a world in which Bruce's parents lived and Krypton was never destroyed?
How is that small potatoes compared to the metatexutal value of slash?
I'll tell you how. We do not have gay stories that are mainstream.
bookshop wrote a brilliant post tackling that very subject, so I won't get into it Lesbian stories are always shown to be fleeting (Tosh, I weep for thee. Willow, it happened too soon after you got back together) and they will always be titillating for the audience because Lesbians are there to be looked at, right? It's okay to show two women kissing, after all, they're not having real sex - there's no cock. They're just waiting for it, of course.
The Lesbian thing, you know as an identity, really needs to be acknowledged. It has a lot to be with men policing sexuality – in the 1970's there was a big divide between the Gay Lib movement and the Women's Lib movement, which left a lot of queer women out to dry – the AIDS crisis brought a more cohesive front against a conservative climate that would have those deviants silenced.
Back to our stories.
The mainstream fears stories in which queer people are simply who they are and the story isn't, in fact, about why they're fucking.
It's one of the reasons I hate Brokeback Mountain and Lost and Delirious (I know, queer girl blasphemy).
The story is palpable because, due to the nature of the characters, they can't be happy or together.
The mainstream fears the stories in which there are two cocks and no cunt in sight.
So… now what?
Personally, I want my solidarity back!
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Date: 2010-01-22 12:18 am (UTC)yeah. yeah.
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Date: 2010-01-29 04:46 am (UTC)