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Writercon Panels Post 2
I want to finish my formal discussion of the con with a recap of a panel that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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. Likealixtii, 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 thatcallmesandy 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.
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
no subject