prof_pangaea: the master (Default)
prof_pangaea ([personal profile] prof_pangaea) wrote2010-01-16 03:09 am

if it was a real slash story the infant would be james mcavoy's mpreg baby

once again someone has noticed that a lot of slash is written by straight (white) women, and that a lot of slash is appropriative and fetishistic, so once again there is much hand-wringing and many desperate attempts to justify taking over sites like afterelton.com in order to complain about how homophobic russell t davies is for killing off fandom's woobie (weirdly enough, no one tried similar tactics after bisexual toshiko was killed, i can't imagine why), as well as the writing of stories where RTD is hit by a bus, or subjected to homophobic abuse, in order to put him in his place. meanwhile other parts of fandom are setting up straw man posts such as, "should women be allowed to write slash??" as if anyone has ever seriously told them the answer is no. people are horrified that slash might be the equivalent of girl on girl porn made for straight guys, because... er, i'm not sure why. because that erases all of the completely imaginary gay activism that straight slashers think they've indulged in by liking boysnogs? who knows. but apprently that meant the hunt was ON for something new to compare slash to!

so now slash is just like drag? seriously? i'm no expert on drag, other than having gone to a few shows (which is probably more than many of these "omg THIS!" commenters have done) and yet somehow i know that drag is a very complex practise with hundreds, even thousands of years of history behind it, that is enacted differently in every culture, that has roots in performance, ritual, and the arts, as well as purely "gay" culture. yes, those kirk/spock zines your aunt used to collect are pretty old, but it's not quite the same! and yet someone has written the following:

My standard line in this argument is comprised of two words: drag queens. Which I expand thus: women (most women) understand that (some) gay men have created a really distinctive and important form of cultural expression, saying things they couldn't say otherwise, through the adoption of female avatars from popular culture. And it seems to me that gay men should understand that (some) women have created a different and yet equally important form of cultural expression, saying things they couldn't say otherwise, by adopting male avatars. As a woman, I have been mostly--but not always and entirely--welcome in gay male spaces, and I think that women should mostly--but not always and entirely--welcome gay men into their spaces. So I think the parallel isn't to lesbian porn, but to drag (even the power relationships are more parallel, and I think drag better demonstrates the power of the alliance between women and gay men.)

aaaaaaand of course the comments are filled with "oh god, this parallel is PERFECT because now i don't have to worry about thinking about appropriation anymore. thanks!!" even though all drag is not about or from "gay" culture ("gay" seemingly standing in for modern, western, male, cis, white, homosexual culture, of course) let me just say (more to the people so eagerly jumping at anything that will let them off the hook of having to think about the realities of intersectionality and appropriation than the original poster, whom i think is wrong, but seems thoughtfully wrong, at least): way to attempt to appropriate even more gay culture for yourselves, slashers. oh, by the way, fuck off.

in all seriousness, why are people still arguing that slash is inherently about women using men to tell women's stories? am i in a coma, mad, or have i travelled back in time? is it crazy for me to write/read slash because i want to write/read about the two characters, and not shitty author avatars? being a female writer means a woman will probably always write with certain awarenesses or experiences that have been informed by being female, not that they're always writing about women in disguise.

obviously, in professional fiction men are the default and so harry potter has to have a male protagonist if it's going to become a "universal" phenomenon, but frankly the same market forces are not at work in fandom, because we're not selling anything. obviously the same cultural forces ARE at work, since so many people seem to think that a story about women can only be interesting if the women have cocks, but hey, we knew that. people just need to stop using thinly disguised internalised misogyny as an excuse for why slash is just "inherently" more interesting and own up to the fact that they like to get off (emotionally or sexually) on boysnogs. there is nothing morally wrong with this until people start declaring that the fact that they like to fetishise said boysnogging means they are true liberal activists/feminists/performers of important cultural expression. boysnogs =/= important cultural expression in and of themselves -- it's the stories you try to tell with them. and guess what? good stories are usually about people, not fetishised objects.


tl;dr: soz if the thought that much of slash really *is* the equivalent of girl on girl distresses you so much, but it is. most slash is like some unholy combination of girl on girl porn and the movie shoot 'em up, except the slash version of shoot 'em up would replace the paul giamatti character with one played by jason isaacs, and would replace the scene where clive owen fucks monica belluci in the middle of a gunfight with a scene where clive owen fucks james mcavoy in the middle of a gunfight. and yes, i would watch this.

ps: am going to utah tomorrow to visit family and finally meet my baby nephew, so if i'm not around for a bit that's why. pls to not be burning down the internets in my absence. <3

[identity profile] prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com 2010-01-17 06:36 am (UTC)(link)
These attempts to elevate slash to some sort of civil rights movement are just weird. I mean, good on you if you as a slasher also support equal rights, but...it's just slash. Can't we let it be what it is? It's like these women think there's something wrong with admitting they like porn...wait. Actually that might have a lot to do with it.

It's just pretty clear to me that slash has a lot more to do with the psychology of the people who write and read it than the people they're nominally writing and reading about. And I feel like playing in that sandbox brings with it a responsibility to recognize the people who actually own it. Not in the stories necessarily, but slashers should at least be aware that in real life, this issue is about more than their enjoyment of underground romance novels.

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-17 09:33 am (UTC)(link)
You mean The Boyfriend is not an angsty superpowered immortal?

unless the tendency to collect dozens of pairs of converse trainers is a superpower, i think the answer is sadly no.

except that I keep coming back to, "So, are girlslashers drag kings? 'Cos, that's hot".

i keep coming back to the fact that we have to explicitly say something like "girlslashers" when we're referring to slashing female characters because it's so rare. i mean, obviously, who needs to write about actual women when you could write about idealised women who happen to be men?

also, drag kings are indeed hot.

[identity profile] linkspam-mod.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 02:57 am (UTC)(link)
Your post has been included in a Linkspam (http://linkspam.dreamwidth.org/17337.html?format=light).

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[identity profile] carmarthen.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 04:59 am (UTC)(link)
I've never exclusively read/written m/m slash (I like m/f, f/f, m/m, polyfic, and gen, no particular preference), either, and love reading and written about women. I've selected fannish circles with similar attitudes, particularly wrt to attitudes towards women and female characters. I get enough sexism in the mainstream media already.

But I have identified as a slasher in fandom because the (fem)slash segments of fandom have been the ones that have felt most like a queer space to me in terms of the self-identification of the authors.

I'm not saying you should change your self-definition, just pointing out that people with similar reading tastes may still arrive at that "slasher" label.

Anyway, the slash-drag comparison sat wrong with me, but I couldn't figure out why. So thanks for your post--it's very well-put and explains a lot of things perfectly.
elf: Rainbow sparkly fairy (rainbow fairy)

[personal profile] elf 2010-01-18 04:59 am (UTC)(link)
i'm no expert on drag, other than having gone to a few shows (which is probably more than many of these "omg THIS!" commenters have done)

I'm one of the "OMG THIS!" commenters.

I don't think of drag as something done in "shows." Drag is my husband's best man at our wedding, in his pink-with-sequins cocktail dress. Drag is loaning my gold eyeshadow to a near-stranger at a convention 'cos he didn't bring makeup that goes with his gold lamé robes. Drag is a woman in an Edwardian tux at a Victorian formal dance. Drag is altering ballgowns to put laces up the back instead of zippers because even if the waist fits, the shoulders are never broad enough. Drag is knowing the sequined sleeve goes on the right arm & the fishnet one goes on the left.

Drag is not a culture I'm appropriating; it's one I live in the middle of. My comparison may be flawed, because it's based on the limited view of my own experiences, but it's not made out of ignorance.

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 08:59 am (UTC)(link)
yah. i think this is just the latest clash between old school slashers (slash is about women subverting male paradigms to write stories about themselves and their sexuality!) and newer fandom (slash is about writing about queer characters, often from a queer perspective!). i just find the perspective that stories about queer men not only can be, but should be read as stories that are really about women, to be really odd. why not just... write about women? obviously, there *could* be loads of reasons, from the easy, "i just like cock", to maybe being interested in the fluidity of gender and wanting to explore that. but we both know that the amount of slash that's out there that actually explores gender in any meaningful way is extremely limited (especially if we're going to narrow the field by asking it to be good or thoughtful at all). most people just like cock. that's cool. go for it if it's your kind of thing. just don't tell me that your janto curtainfic is about appropriating male avatars to tell an important story about what it means to be a woman in contemporary society and expect me to applaud you.

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 09:04 am (UTC)(link)
so I hadn't heard about someone comparing slash to drag (which, surprise, isn't solely the property of a single gender or sexuality! do some fucking research, writer!)

<3!! that was the bit that really got to me -- boling all that down to one preferred storyline of what drag "really" is (which just happened to suit the author's agenda), and then using that to defend an equally reductive definition of what slash really is and who should write it and who shouldn't care if it's written in certain ways.

Have fun with the family, and keep safe while traveling.

thanks! i'm having much fun! still can't seem to get myself to sleep at a reasonable hour though. boo.

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 09:05 am (UTC)(link)
yay i am surrounded by wee crayon hearts!

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 09:07 am (UTC)(link)
heh. i am interested as to why the paragraph you chose to excerpt was specifically chosen to represent my entire essay.

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 09:42 am (UTC)(link)
see, the thing is, i was not the person who reduced the entirety of drag into something that is only performed in "shows" by gay men who are apparently appropriating the lives of famous women in order to say something about the gay male condition. [livejournal.com profile] cesperanza is the person who did that, and i disagreed.

i'm a gay man, but i'm also trans, and a fairly active participant in the trans community in my city. so you may feel very comfortable defining what drag really is, but i'm not, because i get to have people confuse my identity, and that of my friends, for their own preferred definitions all the time. so you might see *my* friends' wedding from this past summer and think, "oh, that is drag!", and i would see a multiplicity of gender expressions, identities, and sexualities on display, none of which were easy to pin down or define.

now i don't think that i personally live in the middle of drag culture, though i have attended shows and performances, know people who perform drag as well as people who simply enjoy cross-dressing when the mood strikes, and experience the way that drag (the practise itself and how outsiders tend to interpret certain kinds of gender expression) interacts with trans culture and queer culture. but you say that you live in the middle of drag culture. okay. so how does your experience of drag have anything to do with slash? my limited experience leads me to believe it's a hell of a lot more complex than the explanation that [livejournal.com profile] cesperanza offered. add to that the fact that i completely disagree with her definition of slash (to me, slash is fanfiction that deals with the relationships of queer characters of any sex, the end), and possibly you can see why i wouldn't be persuaded by her comparison, or impressed by all the people rushing to agree with it.
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[personal profile] gloss 2010-01-18 12:45 pm (UTC)(link)
slash is fanfiction that deals with the relationships of queer characters of any sex, the end
Yes, thank you! (And *word* to your far more complicated & less self-serving understanding of drag in this comment.)

I am really grateful for your entire post.
elf: Rainbow sparkly fairy (Default)

[personal profile] elf 2010-01-18 04:08 pm (UTC)(link)
how does your experience of drag have anything to do with slash?

Directly? Not at all. It matches metaphorically, and I'm aware of & involved with both communities to know what I'm saying when I make that comparison.

Drag:Gay culture::Slash:women's art, rather than lesbian porn:men::slash:women.

It's not a perfect parallel; no metaphor is. But it connects on a number of levels that the "lesbian porn" comparison doesn't.

slash is fanfiction that deals with the relationships of queer characters of any sex, the end

Does Ces say otherwise? (Other than not addressing femslash in her current post.) That's not how I'd define slash, but I don't think it's wrong, either.

you might see *my* friends' wedding from this past summer and think, "oh, that is drag!", and i would see a multiplicity of gender expressions, identities, and sexualities on display, none of which were easy to pin down or define.

Seeing drag wouldn't prevent me from seeing the rest; I wouldn't assume that because someone is in drag, they're gay, or not-gay, or of any particular gender identity, or of any specific sexuality. (Likewise, I don't assume that someone who writes slash is female, or straight, or middle-class, or of any other particular identity.)

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 05:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Directly? Not at all. It matches metaphorically, and I'm aware of & involved with both communities to know what I'm saying when I make that comparison.

Drag:Gay culture::Slash:women's art, rather than lesbian porn:men::slash:women.

It's not a perfect parallel; no metaphor is. But it connects on a number of levels that the "lesbian porn" comparison doesn't.


yeah; i still don't buy it.

Does Ces say otherwise? (Other than not addressing femslash in her current post.)

did you read the post? And I don't think slash is ABOUT gay male relationships any more than drag is about women, that's my point. It just LOOKS like its about gay male relationships / women. I mean, to say that women dominate slash is like saying that men dominate drag. Yes? They do because the artform--which yes, has elements of appropriation, both of them (ask Judy, Liza, Cher, or Barbra)--gives voice to that particular group, if you see what I mean. (http://cesperanza.livejournal.com/238567.html?thread=7657191#t7657191) i.e. slash is about women appropriating male avatars in order to give voice to women's stories.

Likewise, I don't assume that someone who writes slash is female, or straight, or middle-class, or of any other particular identity.)

then why cling to this metaphor that requires one to define both slash and drag so reductively? and to pretend they have anything seriously in common at all? the only reason i can see is so the enjoyment of boy-on-boy can be "elevated" to some other level.

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-18 05:35 pm (UTC)(link)
thanks! i like to define slash in this way since it doesn't exclude any kind of slash (m/m, f/f, or any characters who go beyond the gender binary, it's all good!), and doesn't exclude any kind of author. and because it seems to actually make sense.

[identity profile] darkrosetiger.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 02:50 am (UTC)(link)
the slash version of shoot 'em up would replace the paul giamatti character with one played by jason isaacs, and would replace the scene where clive owen fucks monica belluci in the middle of a gunfight with a scene where clive owen fucks james mcavoy in the middle of a gunfight. and yes, i would watch this.

I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[identity profile] papilio-luna.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 04:30 am (UTC)(link)
Late to the party as per usual, but yes, to all of this. I've mostly avoided... pretty much everything related to this because I don't really move in slash-ish circles (I find the term "slash fandom" to be sort of odd, and in my head it just translates as "don't care who or what, as long as there are cocks"), though I did see that heinous RTD RPF, which made my blood absolutely boil. And I tried to put out of my head that that was probably just the tip of a massive iceberg of fail that's broken off of the fail!shelf and is currently floating... er... nevermind on that metaphor, I give up on it. But you get what I mean.
ext_150: (Default)

[identity profile] kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 06:44 am (UTC)(link)
to me, slash is fanfiction that deals with the relationships of queer characters of any sex, the end

Yes! I really hate when people define slash as a certain type of fic (and frankly, I find [livejournal.com profile] cesperanza's definition of it, where she says slashers write about men who are better than real men, really offensive). On the one hand, it's tempting to say to those people, okay, I don't write that, and I don't want anything to do with your definition, so I guess I'm not a slasher, but...no. I don't want to let slash be only that. If I write fanfic with queer characters, it's slash.

[identity profile] prof-pangaea.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 08:29 am (UTC)(link)
after i wrote that i got a bit sad that this movie didn't really exist.

[identity profile] linkspam-mod.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 02:28 pm (UTC)(link)
Given that people rarely put thesis statements at the beginning of their posts, we try to read through the posts and find a passage that expresses the spirit or aim of the post, or gives readers an idea of what they can expect if they click on the link. We have to read through many posts pretty quickly and so we may make mistakes or pick passages that the author wouldn't have picked. If the excerpt we chose wasn't a good one, then I apologize.
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[identity profile] annlarimer.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 06:49 pm (UTC)(link)
slashers write about men who are better than real men

Oh HELL no.
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Here via linkspam or metafandom or whatevz

[identity profile] spiralsheep.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 07:10 pm (UTC)(link)
Great post. Thank you.

here via linkspam...

[identity profile] dharma-slut.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 10:23 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm a butch dyke bisexual. I am a bisexual FTM who will probably never go into physical transition.

I write male characters who are me. It is drag.

I have written m/m as a way to explore relationships minus biological inequalities, and as if all relationships had the privileges men take for granted. The only way I can write f/f relationships and let my characters do everything I want them to do, is to pretend that they exist in an AU where women have the same privileges that men take for granted. And that include the porn that I write.


So count me in as one of the OMG THIS responders.
ext_43: proust quote: let us be happy to those that make us happy.  They are the constant gardners that make our souls blossom. (11 - Hello)

[identity profile] drho.livejournal.com 2010-01-19 11:59 pm (UTC)(link)
there is nothing morally wrong with this until people start declaring that the fact that they like to fetishise said boysnogging means they are true liberal activists/feminists/performers of important cultural expression.

♥ ♥ There are lines between appreciation, misappropriation, and activism. I think some slash operates on a deeper level than boysnog squee in disguise, but the act of writing slash isn't inherently activism.

[identity profile] miss_prince.livejournal.com 2010-01-20 02:38 am (UTC)(link)
using thinly disguised internalised misogyny as an excuse for why slash is just "inherently" more interesting

Oh yes, that gets real old, REAL fast. *lesbian femslasher here*

And I'd so love more fic about women in drag. UNF.
neveralarch: (Default)

[personal profile] neveralarch 2010-01-21 03:13 am (UTC)(link)
Hi! Got linked here or something- this post is really great.
I'm female, and I don't have a problem with slash being compared to other kinds of porn. I mean, yeah, some of it is just good stories about queer characters, but a lot of it is really just porn. That's fine, and I hate to see people trying to make slash some kind of amazing movement when it really isn't. Especially the female avatars thing- you can do whatever you want for porn, but if I'm reading a character-driven story I'd rather it was actually about the characters. Sure, you always write a little bit of yourself into characters, even if it's just to get a grip on what they're thinking- still, I would never consider one of my characters to be an avatar for myself.
You're definitely right about the cultural forces pertaining to gender in fiction impacting slash. I like femslash and I read it some- but when I think about my favorite characters they're usually guys. Most femslash has to work a little to make the female characters interesting enough to read a story about, and that's unfortunate. It also makes those stories slower to read and less common.
Anyway, thanks again for writing this. I'm still thinking about it, so it's definitely having an impact.

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