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Slash fandom and male privilege/hetero privilege

May 8th, 2007

by Yonmei

Late in 2005, Lucy Gillian wrote a tremendous essay (published at the Fanfic Symposium), When Worlds Collide: Fandom and Male Privilege. Please go and read it: because this blog post wishes to acknowledge that essay as one of its foremothers.

Most slash fans are female. Most slash writers are female. Slash fandom is a female space, though with some male participants.

In February this year I was at Redemption, a British media con. In 2001, the first year I attended, there was one late-night slash panel that was packed out, lasted for two hours, and had one outraged walk-out (a non-slash fan, I believe, who was upset at hearing some particular variety of crackfic discussed calmly). In 2003 (the convention runs biannually) there were several more slash panels: I ran three on the history of slash. I missed 2005 due to lack of funds, but by 2007, there was so many slash panels it was quite possible to have your own little mini-con dashing from slash panel to slash panel. It was great.

Most of the slash panels were attended exclusively either by slash fans or slashcurious fans.

A slash fan is someone who always looks for the slashy. This definition, like so much else in slash fandom, is really never going to be universally agreed to, but I think a slash fan is someone who will first of all want to know, about a new series, “Who can you slash in it?” Which two men (or two women) are the two who are looking at each other with barely-subtextual passion? A slash fan is someone who likes slash, rather than liking any particular series and the slash in it. Of course a slash fan may also be a fan of a particular series: but whatever series she’s a fan of, the slash fan will consider it a matter of course that she’s looking for slash fiction or slash pairings, and a matter of note if she’s interested instead in a het pairing.

Slashcurious is a word I just made up to describe fans who have just discovered a One True Pairing (OTP) in their fandom and want to find out more, or fans who have noticed that increasingly all their friends seem to have been drifting slashwards and who have therefore read/been recced a number of slash stories or music vids which they enjoyed. They’re not slash fans… yet… but they are open to slash pairings, and want to hear more about it.

This was not because there was any attempt to keep non-slash fans out: it was because the panels were all clearly targeted towards slash fandom, not towards people peering in with a kind of detached interest at the funny fish swimming inside. At a busy convention, most people have more to do than go to a panel on a topic they’re not interested in.

At one panel, though, which was intended to discuss why we find certain pairings sexy, there was one man in the audience who wanted to make clear to us that he was not a slash fan, but he “just wanted to understand”. Various people on the panel and in the audience politely answered his very beginner-level questions, and the facilitator finally told him “We are here because we all like to talk about slash, not to answer questions about why we like slash.” I thought this would quell him, but he said in a disgruntled kind of way that he was interested, that’s all, and shut up for a few minutes.

The panel was trying to discuss why we like Bodie/Doyle from The Professionals (and what it says that some people like Bodie/Cowley) and the man piped up. “It’s ridiculous to think a man like Bodie could be gay.”

There was some polite disagreement with this statement, but then the man said, emphatically, “I’ve known men like that. Parachutists.” (Bodie is from a para regiment, and he’s also a sergeant in the SAS.) “They’re not gay.” He went on a little longer in this vein.

He was sitting a row behind me and a little to my right. I turned round and looked at him, and said, loudly, “You’re wrong.”

“I think you can allow me to know my own gender!” he said huffily.

“No, you’re wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.” At this point, to the best of my recollection, filled with angry fannishness, I started to quote from the West Wing, and said something like “Just be wrong. Just sit there in your wrongness and be wrong and get used to it.” He tried to say something again, and I said, again, loudly, “You’re wrong,” and at this point he shut up.

I got criticized later by another man on another panel who claimed that I had insulted one of the GoH, but I have no idea who the first man was: I still don’t. (No one else at that panel complained, though.) I feel – I still felt – half-embarrassed and half-annoyed by that outburst: yes, the man was wrong, ridiculously, absurdly wrong – but it shouldn’t have been necessary to silence him, from the audience or from the panel: he shouldn’t really have gone to the panel, and if he had, he should have done what the only other non-slash fan in the audience did – stayed quiet.

People who argue that slash “isn’t realistic” often seem to be arguing from a state of mind in which, unless someone is coded “gay”, the default is straight. Or they argue that because we can be sure (mostly) that the series writers and the actors thought they were portraying a straight man, we have to assume their intent, even if what we see on the screen looks queer as hell.

Male privilege includes the right to be the observer, not the observed: hetero privilege includes the right to have your sexual orientation taken for granted.

In a big way, slash fandom subverts both those privileges.

Saffic or slashfic, f/f or m/m, the presumed observer – reader/writer/fan – is female. (Male slash fans have been known to complain very quietly about how “she” and “her” are used as generic pronouns, subsuming them into the female majority.) Husbands and boyfriends are apt to worry that a wife or girlfriend who is “into slash” is becoming a lesbian – and not merely because she goes off to conventions to spend three intense days with other women talking in graphic detail about sex. Because (I think) the presumption in conventional thinking is that being the observer is male. Women who judge and observe men – or women – are not being feminine.

Back in the 1970s, and to a certain extent even today, it was assumed that straight women were into slash because it was two straight men together, and she couldn’t have either of them, and she didn’t want either of them to have a girlfriend, so she puts them together. This is ingenious, but I’ve heard it more as a generic explanation for “why women like slash” than I have ever heard it from an actual slash fan trying to explain how she got into slash. When women talk about why they like slash, they talk – usually – about the first OTP they found (Kirk/Spock and Starsky/Hutch are the two famous early OTPs in slash fandom, though there’s considerable argument that Holmes/Watson are the original OTP): they talk about how they always liked “two men together”. They mention the early Pern novels and the moment when they realized that green dragonriders are male and pair off with brown and blue dragonriders. Or they talk about Mary Renault. Or Marion Zimmer Bradley. I think that the reason this explanation was, and remains, so popular is because it does as little as possible to subvert accepted heterosexual privilege.

This is not to say that many slash fans aren’t into the idea of two straight men falling in love, having graphic sex, and moving in together; but in slash fandom, this is seen as just one of many ways to enjoy a m/m relationship. The enjoyment may be in taking their virginity, in forcing them to do something they really didn’t think they wanted to do, in setting up a barrier between them for the joy of breaking it down for them – but it has no connection with the default assumption of heterosexuality. A fan who best enjoys stories in which Jack and Daniel from Stargate:SG1 are both straight, is unlikely to get into a fanwar with a fan who writes stories in which Daniel is bisexual and Jack is gay. (They are both more likely to get into a flame about Jack/Sam fandom, but that’s another story.)

Slash fandom treats sexual orientation in fictional characters (and sometimes, in Real Person Slash (RPS) in actors or pop stars or politicians) as something essentially fluid, to be determined according to the observer.

A non-slash fan is not just someone who isn’t interested in slash: a non-slash fan is someone who is outraged and incensed by slash. And usually, they like this aspect of slash fandom least of all. The foolish man at Redemption was reacting like a non-slash fan who has just stumbled across a stack of stories in which a favourite character falls in love and has graphic sex with another man: OMIGOD, he can’t be gay! (I’m told that some Xena fans react like this to suggestions that Xena and Gabrielle were lovers: and apparently a whole lot of them reacted like this when Willow and Tara emerged from subtext to become text.)

This isn’t just over-reacting to a difference in character analysis: this is the same kind of heterosexual privilege that reacted against Joanna Russ’s essay on lesbian themes in Willa Cather’s novels.

A straight man feels himself empowered to tell me that he “knows his own gender” better than I do, and can therefore say with authority that no man who enjoyed a dangerous/macho sport like parachuting would ever have passionate feelings for someone of his own gender. (What he thinks of women parachutists never came up. Perhaps he doesn’t believe they exist.) That’s straight privilege.

But he also felt he had a right to come along to a discussion about slash, for, by, and with slash fans, and casually disrupt it with questions that no one but himself was interested in: newbie questions he could have answered for himself by googling, while we had only this hour to talk. And that’s male privilege: and I still wonder (in a mildly incurious way) whether he still feels offended at being told, finally, to shut up, or if he still thinks he had a right, and we ought to have paid attention to him, not to what we wanted to talk about. Because, after all, we were all women, and that’s what women do.

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- More blogging by Yonmei at http://yonmei.insanejournal.com

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Filed under Cons & Community, feminism, slash | Comments (110)

110 Responses to “Slash fandom and male privilege/hetero privilege”

Ide Cyan on May 8, 2007 5:38 pm
The last con I attended had a single panel on slash, on a day where I wasn’t there (I’d have had to buy a membership for the day with only two evening panels left by the time I got there, and I decided to spend my money on going to a full day the day afterwards instead, but enough about money…). It has three panelists: two men and one woman. One of the men was the moderator. The panel description wasn’t inspiring, and from what I could gather via blog reports afterwards, it had a shock the mundanes tone through and through, as I’d feared.
Yonmei on May 8, 2007 5:52 pm
The panel description wasn’t inspiring, and from what I could gather via blog reports afterwards, it had a shock the mundanes tone through and through, as I’d feared.

Babelfish won’t translate that, but yes… I wonder if any of the panellists expected the audience to be slash fans? I wonder if any of the audience were slash fans? Argh.

(I’d have had to buy a membership for the day with only two evening panels left by the time I got there, and I decided to spend my money on going to a full day the day afterwards instead, but enough about money…).

Ouch. :-(
Ide Cyan on May 8, 2007 6:46 pm
A rough translation of the panel description from the con program would be:

“The world of fiction really isn’t what it used to be! Nowadays, you have to talk about fan fiction, about slash, plagiarism, soulbonding, blogs… and so on. Three old hands who’ve seen it all shed light on the seedy side of internet pop culture. Sensitive souls abstain!”

And, from the second link, which is a LJ entry by the woman who was on the panel (and who says she & her copanelists managed to put forth a lot of theory and recommendations), there’s a bit that goes:

“Nevertheless, in spite of our efforts, and because it was too funny to see [two established male writers of SF in Québec] completely shocked and speechless, we mostly focused on the worst cases, the most extremes, mpreg, badfic, and even soulbonding.”

(She goes on to describe a particular mpreg story as a trainwreck, and about how the basic tropes of Harry Potter mpreg made one of those authors fall out of his chair.)
Madeline A. on May 8, 2007 8:07 pm
Mark Twain said it best: fiction exists to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. Slash is no exception. Even GoH should receive the Sorkin treatment once in a while, especially when they presume to represent their entire gender, someone else’s job, and by extension a national character. (He was making reference to the SAS, after all, which I take to be a point of British pride.)
Laura Q on May 9, 2007 3:21 am
and, to kind of spin one’s head around from the by-women-for-women world of slash: an article in salon.com about gameplay same-sex marriage in the male-programmer-dominated world of game design.
Yonmei on May 9, 2007 4:11 pm
(He was making reference to the SAS, after all, which I take to be a point of British pride.)

Well, I certainly hope not. But no: he was explicitly saying that men who do parachuting are not gay.

an article in salon.com about gameplay same-sex marriage in the male-programmer-dominated world of game design.

Oh, I read that. It was fun. ;-)
A.R.Yngve on May 12, 2007 3:26 pm
As a writer I don’t object to (or care about, honestly) the slash, but fanfiction as such: using other people’s characters and settings.

If someone (regardless of of gender) wants to write “slashy” fiction, they should at least make the creative effort to come up with original characters and stories. (Both male and female writers have voiced this criticism; it’s not gender-specific.)

Here’s a modest proposal: Take the next step. Dare to write slash without the crutch of TV/movie characters. Create original characters and worlds, and let the characters behave as you want to write them!

Because frankly, as long as slash writers keep using licensed characters, it’s the equivalent of teenagers crying “You’re not the boss of me!” and then begging the parents for money: the pretense of independence.

Slash fanfiction does not “subvert” the gender stereotypes in genre fiction, it cements them.
Quick: Name ONE openly homosexual character in Star Trek, X-Files, Stargate, Harry Potter films, Star Wars, etc. etc.
(Seems all that fanfic hasn’t budged the status quo at all!)

Again: Take the next step. There’s no male cabal that’s going to stop you.
afrai on May 12, 2007 7:06 pm
Here’s a modest proposal: Take the next step. Dare to write slash without the crutch of TV/movie characters. Create original characters and worlds, and let the characters behave as you want to write them!

Now that’s one I’ve never heard before. *g*
Laura Q on May 13, 2007 2:23 am
A.R.Yngve: A quick counterexample: Fan response, largely including slash & “subtext” fans, made a significant effect on the portrayals of Xena & Gabrielle.

More generally, your comment seems to suggest that “licensed” characters are, because they are licensed, wholly the property and wholly the creative output of the licensors. Neither is accurate. “Property”, whether intellectual or otherwise, is never 100%; there are numerous exceptions, and creative “remixes” are an exception to most intellectual property regimes in one guise or another. And media characters are created by multiple parties, not just the licensors or copyright-holders, and also definitely including the audience and audience feedback.

These are a bit specific to what I hear as the intellectual property overtones in your comment. Back to the fanfic: Your flip comment about a “male cabal” really just misses the point, and is frankly a bit insulting to both women writers of “original” work and writers of slash & fanfic. Slash is its own thing. While some people write slash and then go on to write “pro”, it’s as inaccurate to characterize slash as a crutch (or the larval state of pro) as it is to characterize fan as the larval state of pro.
Ide Cyan on May 13, 2007 2:52 am
Two points:

1) Original slash is both a pleonasm and an oxymoron. It’s slash *because* it’s fanfiction, because it’s a response to a text. And that means “original” slash is just straightforward fiction — there’s no reinterpretation. And that means slash is original: it’s a reinterpretation, a new take on a pre-existing canon.

2) Above you see a male commenter leaving a comment on a feminist blog, in which he’s blatantly, imperiously telling women what to do. (Modest proposal, my ass.) In reply to a post that is about men waving their privilege around in conversations between women. Doesn’t the irony, not to mention the sheer patronising outrageousness of this, just kill you?!
the angry black woman on May 13, 2007 2:54 am
also, forgive me if I’m wrong, but once you start writing your own ‘original’ creatiosn doing slashy things, it’s no longer slash. then it’s just fiction about two women or two men who love each other. *shrug*

Part of the appeal, for me, is slashing pairs of existing characters. Picking up on subtext and running with it. I don’t want to read about just any pair of same-sex people getting it on, but this or that aprticular pair.

If that makes sense.
Yonmei on May 13, 2007 4:52 am
As Afrai pointed out, Yngve’s “modest proposal” is way far from being original: it’s a classic response to fanfiction, from a certain kind of person. And while it’s not exclusively men who react like that, Ide Cyan’s right about the lovely irony of a man waving his privilege stick around in a thread attached to a post discussing male privilege. But in general I would point such ignorant folk to Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers and advise them that if they still want to criticise, they will at least be able to do so from an informed viewpoint if they take the time to read it. (Since their usual attitude is that they don’t need to be informed to criticise, they probably never do read it, but it’s still a good starting point.)

“Original slash” is much argued about: my personal definition of it is that it happens either when a slash fan writes it and declares it to be “original slash”, or else that it’s when a slash fan moves into pro fiction and writes stories that clearly make use of the techniques learned in writing slash. “Slashy” is a word to describe a slash fan noticing the passionately throbbing subtext in a work of fiction that doesn’t in any way originate from slash fandom.

But slash itself is what happens when you take same-sex pairs of characters from somebody else’s universe (often, a universe with no one creator and a corporate owner, such as Star Trek) and play with them.
A.R.Yngve on May 13, 2007 4:52 am
Thank you for the responses.
I’m not telling fanfic writers what to do… I’m telling them what they’re NOT doing: changing the status quo.

Let’s use an example… a TV series with actual homosexual characters, “The L Word”.

“The L Word” did not come about because scriptwriters and producers said to each other:
“Let’s have a series about a lot of women who hang around with each other for no particular reason… we drop a lot of sly hints about lesbianism… and then, about halfway through Season 1, we ‘slash’ them and keep it slashy.”

Instead they said: “Let’s make a series where the characters are already lesbians, adn follow how they live in that context.”

“The L Word” does not use homosexuality as a SUBtext but as a CONtext.
Context is something that occurs in the real world.
Subtext is a literary device.

By sticking to the idea of homosexuality based on subtext ONLY, fanficcers are cementing the status quo; they are saying “It’s not real, just subtext.”

If “slash” was all about inserting, say, Black characters based on subtext only, it would be blatantly racist — like saying:
“The subtext of Series X suggests that Character Y could be Black… but you can’t have a context where a Black character makes sense, because there is no such thing. BLACK CHARACTERS CAN’T REALLY EXIST.”

(Pow.)
Yonmei on May 13, 2007 4:57 am
We crossposted. I hate it when that happens. But, Yngve, you’re coming across as someone who is so completely ignorant about fanfiction that I’m not even sure that you know that slash is a genre of fanfiction, and not just another name for fanfiction. Coming into this discussion from a position of such ignorance makes it really difficult to consider having a serious discussion with you – it’s rather like someone coming into a discussion about science-fiction and making comments like “But why don’t you write stories about things that could ACTUALLY HAPPEN, instead of nonsense about life on other worlds?”

Update: I thought I remembered the name Yngve from somewhere, and here it is: a discussion about fanfic on Making Light, in which A.R.Yngve shows up and makes pretty much the same kind of ignorant comments about fanfic there as he does here. That was in April 2006, and then as now, someone recommended Yngve go read Textual Poachers, which evidently, he didn’t.
Feminist SF - The Blog! » Blog Archive » This is our garden. We like it. on May 13, 2007 6:26 am
[...] recent comment on a post I wrote a few days ago (Slash fandom and male privilege/hetero privilege) led me to google on the commenters’ name, which I thought I remembered from a while back – [...]
Laura Q on May 13, 2007 10:39 am
Still shaking my head.

I’m not telling fanfic writers what to do… I’m telling them what they’re NOT doing: changing the status quo.

Of course, this statement presumes that slash writers are, by writing slash, trying to change the status quo. It assumes what the status quo is (published works). It vaguely implies a definition of what “change” to the status quo might be (change in the plot or characterization of the characters in canon).

Each of these presumptions, assumptions, and implications are wrong. I have never heard of a slash writer presuming that she was trying to change or impact the original published work. That appears to be confusing to ARYngve, but let me try to spell it out.

A slash writer (or fanfic writer generally) are not taking the only available copy of an artwork or a piece of fruit and repainting it or cooking it (or attempting and failing to have an impact on its repainting or cooking). Slash, and fanfic more generally, are doing what every creator has ever done: looking at the world (including the art produced by other creators) and saying, “huh, that inspires me to create something.” And then the creation is more or less based on what that person has seen and thought in her life, and within or across the boundaries of some set of genre conventions.

As for defining the status quo: Well, slash is now (and probably ever has been) part of the status quo. Surprise! So slash writers add to the status quo as any writer (including self-published writers) do. But retakes on preexisting works not only have existed for as long as art has, they define art: the second piece of art ever was an audience response to the first. “Hey, I like your deer; I’m going to draw an ass, or maybe add some hunters to the scene.” “Hey, nice story. But let me tell you what I think happened.”

Some genres of creation — like reviews or parodies or slash — are based wholly or largely on one or more preexisting works. They still bring their author’s creativity and knowledge and insight to bear in a new way, but that new expression is focused through the lens of a previous expression. That’s part of the genre convention. A parody is a retake of an existing work. It’s a response by the reader who says there’s something intriguing in this idea that this writer had, but I’ve got a different idea about it … and then the reader engages her own creativity and gives her own take on it. Slash theory gives us lots of reasons and analysis about what the reader-cum-writer is interested in and why she’s doing it.

Slash or fanfic may include “original” characters, plot, settings, etc., and they may reuse any or all of the characters, plot, settings, from an existing work. But they do so for a different end. And you would have to talk to that individual writer to know her purpose, and/or read slash theory to understand it as a whole.

But fanfic is not a failure to create originality. It *is* original creation. The convention that defines and distinguishes fanfic is that it is clearly tied in some fashion to a preexisting work; a similar convention defines and distinguishes parody from satire.

I want to say more about originality, but this has gone on long enough, so just briefly: I wouldn’t suggest any writer rely on “originality” to distinguish his work from prior works. In one of my exceedingly rare referrals to the christian Bible, I suggest Ecclesiastes 1:9. Show me any character in any fiction and I will show you its literary antecedents at closer or further distances than the typical fanfic. Show me any plot and I will do the same.
Yonmei on May 13, 2007 1:09 pm
Each of these presumptions, assumptions, and implications are wrong.

Yeah, but: persistent ignorance is bad faith. A.R.Yngve has been directed to sources that could let him learn more about fanfiction, and specifically slash, over a year ago. He’s chosen not to do so: he prefers to bloviate from a position of extreme ignorance.
Ide Cyan on May 13, 2007 11:02 pm
Yonmei, A.R.Yngve’s bad faith is one thing. It speaks to his character. But his presence as a male commenter, acting in bad faith on a feminist blog? That’s political.
lavendertook on May 13, 2007 11:49 pm
I see we have a real live example of male privilege stomping around slash fandom here, educating the ignorant female masses and saving us from ourselves–what would we do without such good intentioned male help trying to dissuade us from doing what we so wrongheadedly want to do, thus leading to our wasting time defending ourselves instead?

As Ide points out, that’s nothing less than a political attack.
Feminist SF - The Blog! » Blog Archive » So, why do fanboys hate fanfic, especially slash? on May 16, 2007 9:45 am
[...] wrote (Slash fandom and male privilege/hetero privilege) about an incident at a slash panel at Redemption, in which a fanboy disrupted a panel about slash [...]
Hello on May 18, 2007 10:28 pm
“If “slash” was all about inserting, say, Black characters based on subtext only, it would be blatantly racist”

Um, sure thing. There’s no racial issue inherent in the fact that that there are a few well known sci fi shows where characters of color are all but nonexistant, but if somebody who noticed that started writing fanfics that included people of color despite their invisibility on tv? That would be blantantly racist! Especially because putting gay or African Americans in fan fic creates a magic barrier, and that’s why we rarely actually see gay or Black characters on TV!!!!

Your logic does no resemble our earth logic.
Official Shrub.com Blog » Blog Archive » Forcing all spaces to be privilege-oriented spaces on May 19, 2007 2:12 am
[...] SF blog regarding the female-dominated slash fandom. The posts, for reference, are as follows: Slash fandom and male privilege/hetero privilege (a great PiA post written by someone who isn’t me!), This is our garden. We like it., and So, [...]
Janis on May 31, 2007 11:23 pm
Yngve, darling, YOU watch “Hornblower,” take a look at Ioan Gruffudd and Jamie Bamber and tell me no woman should imagine them naked and writhing around one another. Go ahead. Holy fucking GAWD, man. How stupid can you BE?!

Go watch “Peter Pan,” and tell me that, when ONE naked Jason Isaacs is like having all your birthdays and Christmases come at once, the idea of TWO of them won’t make you witness the face of divinity right the hell then and there.

They pretty, they NAKED, and they FUCKING in my tiny little mind. Like rabbits. That’s all you or anyone else needs to know.

Moron.

Go away. I do what I want because I want to do it. When I change the status quo, believe me you’ll know it. And I don’t need advice from any straight male jackwad on how to do it.
Snuffles on June 8, 2007 3:25 pm
No. No no no no no no no no.

You are indeed wrong, though not for the reasons some clearly ignorant male stood up to tell you.

You are making very broad and sweeping assumptions about the nature of people, just as much as those horrible privileged people you complain about!

It’s slashfic. I’m afriad you really aren’t subverting anything. And most of the people you are pissing off, myself included? I’m not mad because you’re not being feminine – I’m hardly feminine. I’m mad because you destroy characteres for the sake of porn, then sit around and pat yourselves on the back about how progressive and subversive you’re being by forcing a pair of guys you think are hot into extremely heteronormative gender roles.

It is so self-righteous it makes me absolutely sick.
Yonmei on June 8, 2007 4:51 pm
Ah, Snuffles. I’m tempted to disemvowel your comment, but I found a really good rebuttal on someone’s livejournal: People who hate slash fans without reason are dumb.

(It’s a very self-righteous post: it might make you feel sick. Just a fair warning.)
Snuffles on June 9, 2007 2:15 pm
Yonmei:

I’m sure that was supposed to put me in my place somehow, but I fail to understand how ranting and making assertions is quite the same as a bunch of slash fans patting themselves on the back because SMUT FANFIC DISMANTLES THE PATRIARCHY.

Really, what?

My statement: “I don’t care for furries, but please, if you’re going to be spewing irrational and mind-boggling hatred, have a reason.”
This statement: “Slash fanfic subverts heterosexual and male privilege in a big way.”

Please.
Yonmei on June 9, 2007 6:20 pm
The key phrase in the statement linked to: “I don’t care for [slash fans], but please, if you’re going to be spewing irrational and mind-boggling hatred, have a reason.”

You don’t seem to have a reason: you just don’t like slash fans, and you want us to know that. Take your own advice! And if you can’t stand the taste of your own advice, buzz off.
Snuffles on June 9, 2007 9:37 pm
.. Okay, but.

First of all, I don’t hate all slash fans.

Second of all, the ones I do hate, I have a rational reason to hate.

I find it offensive and mind-bogglingly pretentious than anybody could assert that fanfiction and smut enjoyed primarily by middle class heterosexual women subverts male or heterosexual privilege. Especially heterosexual privilege. Slash often involves taking any two random men and forcing them into very heteronormative sex roles. There’s absolutely nothing progressive about that. What about all the irrational hatred that’s directed at female characters that get in the way of aforementioned random coupling? There’s a hugely disproportionate amount of that within slash communities and the crux of any argument against one of these female characters tends to be “well she’s a ho and he can do better.” Not to mention, there are some of us who are aggravated with slash (and hell, even many het shippers) because we’re tired of seeing characters we like more or less mutilated (and forced into aforementioned heteronormative gender roles).

And then you have slashers who come along and rip your head off every time you say you don’t like slash, who call you a homophobe because you really don’t feel that Harry and Snape/Draco/Whoever can have a very plausible romantic relationship. Then there’s this stupid, pretentious mentality that writing slashfic = psuedo-activism, like it means you’re stomping on the patriarchy and supporting gay rights every time you read slashfic, no matter how hackneyed it is, no matter how you portray a homosexual relationship, and regardless of the fact that it is almost totally by and for heterosexual women.

This whole article is misguided and unintentionally offensive at best. It even ends with the assertion that a non slash fan is outraged and incensed by slash. By saying that that you’re subverting patriarchy and dismissing all your critics, you basically remove any need for self-examination within slashy subcultures, and there are some of us who are very uncomfortable with that.
Yonmei on June 11, 2007 6:00 am
Snuffles, your problem now is that you obviously had some interesting ideas which might have made a good contribution to the discussion. But because you entered this thread with a poisonous and sweeping personal attack, you have ensured that your ideas won’t be responded to.

Next time you want to enter a discussion, try beginning with a rational argument rather than a personal attack. It’s much more effective, and was, in fact, what I thought you were advising to others in your post about furries. As I said: take your own advice. Smile if it doesn’t taste good.
Snuffles on June 17, 2007 7:50 pm
Pardon me?

I made no personal attack – I just responded to the highly insulting charicature of the anti-slashfan. I gave a perfectly rational, albeit short, explanation.

Really now, if you don’t care to respond to my valid concerns because it doesn’t suit you, you might as well say so.
Yonmei on June 17, 2007 10:36 pm
Snuffles, you’re a troll.

DNFTT, people.
Snuffles on June 18, 2007 2:54 pm
Except for how I’ve brought up all these valid points and you can’t be bothered to answer them..

Just because you don’t want to respond to anything I have to say doesn’t make me a troll, and until you bother to address the points, you’re only proving your attitude is every bit as self-righteous as I assumed.
Yonmei on June 18, 2007 3:37 pm
What makes you a troll is that you came into the thread with an aggressive, fight-starting comment, claiming that all slash fans “destroy characteres for the sake of porn” and asserting “It is so self-righteous it makes me absolutely sick.”

You followed that comment up by claiming that it was “offensive and mind-bogglingly pretentious” to assert that “fanfiction and smut enjoyed primarily by middle class heterosexual women” could subvert male/heterosexual privilege.

And finally wrapped up your failure to open discussion by saying “This whole article is misguided and unintentionally offensive at best” – both patronising and insulting.

All of this might just be very juvenile behavior on the Internet.

But finally, you demonstrate your trollishness by asserting that your attack comments were “perfectly rational” and declining to apologize for them. Instead, you want me to dig out the bits of valid commentary you buried in muck, polish them, and respond: you have no intention of doing this for yourself, and have the chutzpah to complain that I won’t do this for you.

You are banned.
quaedam on June 21, 2007 11:08 am
Snuffles, you seem comfortable with making generalizations about slash/yaoi fans, but equally unwilling to see generalizations made about those who virulently *dlslike* yaoi. Presumably when you hear someone refer to ‘an anti-yaoi fan’ you feel that it is always you, personally, who are being spoken about. It is always good to remember that many of the people who believe *some* of the same things which we do, do not believe these things for the same reason, or for as good reason. Now, you may not *like* to think that your ‘side’ is shared with a decent-sized faction of misogynist fanboys and homophobes than I *like* to think that some
Also, the ‘middle-class’ comment is a bit of a ham-handed effort to appear progressive, here, not to mention that it has little to do with the discussion at hand–there is nothing essentially ‘middle class’ about yaoi; if most of the ‘yaoi fangirls’ you see on these here internets *are* middle-class (and I honestly don’t know that they are–they *certainly* aren’t all heterosexual–enough are bi and lesbian that yet another piece of pop-psychological dismissal of slash/yaoi as an authentic expression of female sexuality, likes to claim that we’re all just repressed and tiding ourselves over with girly-men until we finally admit that we just prefer women. ^^), this has more to do with the good old ‘digital divide’ than
quaedam on June 21, 2007 11:15 am
Damn, pressed ‘submit’ too soon. *headwall*

I meant to say, ‘than I like to think that some slash/yaoi fans really do have a disturbingly negative attitude towards their own gender’, and ‘than. . .slash/yaoi really being, oh I don’t know, specifically and only a result of decadent bourgeois society like folks back in the day used to say about abstract art. XD’

Sorry about that.
Yonmei on June 21, 2007 7:08 pm
Quaedam, Snuffles is banned for trolling. S/he/it won’t be able to respond to your comment.
quaedam on June 21, 2007 7:35 pm
Ah, sigh. I see that. Sorry.
Anna The Pirate King on June 25, 2007 12:18 pm
Wow! You banned Snuffles for that?

Because by troll standards, that was pretty darned tame.

And the bigger question Snuffles … is writing/reading slash really advancing gay rights … was really worth considering.

But gosh … I’d have preferred seeing the debate with Snuffles continue … also I wonder how free the discussion really is on this site!
Yonmei on June 25, 2007 4:26 pm
Anna: s writing/reading slash really advancing gay rights … was really worth considering

Well, raise it. Unlike Snuffles, you haven’t tried to begin the debate by insulting all slash fans, and in particular, me.

I’d have preferred seeing the debate with Snuffles continue

Then you can stripmine Snuffles’ comments for any intelligent, uninsulting commentary, and use the material gained to try starting a debate. But as I saw no reason to assume that if Snuffles was allowed to continue comment here, that s/he would manage to refrain insult, I saw no reason to permit Snuffles to continue trying to provoke me into insulting shim back.

… also I wonder how free the discussion really is on this site!

Discussion, free. Insults, not free. Simple.
Anna The Pirate King on June 25, 2007 4:56 pm
Well, hey then! I am raising it! And “strip-mining” or perhaps simply repeating some of Snuffles’ questions.

What does slash actually do for actual gay rights? Women’s rights? I too have my doubts about this, and would like to see it discussed.

What does it mean that slash is mostly gay erotica written for mostly heterosexual women? And that, while there are queer women reading and writing it, so small a proportion of slash is girl/girl action … what’s that about?

Is it true that slash does follow a lot of patterns that are, to borrow Snuffles’s word, heteronormative? (part of why I wish you hadn’t banned him/her/they is I’d like to hear a clarification what she/he/they think that means)

If so, what does that mean regarding how we construct relationships? In fiction? In life?
Yonmei on June 25, 2007 5:55 pm
What does slash actually do for actual gay rights?

If you mean outside fandom (though, you know, as a fan I don’t discount the effect it has on fandom itself) I think that some slash stories raise awareness of issues directly related to LGBT equality, in the minds of people who would not otherwise have paid them any attention.

As a lesbian, of course, I simply find slash has made media fandom a more comfortable place for me to be and write, because it means a publishing space within which same-sex relationships are taken for granted.

Women’s rights?

I think that slash rises out of equality for women: I don’t think slash fandom would exist without feminism.

What does it mean that slash is mostly gay erotica written for mostly heterosexual women?

Slash is not gay erotica: seriously, it’s not. But slash does (mostly) focus on male/male couples, and it is (mostly) enjoyed by women. That the audience is presumed to be mostly heterosexual I attribute to mostly heterosexism: lesbians and bi women tend to be invisible to outside observers.

And that, while there are queer women reading and writing it, so small a proportion of slash is girl/girl action … what’s that about?

Go figure! I know that being sexually turned on by stories/mental images of “two men together” (for want of a better word) is a part of my sexual orientation: I can’t explain it any more than I can “explain” my being a lesbian, and see no more reason why I should have to justify it than I should have to justify being a lesbian. Being so attracted seems to be a separate strand of sexual orientation which is orthogonal to what we think of as the basic set of lesbian, bi, straight: Joanna Russ, Marilyn Hacker, Mary Renault, Alison Bechdel, and Marion Zimmer Bradley are all lesbians who clearly (from their writings) all felt as I do the attraction of male/male togetherness. And, though I find it difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t share that feeling, this is a distinctly different feeling to the sexual attraction I feel towards women. I’ve never had any doubt I’m a lesbian. I’ve never had any doubt I’m a slash fan. (That is, once I had words to define what I felt: but I knew what my feelings were, and they went way back, long before I had words for them.)

I’ve written saffic stories; but… not many. I could blame the media I get the ideas from – I wrote several saffic Blake’s 7 stories, Jenna/Cally, Dayna/Soolin: set in a series where there were two or three strong female characters in virtually every episode, and many of the episodes passed the Dykes to Watch Out For test. But mostly, then as now, I wrote m/m stories.

Barbara, another lesbian slash fan friend/fellow writer from B7 days, proposed ironically when many slash fans were diving into Mulder/Scully during X-Files that the way in which TV executives could “stop slash” (which many of them seemed to be trying to, if it came to their attention) was to write strong female characters and scripts in which mixed-sex relationships had the kind of intensity, interest, and conflict that usually only male/male relationships have (while making the men whose emotional interest is clearly each other ostensibly heterosexual by providing them with cardboard women to fuck).

And part of it, honestly, is the emotional distancing possible: Joanna Russ wrote about this more than once in her collection of essays Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts. I’ll see if I can find the quotes and post them here, because I remember reading them – 19 or so, I think – and just thinking yes.

It’s all of that, I think. Part of my sexual orientation: part of the culture which depicts m/m relationships on TV, in films, much more intensely than it does het relationships (and tends to render invisible any f/f relationships, or have only one strong female character so that a saffic story has to be a crossover).

Is it true that slash does follow a lot of patterns that are, to borrow Snuffles’s word, heteronormative?

Some slash stories do, yes. The pattern I see is when a couple are identified – Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin from M.U.N.C.L.E., Bodie and Doyle from The Professionals, Jim and Blair from The Sentinel – and one of the couple, in many stories, effectively becomes “the girl” in a classic romance story. He is often written as much smaller/shorter than the other man: he frequently becomes unexpectedly blond (well, Illya is blond): he weeps, he is bullied, he is sexually vulnerable: often he’s a rape victim (the other man often turns out to have raped). Sometimes this may be happening because it’s heteronormative – the writer wants to produce a classic romance novel set in the series, in slash form, and feels it necessary to write one of the characters as “the Girl” and one of them as “the Man”. And sometimes the writer is obviously, consciously or not, exploring power structures in a relationship.

If so, what does that mean regarding how we construct relationships? In fiction? In life

Well, you asked what slash actually does for women’s rights. I think slash is one of the few areas in which women are writing honestly and openly about what turns us on – and writing it, not just writing about it. And taking for granted, within slash fandom, that we have a right to do this. That was unusual in the 1970s, when slash was creeping out into public view (well, hiding under dealers’ tables at mainstream cons: the last time I found slash zines there was at the Worldcon in Glasgow in 1995) but it’s still something people question today, and often in such terms as Snuffles did; the accusation that slash is “ruining characters” by turning them into “pornography”.

What slash says, I think – good, bad, and indifferent, and like any collection of amateur writings, there’s much more that’s bad/indifferent – is that what we want, and how we perceive how to get what we want, is not more complicated than we imagine: but it’s way more complicated than we often tell ourselves we ought to imagine.
Anna The Pirate King on June 25, 2007 6:42 pm
As a lesbian, of course, I simply find slash has made media fandom a more comfortable place for me to be and write, because it means a publishing space within which same-sex relationships are taken for granted.

I think that slash rises out of equality for women: I don’t think slash fandom would exist without feminism.

Please elaborate. You start to at the end, that it is good for queer people and women because it is women writing about sex. But then why is calling it pornography a bad thing? Or … is writing pornography a bad thing? Would it be a bad thing if it were NOT slash?

I write a lot of very erotic work, but little of it is fanfic and none of it is slash. So I’m not just being a snot here. Why is slash somehow other than (better? less smutty? more progressive?) than say, romance novels? Or, (eep) original erotic fiction?

I mean, the constant question about fanfic, one I never see answered, is why is it empowering to write our stories using other people’s characters instead of our own?

Do we as women or queer women (I’m bi, and PSA: no, thank you, NOT just coming out, and NOT just in denial, and NOT just passing, actually bi, as bi as you are lesbian, thanks) Don’t owe it to ourselves to tell our own stories? With characters who we create?

Also regarding heteronormativism … as a bi woman I get to see both sides of the sex role question, and yes the attempt even in queer relationships to insert traditional relationship power values in an arbitrary way? I’ve heard it argued that slash allows women to fully imagine relationships between equals. But doesn’t making those relationships heteronormative just reinforce relationships between unequal partners?
laura quilter on June 25, 2007 7:10 pm
re: anna’s point about freeness of discussion —

just for clarity — each blogger who posts moderates her own thread; and i would say we all have different standards for acceptable discourse. the various styles have their own advantages & disadvantages.

laura
Ide Cyan on June 25, 2007 9:43 pm
Butting in for a moment…

Anna The Pirate King wrote:
«I mean, the constant question about fanfic, one I never see answered, is why is it empowering to write our stories using other people’s characters instead of our own? »

…I don’t see that question all that often, actually. The “empowering” bit, which crops up here as part of a discussion in feminist terms, isn’t necessarily salient to general inquiries from people outside of fandom, who wonder why others write fanfic in the first place, nevermind whether it’s empowering to do so. (…and you’re shifting the focus away from slash and onto fanfic in general, I notice. And presupposing a false dilemma with that “instead”, when it’s quite possible to write both fanfic and original fic, though the process of doing either may be subject to different sorts of unfavourable circumstances.)

But here’s a thought on the matter, anyhow: to consider the matter of empowerment, consider ownership.

The characters in which fans (in their multitudes) invest most of their time and energy, by writing fanfic, vidding, doing artwork and so forth, are precisely those who are most popular. But the legal systems by which these characters remain private intellectual properties serve not simply to protect the livelihoods of ~~writers~~ authors, but also to dispossess the masses of the very entertainment they are meant to consume.

If everyone only wrote about her own characters, the possibilities for public discourse about ideas mediated through fiction would be severely limited by the very individuality of the stories.

Popular characters serve as reference points, whose reinterpretation is as necessary and as vital to the exchange of ideas as the creation of new characters.

To bar fans from using other people’s characters, especially characters from collaborative projects intended for the masses, such as movies and television, can be a tool for oppression, and to the extent that the control of such productions is inherently removed from individuals, it empowers individuals to be able to express their own interpretations of them.

(And I hope I don’t need to outline how feminism maps onto the dynamic of existing power structures vs. alienated individuals.)

In simpler terms: we are writing our own stories. We’re just writing them in a common language.
Yonmei on June 26, 2007 7:43 am
But then why is calling it pornography a bad thing?

I must have missed something: who said that calling it pornography was a bad thing?

Why is slash somehow other than (better? less smutty? more progressive?) than say, romance novels?

The key difference between fanfic and profic is something that Ellen Fremedon (who is both a fanwriter and a prowriter) describes here and here. In short (though I do seriously recommend the long version, both Ellen’s posts and the comment threads) fanfiction is shameless.

I mean, the constant question about fanfic, one I never see answered, is why is it empowering to write our stories using other people’s characters instead of our own?

Perhaps it’s never answered because it’s like the key question about women changing surnames on marriage: why is it empowering to keep your father’s name instead of your husband’s name? (Ide Cyan, I see, has answered at more length.)

Do we as women or queer women (I’m bi, and PSA: no, thank you, NOT just coming out, and NOT just in denial, and NOT just passing, actually bi, as bi as you are lesbian, thanks) Don’t owe it to ourselves to tell our own stories? With characters who we create?

Who are you to tell me that the stories I tell are not my own?

I’ve heard it argued that slash allows women to fully imagine relationships between equals. But doesn’t making those relationships heteronormative just reinforce relationships between unequal partners?

…I really need to find you those Joanna Russ quotes. Can you wait? This is a really interesting discussion that I’d like to have, and I may take it to a front page post.
Anna The Pirate King on June 26, 2007 4:03 pm
meh, okay, I’m not really buying your argument.

Possibly this simply is around a different interpretation of the word “empowerment”.

See, if you were to say “I write slash/fanfic because it gives me joy and what gives me joy is inherently empowering,” I’d probably buy THAT. (I write fanfic too, but for pleasure, not for empowerment.) But the whole rehashing-of-what-Hollywood-provides-us-as-tools is as/more empowering than creating original work … well, no, I’m sorry. I disagree.

Or, okay, I agree in a very qualified way. I agree that slash and/or fanfic is empowering rather the way same-sex educational institutions are empowering. They both provide a safe community to develop the talents of (mostly) women who might otherwise be intimidated out of writing (or learning math, say) at all. In that sense, yes, you develop a voice and a point of view.

There is even something interesting going on in the reinterpretation of works that are mostly created by men from a female point of view.

But real is this real empowerment? As in, do you have real-world power here?

I argue not. Because you are not being read outside your community of true believers. I will not say “you have no impact” … I have read Joanna Russ, so I know you are influencing each other. But are you really influencing the publishing world OUTSIDE that community?

Maybe a little. Joss Whedon reportedly read fanfic to help mold our ideas, but why should the talents of women writers be used to help Joss Whedon. Where is the next chick Joss Whedon coming from?

I argue that there is something very troubling that so many talented women fanfic and slash writers claim they have no ambition beyond fanfiction or slash … ambition in women being the last great taboo in this culture, look at (yes, bless her heart, love her or hate her) Hillary Clinton.

Young male writers of comparable talents will keep bashing their hearts out against the walls of publishing companies until finally they produce something that merits publishing. They write and they read and if they can’t break into the magazines, they start one in their garage.

If the publishing industry therefore gets it into their heads that THIS IS THEIR MARKET, can we entirely blame them?

I find it interesting that you equate participation in the market with simply keeping your father’s name instead of taking your husband’s. Are you arguing that disconnecting from the culture is the appropriate response to sexism in the culture? Because I strongly disagree with that as well.
Anna The Pirate King on June 26, 2007 4:42 pm
(…and you’re shifting the focus away from slash and onto fanfic in general, I notice. And presupposing a false dilemma with that “instead”, when it’s quite possible to write both fanfic and original fic, though the process of doing either may be subject to different sorts of unfavourable circumstances.)

I suppose I am.

I think a lot of the assumptions about what is troubling about slash by slash boosters falls into Ellen Fremedon’s fundamental assumption about it’s inherent shockingness. Believe me, the sex/gay-sex/wrongness is not the point of departure for me. Nor is the sex in most slash-fic as shocking or digressive as people seem to think. I will allow that exceptions exist.

In fact, if there is something unsung about slash is simply it gets people off! If slashfans defended slash on that basis … pleasure for pleasure’s sake … I would be totally on-board! But if anything, all this talk of “empowerment” and political meaning strikes me as a way of justifying an act of erotic pleasure … is if there has to be an intellectual legitimization of something that just happens to make you warm in the nethers.

As for the false dilemma … again it’s not the writing of slash that detracts from real-world “profic” but the attempt to legitimize it that’s creates a problem. If Fremedon, for example, thinks that profic cannot or should not be as transgressive … well, in my opinion, what faint heart on the part of her as a profic writer! Why should we not dare to speak our true desires in our workshops, in (gasp) front of other people?
Laura Quilter on June 26, 2007 4:51 pm
Hi Anna TPK,

I do think there is something inherently empowering in appropriating and recreating preexisting works. From the perspective of thinking about intellectual property, originality, romantic ideas of authorship, etc., I think that the act of wresting creative control out of what would otherwise be a resource to be passively consumed is empowering. Note, I’m comparing writing fanfic, to simply fannishly reading or watching some original text. There’s agency in that act, and in fact from the perspective of a copyright scholar or a mediajammer, it’s virtually a type of civil disobedience, or at least, a conscious operation in a legal grey zone.

Note, that I think this applies, regardless of the substantive content of the reappropriation. In other words, I’m not sure I buy the deconstructing-patriarchy angle either, wholly. I think there are good things that come out of slashing characters — how many folks who really get into slashing characters then turn around and vote for homophobic legislation, for instance? Slash familiarizes people with queerness, and, like coming out of the closet, is therefore one of our greatest weapons against homophobia.

On the other hand, you’re comparing writing fanfic with writing “original” works. (I’m scare-quoting “original” because, again, coming from my perspective, I’d like to problematize the very notion of “originality” and “authorship”.) You’re looking at empowerment in terms of whether it affects commercial cultural practice in publishing and film.

I want to quickly suggest that fan culture as a whole is proving to be quite influential, actually, and I think fan influence is only trending upward.

But, more generally, I do think you’re on to something here — there is some sense in which women writing fanfic instead of seeking to publish “original” works are opting to set up a private garden, to take Yonmei’s previous analogy. This garden lacks the formal gatekeeping that publishing and film have already set up. This has benefits in that avoids the institutionalized sexism in the preexisting commercial gardens, but working in this garden lacks prestige, recognition, respect from the broader world, and so on. (And, arguably, intangible rewards from competing in the “real world”.)

You point out that this is like the benefits for women of same-sex institutions versus coed institutions. That’s exactly the right analogy: slash, to the extent that it is a “women’s genre”, is to that extent a ghetto, and that has both good and bad effects.

… hmm, enough rambling in the heat of boston. will read with interest.
Yonmei on June 26, 2007 5:38 pm
Anna: Why should we not dare to speak our true desires in our workshops, in (gasp) front of other people?

Indeed, why shouldn’t we? I know many people who do. Or did you mean in front of “other people” as a group from which you exclude fans?
Anna The Pirate King on June 26, 2007 5:57 pm
But, more generally, I do think you’re on to something here — there is some sense in which women writing fanfic instead of seeking to publish “original” works are opting to set up a private garden, to take Yonmei’s previous analogy. This garden lacks the formal gatekeeping that publishing and film have already set up. This has benefits in that avoids the institutionalized sexism in the preexisting commercial gardens, but working in this garden lacks prestige, recognition, respect from the broader world, and so on. (And, arguably, intangible rewards from competing in the “real world”.)

Well, and money! I think it is worth noting that all this great “women’s writing” is being created and distributed for free.

I’m serious. How does the film/television/book/comic industry function? Through money? Why do men have the bulk of the power in that system? Because they have the money. If women had more money you’d bet we’d have more real world power … to produce, to direct, to market and to distribute … and to fundamentally influence our international culture.

If you have the money … and ambition … what you create can be front and center! You can have the accolades and the credits and the influence on your readership … just like any guy.

And if women felt that this was possible for us, just like any guy, then I doubt there would be the same temptation to romanticize the lack of intellectual property.

Lemme tell you something, if I made something up, it originated with me. Plain and simple. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea that I *should* not claim authorship if I am the author. But to see things that way, first you have to imagine that you are, can be, *the* author.

This notion that “originality” is a fiction, and that “authorship” is merely a romantic concept is very much reflects a group of writers who believe (rightly or wrongly) that *they* own nothing, that they are the authors of nothing. It is a dis-empowered point of view.

Now women are dis-empowered in the culture, yes, totally. To change that will require more than our own safe spaces, however nurturing they might be. We need a radical re-imagining of our aspirations.
Anna The Pirate King on June 26, 2007 6:01 pm
Indeed, why shouldn’t we? I know many people who do. Or did you mean in front of “other people” as a group from which you exclude fans?

Oh, no, not to exclude fans (why do that?).

But why censor yourself in front of non-fans?
Yonmei on June 26, 2007 6:44 pm
Oh, no, not to exclude fans (why do that?).

Well, you seemed to be excluding fans. That was why I asked.

But why censor yourself in front of non-fans?

Because non-fans don’t have the critical equipment that fans have, and there is a limit to the amount of explaining anyone wants to do to people who not only don’t understand, they don’t understand that they don’t understand.

See another post by Ellen Fremedon on fanfic and authorship.
Yonmei on June 26, 2007 6:47 pm
Lemme tell you something, if I made something up, it originated with me. Plain and simple. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea that I *should* not claim authorship if I am the author. But to see things that way, first you have to imagine that you are, can be, *the* author.

So, if you think that, why are you so anxious to tell people who write fanfiction that, even though they are making stories up, they mustn’t think they can claim authorship?

I asked you before (and you didn’t answer): Who are you to tell me that the stories I tell are not my own?
Anna The Pirate King on June 26, 2007 7:04 pm
So, if you think that, why are you so anxious to tell people who write fanfiction that, even though they are making stories up, they mustn’t think they can claim authorship?

I was actually responding to something Laura said, which was:

I do think there is something inherently empowering in appropriating and recreating preexisting works. From the perspective of thinking about intellectual property, originality, romantic ideas of authorship, etc., I think that the act of wresting creative control out of what would otherwise be a resource to be passively consumed is empowering.

She here defines empowerment as subverting the idea of intellectual property, indeed, even the idea of authorship. Which is an argument I’ve seen elsewhere.

And I suppose that is a kind of empowerment, although I’d argue it is a poor substitution for *claiming* authorship in the first place.

I asked you before (and you didn’t answer): Who are you to tell me that the stories I tell are not my own?

I didn’t want to answer this because I don’t think there is any way to say this in a way that you won’t find offensive.

But if you did not create something, no, it simply isn’t yours.

Now you can *reimagine* something someone *else* created, and there aint nothing wrong with it … comic book writers and tv writers do it all the time. (mostly men, and they mostly get paid … but that’s back to the ambition arguement which, btw, you have not addressed at all).

But if Joss Whedon writes characters that Chris Claremont created (Kitty Pryde, Colossus, Wolverine), does it follow that Joss Whedon *created* Kitty Pryde, Colossus, and Wolverine? No, it doesn’t. And he is legally allowed to write the X-Men, but are the X-Men therefore his?

I doubt even he would say so.

So, no, it isn’t yours. Sorry. Thems the breaks. You are playing in someone else’s garden. The fact that you are doing it extralegally instead of legally doesn’t make it any less so.
Anna The Pirate King on June 26, 2007 7:09 pm
Because non-fans don’t have the critical equipment that fans have, and there is a limit to the amount of explaining anyone wants to do to people who not only don’t understand, they don’t understand that they don’t understand.

Wow. That’s making a whopping set of assumptions!

How do you know what kind of critical equipment that non-fans have? How can you even begin to guess? Non-fans are such a heterodox population!

And hey … I’m a fan and you’re a fan, and yet we have really different perspectives …
laura q on June 26, 2007 7:34 pm
Just on authorship & empowerment (skip if this is not your bag):

“Empowerment” depends on the system of power you’re examining. One system of power is that created by copyright, which is a thoroughly modern layer of control added onto storytelling. As the system of control embodied within “copyright” has grown, in countries around the world, it has become reasonable to speak of empowerment within that system of power.

To the extent that copyright has enabled the growth of massive industries aimed at commercial production and exploitation of storytelling, then subverting copyright works to subvert that system.

To the extent the military-entertainment-industrial complex emerges from & is controlled by Teh Patriarchy, then subversion of the copyright system might be one response. Another response is to argue that we should apply property-like regimes to hitherto-uncopyrighted works, like quilts, fanfic, textiles, etc. See Ann Bartow’s “Fair Use and the Fairer Sex” for an analysis of gender implications of copyright, and see Susan Scafidi’s Who Owns Culture? for an analysis that tends towards the opposite answer. This discussion is also very much at the heart of questions of cultural appropriation, btw.

Quickly:
So, no, it isn’t yours. Sorry. Thems the breaks. You are playing in someone else’s garden. The fact that you are doing it extralegally instead of legally doesn’t make it any less so.

This kind of statement gets thrown around all the time in discussions of fanfic, but it’s unfortunately confusing. It’s not even the right language to use — “yours” or “mine”. Marvel holds a trademark on The X-Men, and no doubt Whedon assigns his copyright in issues he writes to Marvel, or if Whedon is a Marvel employee then perhaps Marvel is deemed to be the legal author (credit notwithstanding). The characters are based on a rich mishmash of sources including Wilmar Shiras‘ Children of the Atom, and assorted superhero comics and concepts of the 20th century, and lots of stuff going back way into the long history of storytelling …. To paraphrase some anonymous author in Ecclesiastes, there ain’t nothin’ new under the sun. What we deem to be “new” and “original” are based on politics and economic structures and a long history of ideas of what constitutes creativity, and fanfic raises this issues in spades.

So, in my view, authorship is not as simple as “[I]f I made something up, it originated with me. Plain and simple.”

In fact, there’s a long history of disputes over both credit and copyright-ownership within the comics industry. Just because these kinds of things are really hard questions.

… this is it, for me, on the more philosophical questions of purpose of copyright, nature of authorship, etc., because they’re not really germane to this blog (feminist sf). they are the subject of my other blog, derivative work.

back to feminist sf.
Laura Q on June 26, 2007 7:53 pm
… But all of my meanderings on the nature of authorship are really straying from what I think is Anna TPK’s major point, which is that fanfic (not just slash), because it is currently delegitimized, is not really the “Big Leagues”, and that women are hurting themselves by not doing stuff for which they can get credit and money, and build reputational capital out in the “real world”. I think there’s an interesting point there, but it seems to me to be the kind of claim that requires some evidence one way or the other.

Here’s what we know or (I think) can reasonably assume for the purposes of a blog post:
* Tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands or even millions, of people write fanfic.
* Most of those people are women.
* Fanfic is not compensated in the way that mainstream, commercially published work is compensated.

Now, Anna’s comment implies that fanfiction is acting as a lure or a distraction, or possibly a ghetto, away from real publishing. Just off the top of my head, here are some other models (not from fishing, hunting, or urban development): gateway drug, training ground, alternative economies.

Obviously, the gateway drug model suggests that fanfic lures people into writing and then they become addicted and become pro writers. I personally know, and have read, a number of writers who got started writing fanfic.

The training ground model is similar, but suggests that people who intend to become pro or consider being pros might use fanfic as a training ground.

The alternative economies model is a variant on the “ghetto”: That there are positive things to be said for creations that are outside of commerce. I take Anna TPK’s point, believe me, I do, but I think one can simultaneously hold both the idea that there is great value in noncommercial culture, and that women ought to be full participants in our economy.

For the sake of argument, I’m not going to consider the idea that fanfic is its own coequal genre. In at least one way, the majority of fanfic written today is not coequal: it isn’t commercializable because of copyright law. But one could argue that fanfic should be commercializable, or one could argue that fanfic is a legitimate and worthy genre even if it is not and should not be commercializable.

But just considering fanfic or fan-text production in relation to commercial fiction writing or production:

We really don’t have more than anecdotal data for any of these propositions or models about the way that the fanfic economy works in conjunction with the commercial economy. (By economy I mean here a system of production.) But my hunch is that all are true to some extent: Probably, some people who could have been productive commercial writers instead get sufficient satisfaction or addictive pleasure or whatever they need from writing fanfic that any ambitions in the the direction of commercial production are thwarted.

But I also strongly believe (and have some anecdotal support for) the idea that many women who would like to be writers but are anxious, or want to hone their writing skills, or had never allowed themselves to believe they could write, or simply hadn’t considered doing it professionally — start considering it after writing fanfic. In fact, this is my operating presumption: That fanfic, whatever its merits as a genre (and as the genre which holds the subgenre of slash, which has different and unique merits), certainly brings more women into commercial writing and production than would otherwise go into those fields.
vito_excalibur on June 27, 2007 3:30 am
If someone is going to make the claim that the thousands of women who write fanfic are having their energy diverted from getting paying writing work, then I want to see statistics showing a significant drop in numbers of published female writers that happened when fanfic exploded all over the internet.
Yonmei on June 27, 2007 3:34 am
Anna: But if you did not create something, no, it simply isn’t yours.

But that isn’t an answer to what I asked, Anna. I asked you who you are to tell me that the stories I tell are not my own. So far you haven’t explained how that works.

How do you know what kind of critical equipment that non-fans have? How can you even begin to guess?

You really need to read the post by Ellen Fremedon I linked to.
Yonmei on June 27, 2007 4:01 am
Actually, let me ask this question more explicitly, Anna.

You wrote: Do we as women or queer women …. Don’t owe it to ourselves to tell our own stories? With characters who we create?

A few years ago I wrote a story for the Yuletide project In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. The fandom’s Quantum Leap, the POV character is Al, it’s focussed very tightly on the series – I reference multiple episodes lightly and the plot turns on the resolution of the series. I didn’t invent Al, Sam, the imaging chamber, the whole concept of the QL series.

But it is still my story. And I would like you to read it, and then explain to me how in your view it’s not. Or just quit arguing this point. If you can’t explain this assertion that a story I wrote is not mine to me, then you shouldn’t be saying it as a generalisation, should you?
Ide Cyan on June 27, 2007 6:02 am
I have so many things I’d like say say here, but the waters are so muddled….

Anna The Pirate King asked:

«If the publishing industry therefore gets it into their heads that THIS IS THEIR MARKET, can we entirely blame them? »

And Laura Q. wrote (interpreting ATPK’s comments):

«…that women are hurting themselves by not doing stuff for which they can get credit and money, and build reputational capital out in the “real world”. »

…both of which are variants on blaming the victim, placing responsability onto women for women’s poverty and for “the market’s” attitude towards women. This presupposes that women could, in fact, just go out into the marketplace and earn money, build “reputational capital” (…) and so forth, stop hurting ourselves, and that we’d be fine then, on equal footing with men.

The problem with this view is that it precludes the oppression of women from the equation, and therefore nullifies the premises for a feminist analysis (to borrow some ideas from Christine Delphy).

I’m guessing, Anna TPK, that what you’re getting at by shifting the focus of your questions about empowerment onto the effects of slashers (and of the writing fan-fiction in general) on “the market”:

«But real is this real empowerment? As in, do you have real-world power here?»

Is the question of whether fanfic has the potential to liberate women from our maginalisation within the market.

But your premises are faulty, and will not lead you to a satisfactory answer, for at least two reasons.

One of them is that you refuse to implicate the rules of the market as it exists. You say:

«So, no, it isn’t yours. Sorry. Thems the breaks. You are playing in someone else’s garden. The fact that you are doing it extralegally instead of legally doesn’t make it any less so.»

These rules are the product of capitalism and capitalist tools of oppression. They are not natural, but political constructs. And they are not immutable. If you treat them as inevitabilities, then you abandon the revolutionary potential of your analysis.

The other is that you (and it is you who have brought up the matter of “empowerment” in this thread) are asking one type of production to justify itself as the means of abolishing oppression within a different system of production in order to accord “empowerment” value to that type of production.

This is reductive and misleading. The disjunction between the production of fan fiction and the production of “pro” fiction is not located in the production of stories, whether they be fannish or original, but in the conditions under which that production occurs.

It isn’t what women write that is the matter. It is how people regulate such production. Asking women to shift from one mode of production to another will not destroy those regulations. Nor does it even begin to address the matter of the value of production under either mode, and the preconditional oppression women face before entering into this production.

While it is possible to “empower” oneself through production in either the fannish mode or the professional mode, revolution — the necessary process to achieve a change that will put an end to the oppression of women, which I think is what you’re hoping for (this being a feminist blog, etc.) — is more complicated than that.

***

Laura wrote:

«We really don’t have (…) models about the way that the fanfic economy works in conjunction with the commercial economy.»

I wouldn’t bet on that. There are way more studies of fanfiction out there than I could possibly ever know of, and even if no study has yet been made of the interrelation of the fanfic economy in conjuction with the ~~pro-fic~~ entire commercial economy (yegads…), we could use other models to approximate such a conjuction. Familial production, barter (…I’ve never formally studied economics, but I’m sure there have been examinations of the co-existence of barter systems and capitalist markets), production for self-consumption… Lots of options out there.

(I would, however, rule out all three of your examples, as they are metaphors rather than economic models, or, in the case of “alternative economies”, a component inside an implicit, unexamined model that posits capitalism as the default.)
Ide Cyan on June 27, 2007 6:24 am
I keep looking at the newest entry by therem, which is just next to the kitchen table chatter at the top of the blog’s main page, where she discusses the civil disobedience of women in the priesthood and I’m thinking: separated at birth from this discussion much?

Hérétiques et auteures d’oblique: même combat? :-D

(Sans parler de celles qui biaisent la Bible…)
laura q on June 27, 2007 8:02 am
on question of cultural economics:

LQ: We really don’t have (…) models about the way that the fanfic economy works in conjunction with the commercial economy.

Ide Cyan: I wouldn’t bet on that. There are way more studies of fanfiction out there than I could possibly ever know of, and even if no study has yet been made of the interrelation of the fanfic economy in conjuction with the pro-fic entire commercial economy (yegads…), we could use other models to approximate such a conjuction. Familial production, barter (…I’ve never formally studied economics, but I’m sure there have been examinations of the co-existence of barter systems and capitalist markets), production for self-consumption… Lots of options out there.

LQ: Well, yes, there are lots of models of different economic models out there, but approximations are problematic in economics. Each shift has lots of real economic effects. Cultural production works differently than other types of production, for example, for many reasons, each of which varies depending on the medium, the genre, even the specific work. For instance, resource inputs are really different from a major motion picture production than from a small indie film to a single person’s film; compare with novel writing, which may just require time and a room of one’s own. Then consider distribution and the very different industries around that in each field, which again, vary even according to genre (commercial Hollywood versus indie film). Things that are hard to quantify, like popularity and network effects, play a significant role in cultural products. And technology is changing these economics really fast.

I think this is a hard problem and there may not yet be scholarship on this question, despite the legions of ink dedicated to fanfic studies. Cultural economics is actually in its infancy as a field of study, so there are lots of unanswered questions. <g> Vito Excalibur said it better and more succinctly (I have a problem with succinctness: I don’t really do it). If someone is going to make the claim that the thousands of women who write fanfic are having their energy diverted from getting paying writing work, then I want to see statistics showing a significant drop in numbers of published female writers that happened when fanfic exploded all over the internet. That’s the work that would need to be done: some real quantitative crunching about fanfic, numbers of women writers, etc., and it would be a real PITA to do it. So if someone has a cite, I’ll be delighted and somewhat surprised to see it.
therem on June 27, 2007 9:55 am
Ha ha, Ide. I think women priests and fanficcers ARE fighting the same fight! Thanks for pointing it out.

And now, I have to ask… does anyone actually write Bible slash? I guess it would make sense in a way, but… wow.

This does raise an interesting point regarding the above discussion about people owning their characters, etc. Narratives based on the Bible and characters in it have been common as dirt for the last 600+ years. Are these authors infringing on the Bible writers’ intellectual property? Or does it not count because we don’t know who wrote it? Or because God wrote it? (Not my belief, obviously.)
Yonmei on June 27, 2007 10:05 am
And now, I have to ask… does anyone actually write Bible slash?

Yes. Oh yes.

Narratives based on the Bible and characters in it have been common as dirt for the last 600+ years. Are these authors infringing on the Bible writers’ intellectual property?

Well, if we believe Anna, these authors cannot claim authorship, because they didn’t actually create anything: they’re taking characters, concepts, stories, and often dialogue from something someone else wrote. So, no authorship claims for them!
Rain on June 27, 2007 6:17 pm
Just butting in on another tangent, I’m not convinced that infiltrating genres like fanfic/slash and appropriating them is a successful model of feminist empowerment.

To me it has similarities with many 60s feminists (and in earlier times) appropriating porn to somehow subvert it into ‘feminist erotica’. Take ‘ownership’ of our sexuality etc. Later analyses teased out the difference between the personal exerience and the patriarchal institution, and the most well-known is the feminist analysis of motherhood, but its the same principle applied to other patriarchal “institutions” such as this one.

While there are examples of individual women being personally empowered by their activities in these institutions, the majority will not be, indeed it could be argued that many will be harmed by it, despite the few female “star performers”.

Its also as with a friend of mine, very radical feminist in much of her life and activities, but she has a personal *thing* for misogynist rap music, (don’t ask me why!) it gets her off personally, she loves it, and even likes making her own with groups of friends. But she draws the line, and doesn’t call this one particular activity of hers, a “feminist” activity – the social-political “institution” of the music is misogynist, and supportive of patriarchy, and she recognises this, but as she says we all make compromises of our ethics or politics at times, none of us can claim 100% “purity” in all aspects of our lives :)

Its like as Anna TPK says: its as if “…there has to be an intellectual legitimization of something that just happens to make you warm in the nethers”.

I am lesbian too, but my early intro to fanfic and later slash was to fnd it funny or silly, not erotic, and I couldn’t help interpreting it as satire back then. Possibly also because I never really identified much with gay men anyway. I never read it now, and havent done for many years.

In short, while I have no problem with women doing whatever rings their bells, and good luck to ‘em on a personal level, enjoy it, maybe even make money & personal power etc, but I’m not convinced that supporting a sexist institution can be a feminist act in the socio-political sense — but I’m open to hearing argument.
Ide Cyan on June 27, 2007 6:33 pm
Rain, you’re working from a fundamental misapprehension when you say that we’re “infiltrating genres like fanfic/slash and appropriating them”.

We CREATED slash.

As Yonmei put it: it’s our garden.
Yonmei on June 27, 2007 6:33 pm
Rain: Just butting in on another tangent, I’m not convinced that infiltrating genres like fanfic/slash and appropriating them is a successful model of feminist empowerment.

“Infiltrating”? “Appropriating”? Do you want to re-consider those verbs?

And what makes you think that fanfic/slash is a “sexist institution”?
Rain on June 28, 2007 5:18 am
Some background:

Yonmei said: “As a lesbian, of course, I simply find slash has made media fandom a more comfortable place for me to be and write, because it means a publishing space within which same-sex relationships are taken for granted…..

Women’s rights? I think that slash rises out of equality for women: I don’t think slash fandom would exist without feminism.”

Yonmei later said “Well, you asked what slash actually does for women’s rights. I think slash is one of the few areas in which women are writing honestly and openly about what turns us on – and writing it, not just writing about it. And taking for granted, within slash fandom, that we have a right to do this.”

and Anna TPK: “You start to at the end, that it is good for queer people and women because it is women writing about sex.”

then later Anna TPK continues: “In fact, if there is something unsung about slash is simply it gets people off! If slashfans defended slash on that basis … pleasure for pleasure’s sake … I would be totally on-board! But if anything, all this talk of “empowerment” and political meaning strikes me as a way of justifying an act of erotic pleasure”.

I guess I’m trying to tease this thread of the discussion out in more detail.

Perhaps its not the verbs that I used inappropriately but the nouns – its more akin to appropriating and claiming ownership of a ‘space’, that was previously a space of male privilege – ie writing about sex.

While obviously exceptions always exist, much of slash doesn’t question/explore the power dynamics of sexual relationships under patriarchy. Like the old cliche, its not about sex, its about power – and slash, like many other mainstream sexualised media, mirrors current sexual politics and the status quo. In this context, (despite the exceptions) it supports the patriarchal social construction of sexuality, which is a sexist “institution”.

Creating/owning gardens or ‘spaces’ for women is always worthwhile and extremely valuable for women,like single-sex education spaces etc – and many women have found them *personally* enriching/empowering etc, even if just as a place to feel comfortable in, away from the menfolk, eg. lesbian separatists attempt to carve out their whole lives in a patriarchy-free space/garden – some of us just visit such gardens whenever we can, while many more women have no access at all to such spaces. Mary Daly calls the energy of these spaces: “gynergy”. Like any other group of women who just like to hang out together with a common interest, whether it be the local church community, dyke community, mothers group, knitting or reading/writing about sex, they remain subordinate to a larger socio-political paradigm. Such female-dominated and created/owned spaces have existed throughout history, eg for some medieval women – nunneries and non-denominational beguinages were far better than the alternatives on offer. Nonetheless they are still subordinated in patriarchy. Nursing as a profession is very female-dominated, and many are attracted to it because of that – but still the “institution” of nursing is subordinate to a larger male-dominated power structure of medicine, and slash is still subordinate to a larger male-dominated worldview.
Yonmei on June 28, 2007 5:56 am
Rain: Perhaps its not the verbs that I used inappropriately but the nouns – its more akin to appropriating and claiming ownership of a ’space’, that was previously a space of male privilege – ie writing about sex.

I agree.

What I don’t see is why you think that’s a bad thing.

While obviously exceptions always exist, much of slash doesn’t question/explore the power dynamics of sexual relationships under patriarchy.

But, as you point out above, the existence of slash does question/explore the appropriation by men of writing about sex, especially writing that is an honest effort to explore what gets you and other women sexually turned on, rather than submitting to the idea that only men get to write about what turns women on.

That women’s sexual fantasies are rarely directly feminist is unsurprising. To argue that women ought not to publicly admit to unfeminist sexual fantasies is virulently anti-feminist: our sexual fantasies are what they are. It is more feminist to say openly “Yes, I get turned on by the fantasy I have of Illya Kuryakin being kidnapped by pirates – one of whom just happens to be Napoleon Solo… [continues for 40 pages of piratical sex] …happy ending!” than to pretend that feminists only have sexual fantasies that are politically correct (and I consider ‘politically correct’ to be complimentary).

It’s very feminine and conventional and unquestioning to patriarchal mores to pretend that women have only polite, unaggressive, correct sexual feelings: it’s aggressively challenging to the patriarchal ownership of women’s sexuality to say “No, in fact, this is what turns me on: deal with it.”
Ide Cyan on June 28, 2007 6:10 am
Rain, the difference between feminist separatism and women’s ghettos is that the ghettos are created *by* the exploitation of women by men, whereas feminist separatism removes men’s access to women’s resources. It cuts off their ability to exploit women. That’s what makes separatism so threatening and objectionable to men, whereas they’re perfectly happy with pink ghettos existing at their service.

It’s why, for instance, men are upset when women won’t let them dominate discussions of slash, although they may be quite happy that women aren’t able to earn money from slash.
Rain on June 28, 2007 6:00 pm
Rain: Perhaps its not the verbs that I used inappropriately but the nouns – its more akin to appropriating and claiming ownership of a ’space’, that was previously a space of male privilege – ie writing about sex.

Yonmei: I agree. What I don’t see is why you think that’s a bad thing.

I don’t, I said it was worthwhile and valuable.

It’s very feminine and conventional and unquestioning to patriarchal mores to pretend that women have only polite, unaggressive, correct sexual feelings: it’s aggressively challenging to the patriarchal ownership of women’s sexuality to say “No, in fact, this is what turns me on: deal with it.”

Ahhh… there is where I don’t fully buy in. I’m sorry.

Patriarchal mores cover all factions of sexuality, the notion of women only having ‘polite unaggressive’ sexuality, is only one faction. There are plenty of factions who have staked their turf on the others, all with their own pink ghettos. Porn/erotica or sexualised literature etc, has always had plenty of women’s auxiliaries, including gay male erotica, BDSM etc, but every generation thinks they are the first to think of reclaiming their sexuality (whatever form it takes). There is a long history of it.

While some factions of patriarchy may see it as challenging, its really a challenge/dominance fight between two or more factions of patriarchy. Women are incidental. Some patriarchal factions would see it as supporting gay male faction – and while it may be threatening to some factions, as long as they are seen as supporting gay men they are still subordinate to a faction of patriarchy, and hence ultimately unthreatening to the status quo. Just a different face of patriarchy. This is part of the conflict between feminist and queer theory.

Its not about sex its about power, and whether its boring polite and unaggressive straight het romance, BDSM, fetish, rape, bestiality, scat…(the list goes on) … there is little or no challenge to the status quo of dom/sub power dynamics (or heteronormative as some call it).

Ide Cyan: It cuts off their ability to exploit women. That’s what makes separatism so threatening and objectionable to men, whereas they’re perfectly happy with pink ghettos existing at their service.

Agreed. Sometimes there is confusion however, some pink ghettos are not aware that they are.
Ide Cyan on June 28, 2007 6:20 pm
Rain wrote: «While some factions of patriarchy may see it as challenging, its really a challenge/dominance fight between two or more factions of patriarchy. Women are incidental.»

Though patriarchal ideology may subsist in the text of many or even most of the stories that comprise slash (because we’re all stuck with patriarchal models, which no-one is denying), and some debates arising out of the movement for gay rights later introduced the notion of the representation of gay men as a point of contention in the production of m/m slash, you are missing the point.

Slash is written by women for women.

There is nothing “incidental” to women’s place in the production of slash, and your denial of women’s agency here is frankly appalling.
Ide Cyan on June 28, 2007 7:29 pm
Rain wrote: «there is little or no challenge to the status quo of dom/sub power dynamics (or heteronormative as some call it). »

Heteronormativity, which is a principle used to describe the sexual arrangements of a class system organised around gender (the social division of people by sex), isn’t, by far, by a really, really long shot, logically, qualitatively, or even practically equivalent to the whole of the principle of domination and subjection. It isn’t, remotely, the single expression of power dynamics to which all others must correspond.

The idea that it is, or that it might be so; the vaunted “complementary of the sexes”, naturalised as a given and found in so much of received philosophy, is a product of patriarchal ideology. It is quite probably the most widespread, and the most mystified.

But to situate the production of slash, the physical exchanges of texts, and ideas through text, between women, as a subset of the ideology of a power dynamic which (obviously) affects women, to reduce any and all expressions of thought concerning power dynamics, and power dynamics and sex, to that one power dynamic, no matter how important it is and how indentured the possibilities for sexual fantasies are to the dominant heterosexual norms, is idealist, reactionary, and absurd.

It is not in the realm of ideas that women’s oppression originates.

When you say that women’s production of slash « [is] really a challenge/dominance fight between two or more factions of patriarchy», you’re saying that the actions of women derive entirely from the realm of ideas, that women have no agency, no position in their own material struggles, and no possible existence that is not equivalent to patriarchy.

You are, in short, not merely denying the production and consumption of slash as an endeavour distinct from men’s material control, the possibility for women to explore ideas beyond heterosexual dynamics within slash, but the very possibility of the existence of feminism itself.

*jawdrops*
Yonmei on June 29, 2007 4:01 am
Rain: While some factions of patriarchy may see it as challenging, its really a challenge/dominance fight between two or more factions of patriarchy. Women are incidental.

*jaw drops*

What Ide Cyan said.

Specifically, and pointedly:

You are, in short, not merely denying the production and consumption of slash as an endeavour distinct from men’s material control, the possibility for women to explore ideas beyond heterosexual dynamics within slash, but the very possibility of the existence of feminism itself.

If you say that any time women write honestly and openly about what we feel sexually and what turns us on, what we’re really doing is taking part in “a challenge/dominance fight between two or more factions of patriarchy” you are, in fact, trying to redefine the whole realm of female sexuality as something that belongs to men – you really meant it when you said that a woman writing slash is “infiltrating/reappropriating”, because you’re saying that we don’t own our own sexual feelings – what turns us on, in your view, belongs to men.
Anna the Pirate King on June 30, 2007 1:22 pm
Woot! Look at this! What a great debate got started in my absence! (I’ve been doing onsite visits at work, involving the very macho world of blowing things up in a laboratory setting, hee! So I havent’ had time for this forum!)

Okay, taking on everything at once, and sorry, I haven’t managed to read all the posts in detail, so I may have missed some nuances or repeat something others have said.

Rain basically gets a large part of my point: I do not mean to argue that FanFiction is Bad, or that it does not benefit women in any way, but I do mean to argue that it is (or more accurately is becoming) a women’s ghetto for writing and that very little fanfic really does much to challenge patriarchal expectations. I liked her analogy to rap music very much. We can enjoy many things, but not everything we enjoy is by definition a subversive.

Also, just because it is a women’s space, don’t assume it is not ripe for patriarchal exploitation. Wasn’t there just a group of guys who wanted to charge for fanfiction not long ago? They wanted to exploit fanfic … not for women’s advancement … for money!

But that brings me to another point, one that I hear a lot of in feminist studies and I have to dissent from. Namely: Capitalism is Bad for Women.

Now, please compare the capitalist system with the two other economic systems that we are most familiar with: communism and feudalism. Both these systems put not only women, but men as well, under the thumb of a higher authority who decided how one’s bread was going to be made. It was only in the 18th century, when modern capitalism became widespread in Europe, that women’s rights could really be taken seriously!

Before that, women were wholly dependant on the patriarchal structures to survive. And if you read the writings of Eastern European feminists, you’ll see that all of them speak of communism as incapable of addressing women’s real needs. Yes, women could work outside the home, but they could not chose any other job but that handed to them by the government … including the job of stay-at-home parent, but also including a lot of jobs considered men’s work.

But afterwards women … and slaves as well … to say nothing of other minorities … suddenly could exchange our labor and goods for money! It is no accident that the Seneca Falls conference coincided with the explosion of women working in factories in the newly industrialized New England. Women … women owning money, women having credit, owning property, getting education and skills and the vote … this represents two centuries and change of the women’s movement, none of which would have been possible before capitialism came along!

Because, IMHO, economic freedom is freedom! Now you may not go that far, but you might consider it a serious pre-requisite to freedom! If you have money, if someone must pay you for your labor … if they must sign a contract allowing them to publish you! Well, that is a significant piece of real world power! If women put out our money to support the fiction we like, then that is real world power too!

Now, did capitalism do away with all sexism, obviously not. But think about it: if women couldn’t earn their own money, would divorce be possible? Reproductive freedom? Is it an accident that the Islamic fundamentalist world tries to control women’s bodies and movement and their access to professions and moey? No, it is no accident. They know that a woman’s paycheck gives her leave to write what she likes, dress how she likes, hire someone else to do the housework … or tell her husband to do it if she likes. It’s only here in the West do we take economic independence for granted. And that only because it was a war fought by Louisa May Alcott’s generation!

Now, you may refuse to participate in and/or subvert capitalism, and there are some powerful arguements for doing so … encouragement for young writers, or plain old fun. But equating that with women’s advancement flies in the face of everything that has happened in women’s rights since Mary Wollenstonecraft’s time! Don’t mistake a half-finished revolution with a failure … consider what came before it. How many women even wrote before 1600? How many women were even allowed to learn to write?

Women will have power in publishing and filmmaking when we have money to be publishers and filmmakers, and that’s not fluffy … it happens. Women dominate romance and erotica so much that men who wish to publish in those genres must don female pseudonyms! And romances are over 50% of the bookselling market!!!!

You’ll see darn few feminists defend romances as women’s writing … even though it is women writing for women for MONEY … And yet romance wriitng is a womens’ publishing success story bar none! Many women pay their rent, raise their kids, finance their other writing ventures in the world of the Ladies in Pink (despite all the pink in the RWA literature, these ladies take their business seriously! ) (And no, I’m not one of them. I make my living writing dry technical stuff.)

But then, I believe the notion that Capitalism is Bad for Women comes into play … FanFiction is faminist because it subverts capitalism … Romance novels are NOT feminist because it is Capitalism!

Just think about it: What if you published a story and it made some real money and some GUY came around and wrote a really mysogynistic send up starring your characters and situations … How would you feel about copywright and the romantic notion of authorship then?

Think about it.
Laura Q on June 30, 2007 3:15 pm
Welcome back, Anna TPK.

ATPK: Just think about it: What if you published a story and it made some real money and some GUY came around and wrote a really mysogynistic send up starring your characters and situations … How would you feel about copywright and the romantic notion of authorship then?

Interestingly, the example that ATPK gives has nothing whatsoever to do with copyright as it is in the US or many other nations. Instead, it is an extremist spin on the droit d’auteur — literally, right of the author, or moral rights as the doctrine is loosely translated into English. The part of the droit d’auteur doctrine that ATPK is greatly expanding is the right to stop others from defaming or harming the work. The rationale is that the work is the author’s product, her/his child, property, and that the work is intrinsically tied into her personal-ty. It’s a dignitary right, and as such, has nothing to do with capitalism. Instead, it has more to do with counter-capitalist ideas, such as, that some rights are and should be inalienable — don’t translate into money. The other piece of French copyright law is the droits patrimoniaux, the proprietary rights, which correspond more closely with the economic rights that US copyright law grants. For a comment that is largely about the beauty of capitalism & how it benefits women to wrap up with a droits d’auteur flourish is, at least, a little funny. … Well, regardless, ATPK’s example is more a reductio ad absurdum of her own argument (intentional or not): these days, parodies are protected in most nations as a species of fair use (under various doctrinal names)

I have some counter-examples to “think about”, too. Suppose you are a writer and you parody a famous book whose author (perhaps unthinkingly) replicates misogynystic and racist tropes. Now that author sues you for copyright infringement. Does it make a difference if you put the book in a different setting (in a historical fantasy world versus outer space), changed the character’s names, and wrote all-original dialog? What about if you take the main characters, plot, and dialog, and retell the famous story from a subaltern perspective — like a major character’s illegitimate sibling? This is a trick question, because the latter case was litigated: it’s the story of The Wind Done Gone, and the court found that this was a fair use because the whole purpose of copyright law (in the US) is to encourage people to create more works. In this instance, a parody of the original work, told from the perspective of Scarlett O’Hara’s enslaved half-sister, was a more devastatingly effective critique than one could ever find in the pages of some literary criticism journal. I imagine Margaret Mitchell’s estate wasn’t too far away from what Margaret Mitchell’s response would have been, in trying to shut down The Wind Done Gone. But Gone With the Wind has been incredibly influential in American society, for better or for worse, and Margaret Mitchell & her estate have profited greatly from the spread of her racist beliefs. Should they be able to prohibit the most effective forms of critique — parody? (I really hate when people tell me to “think about it” so I’ll refrain.)

As for how I would feel if someone parodied my feminist manifesto-disguised-as-novel: Well, (a) chagrinned, embarrassed, angry, annoyed, pleased at the attention, etc.; and (b) it doesn’t matter how I (or anyone else) would feel. It’s a rough & tumble world out there, and if you’re putting ideas out in the world, then you need to be able to stand up & take some critique and parody. And frankly, if the original work was sound, it will be able to take a parody. If there were holes in the original work that the parody found, then it’s useful for all concerned to have them pointed out, and my next manifesto will be stronger as a result.
Laura Q on June 30, 2007 4:05 pm
And while I’m feeling all piss-and-vinegar-y:

I really think that Ide Cyan and Yonmei are significantly overstating matters when they suggest that Rain’s argument “den[ies] … the very possibility of the existence of feminism itself.” There may be some inconsistency in Rain’s argument (or may not; I’m still digesting all those posts, myself), but inconsistency is unavoidable — generally, and particularly in these skinny little comment field threads filled with generalities and unsupported statements and political philosophies. Okay, one could reasonably think that Rain’s view is broadly incompatible with feminism, if one looks at Rain’s argument in its simplest form, but it’s just as easy to marshal a wide variety of concepts from theories of oppression (“internalized oppression”, e.g.) that would support Rain’s arguments and not create some giant rift between her analysis and “the possibility of the existence of feminism”.

In short: Come on. Give a sister some benefit of the doubt.
Anna the Pirate King on June 30, 2007 4:50 pm
Oh, yes, The Wind Done Gone is a great example to use in a rebuttal … and a particularly interesting one because it is a woman parodying the work of another woman … but basically the niceties of copywright law misses the point entirely.

I am not arguing that one ought not parody or not have the right to parody a work, only that …

(I don’t get to finish this post. My goddaughter doesn’t want me to pa.. bye…
Yonmei on June 30, 2007 7:39 pm
Anna the Pirate King: I do not mean to argue that FanFiction is Bad, or that it does not benefit women in any way, but I do mean to argue that it is (or more accurately is becoming) a women’s ghetto for writing

“Is becoming”? Media fanfic has been around for about forty years, and in all that time it has been overwhelmingly something that women do, not men. Overwhelmingly. If your argument is that very many women who might have been writing professionally have instead written fanfic, you need to show that there has been a dramatic drop in the number of women being published that began about 40 years ago. Can you do this?

and that very little fanfic really does much to challenge patriarchal expectations.

My initial point – which Rain’s comments substantiate – was that the existence of slash in and of itself challenges the patriarchy. That many slash stories (and indeed many fanfic stories outwith the slash genre) follow conventional gender expectations, does not change the fact that a community of women writing porn for each other is extremely challenging to the presumption (shared by Rain) that writing porn is a male activity.

Also, just because it is a women’s space, don’t assume it is not ripe for patriarchal exploitation.

Condescending much?

Wasn’t there just a group of guys who wanted to charge for fanfiction not long ago? They wanted to exploit fanfic … not for women’s advancement … for money!

Well, yes. And, if you’d bothered to investigate, you’d know that fanwriters and fanfic fans have been discussing FanLib, what it means, whether others will be along, and how fanfic fans can help people who’ve fallen into the FanLib trap out.

Just think about it: What if you published a story and it made some real money and some GUY came around and wrote a really mysogynistic send up starring your characters and situations … How would you feel about copyright and the romantic notion of authorship then?

Much the same as I feel now, thank you for asking. Were I in the position of having fans who were writing fanfic about my professionally-published fiction, I’d ask my fans politely not to let me know about it, and certainly never to show or to tell me any specific examples. That seems to me the only sane reaction of a pro writer to fanfic.

And I wanted you to explain to me how in your view of authorship, I can’t claim authorship just because I wrote the story.
Yonmei on June 30, 2007 7:46 pm
Laura: In short: Come on. Give a sister some benefit of the doubt.

Even though Rain is declining to give me the benefit of the doubt, but has told me that my writing slash makes me “incidental” because slash is really “a challenge/dominance fight between two or more factions of patriarchy”? I dunno, Laura: this seems fairly clear to me. Anna argues that I can’t claim authorship of the stories I write (“She didn’t really write it”) Rain argues that I ought not to be writing them (“She wrote it, but look what she wrote about”).

I support absolutely their right to show up here and argue their anti-feminist corner, so long as they do so politely. It’s salutory to hear the other side. But it is an anti-feminist corner; they’re trying to argue that there are some things that women just shouldn’t do because they belong to men…
Anna the Pirate King on June 30, 2007 8:08 pm
Strawman much??

Yonmei, you want to say you own your fanfic stories and you are the author of them. Fine. You win. You are the author. However, you also claim that authorship itself is a myth and authors have no special rights over their creations. So that an a couple of boxtops will get you a Cracker Jack prize. Big deal. So you are an author. What does that mean if you have yourself has defined authorship in a way that abdicates any rights YOU have over your own work

You can’t answer that, I assume, because you haven’t even tried.

I am making an economic argument about women’s empowerment, and women’s writing, which you are ignoring so you can claim the Feminism Crown for yourself and carry on like you invented it.

Frankly, go ahead and ban me. In Yonmei’s world, there is only One True Feminism, and we must all walk in intellectual lockstep or be declared out of the club!
Ide Cyan on June 30, 2007 8:48 pm
(I fixed the italics tag in ATPK’s comment.)

Anna, Yonmei is not a Magic Momma.

She has a right to be pissed off, and you’re hurt, but that doesn’t mean she has to make you feel good.

Asking to get banned out of spite won’t make things better.
Yonmei on June 30, 2007 8:54 pm
Anna: However, you also claim that authorship itself is a myth and authors have no special rights over their creations.

Where did I claim that, Anna? Cite.

I am making an economic argument about women’s empowerment, and women’s writing

Fine. But this thread is about fanfic, and specifically about slash, and you are or were trying to make arguments against fanfic in order to shore up your economic argument.

In Yonmei’s world, there is only One True Feminism, and we must all walk in intellectual lockstep or be declared out of the club!

See Ide Cyan’s comment about Magic Mommas. If you think you can defend your position on fanfic as feminist, do so. Don’t accuse me of demanding an intellectual lockstep in place of rigorously defending your position. That’s a lazy way of arguing.
Laura Q on July 1, 2007 1:16 am
Ah, my dream come true: a bunch of feminists arguing. Seriously. I dreamed of this moment.

Anyway, Yonmei & Ide Cyan — maybe one of you can provide a link to something explaining what you mean by “Magic Mommas” ? Not everyone has access to MMATS.

There are several threads of argument happening here, and I have contributed to the confusion of them.

The argument about authorship & what it means, as presented here, doesn’t have much to do with feminism. (There is a feminist angle to this argument, but we haven’t really been touching it.) So arguing this authorship angle, and some argument about how much & whether slash/fanfic is inherently a feminist endeavor, is kinda like throwing the kitchen sink at an argument.

Anyway, I am sort of not seeing the point any more, which must mean I’m tired, so I’m going to head off to bed now. Maybe the point to all this will come back to me later.
Ide Cyan on July 1, 2007 2:33 am
I have the whole text of “Power and Helplessness in the Women’s Movement” scanned & formatted, but standing in the way of distribution is the small matter of… *drumroll* …copyright!

Oooo, the irony.
Yonmei on July 1, 2007 4:07 am
Laura: Ah, my dream come true: a bunch of feminists arguing. Seriously. I dreamed of this moment.

Hee! Well, glad to have made your dream come true.

Joanna Russ’s essay on Magic Mommas and Trembling Sisters identifies a particular kind of power dynamic in all-women environments: in which women who are perceived as having power get trashed for not being perfect. She describes the dynamic specifically in the women’s movement: but I’ve noticed it operating in media fanfic fandom, too – and I’m certain it operates elsewhere, as well, wherever women have power, real or perceived, and other women perceive themselves as not having power.

Magic Mommas are not supposed to respond to insults or unfair demands or anger with anything but complete sympathy and understanding.

Snuffles barged into this thread trying to start a fight. I declined to have that fight.

Anna the Pirate King then joined this thread and demanded to know why I had not responded to Snuffles. (Honestly, I think the first clue that Anna TPK wanted me to be a Magic Momma was that comment: a Magic Momma should have picked out the bits from Snuffles comments that were worth responding to, and provided answers.)

So Anna did that work – which she was fully entitled to do – and I responded to Anna’s presentation of the issues with slash, and now Anna seems to want to move the discussion on to the economic issues of women writing for free instead of for pay, while kicking the authorship argument away and just not dealing with the original topic of the article – the existance of slash as a challenge to the patriarchy, and slash fandom as women’s space which men specifically feel entitled to disrupt and demand that the women talking about slash pay attention to them.

I think her comment claiming I said authors have no special privileges is probably her confusing me with contributions Laura Q and Ide Cyan have made to this thread (we all three being Magic Mommas and therefore blurring together) which is also a misreading of what Laura and the Ide were actually saying – that authorship is way more complicated a thing than ownership.

Thread drift happens. But I think Laura Q’s right that the authorship argument, while an interesting one, is not specifically a feminist issue. (I linked to Ellen Fremedon’s posts discussing authorship and the critical tools that slash writers/slash fans have accumulated over the years partly because it’s not really germane to this blog.)

The issue of women doing work for free and for pay is a feminist issue, and relates to recent events with FanLib rather than specifically to slash fandom. Perhaps we should move this part of the discussion to another thread?
Rain on July 1, 2007 7:37 am
wow… my TZI (time-zone-impairment) caught up with me. I’m almost a day and 2 seasons ahead of y’all, so my weekend off-line, doing winter weekend stuff is now almost over, and you’ve all been posting away while I’m sleeping it off or whatever :)

Im seeing two different threads – the authorship/payment angle (which I havent touched on myself ), and the slash as feminist endeavour one –
I’m more of the one-argument-at-a-time type.

Yonmei: methinx you really misunderstood heaps where I was coming from, and jumped to conclusions/assumptions that just aint so, responding to what you *chose* to see as an “attack”, your perceptions of the “tone” perhaps – (as in, not *what* I said, but *how* I said it?)
rather than the content, putting feelings and motivations etc in my court, that just aren’t there, (and never been there), but that’s very probably partly my fault with my lousy communication or writing skills, or a cultural *thing* etc.

Also compounding the miscommunication & ‘mis-reading’ etc – might be the fact that few of you know me from a dog’s turd? I do have a lifetime history of making bad first impressions *sigh*

There’s no need to be so defensive, when nobody is attacking you, least of all me.

On just ONE of the many points where I think you got me oh soooo totally wrong (too many to go through) – You said that “Rain argues that I ought not to be writing them” — this is totally untrue, I never said anything like that, indeed quite the opposite, but if you read it the wrong way and it pushed your buttons, I am truly sorry you were hurt and pissed off by it, as it was never my intention – but I refuse to apologise, for something I didn’t do, so while I’m sorry for your feelings, in the end, I see it as your problem – not mine – as I cheer and fully support your right to write whatever rings your bells on a personal level (as I said in previous posts) – I was just questioning the feminist politics of it.

I butted in when reading through the earliest posts, because I am genuinely interested in the idea of the “slash as feminist discourse” concept. And the meaning of what I said was that:

while I “wasn’t convinced” etc and didn’t “buy it” etc etc – I was open to exploring it further and hearing other thoughts, arguments etc etc etc – to me, that is giving the benefit of the doubt, up-front and in my first post, and politely opening up to *listening* to ideas and views that might convince me otherwise..

… but, instead – I ended up being told it was just wrong and stupid, and personally attacked, and yelled at.

No worries — been there, done that – story of my life *shrug* -won’t take it personally, even if that was what was intended :)

Like a good Trembling Sister…

Consider my wrists duly slapped and my butt well-spanked.
Yonmei on July 1, 2007 8:51 am
:but that’s very probably partly my fault with my lousy communication or writing skills, or a cultural *thing* etc.

Okay. Would you then care to explain what you meant when you wrote:

While some factions of patriarchy may see [slash] as challenging, its really a challenge/dominance fight between two or more factions of patriarchy. Women are incidental. Some patriarchal factions would see it as supporting gay male faction – and while it may be threatening to some factions, as long as they are seen as supporting gay men they are still subordinate to a faction of patriarchy, and hence ultimately unthreatening to the status quo. Just a different face of patriarchy.

(You wrote “it”, but the antecedent noun was either “slash” or “porn generally” but the specific form of porn we were discussing is slash.)

You say I’ve interpreted that wrong. Okay. Explain to me what you meant when you said that, rather than complaining you’ve been misunderstood.

while I “wasn’t convinced” etc and didn’t “buy it” etc etc – I was open to exploring it further and hearing other thoughts, arguments etc etc etc – to me, that is giving the benefit of the doubt, up-front and in my first post, and politely opening up to *listening* to ideas and views that might convince me otherwise..

Well, you were and still are being given the benefit of the doubt, Rain. You can read and respond to the “other thoughts and arguments” responding to what you wrote – or you can yell at us all for not being sympathetic to your telling us we’re “incidental”, and walk out.

Your choice.
Korey on July 1, 2007 5:36 pm
Yonmei: “authorship is way more complicated a thing than ownership.” — YES. Yes, a thousand times. Just found this argument and thread today, but I’ve read it all, and YES.

Ownership is simple and yes, capitalistic, but we (I think, I know I do) live in a capitalist society (for all intents and purposes). Authorship is true and it doesn’t matter if you’re rewriting an scene from last night’s episode and it’s a songfic to boot, with five words of your own creation: you put your own creative efforts out there, and you created something (something pretty stupid, in my example, but it’s yours). And there is nowhere to draw the line between my adding a few thoughts into Harry’s head during a Quidditch match actually mentioned in the book, or my writing a story about three OCs who didn’t get into Hogwarts, and did their own thing, but still they exist in the world Rowling imagined.

The legal author may own the ‘verse and the canon, source material, but he or she has no ownership over my interpretations of their characters, or the stories I write about them. That authorship is mine.

And really, to go meta about this, I haven’t STOLEN Harry Potter from JKR. I “made” my own Potterverse. JKR’s not going to go back to her manuscript and be like, “Damn! Remus, Sirius, stop that! Or at least use protection!” They’re still there, just like she made them. I didn’t change that. Mine will still be on my computer or on the internet, where I RE-made them. I do not claim ownership. I don’t think any of us are, in the legal, copyright sense. JKR can have those. But the story I created in is my own, and you can rewrite that if you want, but it’s not theft unless it’s plagiarism.

Anna TPK: “Now, please compare the capitalist system with the two other economic systems that we are most familiar with: communism and feudalism.”

First off, communism is only one very bad version of socialism, which is actually much more basic and widely known/used in arguments against capitalism. NEVER call them the same. Also see the latest post on this blog about gift economies. Both would be a better contribution to this thread.

I don’t argue that capitalism is inherently bad for women. I think it’s actually inherently bad for people in general, and the full argument is NOT that it’s bad for women, but rather that it’s bad for women, poor people, and people of color — anyone not on top of the capitalist structure. Most of those people are men though, hence the argument as it looks among feminists. I’m pretty sure if you hung around spaces for people of color long enough, you’d hear the argument there too, though I haven’t spent the time personally, for the same reason not a lot of guys hang out in feminist spaces.

Also, (and again, you should read the latest post on this blog, if you haven’t already), the reason your argument is flawed is because you assume that work done for pay is necessarily more valuable than work done for any other reason. If we were getting paid, you say, that would be more progressive/powerful/worthwhile than giving it away for free to each other in our little corner of the internet.

If we want to uphold capitalism, that’s fine. But we’re not. We are in a gift economy, and we hold our work to have value, whether we receive monetary payment for it or not (and it’s not, in this case). It’s the dignity of the worker. The immigrant getting paid two cents an hour — is her work less valuable than the American getting paid $5.15? Of course not. We don’t need money to make our creations valuable to us, or the rest of the fanfic community.

And in this, we are being subversive. We are removing ourselves from the capitalist push; we have created our own space where how much money something is worth is irrelevant. And yes, we are a target for the capitalist market who wants to exploit us, but we pushed back hard when FanLib popped up, and we said no, you can’t use us. We are giving it away, you cannot take it from us for your profit.

We’re not trying to break capitalism. But that doesn’t mean that the space we make needs to run by capitalist laws.

And that leads into another point I wanted to make, in general. I don’t think anyone says, “How can I tear down the patriarchy? I know! I’ll write slash!” We do it because we like it, each for her own reasons. But that doesn’t mean we don’t subvert along the way. And NOT incidentally.

The thing is, women doing what they want is almost subversive in itself. The idea that we are allowed to be sexual creatures for our own pleasure, not for anyone else’s use, is subversive. The idea that we can step into a man’s head and write from his perspective, “speak” for a man, is subversive (though of course, a man writing a female character and “speaking” for her is totally acceptable). And in a perfect world, they wouldn’t be. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to be subversive. But we create our own world, where all these things are not just accepted, but the status quo. We create our own space, where we write however we want, for whatever reasons we want, and if we’re on the sidelines, not in mainstream culture, that’s because mainstream culture is the white, Christian, heteronormative, capitalist, patriarchal mess that we don’t WANT to be a part of.

In an ideal world, we’d all come together to create a space where we could all play. But just because we don’t want to be a part of the mainstream doesn’t mean we live in a ghetto. We live on a commune. We chose this. It was not chosen for us. And that gives us agency. And that is where all the difference is.
Rain on July 2, 2007 2:02 am
You say I’ve interpreted that wrong. Okay. Explain to me what you meant when you said that…
I said that I suspected that you misunderstood by reacting emotionally to some words/phrases – in this case, ‘incidental’. You took it personally, as a kind of personal insult or something, when that is not what I intended. It was a reference to groups of women in general and their relationship to and within patriarchy.

That passage is responding in the context of the idea that slash is feminist because it is written by women for women, separate and independent of patriarchy. I was positing an alternate perspective that slash might be similar to other women’s groups that are not separate/independent of patriarchy – as in the slang term of ‘pink ghetto’, which I appreciate often does carry negative emotional overtones, but it doesn’t have to.

Personally, I think they are very valuable and worthwhile women’s spaces in themselves, regardless of what emotional tags various other people may put on them. Anna I suspect, (and I could be wrong) also seemed to feel this way. I’m not saying it is a *bad* thing at all. I think its great that such gardens can be created, and even be appropriated from male dominant structures/spaces. I was cheering you on this point, not putting it down, but it backfired.

Such spaces, regardless of what face or faction of patriarchy it may ultimately be co-opted to serve, (or if the group sees themselves as feminist or not, eg christian feminists) can be enormously empowering for women on a personal level, even including right-wing women’s groups who would never think of themselves as feminist (the list goes on across the spectrum), in they have similar feminist elements in being women-for-women. But on the political level, these groups’ ability to challenge patriarchy is very limited and often incidental to its internal faction-fighting.

I’m still not sure I’m being very clear here in explaining my views, and they are just my views, (although there are some factions of feminism which support it) – but to ask you a question – which I believe has been asked before:

What do you see as the difference between slash and mainstream straight het romantic/erotic fiction?

It is also women-for-women, it is women owning their own sexual feelings etc and sharing it with other women.

What makes slash different? Or more-or-less feminist? Do you see some forms of sexuality as more subversive of patriarchy than others?

If so, I disagree – (and hopefully, we can then agree-to-disagree? or alternatively, explore it further to encourage understanding, if not agreement?)

My own experience is that the whole spectrum of sexuality has been colonised by one faction or other. The right-wing conservative het face of patriarchy might be more highly visible and mainstream, (or in the ascendant, so its pink ladies are paid/supported for it – at other times in history the gay male faction has been in ascendant) – but the other end of the range has its own pink ghettos.

Also reminds me on a slight tangent, of Shulamith Firestones polemic on motherhood, “pregnancy is barbaric” etc. A completely understandable reaction – after millennia of enforced pregnancy, where women were rarely even allowed to participate in the decision of which male sired their offspring, the reaction of many feminists was to reject it entirely, biologically as well as socially, including any potential of its pink ghettos. Understandable, can completely sympathise with this feeling. However, it also caused a great deal of horizontal hostility for women who had very positive and empowering experiences of motherhood, especially so in their own pink ghettos, (in spite of, not because of, patriarchal control of it). Even if you are not challenging the patriarchal ‘institution’ of motherhood in a ‘political’ sense, (as Shulamith does) – it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. choose it and be empowered by it in a ‘personal’ sense.

Similarly with sexuality, straight women felt they were being called ‘anti-feminist’ when high-profile lesbian feminists said they were “Sleeping with the Enemy”. On the personal level women ‘owning’ feelings of sexual empowerment and gratification no matter how patriarchal they are, (I myself like a bit of het romance/porn & B&D etc though I’m lesbian), is not a crime or sin. These feelings alone, even with other women, are not necessarily political in a feminist sense either, if it doesn’t challenge or threaten the political sexual status quo.

In this frame, while there is no sin or crime in personally enjoying, celebrating, choosing, owning or feeling empowered by patriarchal pleasures, or creating space/gardens in which to enjoy and share them (mainstream or not), why is it so important to some of us that it be seen as having political ‘feminist’ legitimacy or credentials? As Anna said its as if …there has to be an intellectual legitimization of something that just happens to make you warm in the nethers”.

As an aside, as just a personal anecdote – many years ago, I was a young hooker. We had our own women’s space/gardens too, very empowering on a personal level, networking by women-for-women, sharing ideas and text, helping women in the industry with health and so on. On a *personal* level, it had its woman-centric celebratory moments and its own feminist solutions, its own ‘gift’ economy for example, and for a few, personal wealth/power etc — but, on a *political* level? The “institution” is still a sexist and deeply misogynist one, that harms an enormous number of women, children and men as well. Sometimes, the personal is not all that political, personal empowerment/solutions for individual women or groups of women, is not always de-facto political empowerment for all women, or even many women.

I’m just guessing, but I suspect that this was part of the idea that Anna was exploring, ie about capitalism often being considered *bad* for women, at least in some feminist circles anyway. I guess, just wandering thoughts here – while there are many streams of feminism, my own thinking, is that the two main ones are the personal empowerment and the political empowerment streams (for want of a better word/label).

My own take, for whatever its worth – is that while such personal empowerment is great for women — its still an equality based on class/ethnicity/race/educational status, along with several other social group ‘labels’ — but the gender element is secondary, as it doesn’t address, challenge, or threaten sex-based inequality on a political level.

In other words, to me, its demanding the same ‘equal rights’ to relate to other groups of people, including other groups of women, in the same way as the menfolk of the class/race/education etc with which particular groups of women identify as their primary social identity. While this may be a great social good in itself (at least a step in the right direction), its not primarily about women or sex-based oppression, and is more akin to socialism, humanism, liberalism etc. So can and do enthusiastically support it at times, but with my socialist or liberal hat on, not my feminist one.

But, back to slash.

What I’m hearing (rightly or wrongly) is that you seem to be saying that because it is women-for-women owning their sexual feelings (and non-mainstream feelings), it is challenging patriarchy. I see this as the model of sexuality proposed by queer activism, and although there are similarities and links between feminism and queer, (as there is with feminism and socialism or Marxism for example), they do diverge on some points.

Both grew out of a distrust of contemporary marriage, ‘family’, a keenness to challenge mainstream gender roles, a dedication to the pursuit of equality, amongst other things. One goal of gay liberation eventually over time in the mainstream as it expanded to include bi & trans etc – became the right to freedom to pursue one’s sexual desires and practices, whatever form they took, epitomized by the initial gay call for the social recognition, acceptance and validation of their/our sexual identities on an equal footing. An understandable consequence of (or reaction to) decades of denial of any right to sexual activity, public or private.

Patriarchal sexuality at its most simplistic, is based on social/sexual inequality of the participants, and that provides a socially conditioned erotic impulse. While queer activists might share elements of this with feminists, it does so in the service of a different cause to that of some feminists.

According to queer, sexuality is performance – so simply by adopting a non-mainstream sexuality, one acts transgressively, or radically, and so challenges the dominant sexuality.

But, to some feminists, this queer sexual political model doesn’t challenge or threaten the basic inequality (indeed it often promotes and idealises it, in the same way as mainstream het does) – at best, it is irrelevant and unimportant to queer activists, a secondary side-issue etc – whereas to many feminists it is the basic inequality which is the important element to challenge. Framing sexualised inequality in any form, just reinforces it – regardless of who writes it, performs it, gets off on it, or which gender is framed in it, or how often they ‘switch’. Nothing subversive in it, no matter how weird or off the beaten track of the mainstream it is. Besides the inequality aspect, feminists often seek to challenge not just patriarchal constructions of femininity, but also of masculinity, and slash doesn’t appear to go too far afield in challenging traditional stereotypes of masculinity either, any more than traditional het romance or erotica does.

Anyway, must go – real-life calls…
Yonmei on July 2, 2007 6:08 am
Rain, first of all, thanks very much for coming back and explaining what you meant. That’s clarified what you wrote earlier greatly. I want to respond to your comment at length, but I wanted to get in, first: Thank you.
Anna The Pirate King on July 2, 2007 11:41 am
You know, I don’t have time to answer specifically everything on this thread right now, but I find it enormously condescending that you all think I want anyone to be a “Magic Momma”

Thing is, I am no Magic Momma either. But the difference between myself and Yonmei in this situation is that I cannot ban her from the discussion but she can ban me!

Since I came into this conversation in response to someone getting banned I have felt under pressure to be very careful not to offend, even over some strong points of disagreement.

You know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Anna The Pirate King on July 2, 2007 1:06 pm
Ah, lunch, okay …

I believe the authorship question and the professional writing for money question are inextricably linked, but to explain why, I have to tell you a bit more about where I’m coming from.

I confess to being an adherent of a more old-school, or, dare I say it, working class view of feminism, which is about empowerment of real women in the real world as it is currently constituted. Fantasizing about global revolution and perfect socialist equality is fine and all … but will not help women like me keep Plan B on sale at the local pharmacy.

Moreover, I live in a world that perhaps many of you are shielded from, being either in the UK, or in the US but protected by the money and class privilege you already have. The downward pressure on women’s freedoms and ambition are very real where I sit.

One of the hundred-odd things I do is work with young girls participating in the National Catholic Debate League. These young women are not part of the counter-culture. They are mainstream, intelligent, college bound American Catholic girls. And they write fanfiction.

They, in fact, choose it over attempting profiction because they believe … and this terrifies me … they can’t do it. Their own imaginations are worth less to them than the stories Hollywood provides them. And, as one girl said to me in so many words, they are afraid that if they write for publication they will only end up humiliated!

Their male counterparts have no such problem, even though they are often the weaker writers. Boys are allowed to have both talent and ambition. Increasingly, girls … even terribly talented, intelligent girls … are not. And in the future that will translate into many of these young women staying out of what they are increasingly describing to me as a male playground.

This freaks me out. I tell you that frankly. The more only men enter pro-fic, the more that only men will accrue the money and power to mass produce what’s in the culture already.

Fanfiction may be genuinely empowering to an adult writer like Yonmei. Does that mean it is empowering to everyone who writes fanfic? Is fanfiction empowering to these girls? Only in the sense that without it they might not write at all. And is this all that feminism should aspire to? Not in my opinion. Feminism isn’t just for the rich, for the counter-culture, for the queer, for the intellectual, but for mainstream, ordinary girls too.

It is one thing for those of us old enough, rich enough and lucky enough to have been spared growing up female in George Bush’s America to theorize about culture-jamming. But I look at these kids and wonder. Is the next Mercedes Lackey not even going to try?
Yonmei on July 2, 2007 1:47 pm
Since I came into this conversation in response to someone getting banned I have felt under pressure to be very careful not to offend, even over some strong points of disagreement.

Okay. Here’s my policy: someone who comments on this blog with insults the very first time they post gets an extremely short chance to prove they’ve actually got something to say besides wanting to pick a fight. Someone who’s a regular, who has demonstrated that they’re here to contribute to discussions, gets (among other things) fair warning, and an appreciation that getting het up in an argument may lead to saying things you don’t mean. But in general, I do object to insults and abuse, and yeah, the blog policy is that in the discussions following my posts, I’m the judge of what’s insulting/abusive. If you’re seriously afraid that you don’t know how to express strong disagreement without being insulting, I suggest you go read the LGBT Trillions thread, in which a brand-new commenter showed up and disagreed very strongly with what I had to say without at any point being personally insulting. Check out the differences between his comments and Snuffles’ comments, and try to understand why Snuffles got banned and he didn’t.

(And I’m deleting without prejudice the three comments you made asking why your first comment didn’t go through. Just to get rid of the cruft.)
Yonmei on July 2, 2007 2:02 pm
But I look at these kids and wonder. Is the next Mercedes Lackey not even going to try?

Oh, man. Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna: this was such a bad example.

Mercedes Lackey started writing because of fan fiction. So may your girls in the National Catholic Debate League, if you don’t make the mistake of telling them they shouldn’t.

True, Lackey went pro, and very successfully pro. But her first sales were to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s anthologies, Sword and Sorceress and Friends of Darkover. She met C.J.Cherryh, who mentored her through her first novel, because Cherryh, like Lackey, is a filksinger, and much Lackey filk is fanficcery.

You honestly could not have picked a worse example of why girls should be discouraged from writing fanfiction. Fine, right now they don’t want to write pro-fic, they’re sure they’d be no good. But if you want to make sure the next Mercedes Lackey doesn’t even try, do steer her (whoever she is!) away from fanfiction. That way you can discourage her from writing, getting feedback, getting practice, getting the courage to believe she’ll be really good enough to aim for pro-dom, if that’s what she wants to do.

Is fanfiction empowering to these girls? Only in the sense that without it they might not write at all. And is this all that feminism should aspire to? Not in my opinion. Feminism isn’t just for the rich, for the counter-culture, for the queer, for the intellectual, but for mainstream, ordinary girls too.

And of course, none of your Catholic League girls could be queer. Not one. Yeah, right.
Yonmei on July 2, 2007 2:11 pm
s fanfiction empowering to these girls? Only in the sense that without it they might not write at all. And is this all that feminism should aspire to? Not in my opinion. Feminism isn’t just for the rich, for the counter-culture, for the queer, for the intellectual, but for mainstream, ordinary girls too.

…like most people who write fanfic, y’know. Not rich, not counter-culture, sometimes queer (but the notion that “mainstream, ordinary girls” aren’t queer is just weird to me… we are everywhere), often not classing themselves as “intellectual”. Just people who are writers.

You may disapprove of women becoming successful writers as Mercedes Lackey did it – via fan fiction. You may think that the only proper route to be a successful writer is the lonely, traditionally-male route. You may think that working-class kids aren’t queer and don’t have any edgy fantasies about “two men together”, because in your view of sexual orientation, that’s solely for the privileged classes. (You’re completely wrong about that last, but I can’t quite believe you mean it the way it sounds you do.)

But there are any number of ways for people to make themselves into writers – of which the key element is always: Keep writing. And the key element of stopping people from being writers: discourage them from writing. Which it sounds like you try to do to your Catholic League girls, if you make a point of telling them that what they want to write is going to stop them from becoming a pro writer, or from wanting to be a pro writer.

Yeah, right: just like it stopped Mercedes Lackey.
Anna The Pirate King on July 2, 2007 2:12 pm
No, you misunderstand me. She is an EXCELLENT example precisely because Mercedes Lackey felt empowered … empowered by feminism’s gains in real world genre publishing, btw, to make the crossover to profic!

And I’m afraid these girls don’t (or won’t in future) have the encouragement and confidence to make that leap into profic!!!!

You keep assuming I am anti-fic. I’m not.

I’m just not as convinced as you are that it is empowering to women per-se. If anything it is simply (who said this) a gateway drug? And not to be slammed on for that.
Anna The Pirate King on July 2, 2007 2:13 pm
And of course, none of your Catholic League girls could be queer. Not one. Yeah, right.

Utter nonsense! You’re putting words in my mouth again.

Where do you think *I* came from?
Anna The Pirate King on July 2, 2007 2:18 pm
You also make assumptions about what I tell my girls.

I tell them … or try to … that they should be ambitious … that they should plan for a future as something other than Mrs Somebody.

Yes, that is often about making money and participating in the capitalist system. But that’s the reality in this world!

I want them to aspire … to really aspire … to be the people making the publishing and filmmaking decisions if that’s their heart. And here in the US anyway I feel every day like I’m fighting the entire culture all the time!!!!! Do I have to fight you too? We’re supposed to be on the same side here!!!!

I don’t tell them NOT to write fic. I DO try to tell them to try writing something they can legally, right now, today, submit for publication because that is the road to real world power.
Yonmei on July 2, 2007 2:36 pm
Anna: Utter nonsense! You’re putting words in my mouth again.

No, I’m not.

You said, I quote: “Feminism isn’t just for the rich, for the counter-culture, for the queer, for the intellectual, but for mainstream, ordinary girls too.”

So you’re saying that “mainstream, ordinary girls” aren’t queer? They’re all 100% completely heterosexual? Or what are you saying, for heaven’s sake? Don’t accuse me of putting words in your mouth when I quote what you say and respond to it!

She is an EXCELLENT example precisely because Mercedes Lackey felt empowered … empowered by feminism’s gains in real world genre publishing, btw, to make the crossover to profic!

As she herself acknowledges, she felt empowered by fan fiction to start writing. It was indeed her “gateway drug” – and you want to take it away from the next generation in case they get hooked and turn out like her. Somehow this is not turning into a good argument for your case. You want to go away and pick another writer who you know didn’t get started writing fanfic?

So again: bad example.

I want them to aspire … to really aspire … to be the people making the publishing and filmmaking decisions if that’s their heart.

And one road into doing that is to get practice in writing. There exist writers-for-TV who learned how to do it by writing fanfic. If they aspire to be publishers or film-makers, though, that’s a different road to learning how to be a writer.

And here in the US anyway I feel every day like I’m fighting the entire culture all the time!!!!! Do I have to fight you too? We’re supposed to be on the same side here!!!!

Oh, don’t whine. You don’t have to fight me: you could also (b) agree with me (c) walk away from this discussion.

I don’t tell them NOT to write fic. I DO try to tell them to try writing something they can legally, right now, today, submit for publication because that is the road to real world power.

So you do try to discourage them from writing what they really want to write?

People become writers via a lot of routes. But the absolute essential is: spend years honing your skills. Write. And share what you write with other people, and learn to accept criticism cheerfully, and revise, and make your stories better. Those are the essential skills in becoming a writer. Wanting to be paid is not, though it’s dead cool when it happens.
Anna The Pirate King on July 2, 2007 4:02 pm
So you’re saying that “mainstream, ordinary girls” aren’t queer? They’re all 100% completely heterosexual? Or what are you saying, for heaven’s sake?

I’m saying that some of them are queer and some of them are not. However, I have more hope for the queer girls keeping their essential selves and ambitions intact in the long run, if we can just keep them from committing suicide in high school (not even exaggerating). For despite all the pressures on queer girls they DON’T have the expectation of conformity.

They also don’t generally envision their future around the need to attract or please men.

If anything, I worry more about the essential selves of the straight girls, because they are less likely to look at the culture critically even after they grow up!

you want to take it away from the next generation in case they get hooked and turn out like her.

I don’t want to take anything away. Again you put words in my mouth. Though maybe you simply don’t understand what I do want.

I think they are not receiving the message you intend to send.

It is a short step between “women can write fanfic” and “women should write fanfic” to “women really only should write fanfic.” That’s the garble. That’s the game of telephone at play. They seem, to my old and jaded eyes, to be claiming fanfic as their own all right! But at the expense of other modes of expression!

At the expense of ambition.

(If anything, lesbians IMHO should take ambition even more seriously than straight girls because they can’t assume that they’ll be able to rely on a man’s income. )

People become writers via a lot of routes. But the absolute essential is: spend years honing your skills. Write. And share what you write with other people, and learn to accept criticism cheerfully, and revise, and make your stories better.

See, they already do this. All the time and quite cheerfully.

What they won’t do is take the next step.

For you and me and probably Mercedes Lackey, fanfic was one of many gateways to just writing in our youth, and not even the most easily available one. In the early 80s the cultural context fanfic existed in was entirely different. There was a huge flowering of women in genre profic going on! The veterans of 70s feminism was still battering through glass ceilings in every profession. Sexism was seen as archaic.

These girls do not see sexism in the media as barricades to be challenged. They are told, if anything, women’s rights was a fad, but we’re getting over that now. Some have the smarts to see through it and some don’t.

I do very much suspect that this wonderful women’s garden you’d like to make fanfiction into will turn into a women’s ghetto in a generation … unless we old women are very, very careful not to let that happen.
Yonmei on July 2, 2007 4:59 pm
Rain wrote: That passage is responding in the context of the idea that slash is feminist because it is written by women for women, separate and independent of patriarchy. I was positing an alternate perspective that slash might be similar to other women’s groups that are not separate/independent of patriarchy

I don’t think any group, anywhere, in the world at this time is “separate/independent of patriarchy”. If you know of a group that you think is independent, cite!

But we do know of strategies that enable some groups to be more independent of patriarchal influence than others. For example, Ms magazine’s decision to quit including advertising: the cover price of the magazine went up, but Ms stopped having to consider how an advertiser would react to an article.

Personally, I think they are very valuable and worthwhile women’s spaces in themselves, regardless of what emotional tags various other people may put on them. Anna I suspect, (and I could be wrong) also seemed to feel this way. I’m not saying it is a *bad* thing at all. I think its great that such gardens can be created, and even be appropriated from male dominant structures/spaces. I was cheering you on this point, not putting it down, but it backfired.

I think even this comes across as more than a little patronising, but I’ll accept your essential goodwill. ;-)

Such spaces, regardless of what face or faction of patriarchy it may ultimately be co-opted to serve, (or if the group sees themselves as feminist or not, eg christian feminists) can be enormously empowering for women on a personal level, even including right-wing women’s groups who would never think of themselves as feminist (the list goes on across the spectrum), in they have similar feminist elements in being women-for-women. But on the political level, these groups’ ability to challenge patriarchy is very limited and often incidental to its internal faction-fighting.

I think here we’re coming from an essential difference in how we perceive feminism. Feminism as the most successful revolution the world has ever seen, the only one to change the world and keep changing it without a shot fired: feminism has changed the world already, enormously, over the past 200+ years we’ve been at it, and we’re not done. Ultimately, the goal of the feminist revolution is to end the patriarchy. This, we both agree on, I hope.

But, one reason why the feminist revolution is as successful as it is, is that it’s never aimed at ending the patriarchy in one quick step. Rather, patriarchal institutions are nibbled away in bite-size chunks. Did Margaret Thatcher challenge the patriarchy? Not if you look at her actions as Prime Minister: not much if you look at how she became an MP and a senior minister and leader of the party: but the fact that a woman was Prime Minister was a challenging nibble.

I’m still not sure I’m being very clear here in explaining my views, and they are just my views, (although there are some factions of feminism which support it) – but to ask you a question – which I believe has been asked before:

What do you see as the difference between slash and mainstream straight het romantic/erotic fiction?

Well, there are two obvious differences: one is that slash isn’t het, it’s queer: and the other is that slash is fanfic. Those aren’t differences of perception, those are differences of fact. The differences I perceive is that slash, as fanfic, is written for the hell of it. A slash writer, unlike a pro romance writer, isn’t thinking about what it will take to get published: she’s thinking about what will press her buttons and the buttons of her anticipated audience. A slash writer, unlike a het writer, isn’t thinking in terms of male/female relationships: she’s thinking about same-sex relationships.

Neither should be discounted when analysing the challenge that slash presents to the patriarchy. Because (and here we really are coming at it from a different angle) there’s no question in my mind that slash/slash fandom is challenging to the patriarchy. 23 years in slash fandom, observing outsiders’/male reactions to slash and slash fandom from a feminist perspective, is more than enough to demonstrate that as fact.

What makes slash different? Or more-or-less feminist? Do you see some forms of sexuality as more subversive of patriarchy than others?

Don’t you?

This is not to say that “lesbians are more feminist” or anything like that: but it’s a straightforward, easily demonstrable via historical and current political fact that two women or two men living as a couple challenge the patriarchy.

If so, I disagree – (and hopefully, we can then agree-to-disagree?

No. I’m not trying to argue that all feminists should be lesbians: I’m pointing out the realities of homophobia and the intimate tangle of sexism and gender identity and prescribed gender roles. People’s sexual feelings are what they are: a woman is not more a feminist or less because she’s bisexual, or lesbian, or hetero, or transgender, or whatever form her sexuality takes. But yes, some sexualities, and their expression, are more challenging to the patriarchy than others.

My own experience is that the whole spectrum of sexuality has been colonised by one faction or other. The right-wing conservative het face of patriarchy might be more highly visible and mainstream, (or in the ascendant, so its pink ladies are paid/supported for it – at other times in history the gay male faction has been in ascendant) – but the other end of the range has its own pink ghettos.

I don’t think there’s ever been a time when men who identified as gay have been ascendant in the patriarchy. If you mean to go back to classical Greece and point at the Theban Band and the Platonic argument that same-sex relationships are more noble, I can only point out that none of those men would have identified as gay, and most of them would have been married to women.

Also reminds me on a slight tangent, of Shulamith Firestones polemic on motherhood, “pregnancy is barbaric” etc. A completely understandable reaction – after millennia of enforced pregnancy, where women were rarely even allowed to participate in the decision of which male sired their offspring, the reaction of many feminists was to reject it entirely, biologically as well as socially, including any potential of its pink ghettos. Understandable, can completely sympathise with this feeling. However, it also caused a great deal of horizontal hostility for women who had very positive and empowering experiences of motherhood, especially so in their own pink ghettos, (in spite of, not because of, patriarchal control of it).

I think this is flat, flagrant nonsense, actually. The notion that feminists reject motherhood tends to come from outside feminism. (I have to admit I haven’t read Shulamith Firestone’s writings, but all my experience as a feminist/in my feminist reading says this is just wrong.)

Even if you are not challenging the patriarchal ‘institution’ of motherhood in a ‘political’ sense, (as Shulamith does) – it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. choose it and be empowered by it in a ‘personal’ sense.

And I know of no feminists who don’t acknowledge that, both childfree and parents. I know of plenty of anti-feminists who come up with this theory that feminists reject motherhood, though.

Similarly with sexuality, straight women felt they were being called ‘anti-feminist’ when high-profile lesbian feminists said they were “Sleeping with the Enemy”.

This does have to be looked at in the political context of the time, though. It’s not as if lesbian feminist hostility to straight feminists came out of nowhere: straight feminists had been hostile and homophobic towards lesbian/bi feminists for decades. That this hostility from straight women towards lesbians in the Women’s Liberation Movement was challenged and overcome is a good thing – even if, in the challenging, some lesbians said things which were over-the-top. Nothing like as over-the-top as telling lesbian feminists to stay in the closet for fear of bringing disgrace on the women’s movement, though.

On the personal level women ‘owning’ feelings of sexual empowerment and gratification no matter how patriarchal they are, (I myself like a bit of het romance/porn & B&D etc though I’m lesbian), is not a crime or sin. These feelings alone, even with other women, are not necessarily political in a feminist sense either, if it doesn’t challenge or threaten the political sexual status quo.

Actually, I would say that women owning our own sexual feelings is challenging the political sexual status quo. No matter what those sexual feelings are. I think the most obvious reason why there are, apparently, fewer lesbians than gay men in the world, is because women are taught from pre-sexual beginnings not to think about what turns us on.

In this frame, while there is no sin or crime in personally enjoying, celebrating, choosing, owning or feeling empowered by patriarchal pleasures, or creating space/gardens in which to enjoy and share them (mainstream or not), why is it so important to some of us that it be seen as having political ‘feminist’ legitimacy or credentials?

Now here’s where you are asking the wrong question. (IMO, at least.) This post describes (and two follow-up posts also describe) men reacting to women writing slash with outrage and rejection. Slash is perceived by these men (and by some women) as a challenge to patriarchal norms of sexuality. Slash fandom is perceived by some men as a challenge to their patriarchal right to be the centre of attention, rather than seeing their gender under sexualized observation. So slash/slash fandom is a feminist issue. Why then is it so important to you, and to others, to argue that it doesn’t and it isn’t?

As Anna said its as if …there has to be an intellectual legitimization of something that just happens to make you warm in the nethers”.

As Anna seems to be implying: it’s as if you think we shouldn’t analyse why what turns us on is so challenging to the patriarchy. That women’s sexuality is offlimits, for men only.

I’m just guessing, but I suspect that this was part of the idea that Annawas exploring, ie about capitalism often being considered *bad* for women, at least in some feminist circles anyway.

Well, capitalism is bad for people. We work within capitalist institutions because we must: I’m not in favour of instant revolutions. We can do so, though, without making a big deal about how wonderful a system for benefiting capital and exploiting labour is. It’s not.

What I’m hearing (rightly or wrongly) is that you seem to be saying that because it is women-for-women owning their sexual feelings (and non-mainstream feelings), it is challenging patriarchy.

Yes. It is.

I see this as the model of sexuality proposed by queer activism, and although there are similarities and links between feminism and queer, (as there is with feminism and socialism or Marxism for example), they do diverge on some points.

No: this is based on my direct experience as a slash fan. It’s not a model of sexuality: it’s me looking at what has happened to me and other slash fans, and analysing our experience as a feminist.

Patriarchal sexuality at its most simplistic, is based on social/sexual inequality of the participants, and that provides a socially conditioned erotic impulse. While queer activists might share elements of this with feminists, it does so in the service of a different cause to that of some feminists.

You seem to be strongly implying that it’s impossible to be both a queer activist and a feminist. If that’s what you think, we may as well end this conversation: I exist as a queer activist and a feminist, and if you think I’m impossible, we can’t talk.

According to queer, sexuality is performance – so simply by adopting a non-mainstream sexuality, one acts transgressively, or radically, and so challenges the dominant sexuality.

According to some queer theorists, I assume you meant to say? Not “according to queer”. This is true, but – so what?

But, to some feminists, this queer sexual political model doesn’t challenge or threaten the basic inequality (indeed it often promotes and idealises it, in the same way as mainstream het does) – at best, it is irrelevant and unimportant to queer activists, a secondary side-issue etc

I’m sorry, you’ve missed out the word “some” before “queer activists” again. Surely it was just an accidental omission?

– whereas to many feminists it is the basic inequality which is the important element to challenge. Framing sexualised inequality in any form, just reinforces it – regardless of who writes it, performs it, gets off on it, or which gender is framed in it, or how often they ‘switch’. Nothing subversive in it, no matter how weird or off the beaten track of the mainstream it is. Besides the inequality aspect, feminists often seek to challenge not just patriarchal constructions of femininity, but also of masculinity

Yes. And what you appear to have completely missed is that so do queer activists. Many of whom are also feminists. Impossible or not.

and slash doesn’t appear to go too far afield in challenging traditional stereotypes of masculinity either, any more than traditional het romance or erotica does.

Depends what your traditional stereotype of masculinity is. But I think you’re just wrong about this: you seem to be forgetting that while slash stories are sometimes written as if in the model of a het romance, both partners are male.

Whew! That was a long comment, and this is a long response, but I thank you for it.

As an aside, as just a personal anecdote – many years ago, I was a young hooker. We had our own women’s space/gardens too, very empowering on a personal level, networking by women-for-women, sharing ideas and text, helping women in the industry with health and so on. On a *personal* level, it had its woman-centric celebratory moments and its own feminist solutions, its own ‘gift’ economy for example, and for a few, personal wealth/power etc — but, on a *political* level? The “institution” is still a sexist and deeply misogynist one, that harms an enormous number of women, children and men as well. Sometimes, the personal is not all that political, personal empowerment/solutions for individual women or groups of women, is not always de-facto political empowerment for all women, or even many women.

I just wanted to note that I appreciate your sharing this.
Yonmei on July 2, 2007 5:05 pm
Anna: I’m saying that some of them are queer and some of them are not. However, I have more hope for the queer girls keeping their essential selves and ambitions intact in the long run, if we can just keep them from committing suicide in high school (not even exaggerating). For despite all the pressures on queer girls they DON’T have the expectation of conformity.

Ah. Received and understood. Further comment may follow.
vito excalibur on July 2, 2007 9:41 pm
Anna:

I do very much suspect that this wonderful women’s garden you’d like to make fanfiction into will turn into a women’s ghetto in a generation … unless we old women are very, very careful not to let that happen.

Any time you find yourself talking about how kids these days are doing everything wrong and they’re going to screw it up unless us previous generations show them The Right Way To Do It, you can go ahead and resign yourself to the fact that you are going to be 1) ineffectual, but also, luckily, 2) wrong. Old women are not responsible for and not in charge of what young women are going to do with their lives. That is up to the young women. It’s good to offer them help, but remember that they will take exactly as much as they are willing to and no more. You remember; like we did when we were their age.

And if fanfiction is what they think is good to do, then they’ll muddle through with it somehow. Y’know, like Lois McMaster Bujold did, whose first published novel was a Star Trek fanfiction with the names changed. Like young Cassie Claire, who love her or hate her has got a 4-book publishing contract out of being a Big Name Fan. Like the number of fanfic writers who have gone on to become official writers for the TV shows they used to write about for free. Ooh, hey, let’s talk about 21-year-old Francisca Solar, the Harry Potter fanfic writer who’s just been signed to a three-book contract by Random House because of the success of her fanfic sequel to OOTP

I understand your concern; but you are wrong. You are worrying about the way that this phenomenon could be screwing women up and when it is pointed out that there doesn’t seem to be any real evidence that it is screwing us up and in fact there is a fair amount of evidence that it is being in its own modest way helpful in addition to fun, you continue to wring your hands and insist that it still could be harmful.

Have some faith that other women know what they’re doing, even if it’s not the path that you would take.
Yonmei on July 3, 2007 2:44 am
Anna: It is a short step between “women can write fanfic” and “women should write fanfic” to “women really only should write fanfic.”

Actually, it’s an extremely bloody long leap from “women can write anything they like” to “women really should only write fanfic”.

It is a short step between “women can write fanfic” and “women should write fanfic” to “women really only should write fanfic.” That’s the garble. That’s the game of telephone at play. They seem, to my old and jaded eyes, to be claiming fanfic as their own all right! But at the expense of other modes of expression!

And that’s why fan writers like Cleolinda Jones will never be professionally published. That’s why Naomi Novik wasn’t able to turn her Master and Commander fanfiction into a professionally published trilogy. Because these days that kind of thing just doesn’t happen any more.

Uh huh. Other than that, what Vito said.
vito_excalibur on July 3, 2007 10:17 am
P.S. Anna, if you want your girls to think about writing for publication, a more effective path than trying to convince them that fanfiction isn’t worth their time might be to teach them about all these other women who have made the leap from fic writer to professional; and what it is that allowed them to make that leap.

(Bearing in mind, of course, that not every fic writer wants to be a professional writer, and why should they? If we’re looking at earnings and sheer power to bring civilization to its knees, you might encourage them to become plumbers, instead.)
Yonmei on July 3, 2007 4:25 pm
vito: Anna, if you want your girls to think about writing for publication, a more effective path than trying to convince them that fanfiction isn’t worth their time might be to teach them about all these other women who have made the leap from fic writer to professional; and what it is that allowed them to make that leap.

Very good point.

Bearing in mind, of course, that not every fic writer wants to be a professional writer, and why should they?

Bearing in mind, also, that developing your skill as a writer and making a living from it does not, necessarily, mean writing fiction for sale. I have been a professional writer now for 12 years, but never earned a living from the few stories I’ve sold or the many I’ve published for free.
Laura Q on July 7, 2007 4:22 pm
favorite button that i just picked up at the readercon dealer’s room:

Do not meddle in the affairs of slashers, for you are cute and look good with other men
Yonmei on November 27, 2009 11:59 am
A very, very late addition to this discussion, referring back to the original man-with-man-privilege who started it all in Redemption nearly 3 years ago:
the story of paratrooper Udo Kappler, who decided to break the silence.
We talked a lot about how this man was being sexist … but in fact what finally led me to tell him to shut up, you’re wrong, was the homophobic crack about how paras can’t be gay.

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