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lobelia321Has anybody read this article on the m/m romance genre, slash and fanfic in the American gay magazine Out? Here is the link: Link to Article.
Read it. See what you think. I never like it when my niche goes mainstream (last year we were on Radio Four, argh; I nearly dropped my morning coffee) but here are some of the issues I have with this particular article:
I read with great interest the article in Out. I do not know any of the people, neither the authors nor the journalist, although it is surely bizarre that an American magazine runs a story on two Cambridgeshire slashers (my neck of the British woods). I peered at the photo to discover where exactly in Cambridgeshire but I couldn't identify the church. Also, quick googling revealed that both the fiction authors are on LJ (huh, the world's a village) and that the journalist twitters.
Several things about this article:
Unfortunately, the women are portrayed in the article as being marginal and even 'freaks'. Fans and slashsibs are of all sorts. The article, by focusing only on two case-studies, reduces the spectrum.
Secondly, the two case-studies reduce the thousand-flowers-blooming reality further by emphasising what the article author takes to be a very unusual, even bizarre, kind of sexuality: I am a penetrative gay man inside. Great, whee, whatever, let those flowers blossom -- but this is not the attitude of the article writer. We are a broad church, and this somewhat glib explanation of the fandom phenomenon is purposely designed to make us look bizarre. I found it very interesting reading about these two women's stories in particular. What I object to is taking their unique lives and making them representative of a) everybody in slash, and b) making them look weird in the process. Which brings me to:
Thirdly, the language reinforces the notion of slash being a very weird and freakish predilection. Some quotations:
Confused yet?
What has been a relatively recent and suprising revelation...
"Why," I ask, trying to take this in
absorbing this revelation I kept asking myself: what revelation?
who are we to judge? Who was even thinking of judging? Only the article author, I presume.
Why are women fans so alienated from their own bodies that they can write erotic fantasies only in relation to a non-female body? (Uncritically quoted from Constance Penley who was, in the 1990s, quite ill at ease with what she had just discovered -- Kirk/Spock! -- and whose sentence is a symptom of a particular moment of feminism -- I think it was a moment of feminism-on-the-wane so perhaps she felt beleaguered. I don't think one can just quote this 15 years later without querying Penley's premises here.)
there was something self-assassinating and a little bit politically disturbing about the M/M fiction I read. Femininity, in this genre, is a culture that is so completely conquered as to be utterly vanquished.
While the men in M/M novels are invariably described as looking like Roman gods, the women -- auxiliary characters such as unwanted wives or nosy scullery maids -- are not portrayed as sexually or emotionally desirable at all. They are usually quite the opposite -- weak, whining simps who cough up blood and lose their hair and/or their minds.
Does Snape look like a Roman god? Does Rodney McKay? Does a wraith? Does an orc? Does Wayne Rooney? Does Dudley Dursley? Does John Rhys-Davies? Does David Mitchell? (All of whom I've written or read.) I object to the word invariably. Yes, by all means, bring on the Roman gods (although shouldn't this read 'Greek gods'? What Roman statues was the journalist thinking of, exactly??) but do not tell me that this is the only thing we are interested in.
Also, and especially, please do not tell me that all the women are portrayed as whining simps...!!!!! Perhaps they are in m/m romance novels (I've not read any in this genre, and after this article I may never try...!) but in fanfiction, this is so patently NOT TRUE. I can't even be bothered to dredge up examples; it seems beneath my dignity to have to prove the point that fans are grateful for any woman character that they can work with. It's not we who turn women into simps; it's the material we are given to work with! And from my own experience in reading fanfic: even the most pathetic female role in some drivelly TV show can be spun into pure narrative gold by slashsibs. (Why do you think am I called Lobelia Sackville-Baggins...? *g*)
Misguided sentence on two counts:
Explicit sex, however, is a necessary evil of writing M/M romance novels -- at least as far as publishers are concerned.
Count One: How many fanfics have you read in your life that contain 'explicit sex'? Yes, that's right, hundreds, if not indeed thousands. None of these was published except on the intrawebs; no author was coerced into the making of these explicit sex scenes. Yes, some authors are not so fond of explicit sex (I've read lots of stories without a whiff of sex and I've read lots of posts where authors talk about their difficulties with writing sex scenes and where others come in to give writing advice), and other authors are extremely fond of explicit sex and write PWPs galore. In sum: the sentence is misguided factually.
Count Two: Baldly stating that explicit sex is an 'evil' assumes that women are pure little innocents wot want their sex watered down into pretty hand-holding and cooking bagels (beagels?) in t'kitchen for each other when they have colds. Yes, indeed, we have all read stories like that but we have also read a thousand others. I object to the reduction of the variety of fandom experience, and especially to the belittling to one of the driving forces of the entire enterprise: the, um, sex. Wot is, of course, evol. Very evol. Especially if it involves Draco being tied to a stake and whipped by Harry. Just sayin'. (Evol. But is it really necessary, dear? Perhaps it's all an unnecessary evol, oh noes!!) In sum: the sentence is misguided ideologically.
I guess partly this language is journalese sensation-mongering (it's always illuminating reading about something you know about in the press: perhaps this is why I've stopped reading the papers because things get distorted). But why did the article-writer have to be so weirded out??
I was not at all surprised myself, nor are these radical new 'revelations'. However, I did not know about these m/m romance imprints! Nobody on my flist has mentioned these, and I shall henceforth post about it and see what people say. (It is true that I have been a bit out of the loop lately so may have missed a controversy here and there, and perhaps it all took place on DW...?) I was also delighted at having immediately identified the fandoms that the authors' original fictions are based on, before I even read the article. I looked at the pirate book cover and said to myself, "Aha, Pirates of the Caribbean! Or Hornblower!" And sure enough, that's how she'd got into the thing.
I did,, however, not like one of the author's attitude to fan fiction as a 'nursery slope'. Nursery slope??? I have read stuff within fanfiction that is tons better than much that is published! Nursery slope indeed. Also, I know at least four published authors whose fan fiction is as good as and, frequently, better than their published works. The ones I admire most are the ones who stay loyal to fandom and don't diss the fans by referring to them as nursery slope bumblers. However, again this may have been distorted by the article author so who knows what was actually said in the interview?
The journal article writer seemed dismayed at the ousting of feminine / feminist might from m/m romance, as if this involved suppressing the feminine and projecting all onto the masculine (or whatever she thought was happening). This shows ignorance of: fandom; narrative theory; reception theory; and life. Fandom is all about women. These are stories written by women for women, and men don't even enter into it. The journalist has confused iconography (yes, men figure within the stories) with semiotic meaning. The signifier is 'man' but is the signified 'man'? And are these stories 'about' men? In terms of reception and narrrative theory, I would argue that they are not. They are addressed to a female audience; they circulate within a female economy; they are debated, read and feedbacked on by women readers; they are written by women and speak to feminine sensibilities, desires, aesthetics, what you will (cultural; genetic; I'll leave this aside for the moment but a feminine public sphere does exist).
One thing the writer has got right and that is that these stories are not pornography (although at various points in the article, she goes and muddles this issue up again). Or we'd have to redefine pornography. I guess she didn't even define it, to begin with.
In sum: bully to the two authors for outing themselves (some of us choose to do this, and go you; and others choose to separate online life and rl rigorously, like me; so I would never say that one strategy is better than another; we all make individual choices here) but not-bully to the article author for delivering ideology along with her facts which are sometimes not facts.
Read it. See what you think. I never like it when my niche goes mainstream (last year we were on Radio Four, argh; I nearly dropped my morning coffee) but here are some of the issues I have with this particular article:
I read with great interest the article in Out. I do not know any of the people, neither the authors nor the journalist, although it is surely bizarre that an American magazine runs a story on two Cambridgeshire slashers (my neck of the British woods). I peered at the photo to discover where exactly in Cambridgeshire but I couldn't identify the church. Also, quick googling revealed that both the fiction authors are on LJ (huh, the world's a village) and that the journalist twitters.
Several things about this article:
Unfortunately, the women are portrayed in the article as being marginal and even 'freaks'. Fans and slashsibs are of all sorts. The article, by focusing only on two case-studies, reduces the spectrum.
Secondly, the two case-studies reduce the thousand-flowers-blooming reality further by emphasising what the article author takes to be a very unusual, even bizarre, kind of sexuality: I am a penetrative gay man inside. Great, whee, whatever, let those flowers blossom -- but this is not the attitude of the article writer. We are a broad church, and this somewhat glib explanation of the fandom phenomenon is purposely designed to make us look bizarre. I found it very interesting reading about these two women's stories in particular. What I object to is taking their unique lives and making them representative of a) everybody in slash, and b) making them look weird in the process. Which brings me to:
Thirdly, the language reinforces the notion of slash being a very weird and freakish predilection. Some quotations:
Confused yet?
What has been a relatively recent and suprising revelation...
"Why," I ask, trying to take this in
absorbing this revelation I kept asking myself: what revelation?
who are we to judge? Who was even thinking of judging? Only the article author, I presume.
Why are women fans so alienated from their own bodies that they can write erotic fantasies only in relation to a non-female body? (Uncritically quoted from Constance Penley who was, in the 1990s, quite ill at ease with what she had just discovered -- Kirk/Spock! -- and whose sentence is a symptom of a particular moment of feminism -- I think it was a moment of feminism-on-the-wane so perhaps she felt beleaguered. I don't think one can just quote this 15 years later without querying Penley's premises here.)
there was something self-assassinating and a little bit politically disturbing about the M/M fiction I read. Femininity, in this genre, is a culture that is so completely conquered as to be utterly vanquished.
While the men in M/M novels are invariably described as looking like Roman gods, the women -- auxiliary characters such as unwanted wives or nosy scullery maids -- are not portrayed as sexually or emotionally desirable at all. They are usually quite the opposite -- weak, whining simps who cough up blood and lose their hair and/or their minds.
Does Snape look like a Roman god? Does Rodney McKay? Does a wraith? Does an orc? Does Wayne Rooney? Does Dudley Dursley? Does John Rhys-Davies? Does David Mitchell? (All of whom I've written or read.) I object to the word invariably. Yes, by all means, bring on the Roman gods (although shouldn't this read 'Greek gods'? What Roman statues was the journalist thinking of, exactly??) but do not tell me that this is the only thing we are interested in.
Also, and especially, please do not tell me that all the women are portrayed as whining simps...!!!!! Perhaps they are in m/m romance novels (I've not read any in this genre, and after this article I may never try...!) but in fanfiction, this is so patently NOT TRUE. I can't even be bothered to dredge up examples; it seems beneath my dignity to have to prove the point that fans are grateful for any woman character that they can work with. It's not we who turn women into simps; it's the material we are given to work with! And from my own experience in reading fanfic: even the most pathetic female role in some drivelly TV show can be spun into pure narrative gold by slashsibs. (Why do you think am I called Lobelia Sackville-Baggins...? *g*)
Misguided sentence on two counts:
Explicit sex, however, is a necessary evil of writing M/M romance novels -- at least as far as publishers are concerned.
Count One: How many fanfics have you read in your life that contain 'explicit sex'? Yes, that's right, hundreds, if not indeed thousands. None of these was published except on the intrawebs; no author was coerced into the making of these explicit sex scenes. Yes, some authors are not so fond of explicit sex (I've read lots of stories without a whiff of sex and I've read lots of posts where authors talk about their difficulties with writing sex scenes and where others come in to give writing advice), and other authors are extremely fond of explicit sex and write PWPs galore. In sum: the sentence is misguided factually.
Count Two: Baldly stating that explicit sex is an 'evil' assumes that women are pure little innocents wot want their sex watered down into pretty hand-holding and cooking bagels (beagels?) in t'kitchen for each other when they have colds. Yes, indeed, we have all read stories like that but we have also read a thousand others. I object to the reduction of the variety of fandom experience, and especially to the belittling to one of the driving forces of the entire enterprise: the, um, sex. Wot is, of course, evol. Very evol. Especially if it involves Draco being tied to a stake and whipped by Harry. Just sayin'. (Evol. But is it really necessary, dear? Perhaps it's all an unnecessary evol, oh noes!!) In sum: the sentence is misguided ideologically.
I guess partly this language is journalese sensation-mongering (it's always illuminating reading about something you know about in the press: perhaps this is why I've stopped reading the papers because things get distorted). But why did the article-writer have to be so weirded out??
I was not at all surprised myself, nor are these radical new 'revelations'. However, I did not know about these m/m romance imprints! Nobody on my flist has mentioned these, and I shall henceforth post about it and see what people say. (It is true that I have been a bit out of the loop lately so may have missed a controversy here and there, and perhaps it all took place on DW...?) I was also delighted at having immediately identified the fandoms that the authors' original fictions are based on, before I even read the article. I looked at the pirate book cover and said to myself, "Aha, Pirates of the Caribbean! Or Hornblower!" And sure enough, that's how she'd got into the thing.
I did,, however, not like one of the author's attitude to fan fiction as a 'nursery slope'. Nursery slope??? I have read stuff within fanfiction that is tons better than much that is published! Nursery slope indeed. Also, I know at least four published authors whose fan fiction is as good as and, frequently, better than their published works. The ones I admire most are the ones who stay loyal to fandom and don't diss the fans by referring to them as nursery slope bumblers. However, again this may have been distorted by the article author so who knows what was actually said in the interview?
The journal article writer seemed dismayed at the ousting of feminine / feminist might from m/m romance, as if this involved suppressing the feminine and projecting all onto the masculine (or whatever she thought was happening). This shows ignorance of: fandom; narrative theory; reception theory; and life. Fandom is all about women. These are stories written by women for women, and men don't even enter into it. The journalist has confused iconography (yes, men figure within the stories) with semiotic meaning. The signifier is 'man' but is the signified 'man'? And are these stories 'about' men? In terms of reception and narrrative theory, I would argue that they are not. They are addressed to a female audience; they circulate within a female economy; they are debated, read and feedbacked on by women readers; they are written by women and speak to feminine sensibilities, desires, aesthetics, what you will (cultural; genetic; I'll leave this aside for the moment but a feminine public sphere does exist).
One thing the writer has got right and that is that these stories are not pornography (although at various points in the article, she goes and muddles this issue up again). Or we'd have to redefine pornography. I guess she didn't even define it, to begin with.
In sum: bully to the two authors for outing themselves (some of us choose to do this, and go you; and others choose to separate online life and rl rigorously, like me; so I would never say that one strategy is better than another; we all make individual choices here) but not-bully to the article author for delivering ideology along with her facts which are sometimes not facts.