lunabee34: (Default)
[personal profile] lunabee34
I want to finish my formal discussion of the con with a recap of a panel that [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.

[livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.

Date: 2009-08-06 12:27 pm (UTC)
ext_2351: (Default)
From: [identity profile] 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)

Date: 2009-08-06 09:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] cadence_k's [livejournal.com profile] 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).

Date: 2009-08-07 07:52 pm (UTC)
ext_2351: (Default)
From: [identity profile] 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.

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