Bisexuality and Fanfic
trobadorahas an interesting post on biphobia in fanfiction that got me thinking:In fanfic, all too frequently characters who have had heterosexual relationships are presented as gay and closeted. (Not bi and closeted.) In fannish squee, slashy subtext is generally welcomed as "gay". It hardly ever seems to allow for bisexuality.
1) This is so not my experience--but OTOH, I'm filtering it through het male privilege, so it could just be there and I'm not noticing it. I wondered if this could be an issue with m/m slash more than slash in the broadest sense, but trobadora said in response to nymphaea1's suggestion that bi invisibility in m/m fic could be a manifestation of misogyny that she saw femslashers "erasing men" (from canon characters' sexual lives, I'm assuming?), though. (And makes me think that I'm just not noticing what she's noticing, that I don't understand what was meant by "erasing.")
Can anybody on the flist think of femslash pairings where this sort of thing might happen?
2) Or this seems like it could be linked to OTP-ism. Since one of the common tropes of OTP-ism is that all relationships pale in comparison to the OTP, of course Character A's real sexuality can only be that which pairs them with B. Since all relationships with the gender B isn't are by definition lesser, than A can't really be attracted to that gender. It's stupid logic, but that's OTP-ism for you. And since I don't read OTP-y fic, it'd explain why the fic I read/write has bi characters, or at least characters engaged in queer acts while only being seen as het in canon without being explicitly labelled as something other than bi.
I wonder if this could be systematically studied? Read a bunch of OTP fics, then quantitate the bi visibility somehow, and then do the same for a bunch of rarepair fics. The only femslash OTP I read on a significant enough basis is in DWP, though, and I hadn't noticed that those fics erased Nate--just mocked and marginalized him (as well they should).
3) Most m/m or f/f fic I read/write is about queer acts more than queer experience--the love of A for B rather than A coming to terms with her sexuality. In the fic I read, characters don't struggle with their sexual identity--whether it be straight, gay, or bi--and homophobia is largely absent. That's part of the fantasy.
Queer acts between two cisgendered persons have to be either homosexual or heterosexual (am I missing something?); bisexuality only becomes relevant when characters begin putting themselves in boxes. Most (but not all) fic I read/write isn't about that. "My" Dawn is absolutely bi (other characters might have other identities, or it might depend on the fic, although most are bi), but I might not manage (or even try) to make that clear in a particular fic.
In WNG Femslash, I looked at the sexual identities of some of the charcters in my fic. And there are characters who, to me, have constant sexual identities. Whenever I write Dawn, she's bi. Whenever I write Willow, she's gay. Buffy's straight in my head unless I'm writing her in a femslash pairing. But does the fact that Amanda and Vi have sex in Just Skin and its sequel First Time's Not the End of the World mean they're gay or bi or straight or what? Hell if I know.
In military fandoms like SG1/SGA, DADT also makes an emphasis on the queer experience more necessary than it would be in, say, Buffy, I think.
4) Asking why people who are interested in writing about the queer experience might tend not to write characters as bi is certainly an interesting question. Indeed, out of the hundreds of stories I've written, most of them femslash, I consider one of them, My Girlfriend is a Telepath, to be about the queer experience--and yes, sure enough, bisexuality is never mentioned.
But then the word "gay" is only used once in the entire story, by Kitty's brother in the IM conversation which closes the fic:rdwingzkikass: hey sis
arielsprite129: hey
rdwingzkikass: mom sez ur gay now?!1?
arielsprite129: i dunno. i guess. maybe.
rdwingzkikass: cool. B-]
rdwingzkikass: is she hot?
Similarly, the word "lesbian" is never mentioned either, although there are a couple uses of "dyke" by homophobic, mutant-phobic street hoodlums. So even in my story about the queer experience queerness as an identity is never utilized except from without--and every time it does, it's by objectifying males. It's a story about "repression and coming out," to use trobadora's words, but what is being released is not the knowledge that Kitty is bi or gay, but that she likes girls. Whether or not she likes boys never actually comes up. (Is that a sort of invisibility? I honestly don't know. If the deleted Bobby/Kitty kiss in X3 had been included in canon, would that have changed things? Possibly.)
While I'm sure there are cases of biphobia or mononormativity at work in some "coming out" stories, I'm not quite succeeding in imagining how the systemic process would work--which is probably a failure of imagination on my part. But there does seem to be enough of a pattern to assume that something systemic is going on. So I don't know.
5) It's not just my story; conversationally it's common to say "gay" and mean "queer," which adds to the problem. Fic often needs to be realistic about this or risks going into OOC territory; how would most canon characters refer to "not-straightness"? Which, yes, is a reflection of biphobia in the source text, which is a reflection of--and normalization of--biphobia in the real world. But I think trobadora's post may also be in part to actual uses of "gay" to mean "queer" on the parts of fans? (This problematic usage is probably common enough to not be nonstandard, unfortunately.)
6) How much is this linked to our sucky classificatory schema? I'm still trying to struggle with what was mean by "erasing" a gender. Femslash generally isn't about men; m/m slash isn't about women. Now obviously fics can and do contain both m/m and f/f pairings within the same fic, but the way our genre system leads us to think about a fic being either about a m/m pairing or about an f/f pairing or about a het pairing or about plot (i.e., gen) is extremely problematic, as I and others have argued at length before. Is this leading into bi invisibility in fic?
7) How is this related to who's writing the fic? We can explain bi and lesbian writers erasing women in m/m fic either as biphobia or as misogyny. Do we even need as complicated an explanation for the straight women who may be erasing women in m/m fic? And if I'm erasing men in my m/m, misandry strikes me as a more likely culprit than biphobia (but then I'm the worst person to judge, being me).
8) trobadora is right that WNG is less common than it used to be in the sense that you'll rarely find explicit denials that a m/m or f/f calls into question a character's straightness anymore. But I don't think the successor to WNG is a bunch of stories where the characters are explicitly gay--or if it is, then that's the second-wave successor while we're in the fourth wave or such. I think in a postmodern slash environment where everyone's potentially slashable, where there's probably an entire comm for Dumbledore/Sorting Hat, the old categories are just assumed to not apply anymore. And I think this is why biphobia and OTP-ism might go together, because with an OTP everyone's not potentially slashable; instead, it's something specific about those two characters. It's a more mordernist aesthetic.
Also, again, the existence of DADT exacerbates the problem in military fandoms--it makes the "not caring about sexual identities" thing literally impossible.
9) I find myself getting flummoxed by terminology, because straight != 100% straight, only ever attracted to the opposite gender. I'm not so much as agnostic as to whether 100% straight people exist as I find the very question to be a dangerous reification of the Kinsey scale: it assumes sexuality can be quantified, that we can possibly mean something by the English phrase "one hundred percent straight" when really, we can't. I find myself not wanting to homophobically deny my same-sex attraction but at the same time not acting like the fact I wouldn't turn down phone sex with David Tennant makes me bi--not because I don't want to be bi but because I'm just not, and I don't want to appropriate someone else's identity. (And this is true on the other side of the scale, too: is the assumption that all talk of gayness constitutes bi invisibility itself a medium of bi invisibility? Because obviously gay != 100% gay any more than straight = 100% straight.)
1) This is so not my experience--but OTOH, I'm filtering it through het male privilege, so it could just be there and I'm not noticing it. I wondered if this could be an issue with m/m slash more than slash in the broadest sense, but trobadora said in response to nymphaea1's suggestion that bi invisibility in m/m fic could be a manifestation of misogyny that she saw femslashers "erasing men" (from canon characters' sexual lives, I'm assuming?), though. (And makes me think that I'm just not noticing what she's noticing, that I don't understand what was meant by "erasing.")
Can anybody on the flist think of femslash pairings where this sort of thing might happen?
2) Or this seems like it could be linked to OTP-ism. Since one of the common tropes of OTP-ism is that all relationships pale in comparison to the OTP, of course Character A's real sexuality can only be that which pairs them with B. Since all relationships with the gender B isn't are by definition lesser, than A can't really be attracted to that gender. It's stupid logic, but that's OTP-ism for you. And since I don't read OTP-y fic, it'd explain why the fic I read/write has bi characters, or at least characters engaged in queer acts while only being seen as het in canon without being explicitly labelled as something other than bi.
I wonder if this could be systematically studied? Read a bunch of OTP fics, then quantitate the bi visibility somehow, and then do the same for a bunch of rarepair fics. The only femslash OTP I read on a significant enough basis is in DWP, though, and I hadn't noticed that those fics erased Nate--just mocked and marginalized him (as well they should).
3) Most m/m or f/f fic I read/write is about queer acts more than queer experience--the love of A for B rather than A coming to terms with her sexuality. In the fic I read, characters don't struggle with their sexual identity--whether it be straight, gay, or bi--and homophobia is largely absent. That's part of the fantasy.
Queer acts between two cisgendered persons have to be either homosexual or heterosexual (am I missing something?); bisexuality only becomes relevant when characters begin putting themselves in boxes. Most (but not all) fic I read/write isn't about that. "My" Dawn is absolutely bi (other characters might have other identities, or it might depend on the fic, although most are bi), but I might not manage (or even try) to make that clear in a particular fic.
In WNG Femslash, I looked at the sexual identities of some of the charcters in my fic. And there are characters who, to me, have constant sexual identities. Whenever I write Dawn, she's bi. Whenever I write Willow, she's gay. Buffy's straight in my head unless I'm writing her in a femslash pairing. But does the fact that Amanda and Vi have sex in Just Skin and its sequel First Time's Not the End of the World mean they're gay or bi or straight or what? Hell if I know.
In military fandoms like SG1/SGA, DADT also makes an emphasis on the queer experience more necessary than it would be in, say, Buffy, I think.
4) Asking why people who are interested in writing about the queer experience might tend not to write characters as bi is certainly an interesting question. Indeed, out of the hundreds of stories I've written, most of them femslash, I consider one of them, My Girlfriend is a Telepath, to be about the queer experience--and yes, sure enough, bisexuality is never mentioned.
But then the word "gay" is only used once in the entire story, by Kitty's brother in the IM conversation which closes the fic:rdwingzkikass: hey sis
arielsprite129: hey
rdwingzkikass: mom sez ur gay now?!1?
arielsprite129: i dunno. i guess. maybe.
rdwingzkikass: cool. B-]
rdwingzkikass: is she hot?
Similarly, the word "lesbian" is never mentioned either, although there are a couple uses of "dyke" by homophobic, mutant-phobic street hoodlums. So even in my story about the queer experience queerness as an identity is never utilized except from without--and every time it does, it's by objectifying males. It's a story about "repression and coming out," to use trobadora's words, but what is being released is not the knowledge that Kitty is bi or gay, but that she likes girls. Whether or not she likes boys never actually comes up. (Is that a sort of invisibility? I honestly don't know. If the deleted Bobby/Kitty kiss in X3 had been included in canon, would that have changed things? Possibly.)
While I'm sure there are cases of biphobia or mononormativity at work in some "coming out" stories, I'm not quite succeeding in imagining how the systemic process would work--which is probably a failure of imagination on my part. But there does seem to be enough of a pattern to assume that something systemic is going on. So I don't know.
5) It's not just my story; conversationally it's common to say "gay" and mean "queer," which adds to the problem. Fic often needs to be realistic about this or risks going into OOC territory; how would most canon characters refer to "not-straightness"? Which, yes, is a reflection of biphobia in the source text, which is a reflection of--and normalization of--biphobia in the real world. But I think trobadora's post may also be in part to actual uses of "gay" to mean "queer" on the parts of fans? (This problematic usage is probably common enough to not be nonstandard, unfortunately.)
6) How much is this linked to our sucky classificatory schema? I'm still trying to struggle with what was mean by "erasing" a gender. Femslash generally isn't about men; m/m slash isn't about women. Now obviously fics can and do contain both m/m and f/f pairings within the same fic, but the way our genre system leads us to think about a fic being either about a m/m pairing or about an f/f pairing or about a het pairing or about plot (i.e., gen) is extremely problematic, as I and others have argued at length before. Is this leading into bi invisibility in fic?
7) How is this related to who's writing the fic? We can explain bi and lesbian writers erasing women in m/m fic either as biphobia or as misogyny. Do we even need as complicated an explanation for the straight women who may be erasing women in m/m fic? And if I'm erasing men in my m/m, misandry strikes me as a more likely culprit than biphobia (but then I'm the worst person to judge, being me).
8) trobadora is right that WNG is less common than it used to be in the sense that you'll rarely find explicit denials that a m/m or f/f calls into question a character's straightness anymore. But I don't think the successor to WNG is a bunch of stories where the characters are explicitly gay--or if it is, then that's the second-wave successor while we're in the fourth wave or such. I think in a postmodern slash environment where everyone's potentially slashable, where there's probably an entire comm for Dumbledore/Sorting Hat, the old categories are just assumed to not apply anymore. And I think this is why biphobia and OTP-ism might go together, because with an OTP everyone's not potentially slashable; instead, it's something specific about those two characters. It's a more mordernist aesthetic.
Also, again, the existence of DADT exacerbates the problem in military fandoms--it makes the "not caring about sexual identities" thing literally impossible.
9) I find myself getting flummoxed by terminology, because straight != 100% straight, only ever attracted to the opposite gender. I'm not so much as agnostic as to whether 100% straight people exist as I find the very question to be a dangerous reification of the Kinsey scale: it assumes sexuality can be quantified, that we can possibly mean something by the English phrase "one hundred percent straight" when really, we can't. I find myself not wanting to homophobically deny my same-sex attraction but at the same time not acting like the fact I wouldn't turn down phone sex with David Tennant makes me bi--not because I don't want to be bi but because I'm just not, and I don't want to appropriate someone else's identity. (And this is true on the other side of the scale, too: is the assumption that all talk of gayness constitutes bi invisibility itself a medium of bi invisibility? Because obviously gay != 100% gay any more than straight = 100% straight.)