muggle caps

Muggle -- to be spelled with a capital M or with a lower-case m? 'There was a Muggle in his arms' or 'The muggle pressed up hard against him'?

Book canon says 'Muggle' but what is your preference? Why write 'Muggle' but not 'Wizard' or 'Human'? Which is more elegant?

slashy moments

kyuuketsukirui asked me what I meant when I wrote Annie Proulx's short story is the origfic of someone who is a slasher at heart. The film is made by a man. The story is slashy. The film is not.. This is what I replied:

Ah, I'm so glad you asked this! But kind of daunted as well because I have a whole theory and philosophy about this!

In sum, my notion is this: there is a thing called slashiness and it goes beyond fandoms; it's a women's thing and it involves loving the idea of man-on-man action. I have a few ideas why women go for this; I myself include the following reasons: wish to imagine a relationship between equals in a patriarchal world full of gender inequality where straight relationships in fiction and film are 99 per cent of the time portrayed with stupid female characters; the buzz of transgression; subverting the male-male world, gaining access to all-male homosociality by exposing the homoerotica underneath it all (being able to lust over Blackhawk Down!); some as-yet undiscovered and unexplained slash-gene, *g*. Slashy is not the same as gay.

I've become quite good at spotting slashy moments in literature. One of these days, I will compile a list of quotations, juxtaposing slashy moments with gay moments. Men write about man-on-man in a different way from women, this includes both gay men and straight men. Annie Proulx is totally slashy: she gets off on the men together and she loves the romance and she imagines the men as totally manly (slashers love manly men and suppressed emotions). When I read Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor, I thought I was reading a book by a man (I confused Lian with Liam). Then I got to the boy-on-boy action at the end (totally gratuitous!) and thought, hm, so I googled Lian Hearn and sure enough, it was a woman. I knew because it was what I call a slashy moment.

Ditto Joan Brady's Theory of War. There I knew it was by a woman and cackled with Am-I-Surprised glee when, hah, in the final chapter, she revealed herself with a supremely slashy moment.

Ang Lee can't be slashy because he's a man. And Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger can't be slashy because they're men and straight to boot. Ultimately, the slash lives in our wimmin's brains. As I always say in my userinfo: we swim in the interstices. :-)