Meta: Gazes in/and/of Criticism

[alixtii]

This post is a response to melannen's much-recced (and deservedly so) post on the slasher's gaze, but more directly a response to a couple of responses to her post, namelyithiliana when she says, "I'm going to immediately complicate it by asking about 'the femslash gaze' (because although people are convincing me that slash can be f/f as well as m/m, her meta seems

Comments

[alixtii]

This post came from two places, mainly: Grace's absolutely correct objection that the "slasher's gaze" essay couldn't do what it claimed to do through a textual study alone, and my own struggles with "School of Lost Souls" as the type of story it would squick me to write for any other audience. Rebutting Grace's arguments at to actual sex was less a response to her and more a necessary move as I saw it, considering my own gender.

Also, less so, from seeing the Frank Miller's scans for the first time and immediately (mis)reading them as a deconstruction of the het male gaze, rather than as unironic (as they are generally interpreted). I read them the way I'd read one of wisdomeagle's fics, assuming a feminist community when in fact none actually existed.

It's odd that you should mention chan as an example, since "School of Lost Souls" falls under some of the broader definitions of the term--it's a crossover story about a teacher and a 15-year-old girl.

So I don't even so much rebut Grace's argument when I point out how community is crucial, because I couldn't write what I write for an audience of 21-year-old boys: I'd be squicked far too badly. (Not that I necessarily have a problem with them enjoying that sort of thing per se.) But as a member of this community, with this audience, I can have an idea of what the immediate effects of my fiction are, and under what hermeneutic conditions my fic will be interpreted, and they are IMHO very positive.

[alixtii]

Well, for "School of Lost Souls," I never say whether the situation is good or bad, or who is at fault. I know that, given my audience, I don't have to. The scenario is erotic, sure, but so is a woman's rape fantasy; it's not a condoning of the premise of the fic, and that's taken for granted by a community of feminist readers that teachers should not sleep with their teenaged students.

If my audience was, OTOH, a bunch of guys going "Ooh, tap that young jailbait student ass, teacher!" or "Scored with the teacher! Cool!" or "It's the student's own fault she ended up badly, because she had sex" it'd be sending a completely different message, shaping the audience in a completely different way, and I wouldn't be comfortable with it at all.

[alixtii]

Only, it clearly does, because I know you think about how your story will be read by your readership--for example, whether they will, from your perspective, strip it of certain nuances you see as existing in the story.

More fundamentally, you probably wouldn't write a fic in a foreign language if your readership didn't understand it.

[glossing]

I know that, given my audience...
One of the problems I have with this essay is how one can be so assured of what the audience is - short of posting under friendslock, there's no way to gauge, or control, that audience. Instead, you're moving the gaze back into the realm of the author's intent, which is fine, but doesn't have much to do with representation and spectatorship, which are the main concerns of gaze theory.

[alixtii]

Well, of course someone can read the story under hermeneutic conditions other than the ones I'd like, just as I can read Frank Miller's scans as a ironic deconstruction. Texts don't speak with moral voices in and of themselves, and a resistant reading is always possible and legitimate.

But if we're left assuming that no feminist criticism of anything is possible, that there's no difference between what I'm doing or what Ari is doing or what Miller is doing simply because on a textual level they are similar, then I think we've gone wrong somewhere.

We know how the story functions in a certain community, and that it is part of a conversations. Beyond that, anybody could be reading it, but it's just speculation. But we can talk about representation and spectatorship within the community we have at hand, and as a part of which it was produced. We can talk about who responds in feedback, who recs the fic (and to whom), and how they go about doing so. Anybody with a search engine can read it, but it's a sociological fact that it was written from a position within fandom (which to me implies it was written for fandom).

My sociology class watched Triumphant of the Will as an example of--well, I forget what exactly, but some sociological principle gone. But the fact that we performed a subversive reading doesn't mean we can't talk about representation and spectatorship within Nazi communities.

[alixtii]

It doesn't necessarily involve real intent, though, but the construction of an author-function, which moves it back into representation and spectatorship. I don't know Ari's real intent, as I don't have access to her psyche, just her journal, but I construct her as an author (feminist, queer, and most of all, fan) in certain ways based on what I do know, which in turn influences how the text is read, regardless of whether Ari is "really" an android from Alpha Centauri.

[cathexys]

But Grace, of course you're writing within a community. You're writing in a community of English speaking people; you're writing in a community of culturally literate people in the 21st century (I'm sure you make references to social/cultural things and expect your reader to pick it up?); you're writing within a community of FANS, i.e., if you write an SGA story, you must expect your readers to know th characters so you can shorthand, to recognize these characters, or otherwise you're just writing ATGs and not fanfic, right? And you're even, to a degree writing within the fantext community, even if it's only as a negative response, e.g., when you're writing a bad sex story, what you're doing is engaging with one of the fundamental tropes of the community...and inverting it. Clearly, someone who stumbles upon your story will have a certain sense of someone having lousy sex...but someone from the community within which (for which?) you're writing will understand the context in which the story is situated...

[alixtii]

I think we can go one step farther. Why did Grace enter SGA? So she could write a response to "Take Clothes Off As Directed." Why does she write Jude/Ewan? Because she was a member of an RP community.

[ellie_nor]

Please excuse me butting in - and so long after the original discussion, too. I just wanted to comment on this:

It's just never occurred to me that I should care whether the audience is male or female or whether fellow fans are male or female.

I don't think that's what alixtii is saying. It doesn't really matter whether you care about the audience or not, what matters is that your practice of writing is within and part of the context of a community of fans, which is primarily - or acts/performs as if it were primarily - literate, female and thinking.