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edenfallingThere is an imbroglio going around some* fannish circles about slash and professional m/m fiction and how it is often appropriative and disrespectful to/of gay men, and how gay men are being hurtful in criticizing female expressions of sexuality through slash, and god knows what all else. Recently this has developed side issues about the way the issue is persistently framed as 'straight women vs. gay men' which ignores the fact that (apparently) the majority of slash writers identify as some variation of queer.
(You can find some of the latest round in this metafandom post, if you are curious.)
I, meanwhile, am sitting back and going WTF at all this, because whatever other people may be getting out of slash or putting into it, what I am doing when I write two men in a romantic and/or sexual relationship (which I have done, though I seem to lean more toward het or threesomes when I actually write sexual -- or presumably sexual -- relationships... and I write femslash, too) is exploring how those particular characters might behave in such a relationship.
In other words, I write character-based stories. And stories about specific, particular characters in a relationship defined by their specific, particular qualities and circumstances are the stories I am most interested in reading, as well. (Plot, world-building, and nifty thematic ideas are also good lures. *grin* And so is sex, sometimes, if and when I am in the mood, and if and when a story convinces me that this particular sex scene is realistic for these particular characters in this particular setting and plot circumstance. Otherwise I will probably be skimming right over your carefully written sex, sorry.)
Anyway, for me, slash has nothing to do with exploring my own sexuality, or acting out my sexuality through male proxies, or playing around in drag, or whatever new analogies people are coming up with. It has very little to do with sex, honestly. (The same goes for het and femslash and poly and whatever else people get up to by way of sexual/romantic relationships.) I am interested in character as displayed through relationships, and relationships as an influence on characters and actions; it is all about being human in community with other humans. Sex/romance/love just happens to be a convenient way to explore emotional and social connections, sometimes -- though generally speaking, even when I write actual sex scenes, they are not the point of the story.
I grant you, this attitude is almost certainly influenced by my general asexuality, but I would be willing to bet that character study and development is a significant part of a lot of other writers' motivation for writing slash... or at least the people who write stories where you cannot just run a global search-and-replace on the characters' names and then have the fic work just as well -- or just as badly, more likely -- in half a hundred fandoms.
But that does not make for good arguments or sociological essays, I guess. *wry*
*I say 'some' because it is clearly completely off the radar of, like, eighty percent of my flist... which I am pretty sure is related to the fact that a lot of my flist is mostly in animanga fandoms and another, somewhat overlapping proportion does not seem interested in pan-fandom meta. (This is, incidentally, much more true for LJ than DW; I use DW less for fic reading and more for thinky semi-sociological reading.)
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Please note that this post is not intended as an attack on anyone or anyone's point of view. I am just saying that for me, this whole argument is like reading local news from a foreign country, because none of the perspectives (except maybekaz's post about invisible asexuals) have much to do with my experience of the world.
(You can find some of the latest round in this metafandom post, if you are curious.)
I, meanwhile, am sitting back and going WTF at all this, because whatever other people may be getting out of slash or putting into it, what I am doing when I write two men in a romantic and/or sexual relationship (which I have done, though I seem to lean more toward het or threesomes when I actually write sexual -- or presumably sexual -- relationships... and I write femslash, too) is exploring how those particular characters might behave in such a relationship.
In other words, I write character-based stories. And stories about specific, particular characters in a relationship defined by their specific, particular qualities and circumstances are the stories I am most interested in reading, as well. (Plot, world-building, and nifty thematic ideas are also good lures. *grin* And so is sex, sometimes, if and when I am in the mood, and if and when a story convinces me that this particular sex scene is realistic for these particular characters in this particular setting and plot circumstance. Otherwise I will probably be skimming right over your carefully written sex, sorry.)
Anyway, for me, slash has nothing to do with exploring my own sexuality, or acting out my sexuality through male proxies, or playing around in drag, or whatever new analogies people are coming up with. It has very little to do with sex, honestly. (The same goes for het and femslash and poly and whatever else people get up to by way of sexual/romantic relationships.) I am interested in character as displayed through relationships, and relationships as an influence on characters and actions; it is all about being human in community with other humans. Sex/romance/love just happens to be a convenient way to explore emotional and social connections, sometimes -- though generally speaking, even when I write actual sex scenes, they are not the point of the story.
I grant you, this attitude is almost certainly influenced by my general asexuality, but I would be willing to bet that character study and development is a significant part of a lot of other writers' motivation for writing slash... or at least the people who write stories where you cannot just run a global search-and-replace on the characters' names and then have the fic work just as well -- or just as badly, more likely -- in half a hundred fandoms.
But that does not make for good arguments or sociological essays, I guess. *wry*
*I say 'some' because it is clearly completely off the radar of, like, eighty percent of my flist... which I am pretty sure is related to the fact that a lot of my flist is mostly in animanga fandoms and another, somewhat overlapping proportion does not seem interested in pan-fandom meta. (This is, incidentally, much more true for LJ than DW; I use DW less for fic reading and more for thinky semi-sociological reading.)
-----
Please note that this post is not intended as an attack on anyone or anyone's point of view. I am just saying that for me, this whole argument is like reading local news from a foreign country, because none of the perspectives (except maybe
kaz's post about invisible asexuals) have much to do with my experience of the world.
Re: Here via Metafandom
Date: 2010-01-21 03:53 am (UTC)I think maybe it boils down to this: I write characters in relationships because I think said relationships are interesting and/or make sense in relation to the characters' personalities and (potential or textually explicit) sexualities. I am getting the impression that many other people ship and/or write characters in relationships because those pairings are useful in regard to their own sexualities, as well as, hopefully, plausible for the characters in question. And that position -- using characters as sexual proxies -- is very hard for me to wrap my head and gut around.
I suppose it might make more sense to me if I were not basically asexual and aromantic. *shrug*