Writercon Panels Post 2

[lunabee34]

I want to finish my formal discussion of the con with a recap of a panel that executrix moderated.

SLASH: GAY, QUEER, BOTH, NEITHER

Exec was the lone mod and I think she did an enviable job of directing conversational traffic flow. She stepped in with a joke, a reflection, a comment--but mostly what she did was allow the audience to speak.

This is a potentially explosive conversation. A con groups together people from all segments of fandom and society at large, and the possibility for the discussion to descend into hostilities rather than anything useful is monumental. I must say that I was impressed with the group of people attending this panel. There was passion and sincerity and seriousness but also a real effort at bridge building and communal understanding and I have to credit Exec's leadership for making that possible.

Again, this was a panel that raised more issues than it provided answers for.

One of the first things that was mentioned is the propensity of slash to elide the female characters. This is one of the things that irritates me about slash the most. Erasure of female characters does not have to be a convention of m/m slash in the same way that obliterating Angel off the face of the earth isn't necessary to make Buffy/Spike a successful ship. Demonizing, killing off, or simply neglecting to mention canon characters in order to make one's OTP more written in the stars is never cool. Never. Do the extra work and write a story with depth, with nuance, instead of taking the easy route. For many of us, the journey to that non-canonical relationship is more important than the torrid sex anyway.

Someone mentioned that the idea of slash as a genre is problematic. A sexual orientation is not a genre. I agree with this whole heartedly. Like alixtii, I think the descriptive power of a lot of the labels we use in fandom is pretty much nil at this point, particularly since they are often working at crosspurposes--serving on the one hand as warnings and on the other as advertisements.

Does a canon queer pairing fall under the heading of slash? Or does slash only signify canon subversion? I have to admit that when I first got into fandom, the Old Skool definitions of slash were not readily apparent to newbies and so I just assumed that slash meant same-sex attraction and behavior, regardless of canonicity.

One of the audience members cited slash as a shameful fannish activity and related anecdotal evidence of women who used posted het content to a community under one name and slash content under another in order to escape censure from friends.

WHY DON'T MORE WOMEN AND MORE QUEER WOMEN ESPECIALLY WRITE FEMSLASH???????????
Talk amongst yourselves.

Several people talked about the ways in which queer people's actual lived lives are not reflected in slash stories and there didn't seem to be a consensus on this issue. Some commenters felt like slash does a real disservice by not accurately reflecting the lives of queer people; others felt that as examples of fantasy, slash stories are not beholden to versimilitude. Still others felt like there isn't a Queer Standard of Experience with which to hold fiction up to anyway.

kindkit brought up the question of creating gay communities in fic. How do you create a gay community for your character without making everyone gay or writing a whole bunch of OCs?

The most important thing that I took away from this panel was something that callmesandy said: Write what you want, but be prepared to face the consequences. This resonates really powerfully with me. We have no censors and I am so appreciative of that. I'm glad that a wide variety of kinks and opinions get aired on the fannish stage. But by the same token, we must acknowledge that when what turns us on or makes us happy or operates as our status quo is hurtful or appropriative or misogynistic or homophobic or racist, that we can and will be called to responsiblity for what we have written by our peers. I understand that mileage on these issues varies and that true consensus is impossible. But I cannot help but applaud the activism that takes place in our microcosm of society.

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Thank you! But, to put it in context, there's rm's no-star, two-thumbs-down review on her journal.

Fanwriters vary greatly in attitudes toward canon, and how we think our stories have to/should relate to canon. And romantic fiction (fannish or otherwise) often has a very tight focus on the couple. That is, not only do Jack and Daniel not exist in the context of a gay community, in a lot of fics they don't exist in the context of a military community or a social scientific community EITHER.

Most romance fic assumes a context of monogamy. If, for the moment, we only look at cisgendered heterosexual couples, and Alice marries Tom, this is seldom perceived as an act of misandry, although we assume that she will not thereafter become involved with Rick or Nigel or Gary.

If we then move to slash examples, unfortunately it's easy to find misogynistic examples, where two men get together because no woman could ever be good enough for them. But it's *possible* for m/m or f/f couple formation in a fic to take place for positive rather than negative reasons--i.e., Angel and Wes really suit each other, not because they trash Cordelia but because they care about each other.

There's plenty of fluffy slash fiction, so although "everybody's gay! Let's party!" is not very believable in the real world, that isn't necessarily the test.

Another possibility would be to say, "OK, there's only one gay or lesbian couple in the team that we see on the screen, but I'm going to write them interacting with the gay community outside the team." I think that's a very sound strategy, but lots of readers hate OCs.

FWIW in one of my first B7 stories, Avon turned up with a pink triangle badge on his jacket. Let's just say the story was not universally loved. A commenter said that Avon is a very private person, but I don't think he'd forfeit an opportunity to get up in people's faces (in the figurative sense, as well as the many on-screen discussions he has where he's pretty much standing on the other person's boots.)

I'm also not without sympathy for the position "After decades of misery-drenched LGBT fiction where the characters shot themselves or lived horrible lives, I kind of enjoy Gaytopian stories even if they don't strike me as at all realistic." I've never actually heard anybody *say* it though.

And it might be a worthwhile propaganda objective: "If I keep writing happy, smutty, filthy, hot stories with happy same-sex couples who never encounter any homophobia, perhaps at least one person will begin to think of this as a normative state."

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I just went and looked at that review of your panel.

I think ze and I had two very different experiences of what happened there which troubles me. I'm not certain how to parse that difference. Do you think that maybe it's because I know you well, your agenda (or at least framework of understanding of the topic) was clearer to me than someone listening to the panel? Also, I didn't think of your list of talking points as questions you had personally vetted in terms of appropriateness, but questions that occur in discussions of queerness from a variety of perspectives.

[ariadne83]

Would you mind linking me? I didn't see it at rm's journal.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Sent! :)

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

How do you create a gay community for your character without making everyone gay or writing a whole bunch of OCs?

AU! I hate everybody's gay canon fics, because I find it really unbelievable that somehow every student at Hogwarts or everyone on Atlantis just happens to be gay. But if you're writing an AU, then it can make sense for someone's social circle to be exclusively gay (and if you cast canon characters in the roles of friends, then it's not unbelievable because it's not relying on the coincidence of these twenty people all just happening to be gay).

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I think that works really well for AUs.

It does make sense though to create a queer community for characters *in canon* and that's much harder. I'm not one of those that back buttons immediately because of OCs (and have in time really enjoyed an OC in a fic), but I think even I would balk a little at the inclusion of a lot of OCs. Maybe the answer is to take really, really tangential characters that have only been seen for a short amount of time onscreen, maybe in episode one offs, and use them to create a queer community? I don't know.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I think it's depends on the type of story, too. In a longer story, it's important to have more than just the main character(s), but short stories don't need a huge cast of characters.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I think another possibility is working in a canon that's very unlike contemporary reality. I, too, would think it was unbelievable if every student at Hogwarts was gay, but I could believe in a Wizarding World where nobody actually gave a monkey's toss about whether other people were gay. However, I would absolutely not believe that about the contemporary US Air Force.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

*nods*

Or a Star Trek reboot where sexual orientation is no longer an issue.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

AFAIK, Star Trek is supposed to be about a *good* future so it would make sense that inter-group hatreds are, if not eliminated, at least reduced. I would find that harder to believe in a dystopian setting like Firefly or B7.

[sunnyd-lite.livejournal.com]

oh new word -- elide!

My thought is that it's not so much writing women out, as writing obstacles out to guarantee the *ONE TRUE PAIRING* that the entertainment industry has set up as the romantic goal. Many (not all by any stretch) of these stories don't have any community or even much interaction beyond the paired couple. /soapbox

It was a good thinky panel.

Completely OT: It was fabu hanging out with you all weekend, you give great hugs!

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

It was wonderful hanging out with you too! You are truly one of the most welcoming people I've ever met. *hugs*

You're absolutely right that a lot of these stories aren't just writing out women, they're writing out entire ensemble casts to foreground the OTP. It gets on my every last nerve. LOL

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Someone mentioned that the idea of slash as a genre is problematic. A sexual orientation is not a genre.

I wonder sometimes what some people are using "genre" to mean; it seems to them to have connotations or denotation beyond that carried by "category," while to me they are synonyms. (Well, not quite true: for me, "genre" denotes a category with the added understanding that its boundaries are fuzzy; while this is true of all categories, use of "genre" makes this explicit.)

People usually make the comparison to books or movies, as if only aesthetic works can have genres, but even then the fannish usage makes perfect sense to me: the genres a bookstore uses are the categories they lump books into in order to sell them; the genres fandom uses are the categories they lump fic in order to "sell" it to potential readers. Sometimes it seems that people assume that the generic nature of a work necessarily has some type of reference to its content (i.e., what happens in it) but this is clearly not the case (poetry is a genre of literature) even if talk of content could make any sense outside of a textualist New Criticism-like critical schema. (Also what type of sex a work contains is clearly a statement about content.)

ladycat777 (who is out as a librarian) and I were discussing this late Sunday night, actually.

Furthermore, it's clear that there is a need in fandom to group fic together based on the sexual activity represented within: for example, the Femslash Annual ficathons or even just the fact that I identify as a femslasher. It's just that the current taxonomic system doesn't fill the need very well.

WHY DON'T MORE WOMEN AND MORE QUEER WOMEN ESPECIALLY WRITE FEMSLASH???????????

I don't know (obviously)--although the oft-cited explanations of femslash being too close to home make perfect sense to me--but I look at it the other way around: who writes femslash? Women, especially queer women, with a small spattering of straight men and as far as I can tell no gay men. So looking at femslash can tell us useful things about the way (queer) women construct female sexuality in fic.

Several people talked about the ways in which queer people's actual lived lives are not reflected in slash stories and there didn't seem to be a consensus on this issue.

I still think the fact that this is true of f/f (see above about queer women writing it) as well as m/m is an important point.

Write what you want, but be prepared to face the consequences. This resonates really powerfully with me.

This really made no sense to me. The reason the consequences exist is because we've done something wrong, no?

I was kind of sad the question "Is slash queer?" was never really ever discussed or considered.

[callmesandy.livejournal.com]

Consequences can be positive and negative, though. Either way, I think we have to balance silencing people (don't write that!) and acknowledging some of the things people write are super problematic.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

This is my understanding as well.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I hate to speak for anyone else, so I'm not. This is just my understanding of why the idea of slash as a genre is problematic and may not reflect anyone else's. Also, I'm just now working on articulating this as I write the comment so bear with me.

I think it's the idea that a person's sexual identity, hir sexual being, can be reduced to the same level as "action-adventure" or "romance." It feels dismissive. Maybe somebody else should chime in. *looks around*

Why don't I write more femslash? As a bisexual woman, my fic archive should be full of femslash and while there's some there, there's way more gen and m/m slash. Without counting numbers, het probably gets the least representation. I think, for me, this is because writing femslash and het feels like I'm exposing a part of myself for examination by the reader and that can be uncomfortable.

Re: consequences
I think that when Buffy becomes an evil bitch who never even really liked Xander and who wants to smite his newfound gayness all so Spike can see his way clear to claiming Xander as his life mate or when J2 get it on to the backdrop of the killing fields--for me, those things are wrong. I don't want to read them and I don't want to write them (although I am certain that I have written fic that fails my own tests, particularly in my early days of fandom). I have huge problems with the cultural appropriation and sexism these kinds of stories represent. However, I know not all fen agree with me or these kinds of stories wouldn't keep appearing. Does that make sense?

[mofic.livejournal.com]

I think it's the idea that a person's sexual identity, hir sexual being, can be reduced to the same level as "action-adventure" or "romance." It feels dismissive. Maybe somebody else should chime in. *looks around*

It doesn't feel dismissive to me, as a lesbian. I think "gay and lesbian literature" is a perfectly valid genre, and one I look for in my book store and library all the time. And there are plenty of sub-genres within it - lesbian mystery, gay erotica, coming out stories, etc.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

*nods*

It is a useful way to locate stories with the kinds of content you want to read.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I think it's the idea that a person's sexual identity, hir sexual being, can be reduced to the same level as "action-adventure" or "romance." It feels dismissive.

Hmm. Is it the fact that people are centering their reading around the sexual orientation of the characters, deciding whether or not to read a story based on whether (for instance) it includes a queer female or not, that you find dismissive--or the language of genre being used to describe this pattern of reading behavior?

However, I know not all fen agree with me or these kinds of stories wouldn't keep appearing. Does that make sense?

Not really? Obviously we have the physical capability to post whatever we want, and (in the USA) the legal right to say whatever we want (although being hosted is not guaranteed). But by saying "write what you want" there seems to be something which goes beyond recognizing this into an endorsement of unethical activity, as if appropriation and resulting criticism were both morally neutrally processes. Cf. "kill who you want, but be willing to face the consequences."

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Re: the first question

I don't know? *shrugs* Slash as a genre isn't something I'd really thought about before that panel but when some of the commenters talked about it bothering them, that really resonated with me. I remember thinking, "Of course," and now I feel like I can't get a very good handle on why I had that gut feeling of agreement. Does that make any sense? I think it's a little of both that bothers me.

Re: your second questions

Again, I don't really know how to respond ethically to this question. I feel a great (personal) tension between the idea of censorship and the tacit endorsement of words and ideas I think are very harmful. You are absolutely right to say that appropriation and communal criticism of it are not morally neutral processes and when any group exerts communal pressure on another, an act of judgment is taking place.

I also know that mileage on these issues varies and that even within a group (women, PoC, queer individuals, etc) not all members will agree on what is offensive, dangerous and appropriative.

Somebody else chime in, please! I'm flailing here, I think.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think you could actually go a lot of interesting different places with a criticism of fen centering their reading on the orientation of the characters, but of course each place would get its own unique response. It's certainly intersecting the "Why slash?" question and the quality/kink dichotomy (which reared its head in interesting ways at WriterCon both in expected places--like kbusse's presentation--and unexpected places as the meta perspective and the how-to perspective interacted and sometimes clashed in fascinating ways; more on that when I discuss the science vs. magic panel, I think).

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I am really interested to hear what you have to say about that panel as I had already gone home at that point.

I was just re-reading something on my journal in preparation for the Lesbian Erotica posts that Elizabeth and I were talking about doing and I came across this comment glossing made:

So not a minstrel show (http://lunabee34.livejournal.com/104255.html?thread=1561407&format=light#t1561407).

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

And . . . I hit post before replying to the second half. It's certainly intellectually honest and coherent to recognize that we as human creatures might hold moral theories which are subject to error, and that is as such necessary to allow for the freedom of fen to write fic which may be verboten under any individ
ual fan's ethical system. (Of course, this allowance is more or less built into the structure of the internet and can, I think, be safely taken for granted.) Clearly, the person behind the eyeballs must follow her own conscience and make decisions for herself; relying on an oppressed Other to tell her what was okay or not would constitute an abdication of her moral responsibility, not to mention her faculty of reason, and be something which is totally not the oppressed person's job.

This does not mean we have to abandon any sense of a quasi-objective ideal of right and wrong being bigger than any individual fan's prejudices, however. (Quasi-objective because it's not necessary to write it metaphysically into reality. It's perfectly okay for this standard to be contingent upon the historical moment, as long as its not radically relativistic on an individual level.) Acknowledging that we are often wrong doesn't mean there isn't a right answer out there.

If "write what you like, but be ready to face the consequences" were replaced with "Follow your own conscience in posting what you think appropriate, but be aware you will be subject to the criticism of those who (perhaps erroneously, perhaps not) disagree with you," I think I'd be much more comfortable with the sentiment. For me, however, the original implied that the only ethical calculus one's writing need go through prior to writing/posting was whether one was willing to weather the wankstorm it might provoke--a sentiment I found problematic to say the least.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

For me, however, the original implied that the only ethical calculus one's writing need go through prior to writing/posting was whether one was willing to weather the wankstorm it might provoke--a sentiment I found problematic to say the least.

Okay. I see where you are coming from now. It's always so fascinating to me that when I really start to examine ideas that seem logical and obvious on the surface, there are more often than not other issues lurking beneath. And when you unspool "write what you like, but be ready to face the consequences," the underlying premise isn't one that I'm willing to accept either.

Thank you for showing me that. I think "Follow your own conscience in posting what you think appropriate, but be aware you will be subject to the criticism of those who (perhaps erroneously, perhaps not) disagree with you" is a much less pithy but more accurate way of stating what I understood "write what you like, but be ready to face the consequences" means.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Just musing, but do you think that the reason you identify primarily as a femslasher is because het and m/m slash feel too close to home for you? I'm wondering if some of the things that Nina said in one of the panels about the female marked body is inversely true for you. Does that make sense? (Also, you can tell me to shut up if that's too personal a question)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

In theory, women's bodies are marked at least in part because of the role they play as Other in the greater semiotic system of cultural signification, so this should be true regardless of the gender of the person; this goes back to the Lacanian notion that there is no such thing as a female gaze. As a man, with woman truly being a biological other in some (socially constructed) sense, my own body should even be even more unmarked then--again, in theory.

In practice, I tend to (like Joss?) identify with female characters more easily than male characters in fiction. This has been the case since even before I had a sexuality as such. I don't have an explanation, especially as I'm wary of pop psychology. But this means that I don't often experience het as being close to my own experience.

Furthermore, being the one with privilege, there's no reason why my own experience--or at least my experience as a male--should be particularly painful to retread.

M/M is, if anything, even farther from my own experience, certainly farther than femslash (I know what it is like to desire a woman).

But my identification as a femslasher is primarily a statement about community. I didn't start out in fandom as femslasher; I became one as a result of cadence_k's femslash_minis ficathons, which had me reading and writing new femslash stories every two weeks and interacting with and forming bonds with other writers of femslash and friending them. Being a femslasher is primarily about being a member of this community centering around desiring and loving women (which is often elided with just plain paying attention to them, given the fannish landscape).

But back before my output consisted primarily of 'ship fics (i.e. before I discovered ficathons) but rather of of gen-like plotty fics with incidiental het and femslash, I was still writing about Dru and Dawn as my POV characters.

But for me to be excited about a pairing, there typically needs to be at least one character I can identify with and at least one character I can desire in the pairing. Het more or less forces me to identify with the male character (so that I can desire the female), which certainly is possible (Giles, Ethan, Simon, Mal, sometimes even Xander), but often more difficult, and sometimes impossible (Spike, Angel, Riley, Jayne, Wash).

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Yes! This articulates something that's been banging around in my head for awhile. Most of the definitions we heard at the con and I'm seeing on my next post lack community as part of the definition. I'm starting to think that any useful definition will have to include the idea of community.

Burn the Floor

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Replying to "a sexual orientation is not a genre." I'd move the locus of the genre--it's not that slash posits *sexual orientation* as a genre but that it collects certain literary artefacts into a genre.

And look at what a great discussion occurred here when lunabee34 opened up the floor! You could do the same on your journal so we can tuck in to the "Is slash queer?" question.

Re: Burn the Floor

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

There's no way I'm hosting that can of worms! That's why I wanted someone else to bring it up!

[callmesandy.livejournal.com]

I admit, I got the line about be prepared to face the consequences from reading many many many racefails and the like, but I don't remember who said it first.

[ariadne83]

WHY DON'T MORE WOMEN AND MORE QUEER WOMEN ESPECIALLY WRITE FEMSLASH???????????

I'm a ashamed to admit it, but the truth is I just didn't think about the women. Not the way I do with guys, trying to get inside their heads and give them complete backstories and try to fanwank things I consider OOC. I don't think there's any excuses as to *why* I didn't; it just never occurred to me, which makes me sad.

In fact, a direct result of trying to come up with a backstory for Keller that made her motivations make sense to me (and fall back in love with SGA) was that I became a little tinhatty about Keller/Vega, so it's not even that the chemistry isn't there. I was simply being blind.

You learn something new every day.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

But I have seen as you and I have written together for over a year now and talked about the nuances of SGA and really explored the complexity of these characters, a real growth in both our understandings of the show. And what I love about you most is that as your opinions evolve, you constantly call yourself out for things you said or thought before that aren't true for you now. I think that's incredibly self-aware.

[ariadne83]

Self-analysis, one of my favorite hobbies LOL.

At least now that I see it, I can try to do better. It just boggles my mind that women were *invisible* to me, all these years. Truly mind-boggling.

[mofic.livejournal.com]

This sounds really interesting!

I like the question of "How do you create a gay community for your character without a whole bunch of OCs or making everyone gay?" I think the answer is you probably can't, at least with any realism and depth, without OCs, but I'm also not sure you need to. It depends on the story. Some characters will be peripherally involved with gay community, some very involved, some not at all. For most I'd expect involvement to change over time. But even those with a strong involvement, the gay community activities needn't be the focus of the story.

I think there's room for lots of different kinds of slash and we should all read - and write - what we want to. For me, realism is required in slash. I'm not interested in slash that is set in our world or a world close to ours that doesn't reflect the realities of being gay in our world. So I don't write that and I don't read it. OTOH, I don't care that other people do...

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I am beginning to suspect that there are as many definitions of these words and ways to read the fic we write as there are people in fandom.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Wot, lunabee34--only ONE to a customer?

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Touche!

[mofic.livejournal.com]

WHY DON'T MORE WOMEN AND MORE QUEER WOMEN ESPECIALLY WRITE FEMSLASH???????????

I resemble that remark. I'm a lesbian who mostly writes m/m slash. I do think that femslash - and even heterosexual sex - feels a lot more personal to me to write, because it discusses a woman's experience. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but being quite private about my own sex life and never having written anything about sex before I took up fanfic writing, it felt more comfortable to me to have some distance from the subject. In addition, I like the challenge of writing sex from a male POV. I want it to sound as real as if I had experienced it myself, when obviously I haven't. I feel the same way about writing telepathy :-)

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

This is the reason I have most often heard, that it feels too personal.

[lyr]

On the femslash question, I know that one of the major reasons I don't write more of it is that I like to write about pairings which have very complex, strong relationships in canon. And the sad fact is, very few canons include all that many examples of such relatioships between non-blood related women. There's Buffy/Faith, which I'm writing right now. There are a few others. But really, precious few. I feel that this is a sad impoverishment, and I wish mainstream media would cut it the hell out.

On the Queer Standard of experience, I feel that there isn't one---and I think that this is more true now than it has been in a very long time. I know that my queer experience as a bi woman was very different from a gay man's or a bi man's or a lesbian's or a transgendered person's. Hell, my experience is different from a lot of other bi women's. But even that is nothing to the change in the generation after us. They're coming out much younger, and with much less fallout, on average. They're not so political on the large scale, but they live their lives more openly and easily. They can see themselves reflected in mainstream media more than I could at their age. I have heard this described in queer circles as the beginning of the death of queer culture, and maybe this is true. I know that it gives me a pang when the whippersnappers don't understand why we have to get so fired up about political issues, because they wonder what we are so worried about. But, for all these reasons, I don't think that there is any One True Queer Experience, and I, for one, enjoy working out what my characters' individual queer experiences (no caps, all small and personal and singular) might be like.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing this with me. I am so glad I have surrounded myself with the smart people who say thinky things. :)

That's a really interesting point you make about the generational differences. I can see how they would be simultaneously sources of resentment and irritation but also hope and joy.

[lyr]

I can see how they would be simultaneously sources of resentment and irritation but also hope and joy.

Yes, it is that. I'm simultaneously a little incensed that the young'uns have no understanding of what their forequeers went through (Stonewall? What's that?), and somewhat heartened that they don't because they don't have the desperate need to.