inalasahl (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} inalasahl) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} metafandom,@ 2010-01-18 17:26:00 |
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Monday, January 18, 2010
- mjules: I really wasn't going to get involved in this. - If you, as a straight author, are serious about wanting to help the GLBTQ community and if you are sincere in your beliefs that your fiction can do that, you might want to take a step back, stop defending yourself for a minute, and consider something. -
- mothwing: herongale: Reality is reality and fiction is fiction - The narratives you come across organise your thinking, and if you come across one particular narrative over and over again, it is difficult or even impossible not to have that part of your narrative enter your brain and become the definitive narrative. This is my problem with a majority writing a minority. M/M, as I am told, is a genre by and for straight women - it influences their narrative of what gay men are like. -
- herongale: Slash and the appropriation/objectification of The Other - Although it's true that several female writers of slash can get extremely obnoxious about defending their privilege to write whatever the fuck they want, and end up being insulting towards real gay men and women in the process, I can't see how lack of realism in a genre under the overall umbrella called fiction is this big crime. -
- anarchicq: I hope I don't regret writing this post - Look, yes, Racism is bad. *isms at all are bad, but they happen. And there will always be people who don't care. Because of this, *isms won't go away. It also won't go away because you keep bringing it up. -
- facetofcathy: Two things. - I want Rodney McKay, or any other fandom genius, to build a machine we can scan a post with and it will show us in fully complex visuals with surround sound and maybe even let us feel what the poster meant when they used words like slash, fandom, stereotype, harmful, exploitive, degrading, fetishizing, woman, man, gay, queer, porn, and on and on. -
- happydork: Apparently we do exist. Who knew? - "They're not just invisibilising us. They're invisibilising us to ourselves." -
- das_dingsi: Why the current m/m slash/appropriation debate is making me feel exhausted - as a gay trans man without ties to a gay community, who also is a slash reader, who found and maintained his queer space(s) mainly in online fandom instead of meatspace organizations, [...] I feel like I'm being erased or shouted at from [nearly] all sides for Doing It Wrong. -
- logophilos: Harmful romantic tropes and commonplaces in straight-authored gay romance - I was thinking today about how common Romance and m/m tropes, which are not overtly homophobic in themselves (those are really rare) or simply the result of bad writing, could harm gay men, especially young gay men, by damaging their self-image, or unwittingly reinforcing homophobic attitudes. -
- elf: We're not sleazy; we're drag queens! - Slash isn't "romance with two men," except for in-some-cases technically. (Like drag queens are not transvestites, except for technically, and in-some-cases.) There are reasons it uses pre-existing characters and media tropes. (Reasons for using women's dress designs & adapting them, instead of kilts or sarongs designed for men.) Reasons for mpreg and hurt/comfort and aliens-made-them-do-it and WNGWJLEO. (Reasons for huge hats with feathers and jewels, and high heeled boots, and feather boas, and evening gowns and tiaras being worn by men with beards.) -
- logophilos: Drag queens and female authored gay-charactered romance* - Our 'drag' writing — no matter how accurate or sympathetic — can be used against gay men, even by themselves if they internalise it — to hurt them. -
- ithiliana: Yay Melannen! - As far as I know, and I've looked, there is not and never has been any real demographic work on fandom that any statistician would consider authoritative. -
- gloss: I try to look the other way/but there's a mirror behind me - I don't understand how countering one example of appropriation with...another example of appropriation does anything productive. -
- damned_colonial: The itch of queerness, slash, and genre. - But then I had second thoughts, overnight, and wondered whether the itch of queerness is a universal good. Do I (as a queer reader) always appreciate it in fiction I read? How do I feel when I have that itch, as a reader? Is that something I want my readers to feel when they read my stuff? -
- darkrose: Through a glass, darkly - Removing a character from their historical context by ignoring the problematic aspects of that context is exactly what I wanted to avoid. At the same time, I'm not writing a dissertation on slavery during the Crusades, or about 10th-century Constantinople, or Roman Alexandria, or the history of any of the cultures Jason's been a part of. The arc is fundamentally a romance. -
- stoneself: as below, so above: where is the m/m debate going? - when msm write about msm experiences, it's about us msm.//when you women write about msm experiences, is it about us msm? or is about you women?//if it's about us msm, how?//if it's about you women, how? -
- melannen: More Science! - So first! Apparently the poll numbers about most slashers being queer struck a chord with people. (yay!)//As a result I have acquired numbers for several more polls now, with no effort on my part! -
- thoracopagus: [meta] The Slash Debate: Slash and Heterosexual Privilege - The point, I think, is not that slash is written by straight people, or women. It's that slash fiction is NOT gay fiction. Slash fiction isn't even always about gay people. And that creates issues when slash fans claim a link between slash and LGBT interests, or compare it to LGBT literature, or think gay people should embrace it as a whole. -
- thoracopagus: [meta] The Slash Debate: Queer vs. Female SpaceOverwhelmingly, though, slash is written "by women, for women." To the women in question, this is an empowering act, which transforms slash fandom into a female space.
Female space, not queer space. The overall exclusion of gay women from the slash debate is evidence of this, though, really, it's not hard to figure out. - thoracopagus: [meta] this is why I get to call myself a dyke and still ask that you not - I come to this meta post. I read a post that mirrors my experience, and I feel understood, because I am. I point out that it baffles me that lesbians are being excluded from the discussion rather than trotted out as the reason that slash fic is for everyone and not like lesbian porn, because as the "gay friend" people will trot out, I have a reasonable expectation of seeing this, and also, this is a queer space, I can express my bitterness over exclusion. -
- xie_xie_xie: Where on the fail spectrum am I? - And so you see, what am I exactly? What is a lesbian who doesn't "write slash" generally but does have this strange fascination for one male/male couple and writes about them constantly, for years? Am I on the side of the outraged disenfranchised queers, or the women squeeing softly at the buttsex? -
- prof_pangaea: if it was a real slash story the infant would be james mcavoy's mpreg baby - why are people still arguing that slash is inherently about women using men to tell women's stories? am i in a coma, mad, or have i travelled back in time? is it crazy for me to write/read slash because i want to write/read about the two characters, and not shitty author avatars? being a female writer means a woman will probably always write with certain awarenesses or experiences that have been informed by being female, not that they're always writing about women in disguise. -
- nushanakt: New law could block access to anime, manga and slash fan sites in Australia - In 2010 the Australian Government proposes to go ahead with a mandatory ISP-level internet filtering scheme which, if passed into law, could have a massive impact on anime, manga and slash fans. Why manga and slash fans? Because the main target of the law is to prevent the circulation of 'child abuse sexual imagery' — BUT in Australia 'child abuse sexual imagery' covers even FICTIONAL representations and includes 'under age' characters in anime, manga and slash. -
- bedlamsbard: ordinary people doing extraordinary things (warning: EXTREME RAMBLING) - I don't like stories about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. I like stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. -
- hokuton_punch: A Guide to Experimental Formatting in Writing - In the end, it isn't that difficult. All you need is some basic HTML, a color chart at hand, and the willingness to say, what the hell, let's get some formatting in this joint!//You may regret it. I don't. -
- bookshop: The flip side. ("Pickering, why can't a woman be more like a man?") - And the thing is, you can't talk about hating the heteronormative tropes of mainstream media without facing up to the fact that having this conversation within the context of slash fandom is a bit like having an anti-slavery convention in the middle of a plantation. -
- muccamukk: Danny Rand and Race - I'm not 100% comfortable with the idea of just casting a person of colour and calling it done[...]There is a lot of issues to be nagoiated in changing race. Lines of dialogue, attitudes, ideas, that play differently with a white character than they do with a character of colour -
- ix_tab: Sorry to be posty-mcposterson, but just a random thought on a fandom kerfuffle - What I am saying is that I encourage everyone to write out of their comfort zone, to write what they don't know, queers and heteros alike. -
- writestufflee: Meta Flail &*(_)($#@% bullshit - Writing fiction is only partially a political act. It is only a political act if you, the writer, intend to make it one, not if someone interprets it that way. Nobody gets to say what the ultimate meaning of your piece of fiction is but you. -
- carmarthen: That discussion about m/m fiction and appropriation... - A lot of people seem to be drawing a hard line between porn/erotica/romance and "everything else." The former is somehow not as valid a literary form or something. Which bugs me, because sex is hugely important to a lot of people. Good sex scenes aren't devoid of character, they continue characterization. Good PWPs still exhibit characterization. We exhibit aspects of ourselves in sexuality and romance that we don't exhibit in other places. Explicit sexual depictions can be just as artistic and meaningful as stories with no sex in them at all. -
- sqbr | Outside the borders of SlashtopiaThis isn't universal, but there is a tendency for fanfic meta by women who write erotic m/m slash to act as if that's the only form of fanfic that is really interesting, and at best to say "Oh, yes, I guess this a lot of this applies to femslash/gen/non-porny m/m slash etc too" or "Except for
femslash/gen/non-porny m/m slash, I guess, if you like that sort of thing" as appropriate when prompted - copracat: so you're back from outer space - But if slash is like drag, slash is not always okay and maybe we should stop stepping on those guys' toes. -