Agendae
I never did get back to the topic of sexual politics from my backblog list, but since Fay has been commenting on an old post about slash I’ve been thinking about it again.
When I said I wasn’t interested in fic driven by gender politics or an underlying agenda, I didn’t mean that I thought the purpose of slash was to convert innocent heterosexuals to homosexuality. Of course no reasonable person reading the posts would believe that, but in a game of telephone with my words on fandom_wank, some very strange misinterpretations come out.
I find the sexual politics of slash fascinating - not because they’re threatening but because they’re weird. If someone had written a sci-fi story about thousands of women getting together on the Internet and spontaneously writing gay male erotica, who would have believed it? What’s the attraction? When slashers say that it’s pretty boys, the answer answers nothing at all - it only shows that they’re so into the fad that they cannot see that it’s unusual.
Femslash, by comparison, is hardly problematic. Many femslash writers are openly bisexual, while female m/m writers clearly are not homosexual men. I wonder at the appeal of m/m slash - the social phenomenon (i.e., the sexual politics) is far more interesting than the fic. That goes for strange het subgenres as well, although when a het writer writes some unbelievable pap about a m/f couple, you can always chalk it up to an overdose of Harlequins in real life.
As for having an agenda, of course people are free to write for whatever reason they wish. However, I consider fic where the author’s motives are transparent to be bad fic. I’ll always remember one classic example of agenda-fic in which the author was writing about gun violence, with barely a nod toward the show and characters.
There’s an even simpler sense of “agenda,” though, that covers all the genres in which my interest, if I ever had one, has faded. If a fic gives the reader the impression that the author was at a meeting that the reader missed, in which it was decided that Chakotay is gay and involved with Tom Paris, or Chakotay is married to Janeway, or Chakotay and Janeway’s abandoned love children are out looking for one of them, then that’s an agenda-fic. There’s a fanon agenda from that missed meeting that the reader is assumed to know and buy into. The story doesn’t stand on its own; you have to have the fanon Cliff notes.
I lost my Cliff notes somewhere along the line, so I need the story to start from canon. Where it goes after that is up to the author.
April 5th, 2003 at 9:57 am
Hi there! Me again.
I find the sexual politics of slash fascinating - not because they’re threatening but because they’re weird. If someone had written a sci-fi story about thousands of women getting together on the Internet and spontaneously writing gay male erotica, who would have believed it? What’s the attraction? When slashers say that it’s pretty boys, the answer answers nothing at all.
It would indeed be ridiculous to find slash threatening, or to interpret it as an attempt to woo people over to the gay side of the Force - fwiw, from what I read before, I didn’t get the impression that you did either. I do sympathise with your bemusement at the phenomenon of slash. The thing is, there are so very many different kinds of stories contained under the umbrella term “slash” that it’s not much more useful than saying “feminist” or “science fiction” or “black fiction” as a means of bundling together disparate writers and their wildly varied texts. For one thing, not all slash is erotica. Honestly. Much of it is (as much of all relationship-based fanfiction is erotica) but there are a lot of stories out there which aren’t explicitly sexual, or indeed titillating. Slash and m/m porn are interwoven, but they are still two separate issues.
So let’s look first at the question of some women enjoying reading and writing hot boy-on-boy sex. In terms of the titillation which is a big part of much slash fiction, a lot of it IS to do with “pretty boys”, just as male appreciation of Ali McBeal snogging Ling is to do with “pretty girls”. I can appreciate that this doesn’t float your boat, but virtually every heterosexual man I have ever met has been aroused by the idea of hot girl-on-girl sex. So, logically, it shouldn’t be any “weirder” for some girls to find m/m sexy. Surely? Not your cup of tea, granted, and not as mainstream a turn-on for girls as it is for boys, but still not inherently weird.
Nor is it by any means a phenomenon that’s limited to slash fiction. Off the top of my head I could point you to Pat Barker’s award winning Regeneration Trilogy, many of Mary Renault’s historical novels, Ellen Kushner’s “Swordspoint” and most of Anne Rice’s literary output to date - these are all instances of women writing stories that are either implicitly or explicitly homoerotic. A hefty percentage of the audience of Queer as Folk (both UK and US) is female. So although female appreciation of m/m (sex and/or romance) is not mainstream, neither is it limited to “weird” people reading and writing fanfiction online.
So that’s the question of some girls liking the Big Gay Sex.
But Slash isn’t simply a matter of titillation. That’s just one facet of slash.
Slash is interpreting fictional characters’ same-sex relationships as romantic rather than platonic. I maintain that this isn’t necessarily a perversion of canon - it’s an interpretation of canon. Occasionally a character’s homosexuality is explicitly stated ( Dark Angel’s Original Cindy is well and truly out of the closet from the word go) but sometimes it’s just subtextually implied. For example - Babylon 5’s f/f romance between Winter and Ivanova was implied rather than explicitly stated in canon. (Michael J. Straczynski: “We had it growing since the very first episode of the first season. The relationship was about all of that mutual antagonism that really means they’re attracted.”SciFi Universe, March ‘96; Andrea Thompson: “There was a sexual relationship between Talia and Commander Ivanova. It was edited so that it was not blatant. But that was exactly what happened. It had been talked about from the very beginning.”TVZone, Nov ‘96 ) Andrew’s crush on Warren was very, very heavily implied in BtVS (”He never lovedÖ..hanging out with us”, the Klingon love poetry, the transparent adulation, the sheer, overwhelming campness) but it was never explicitly stated in canon. Prior to “New Moon Rising”, exploring the romantic subtext to Willow’s budding friendship with Tara was as much an act of Slash as writing Buffy/Faith would be today- indeed, Buffy/Faith had more canonical backup. But the show’s writers decided to go with W/T, despite the fact that canonically Willow had only ever been seen to have heterosexual crushes and relationships.
In this day and age people are not required to walk around with a convenient pink triangle sewn onto their sleeves even if they *have* come out to their nearest and dearest. The fact that someone hasn’t told you they’re attracted to their own gender does not automatically mean that they are straight. The fact that someone has had relationships with people of the opposite sex does not automatically mean that they are straight. If there’s palpable chemistry between two people of the same sex then the fact that neither of them has ever come up to you and said “by the way, I’m kinda gay” doesn’t mean that they can’t possibly fancy one another. People are complex and multi-faceted. This is true in life - surely it should also be true in fiction?
Femslash, by comparison, is hardly problematic. Many femslash writers are openly bisexual
Yes they are. But what of it? It seems to me that you’re working on the assumption that one’s characters are simple self-insertions, and that they should mirror one’s own desires. Even if one *is* bisexual, it doesn’t follow that one always writes a f/f story just for titillation. If there’s an interesting dynamic between two characters on screen - if there’s already passion or tenderness there, already a spark - then that’s reason enough to explore it in fiction. (Which doesn’t necessarily mean porn.)
(For what it’s worth, there are plenty of writers - be they bisexual, gay or straight - who write f/f, m/f and m/m. And I know at least one straight male who has written exquisite [not to mention explicit] m/m as a gift for a female slasher.)
female m/m writers clearly are not homosexual men
An inarguable statement. However, to follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion would be to say that it is ‘problematic’ to have female writers (who clearly are not heterosexual men) writing from the POV of heterosexual male characters. Or that male writers should not write female characters. Or that black writers should not write white characters. Writers do write about people of other genders, other sexual orientations, other social classes, other nationalities, other eras. And readers read about them. They make an imaginative leap. It does involve more effort than writing about what one knows most intimately already, certainly, and some research is often required. But this is the nature of storytelling, isn’t it? And at the end of the day, people are people. Our similarities transcend our differences, for all that we are informed by these trappings of gender and nationality and sexual orientation and so forth. One need not be an orphaned Danish prince to identify with Hamlet; one need not be a serial killer to be gripped by ‘The Silence of the Lambs”.
Certainly there is also a lot of rubbish that falls under the ’slash’ heading - because a large percentage of any given genre will be mediocre or bad, and this is as true of slash as it is of het or of gen - or of fanfiction in general, or of television in general, or of poetry in general. Pigeonholing all stories which feature a romantic take on a same-sex relationship as Slash (unless that relationship has been made explicit in canon) really doesn’t tell you anything useful about those stories or their quality. If you are determined to believe that all slash is simply “weird” porn, or that it is all Harlequin-level writing, then I suppose you will continue to believe this whatever I say. In this you will be sorely mistaken, but perhaps it is more comfortable to cling to a preconception than it is to question its validity and risk having to reassess one’s stance.
Slash comes in all shapes and sizes. Some of it is as erotic as a wet weekend in Milton Keynes. Some of it distorts characters out of recognition. Some of it is cringe-making. Some of it is risible. Some of it is witty. Some of it is touching. Some of it is sizzlingly sexy, and intelligent, and thought provoking. Some of it is tragic. Some of it is laugh-out-loud funny, and intentionally so. Because all that these stories have in common is that they feature eros rather than agape in their interpretation of canon. Beyond that they can be anything, anything at all. A comedy of manners, an uncontextualised bout of hot monkey sex, a mystery, a romance, a swashbuckling adventure, a nightmare, a dream, a grocery list. An unspoken crush or a violent rape. So making sweeping statements about all slashers doing X, or thinking Y, is redundant. People write many different kinds of stories that fall into the category for many different reasons. For some it’s about pretty boys. For some it’s about storytelling. For some it’s about both. For some it’s about something else again.
April 5th, 2003 at 11:19 am
I talk about slash to reporters, etc., quite frequently. I have yet to find anyone who didn’t accept the “sauce for the goose” argument — that is, men notoriously like the idea of two women together, so . . .
I actually don’t think the “sauce for the goose” argument covers it all by any means, but I’m surprised that you don’t find it at least partially convincing.
April 5th, 2003 at 2:04 pm
I wonder at the appeal of m/m slash - the social phenomenon (i.e., the sexual politics) is far more interesting than the fic. That goes for strange het subgenres as well, although when a het writer writes some unbelievable pap about a m/f couple, you can always chalk it up to an overdose of Harlequins in real life.
It seems to me that you’re coming at this from a particularly dismissing point of view, i.e., that slash always equals bad writing. Further, you seem to be stating here that it’s bad writing only because you don’t like to read it and that the discerning reader will only find it interesting because it illuminates a particular subculture.
I don’t write slash but have read it and found it to be much like any other type of writing, some of it incredibly good, some average and a large chunk utter pap, at best. I don’t think you can just chalk that up to reading harlequins. I think it has to do, a lot, with the care and attention to detail that the writer puts into the piece and that’s true of any subgenre.
I lost my Cliff notes somewhere along the line, so I need the story to start from canon. Where it goes after that is up to the author.
Exactly! Any good fic starts from canon, as any good fiction sets up its own canon and then follows it. Just because two characters have a homosexual relationship within a fic doesn’t mean it didn’t start from canon and go from there. If it is good writing, then it won’t make us sit back and think, “Where did that come from?” That’s true of any fic–het, slash or gen.
The first slash I ever read, and with some trepidation because I didn’t think I’d like it, was, thankfully, well-written (not thankfully because it was slash, but thankfully because I didn’t want forks in my eyes at the time). Since then, I’ve read a few where I questioned where the writer came up with “this nonsense.” However, with that first story, I was immersed in it immediately and followed where it took me. Why? because it was good writing, it was based solidly within canon and it explored an interesting facet of the relationship between the characters upon whom it focused.
So, though you may choose not to read slash, either because you feel it’s immoral (and I disagree with your assertion that a writer can’t find homosexuality immoral) or it makes you uncomfortable, or just because you don’t enjoy it, I don’t believe you can truthfully say that it never arises out of canon or that it can’t be good writing.
April 5th, 2003 at 3:31 pm
I came to your journal via Fay’s, and then read your old post as well as this one. I’m a writer of pretty much everything (male slash, femslash, het, gen), and I found some of your comments very interesting ñ for example how you need something to “start in canon”. While a jarringly different start can be interesting at times, this is usually very much true, and I agree that a lot of slash fics assume that characters X and Y are in love without ever stating why this should be the case. (Obviously, those fics also have their function, but it’s a form of “preaching to the converted” rather than a proper introduction to a pairing.)
But there are also things I question very firmly. One is the idea that a character is straight unless shown otherwise. (Yes, Fay took this up too, but it deserves to be stressed extra.) I’m a bisexual woman with very little interest in relationships in general. I also don’t speak very much of my personal life. This means that most people I meet will consider me asexual, and that many of those will assume that I’m straight. Others will have recalled my teenage dates and assume that I’m straight. Others still will have seen me at gay bars and such and will assume that I’m gay. All these will be wrong, and all will be reasonable assumptions.
When I write slash about a person, it isn’t because I necessarily see that person as gay ñ they could be pretty much anywhere on the Kinsey scale except 100% heterosexual. But it certainly isn’t because I see that person as straight and am trying to be subversive. Most likely, I just see the potential of an interesting relationship and want to explore it further. (I’m not into “one true pairings” or slash only, and can write most characters differently on other occasions.) In other words, regardless of what you may think I do see it as a canonical reading ñ or at least no less canonical than my non-slash fics.
April 6th, 2003 at 12:23 am
I’ve responded in a new entry: Pretty Boys.
April 6th, 2003 at 4:34 pm
Slash, Canon, and Shades of Grey
Before I go into this, it may be a good idea to read all of Jemima’s posts on the subject