Femslash and the Lesbian Experience. Which Is Clearly Not My Experience.
So my reaction to the big m/m meta discussions going on has been basically, "Well, I'm glad I write alongside queer female writers about queer female characters for the benefit of a queer female audience." (Part of the reason for this is that I'm in the middle of a job search, so I don't have the time or the energy for a real opinion. If anyone knows of opportunities in the Philly/South Jersey region, do tell.) Not that the position I do occupy is unproblematic, but it's sort of problematic in fairly obvious ways we can all agree upon and don't require massive amounts of discussion.
But then my fellow femslashers have spoken up and the conversation has mutated in various ways and suddenly, I have thoughts. Because obviously m/m slash and femslash are different than and similar to each other in many complicated and different ways ( many of which I've discussed repeatedly before), but my impression has always been that in more or less exactly the way that m/m slash isn't actually about real-world gay men (in a way that some interlocutors have found problematic, to say the least), femslash isn't about lesbians. (Obviously, the corollary to that is that femslash is about lesbians in all the ways m/m slash is about gay men. My purpose isn't to erase queerness.)
Obviously, I am not at all remotely qualified to speak to whether femslash accurately reflects The Lesbian Experience. So this is your invitation to tell me that I'm totally wrong. This post on femslash and the lesbian experience (eta: now locked, presumably in response to accusations of biphobia, although still much discussed throughout the LJ-meta-sphere) by freifraufischer, linked on
metafandom, clearly indicates* that there's at least one queer female femslasher who would presumably disagree with the hypothesis put forth above. And it's interesting the ways in which she frames femslash writing in ways which seem foreign to this particular het male femslasher, such as her assertion that most "unrealistic" femslash fics are evidenced by bad writing: just stop by any femslash porn battle and you'll find plenty of incredibly well-written but not-at-all-realistic ficlets. (Putting aside for the moment the question of just what realism would even look like when one is slashing a Vampire Slayer with a vampire or werewolf.)
[*ETA, now that the post in question is no longer accessible: "The higher percentage of femslash stories that reflect aspects of lesbian culture beyond the purely sexual make it an expression of the lesbian community. In so much that there are straight women, and men, who write femslash they appear more likely to make some effort towards expressing true aspects of LGBT culture, as opposed to writing pure fantasy that has little relation to gay culture." I'm deeply saddened that I can't find, floating around the internets anywhere, the quote about how any fic in which C.J. Cregg picked up Sam Carter in a bar would automatically have to be badly written.]
[ETA2: I've just come across this post, "Professional Lesbians . . . and Fanfic" which goes on at length about the sorts of unrealisticness she dislikes for not adequately living up to certain elements of the lesbian experience--the tacit assumption being, of course, that it should.]
It makes sense to me, in a more-or-less purely theoretical way (I don't think it actually is a purely theoretical way, because I have been a member of this community and one of you for many years, and at least to some degree have learned your ways, but het male privilege is all-pervasive) that may be totally wrong, that a predominately queer female body of writers writing for a predominately queer female audience about characters who are in some sense or another queer and female doesn't require them focusing on how they are representing themselves (because the people to whom they are representing themselves are themselves), or at least not how they are representing themselves in any way which requires realism. Rather that which is being represented is a set of hopes and dreams, fears and fantasies. It's not a mirror that's intended to exist without distortion; indeed, given the grim reality of so many queer female lives, it'd be the source of much pain and anguish if it were. Femslash, no less than m/m slash, is frequently a genre of escapist literature (although, of course, it doesn't have to be, and it can be in ways other than the immediately obvious).
Femslash, I thought, is primarily about female pleasure, both as medium and as message. Of course, female pleasure is no less political a goal than representation is--cue the Hélène Cixous Laugh of the Medusa song-and-dance:We've been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we've been made victims of the old fool's game: each one will love the other sex. I'll give you your body and you'll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them? Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word 'silence', the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word 'impossible' and writes it as 'the end.'
(In one sense, it seems self-evident that femslash lives up to this ideal in a way that m/m slash does not; on the other hand, that acknowledgment seems to have something of the "we should all become lesbians" sentiment to it which characterized second-wave feminism** at its worst.)
[**ObDisclaimer: Wave-terminology erases feminist history; feminism never stops happening.]
I keep thinking back to my meta post of two years ago, Gazes in/and/of Criticism, in which I attempt to compare the desiring elements of both the het male and queer female gazes (assuming for the moment that we're breaking with Freud and Lacan enough to even posit that a female gaze is a possible subject position to begin with, as ithiliana notes in her post on fetishization). Of course, femslash is about much more than just a desiring gaze; it's also about agency (and the fantasy of agency) and about female characters (albeit characters who, although female, were probably written and created by het white men) being themselves (which in itself can be a radical act): women are desiring, women are desired, and women also get to do things which have little to nothing to do with desire before and after all the desiring. But I do think there is something "fetishistic," insofar as I understand that concept (linked gacked from ithiliana), with what queer women (and people who are not queer women, like me) are doing with fictional(ized) female characters in femslash. They're (and we're) playing with them like dolls. I just don't think that's especially problematic in and of itself.
(And may I say that all the google hits for "queer female gaze" which aren't me--and I'm glad to see that I'm not at the top--all look incredibly interesting?)
Now what the implications for the m/m debate are, in which the representations of--I hesitate to say "an other," because men are the default, unmarked gender and many (if not most) of the writers of m/m slash are queer, so they clearly aren't Other in the Lacanian psychoanalytic sense--but the representations of a group of people who are not the same people as the writers or the readers, and who likewise hold an oppressed position in relation to the patriarchy--are used to replace the fantastic (meaning not realistic, but also fantastic in a psychoanalytic sense) representations of the writers/readers that we get with femslash, I don't claim to know. But I did want to write down my thoughts on the femslash discussion, say a bit about how I frame femslash as a genre, and give a chance for queer women in the femslash community/ies to tell me I'm totally wrong.
(And while we're on the subject of female characters: less than eight hours until "Epitaph Two"!)
This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/327701.html. There are currently
comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.
But then my fellow femslashers have spoken up and the conversation has mutated in various ways and suddenly, I have thoughts. Because obviously m/m slash and femslash are different than and similar to each other in many complicated and different ways ( many of which I've discussed repeatedly before), but my impression has always been that in more or less exactly the way that m/m slash isn't actually about real-world gay men (in a way that some interlocutors have found problematic, to say the least), femslash isn't about lesbians. (Obviously, the corollary to that is that femslash is about lesbians in all the ways m/m slash is about gay men. My purpose isn't to erase queerness.)
Obviously, I am not at all remotely qualified to speak to whether femslash accurately reflects The Lesbian Experience. So this is your invitation to tell me that I'm totally wrong. This post on femslash and the lesbian experience (eta: now locked, presumably in response to accusations of biphobia, although still much discussed throughout the LJ-meta-sphere) by freifraufischer, linked on
metafandom, clearly indicates* that there's at least one queer female femslasher who would presumably disagree with the hypothesis put forth above. And it's interesting the ways in which she frames femslash writing in ways which seem foreign to this particular het male femslasher, such as her assertion that most "unrealistic" femslash fics are evidenced by bad writing: just stop by any femslash porn battle and you'll find plenty of incredibly well-written but not-at-all-realistic ficlets. (Putting aside for the moment the question of just what realism would even look like when one is slashing a Vampire Slayer with a vampire or werewolf.)
[*ETA, now that the post in question is no longer accessible: "The higher percentage of femslash stories that reflect aspects of lesbian culture beyond the purely sexual make it an expression of the lesbian community. In so much that there are straight women, and men, who write femslash they appear more likely to make some effort towards expressing true aspects of LGBT culture, as opposed to writing pure fantasy that has little relation to gay culture." I'm deeply saddened that I can't find, floating around the internets anywhere, the quote about how any fic in which C.J. Cregg picked up Sam Carter in a bar would automatically have to be badly written.]
[ETA2: I've just come across this post, "Professional Lesbians . . . and Fanfic" which goes on at length about the sorts of unrealisticness she dislikes for not adequately living up to certain elements of the lesbian experience--the tacit assumption being, of course, that it should.]
It makes sense to me, in a more-or-less purely theoretical way (I don't think it actually is a purely theoretical way, because I have been a member of this community and one of you for many years, and at least to some degree have learned your ways, but het male privilege is all-pervasive) that may be totally wrong, that a predominately queer female body of writers writing for a predominately queer female audience about characters who are in some sense or another queer and female doesn't require them focusing on how they are representing themselves (because the people to whom they are representing themselves are themselves), or at least not how they are representing themselves in any way which requires realism. Rather that which is being represented is a set of hopes and dreams, fears and fantasies. It's not a mirror that's intended to exist without distortion; indeed, given the grim reality of so many queer female lives, it'd be the source of much pain and anguish if it were. Femslash, no less than m/m slash, is frequently a genre of escapist literature (although, of course, it doesn't have to be, and it can be in ways other than the immediately obvious).
Femslash, I thought, is primarily about female pleasure, both as medium and as message. Of course, female pleasure is no less political a goal than representation is--cue the Hélène Cixous Laugh of the Medusa song-and-dance:We've been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we've been made victims of the old fool's game: each one will love the other sex. I'll give you your body and you'll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them? Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word 'silence', the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word 'impossible' and writes it as 'the end.'
(In one sense, it seems self-evident that femslash lives up to this ideal in a way that m/m slash does not; on the other hand, that acknowledgment seems to have something of the "we should all become lesbians" sentiment to it which characterized second-wave feminism** at its worst.)
[**ObDisclaimer: Wave-terminology erases feminist history; feminism never stops happening.]
I keep thinking back to my meta post of two years ago, Gazes in/and/of Criticism, in which I attempt to compare the desiring elements of both the het male and queer female gazes (assuming for the moment that we're breaking with Freud and Lacan enough to even posit that a female gaze is a possible subject position to begin with, as ithiliana notes in her post on fetishization). Of course, femslash is about much more than just a desiring gaze; it's also about agency (and the fantasy of agency) and about female characters (albeit characters who, although female, were probably written and created by het white men) being themselves (which in itself can be a radical act): women are desiring, women are desired, and women also get to do things which have little to nothing to do with desire before and after all the desiring. But I do think there is something "fetishistic," insofar as I understand that concept (linked gacked from ithiliana), with what queer women (and people who are not queer women, like me) are doing with fictional(ized) female characters in femslash. They're (and we're) playing with them like dolls. I just don't think that's especially problematic in and of itself.
(And may I say that all the google hits for "queer female gaze" which aren't me--and I'm glad to see that I'm not at the top--all look incredibly interesting?)
Now what the implications for the m/m debate are, in which the representations of--I hesitate to say "an other," because men are the default, unmarked gender and many (if not most) of the writers of m/m slash are queer, so they clearly aren't Other in the Lacanian psychoanalytic sense--but the representations of a group of people who are not the same people as the writers or the readers, and who likewise hold an oppressed position in relation to the patriarchy--are used to replace the fantastic (meaning not realistic, but also fantastic in a psychoanalytic sense) representations of the writers/readers that we get with femslash, I don't claim to know. But I did want to write down my thoughts on the femslash discussion, say a bit about how I frame femslash as a genre, and give a chance for queer women in the femslash community/ies to tell me I'm totally wrong.
(And while we're on the subject of female characters: less than eight hours until "Epitaph Two"!)
This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/327701.html. There are currently
comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID, or here.