Bisexuality and Fanfic

[alixtii]

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

Comments

[peasant_]

The complaints about bi invisibility always strike me as being mostly related to insecurity about sexual identity - which is perfectly understandable, because pretty much everyone with a minority sexuality (and probably quite a lot of normal people as well) is insecure about their sexual identity and hence touchy on the subject of 'invisibility'. How you get from that to an actual 'phobia', or accusations of 'prejudice', I don't know. If people are specifically prejudiced against me for being bi as opposed to merely queer, then all I can say is I've never noticed it. And there seem to be plenty of bi people in the media, at least as many as vanilla homosexuals, so I've personally never felt particularly invisible. So I am rather bemused by the claim

[peasant_]

Also meant to say:

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).

Oh definitely misogny in my case. Never felt it was anything more complicated.

[executrix]

I think we have to read fanfic in the context of the larger media world, though. I'm mostly a m/m slasher, not because I think that women are unimportant or that women's bodies are unattractive, but because there are a lot of media products commercially available dealing with m/f relationships. (As to why I don't write a lot of f/f slash, short answer is that I don't have vocabulary I'm comfortable with for women's sexual anatomy, physiology, and responses.)

[peasant_]

One thing I've learnt about slash - probably about all forms of writing - is that there is no single reason why people write it. Or no single reason beyond 'it gives me pleasure', the exact sources of that pleasure being innumerable.

When I say my motive is misogyny, I don't actually mean I think that is a bad thing. The main root of my 'misogyny' is that I live in a female dominated environment, and I write for escapism, including escapism from being female. So I write male dominated stories from a male POV. So when being slightly flippant with my old mate alixtii I will cheerfully claim that as misogyny, and doubtless he can deconstruct it in radical feminist terms to show aspects that are rooted in genuine societal based female-phobia. I'm not actually claiming to be a female hater though, or not very seriously

[st_crispins]

Not my experience either. In Man from UNCLE fandom, one or both of the guys (but especially Solo) is more likely to be cast as bi- than truly gay.

[lunabee34]

I think that in much of the fanfic that I currently read, the characters are represented as bisexual by default and that like you say in your post, the focus is on queer acts, not coming to terms with newfound gayness.

But when I first got into fandom (Buffy), most of what I read was about Xander discovering he is gay and going through that existential angst and forging a relationship with Spike. Lots and lots of We're Not Gay in that segment of the Jossverse and it's a trope I've sincerely come to despise. I find stories now and again that fall into that genre that I enjoy but they are very few and far between. Mostly I find the whole concept very insulting.

One of the things I notice in femslash is that I've rarely come across the We're Not Gay trope there. I hesitate to say it doesn't exist, because, dude, internet huge, but I can't think of a single femslash piece I've read that falls into that category. I wonder why. *muses* I'd love to find some femslash like that for comparison's sake.

[alixtii]

Hmm, yes, my post WNG Femslash was all about that--because I, too, noticed the lack of WNG in femslash. (Indeed, that lack is one of the first things I point to when I argue that m/m slash and femslash are radically different beasts, as I do regularly.) We discuss why there's no WNG Femslash at length in the comments, but I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that a lot of femslash is written by queer women, which cuts down on the homophobic versions of WNG.

I suppose I could still see the kink-based, non-homophobic (or at least less homophobic) "our love is so great it transcends sexuality" versions of WNG operating in some femslash--I could see it working well in some Buffy/Faith, for example--but as you note, I haven't seen it. (It strikes me that the more OTP-y a pairing is, the more easily I can imagine WNG-ing it. I discuss the relationship between femslash and OTPs here.)

[executrix]

I think it's because for a lot of people, feelings about same-sex romantic attachments and sexual acts are mixed up with feelings about masculinity. A lot of male characters angst over not only having sexual relations(hips) with other males but over loss of masculinity, which is also status. (And a lot of ficwriters find it necessary to make one partner in a male/male relationship figuratively--or literally--barefoot, pregnant, and stuck in the kitchen.)

It's a lot harder to lose femininity, because not only is it a default position but most societies are set up so that masculinity is considered an Important Big Deal but femininity gets much less thought.

[lunabee34]

I think that's a very cogent argument.

[chasingtides]

If you're looking for femmeslash that erases men, I would direct you to a lot of the femmeslash in the Harry Potter fandom. While I'm bisexual and was, at one point, active in the Harry Potte femmeslash community, they often go to great lengths to erase the men, especially after the epilogue was so heavy handed with het pairings

[blackjackrocket]

Can anybody on the flist think of femslash pairings where this sort of thing might happen?

Revolutionary Girl Utena, but that series has the most elaborate relationship charts I've ever considered.

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.But in that fervent of OTPism there's also the matter that any relationships the characters have outside the OTP don't matter, no matter the orientation