Not Anonymous

I'm glad I followed the link here! I'm just going to babble for a while, since you asked for feedback.

A few background notes: I'm 56, was active in Star Trek fandom in the late 70s (zines!), dropped out of fandom to write my dissertation, and then found myself in LOTR online fandom in 2003. Although there must have been some slash under some of the tables at the cons I was at on the west coast in the late 70s, I never heard about it (possibly because I was hanging out more with the male nerds). I learned about slash from reading Russ, and Lamb and Veith; I liked the idea intellectually, but never liked it enough to try to read it until 2003 when I found myself totally turned on in every possible way by some good LOTR fic. I can call myself a slasher (as I have called myself bisexual, as I now call myself queer), but I have no interest in most slash (I do have friends who love slash, even if they don't know or love the canon).

With that in mind: in some ways I don't feel the media landscape has changed that much (for example, with regard to women: Cagney and Lacey was incredible -- I could not stand even five minutes of Rizzoli and Isles--could be my prejudices--I have not seen any great expansion in women's roles that strike me as any more progressive than, say, GOLDEN GIRLS or MURDER, SHE WROTE -- in some ways I don't see as wide a range of women characters as in past decades--although there are a few more roles for women of color). And bisexuality is not exactly out there that I've ever seen! There are more gay characters--but they seem to be mostly white men, in mostly sit coms and realistic dramas -- I am a stone sf fan (with a little less passionate love for mysteries) (and am also an English teacher which means I know a lot about the canon and the challenges to it--as a result of being an sf fan since grade school, I ended up with a strong interest in marginalized literatures, and define more as a critical theorist and creative writer than traditional lit prof). So the various shows featuring (what I perceive to be mostly very young--and that's an issue too!--featuring very conventionally and heternormatively pretty--slim for example--gay and lesbian characters are of absolutely no interest to me). It's always been easier to find multiple queernesses in sf/fantasy (or at least I've found it so).

The incredible sexual turn-on that I found as I discovered LOTR slash AND began peri- menopause at the same time is impossible to describe. That's not to say all slash is good, or all LOTR fic is good (I read good gen, good het, and damn some amazing Femslash in LOTR--it's LOTR, and I've been queer for Eowyn since I was 10). It's to say in some ways I thought I either had a very low libido or was asexual (a concept I learned about through fandom) UNTIL I found that specific kind of slash. So….the discussion about being a queer fan in slash fandom….doesn't quite work for me, because I don't, and have never seen a unified slash fandom (and there are some slash areas in some fandoms I won't touch with a ten foot pole due to my own squicks). (If it comes to that, LOTR fandom is split among different sub-groups as well, and Hobbit Slash is different from Elf Slash is different from Manslash is different from Interspecies slash--which was my main thing at the start, i.e. Frodo/Faramir).

I like the idea of slash as a queered fiction, and have used that terminology myself. A lot of slash is heteronormative (and classist, and racist). (I am remembering Alexander Doty's note in his book on queering film that "queer is not automatically progressive"). There is a lot to deal with in the idea of "Queer fiction" (in the same sense of Lesbian Fiction--and "Women Writers"-- a course I have taught. My students are shocked when the women turn out to include black women, lesbians (of different ethnic groups), and most of all OMG science fiction!). The designation is based on identities of the writers, not the genre conventions--and that identification is vital in the process of making marginalized literatures visible, but at some point….the intersections are important as well.

I'm not interested in a queer (or lesbian) (or gay) fiction that's not also (and more importantly to me in some ways) sff. I don't want to read realistic or naturalistic "litfic," and the "gay history and culture" (and there is more than just one of course, but I know that it's impossible to always qualify) has no part in any slash I love because, well, LOTR isn't set in a contemporary setting. The only way I can connect with that issue is that some of the LOTRiPS is of course set in the here and now--but even then, as I've said in the past, I write bisexual characters, male and female, not gay men. I don't think I'm a part of your sexual culture (though I don't know for sure since you don't give many specifics)--I'm queer. I'm a pagan (animistic). I'm rural. I'm against marriage. I don't want children. I am a nerd and have been for about half a century. I'm fat. Some of these aspects of my identity are, I guess, part of something that might be called "gay culture" though I resist that term because for me, it's male (and I dislike "lesbian" being subsumed into gay--which it mostly has been in my perceptions). But while I can easily identify as queer (mostly because of my queer relationship with a woman--neither of us are lesbians), I do not and have never identified as part of a gay culture. I don't even think I'd call myself part of a queer culture because that implies a more coherent set of boundaries and definitions than I'm comfortable with.

So, I'm not quite sure--but I plan to subscribe so I can read the responses you get because I'm sure they will be fascinating.