a proper meta essay, for once - on the recent debate about women writing m/m romance
So metafandom's been giving me a headache recently, first with all the "LOL fan studies"/anti-academic stuff that's been coming out of the Yuletide/AO3/OTW discussions (which I was going to make a big ranty post about, before deciding that it was just another jet of urine in the embarrassing defensive pissing contests that acafen have been responding with, so have the short version: there's nothing in this world that's not worth trying to understand better, fandom included, and I've got no time for anyone who thinks otherwise), and now the ongoing debate over m/m romance and appropriation.
With the exception of a few voices that are starting to emerge now, pretty much this entire discussion is making me feel alienated and tetchy. I'm struggling to locate something I recognise as my sexuality, my sexual identity, my fannish practice and my responses to both fic and source material in these exchanges, and this frustrates me; it's also leaving me uncertain and unsettled as to my response to the issues raised.
Obviously, because I am by nature a neurotic overthinker and we're dealing with things here that are extremely important to me, I've been wanting to work through and get feedback on where I'm at in my thinking; I've been hesitant to post about it, though, mostly because I honestly feel that when there's a discussion going on about problematic behaviour by members of a group, it's profoundly unhelpful for other members to speak up and say, "well, but I'm not like that" - it doesn't matter how much truth there is in it; it just deflects from where there is a problem. It doesn't help anyone but yourself. In this discussion, though, I ultimately think there is some value in contributing that kind of perspective, because I think the fact that it's gone ignored is problematic in itself.
To begin with, a couple of things that I agree with unreservedly:
1. As far as what (I think?) started it all is concerned: the entitlement and privilege that some straight cis writers showed upon learning that one LGBT space would rather they didn't come in was staggeringly ugly and a whole world of Not OK.
2. Using the lives and stories of marginalised people to tell a story or work through issues that are actually All About Non-Marginalised (or at least, not in the same way) You is appropriative. That is not the same as saying that Non-Marginalised You is not "allowed" to write such stories; it is saying that maybe Non-Marginalised You should think about whether you should write them. It is also not remotely the same as saying "straight people cannot write about gay people ever/cis people cannot write about trans people ever" (wow, shades of RaceFail09 again, sigh); it is saying that there are ways of writing about LGBT people that are more problematic than other ways. There are plenty of ways that straight cis people can write (comparatively) unproblematically about LGBT people; they just might require a bit more work.
So. Not only do I agree that this trend of female-authored m/m original romance/erotica is potentially problematic, I also think that - while I understand absolutely where they're coming from and I do have a degree of sympathy with the position - the attempt to dodge accusations of stereotyping, lack of realism, lack of genuine representation of gay men and gay male lives in these texts by saying to queer male critics, "this is not about you; this is fiction written by women for women", actually makes it seem more problematic, not less, at least as long as we're talking about appropriation.
In fact, I'm really growing to hate that framing, no matter which side of the debate brings it up - but for more reasons than just the above, and this is where my tetchiness starts.
I want to add my voice to some of the others that are starting to speak up, and say that I'm pretty damn frustrated at the fact that queer fans are being repeatedly written out of this discussion - that there are a lot of configurations of sexuality and identity forming part of the kinds of trends and practices being discussed (the proportion of LGBT fans and slash writers on my flist alone is pretty huge, and I really doubt I'm that unrepresentative a sample), and yet time after time they're being collapsed and elided into a "straight cis women writing gay men" dynamic. I'm frustrated not just because I feel I and my friends are being made invisible, but also because I do think there are non-trivially different issues at play when you're talking about queer fans writing.
For example, I've seen a good deal of mockery from queer critics of m/m romance and/or slash of the claim by its writers that it's subversive - and to an extent I see where they're coming from, insofar as "subversive" implies that it's actually having any meaningful effect towards social change, which I don't think is a claim that you can make. At the same time, giving no credence whatsoever to the idea that this practice does have something to do with heteronormativity in mainstream media invalidates the motivations of a swathe of queer fans - or at the very least, this queer fan right here. While it may not be precisely subversive, slash for me is very much reactive, and an expression of frustration and complaint at the heteronormativity of the mainstream media landscape; writing it and reading it absolutely comes from a place of desiring, as a queer woman, stories that are, quite simply, Not Heterosexual. It comes from a place of wanting to find and create narratives of sex and romance that not only sit outside the heterosexual paradigm, but also sit outside the complex of discourses and tropes in storytelling and representation that have emerged from and in turn reinforce it; I write and read slash because I want to make more fluid the constructed boundaries of Where (and Between Whom) Sex and Sexual Attraction Can Happen, to explore situations where chemistry and intensity of emotional connection isn't automatically precluded from becoming/being sexual purely because of the genders of the people involved. And though I am speaking for myself here, I highly doubt I'm alone in this.
I've also seen a lot of scorn directed at the idea of wanting sexual/romantic narratives "where gender just isn't an issue" - and again, I see and understand where it rankles; "gender/sexuality-blindness" smacks of that kind of fuzzy liberal thinking that glosses over actual identity politics and actual social discourses and structures. BUT, and this time it's a big but (heh), speaking as a woman who identifies as bisexual (although I rarely get into arguments over it with people who, thanks to my life partner being a woman, read me as a lesbian)...the idea of gender not being an issue is a big part of how I understand my queer identity. If I write and read about people or characters who don't identify strongly with the idea of an orientation, and who don't care about the gender of their partners, that is me expressing and engaging with what for me it means to be queer. Although I haven't really done enough thinking on the subject to say this with too much conviction, I feel like bisexual identity politics are perhaps different from gay and lesbian identity politics, and that this is causing a disconnect between queer critics (a lot of whom seem to identify as monosexual) and queer fans (a lot of whom identify as bisexual) that's complicating the issues at hand in ways that aren't being fully acknowledged, because, well: elision of queer fans (and can I just say, by the way, how utterly fucking thrilled I am, and when I say utterly fucking thrilled I mean a big fuck you to anyone who's implied this, to have seen bisexual women dismissed as "not queer enough" in this discussion).
I want to make clear that as far as I'm concerned, none of this automatically precludes the results of this kind of exploration and engagement being problematic, and being queer neither gives you a free pass for writing queer people offensively nor gives you any kind of magic ability not to; I understand that motivation and intention don't mean much when someone's done something harmful. But first of all, I feel like a lot of critique I've seen has been contingent on motivation, and secondly, I think the different place that queer fans might be coming from is worth highlighting anyway, because the discussion at the moment is silencing and dismissing a sizeable number of queer people in its assumption, construction, and projection of motivations.
You may have noticed so far that I've been unclear or inconsistent in the type of writing that I've been talking about; that's a reflection on the state of the debate I'm engaging with, which started off addressing a very particular genre of pro fiction that I'm given to understand should be referred to as m/m romance, and that as far as I can tell is defined as original romance or erotic fiction centring on gay male relationships and written by women (not necessarily straight and/or cis women, I don't think), and somewhere along the line has implicitly stretched to include any representation of gay men not authored by gay men, and more often than not maleslash. And here we have source of tetchiness #2.
I think, when it comes to the kind of discussions of appropriation and fetishisation we're having, maleslash and m/m romance are different kettles of fish. I say that not to argue that one is problematic where the other isn't, even though I've very much got a horse in one race and not in the other. I do think, though, that they require different conversations. There've been some important and resonant critiques that have come from a perspective of unease with the huge emphasis on sex and relationships in maleslash and m/m romance, suggesting that it taps into broader oppressive cultural discourses that construct gay men as hypersexual and aggressively sexual; I think the issue is complicated with respect to maleslash, though, by the fact that to some extent you have to see maleslash as an extension of or supplement to its source text, concerned with providing what the source text does not - i.e., the actual consummation of relationships. Characters are not necessarily being reduced to their sex lives, but perhaps to some extent their sex lives are being filled in by fandom. The crucial issues of power and dominance are slightly different, meanwhile, in that m/m romance can be seen to be encroaching on the sales, the circulation, and the cultural voices of gay male authors; I'm not sure you can say that slash does the same thing. The idea of reaction against, even if not subversion of, heteronormativity I've discussed already is much more pronounced and central to slash fiction than to m/m romance, because slash fiction is directly a response to media products. Generally speaking, in fact, you're dealing with two very different types of writing in fan fiction and original fiction - I'm convinced and I will maintain that fic is as close a cousin of meta and literary criticism as it is a cousin of original fiction; it is a comment on existing texts, a way of articulating a response to a text and an understanding of a text. As far as representation in slash is concerned, it's not necessarily most productive to understand it as the creation and exploration of a notional gay man and his notional life in the same way as original fiction can be understood; it's as much an expression of what someone has read or seen in a text or character.
Again, some qualifications: that's not to say that someone's response to a text can't be subject to critique - I certainly think the concept of slash goggles could bear interrogation. This isn't to say also that slash writers don't equally much have a responsibility to avoid stereotype and offensiveness in their writing (although I would say that I am not sure the demand of being faithful to the real life experiences of contemporary or historical gay men has quite the same primacy; authenticity to the storyworld and the characters in question plays a part too). And most of all, I don't want to give the impression that the product of this kind of writing and interaction with texts isn't often consumed basically as porn in a similar way to the way original m/m erotica is, because it is, and so the issue of fetishisation and objectification is very much still at play. That said, though, I think the two kinds of writing raise different issues, and I don't think it's necessarily helpful to talk about them both at the same time - not least because time and words are being wasted talking at cross-purposes. I think a derailing hostility is also being produced by the fact that a lot of the people critiquing m/m romance and slash at the same time are demonstrably unfamiliar with fan fiction; fans are getting defensive not only because of the awkward connotations of men, queer or not, seeming to police female sexuality (note: I don't think this is remotely what's happening, but as has been discussed a lot by now I think it's definitely being perceived), but because they're perceiving something that seems even more guaranteed to put their backs up: outsiders talking about fandom.
I've been happiest reading posts that are clear about the precise dynamics and the precise texts they're talking about, that explicitly either exclude or differentiate queer fans and slash, rather than just eliding them; still, though, I'm feeling a third kind of tetchiness that persists even through that, and that's related to how the discussion of the sexual desires &c. at play are being framed. My thinking on this aspect of things isn't anywhere near as clear - it's a much more shapeless sense of :/ I'm feeling, but I think in the end it boils down to feeling like a lot of the concepts being knocked about are either kind of reductive or kind of fuzzy. I don't like the discourse about women writers projecting themselves into m/m sexual encounters, out of reluctance to write about or talk about or think about their own bodies and the kind of sex that they do or would have - disregarding the problematic variable of lesbian or straight male slash writers, I think my :/ comes from the fact that as I see it, the idea that writing about two men fucking represents a deflection of the female-attracted-to-men writer's sexuality assumes a bizarrely limited understanding of sexuality. Is voyeurism, for example, not understood as a valid part of someone's sexual make-up? I, TMI, would take issue with that. Does the act of writing about, thinking about, talking about something that you find sexually arousing not "count" as confronting or engaging with your own sexuality? (I'd also be interested to see whether a lot of the discourses and formulations about female sexuality that have emerged from this discussion can accommodate straight women writing femslash (which, comme toujours, has been made largely invisible by the definitions of slash people have been working with, but nm). Does that raise similar issues of appropriation and fetishisation?) Are the issues re. objectification, meanwhile, different if you think about what's going on as a negotiation of ways of desiring, looking at, sexualising, men rather than gay men specifically - if you think about slash and m/m romance as a way of finding a language or a gaze for expressing female desire for men? Of course, there's nothing stopping women from producing that by writing heterosexual romance, and you do have to confront the fact that a) gay male narratives and experiences are being co-opted for the purpose, and b) that for many people that's the point, it's necessary. That latter's been framed a lot in terms of kink, fetishisation and objectification, writers being positioned as fetishising "two men fucking" rather than responding to two particular men as fully rounded individuals...but, idk, I'm struggling to locate the line between fetishistic sexuality and non-fetishistic sexuality, especially when we're talking about fetishising genders, a configuration of genders, or a configuration of genitals. Because, and I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse or oblique here, speaking as someone who does not have monosexuality as part of their sexual makeup and does not intuitively "get" it (whether exclusively hetero- or exclusively homo-)...there's a distinction at play here that I don't think I'm quite grasping. I'm not sure I see "finding two men having sex arousing generally" as necessarily a kink or a fetish, in the same way that I don't see "finding only men arousing generally" as a kink or a fetish, i.e. where in both cases the gender is the salient point. Idk, I worry I'm not making myself clear here, but this is the best I can do.
Like I said, I've not fully worked through that tetchiness, and I think by now I'm starting to derail, which I don't want to do - I think it's incredibly important to subject both m/m romance and slash to critique; I've certainly grown more inclined to interrogate it and make sure to be careful and critical in my own participation as I've grown older and more aware of the issues and dynamics at play. But ultimately I do want to say, and I do think it's important to say, that in this discussion there's a reductiveness in the framing of sexuality, sexual makeup and identity politics that I find troubling, and an erasure and silencing of some queer voices that I find really troubling - and that they touch on issues of biphobia/bisexual invisibility and problematic conceptualisations of female sexuality that I really don't think should go ignored, not even in the service of an overarching pertinent critique.
Even with all those words, I don't think I've even scratched the surface of what interests and excites and worries me about these issues, and I'm definitely still at a preliminary stage in my thinking, open to discussion and revision. It's inspired me to dust off my queer theory brain, though, and I might end up channeling the churning of my thoughts on this into some kind of paper on queerness and fandom for a Call for Papers I saw recently that may or may not involve an exploration of Sherlock Holmes and the issues that converge on the concept of "bromance" ¬_¬
Speaking of work, I am currently thoroughly embroiled in a mid-thesis crisis which I am struggling to keep on top of (essentially: I've been forced to come to the conclusion that while the content and ideas I've got are fine, the structure I've been working to for the past year and a bit is fundamentally ill-suited to producing useful work in a field that's moving as fast as mine is), to the point that I've actually requested an emergency meeting with my supervisor :/ I have been working on ways of resolving the issues that I think might work, but as my supervisor by a cruel twist of fate is away next week I can't okay them with him for a little while; if I seem absent, stressed, irritable or glum in the near future, then, that's why.
With the exception of a few voices that are starting to emerge now, pretty much this entire discussion is making me feel alienated and tetchy. I'm struggling to locate something I recognise as my sexuality, my sexual identity, my fannish practice and my responses to both fic and source material in these exchanges, and this frustrates me; it's also leaving me uncertain and unsettled as to my response to the issues raised.
Obviously, because I am by nature a neurotic overthinker and we're dealing with things here that are extremely important to me, I've been wanting to work through and get feedback on where I'm at in my thinking; I've been hesitant to post about it, though, mostly because I honestly feel that when there's a discussion going on about problematic behaviour by members of a group, it's profoundly unhelpful for other members to speak up and say, "well, but I'm not like that" - it doesn't matter how much truth there is in it; it just deflects from where there is a problem. It doesn't help anyone but yourself. In this discussion, though, I ultimately think there is some value in contributing that kind of perspective, because I think the fact that it's gone ignored is problematic in itself.
To begin with, a couple of things that I agree with unreservedly:
1. As far as what (I think?) started it all is concerned: the entitlement and privilege that some straight cis writers showed upon learning that one LGBT space would rather they didn't come in was staggeringly ugly and a whole world of Not OK.
2. Using the lives and stories of marginalised people to tell a story or work through issues that are actually All About Non-Marginalised (or at least, not in the same way) You is appropriative. That is not the same as saying that Non-Marginalised You is not "allowed" to write such stories; it is saying that maybe Non-Marginalised You should think about whether you should write them. It is also not remotely the same as saying "straight people cannot write about gay people ever/cis people cannot write about trans people ever" (wow, shades of RaceFail09 again, sigh); it is saying that there are ways of writing about LGBT people that are more problematic than other ways. There are plenty of ways that straight cis people can write (comparatively) unproblematically about LGBT people; they just might require a bit more work.
So. Not only do I agree that this trend of female-authored m/m original romance/erotica is potentially problematic, I also think that - while I understand absolutely where they're coming from and I do have a degree of sympathy with the position - the attempt to dodge accusations of stereotyping, lack of realism, lack of genuine representation of gay men and gay male lives in these texts by saying to queer male critics, "this is not about you; this is fiction written by women for women", actually makes it seem more problematic, not less, at least as long as we're talking about appropriation.
In fact, I'm really growing to hate that framing, no matter which side of the debate brings it up - but for more reasons than just the above, and this is where my tetchiness starts.
I want to add my voice to some of the others that are starting to speak up, and say that I'm pretty damn frustrated at the fact that queer fans are being repeatedly written out of this discussion - that there are a lot of configurations of sexuality and identity forming part of the kinds of trends and practices being discussed (the proportion of LGBT fans and slash writers on my flist alone is pretty huge, and I really doubt I'm that unrepresentative a sample), and yet time after time they're being collapsed and elided into a "straight cis women writing gay men" dynamic. I'm frustrated not just because I feel I and my friends are being made invisible, but also because I do think there are non-trivially different issues at play when you're talking about queer fans writing.
For example, I've seen a good deal of mockery from queer critics of m/m romance and/or slash of the claim by its writers that it's subversive - and to an extent I see where they're coming from, insofar as "subversive" implies that it's actually having any meaningful effect towards social change, which I don't think is a claim that you can make. At the same time, giving no credence whatsoever to the idea that this practice does have something to do with heteronormativity in mainstream media invalidates the motivations of a swathe of queer fans - or at the very least, this queer fan right here. While it may not be precisely subversive, slash for me is very much reactive, and an expression of frustration and complaint at the heteronormativity of the mainstream media landscape; writing it and reading it absolutely comes from a place of desiring, as a queer woman, stories that are, quite simply, Not Heterosexual. It comes from a place of wanting to find and create narratives of sex and romance that not only sit outside the heterosexual paradigm, but also sit outside the complex of discourses and tropes in storytelling and representation that have emerged from and in turn reinforce it; I write and read slash because I want to make more fluid the constructed boundaries of Where (and Between Whom) Sex and Sexual Attraction Can Happen, to explore situations where chemistry and intensity of emotional connection isn't automatically precluded from becoming/being sexual purely because of the genders of the people involved. And though I am speaking for myself here, I highly doubt I'm alone in this.
I've also seen a lot of scorn directed at the idea of wanting sexual/romantic narratives "where gender just isn't an issue" - and again, I see and understand where it rankles; "gender/sexuality-blindness" smacks of that kind of fuzzy liberal thinking that glosses over actual identity politics and actual social discourses and structures. BUT, and this time it's a big but (heh), speaking as a woman who identifies as bisexual (although I rarely get into arguments over it with people who, thanks to my life partner being a woman, read me as a lesbian)...the idea of gender not being an issue is a big part of how I understand my queer identity. If I write and read about people or characters who don't identify strongly with the idea of an orientation, and who don't care about the gender of their partners, that is me expressing and engaging with what for me it means to be queer. Although I haven't really done enough thinking on the subject to say this with too much conviction, I feel like bisexual identity politics are perhaps different from gay and lesbian identity politics, and that this is causing a disconnect between queer critics (a lot of whom seem to identify as monosexual) and queer fans (a lot of whom identify as bisexual) that's complicating the issues at hand in ways that aren't being fully acknowledged, because, well: elision of queer fans (and can I just say, by the way, how utterly fucking thrilled I am, and when I say utterly fucking thrilled I mean a big fuck you to anyone who's implied this, to have seen bisexual women dismissed as "not queer enough" in this discussion).
I want to make clear that as far as I'm concerned, none of this automatically precludes the results of this kind of exploration and engagement being problematic, and being queer neither gives you a free pass for writing queer people offensively nor gives you any kind of magic ability not to; I understand that motivation and intention don't mean much when someone's done something harmful. But first of all, I feel like a lot of critique I've seen has been contingent on motivation, and secondly, I think the different place that queer fans might be coming from is worth highlighting anyway, because the discussion at the moment is silencing and dismissing a sizeable number of queer people in its assumption, construction, and projection of motivations.
You may have noticed so far that I've been unclear or inconsistent in the type of writing that I've been talking about; that's a reflection on the state of the debate I'm engaging with, which started off addressing a very particular genre of pro fiction that I'm given to understand should be referred to as m/m romance, and that as far as I can tell is defined as original romance or erotic fiction centring on gay male relationships and written by women (not necessarily straight and/or cis women, I don't think), and somewhere along the line has implicitly stretched to include any representation of gay men not authored by gay men, and more often than not maleslash. And here we have source of tetchiness #2.
I think, when it comes to the kind of discussions of appropriation and fetishisation we're having, maleslash and m/m romance are different kettles of fish. I say that not to argue that one is problematic where the other isn't, even though I've very much got a horse in one race and not in the other. I do think, though, that they require different conversations. There've been some important and resonant critiques that have come from a perspective of unease with the huge emphasis on sex and relationships in maleslash and m/m romance, suggesting that it taps into broader oppressive cultural discourses that construct gay men as hypersexual and aggressively sexual; I think the issue is complicated with respect to maleslash, though, by the fact that to some extent you have to see maleslash as an extension of or supplement to its source text, concerned with providing what the source text does not - i.e., the actual consummation of relationships. Characters are not necessarily being reduced to their sex lives, but perhaps to some extent their sex lives are being filled in by fandom. The crucial issues of power and dominance are slightly different, meanwhile, in that m/m romance can be seen to be encroaching on the sales, the circulation, and the cultural voices of gay male authors; I'm not sure you can say that slash does the same thing. The idea of reaction against, even if not subversion of, heteronormativity I've discussed already is much more pronounced and central to slash fiction than to m/m romance, because slash fiction is directly a response to media products. Generally speaking, in fact, you're dealing with two very different types of writing in fan fiction and original fiction - I'm convinced and I will maintain that fic is as close a cousin of meta and literary criticism as it is a cousin of original fiction; it is a comment on existing texts, a way of articulating a response to a text and an understanding of a text. As far as representation in slash is concerned, it's not necessarily most productive to understand it as the creation and exploration of a notional gay man and his notional life in the same way as original fiction can be understood; it's as much an expression of what someone has read or seen in a text or character.
Again, some qualifications: that's not to say that someone's response to a text can't be subject to critique - I certainly think the concept of slash goggles could bear interrogation. This isn't to say also that slash writers don't equally much have a responsibility to avoid stereotype and offensiveness in their writing (although I would say that I am not sure the demand of being faithful to the real life experiences of contemporary or historical gay men has quite the same primacy; authenticity to the storyworld and the characters in question plays a part too). And most of all, I don't want to give the impression that the product of this kind of writing and interaction with texts isn't often consumed basically as porn in a similar way to the way original m/m erotica is, because it is, and so the issue of fetishisation and objectification is very much still at play. That said, though, I think the two kinds of writing raise different issues, and I don't think it's necessarily helpful to talk about them both at the same time - not least because time and words are being wasted talking at cross-purposes. I think a derailing hostility is also being produced by the fact that a lot of the people critiquing m/m romance and slash at the same time are demonstrably unfamiliar with fan fiction; fans are getting defensive not only because of the awkward connotations of men, queer or not, seeming to police female sexuality (note: I don't think this is remotely what's happening, but as has been discussed a lot by now I think it's definitely being perceived), but because they're perceiving something that seems even more guaranteed to put their backs up: outsiders talking about fandom.
I've been happiest reading posts that are clear about the precise dynamics and the precise texts they're talking about, that explicitly either exclude or differentiate queer fans and slash, rather than just eliding them; still, though, I'm feeling a third kind of tetchiness that persists even through that, and that's related to how the discussion of the sexual desires &c. at play are being framed. My thinking on this aspect of things isn't anywhere near as clear - it's a much more shapeless sense of :/ I'm feeling, but I think in the end it boils down to feeling like a lot of the concepts being knocked about are either kind of reductive or kind of fuzzy. I don't like the discourse about women writers projecting themselves into m/m sexual encounters, out of reluctance to write about or talk about or think about their own bodies and the kind of sex that they do or would have - disregarding the problematic variable of lesbian or straight male slash writers, I think my :/ comes from the fact that as I see it, the idea that writing about two men fucking represents a deflection of the female-attracted-to-men writer's sexuality assumes a bizarrely limited understanding of sexuality. Is voyeurism, for example, not understood as a valid part of someone's sexual make-up? I, TMI, would take issue with that. Does the act of writing about, thinking about, talking about something that you find sexually arousing not "count" as confronting or engaging with your own sexuality? (I'd also be interested to see whether a lot of the discourses and formulations about female sexuality that have emerged from this discussion can accommodate straight women writing femslash (which, comme toujours, has been made largely invisible by the definitions of slash people have been working with, but nm). Does that raise similar issues of appropriation and fetishisation?) Are the issues re. objectification, meanwhile, different if you think about what's going on as a negotiation of ways of desiring, looking at, sexualising, men rather than gay men specifically - if you think about slash and m/m romance as a way of finding a language or a gaze for expressing female desire for men? Of course, there's nothing stopping women from producing that by writing heterosexual romance, and you do have to confront the fact that a) gay male narratives and experiences are being co-opted for the purpose, and b) that for many people that's the point, it's necessary. That latter's been framed a lot in terms of kink, fetishisation and objectification, writers being positioned as fetishising "two men fucking" rather than responding to two particular men as fully rounded individuals...but, idk, I'm struggling to locate the line between fetishistic sexuality and non-fetishistic sexuality, especially when we're talking about fetishising genders, a configuration of genders, or a configuration of genitals. Because, and I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse or oblique here, speaking as someone who does not have monosexuality as part of their sexual makeup and does not intuitively "get" it (whether exclusively hetero- or exclusively homo-)...there's a distinction at play here that I don't think I'm quite grasping. I'm not sure I see "finding two men having sex arousing generally" as necessarily a kink or a fetish, in the same way that I don't see "finding only men arousing generally" as a kink or a fetish, i.e. where in both cases the gender is the salient point. Idk, I worry I'm not making myself clear here, but this is the best I can do.
Like I said, I've not fully worked through that tetchiness, and I think by now I'm starting to derail, which I don't want to do - I think it's incredibly important to subject both m/m romance and slash to critique; I've certainly grown more inclined to interrogate it and make sure to be careful and critical in my own participation as I've grown older and more aware of the issues and dynamics at play. But ultimately I do want to say, and I do think it's important to say, that in this discussion there's a reductiveness in the framing of sexuality, sexual makeup and identity politics that I find troubling, and an erasure and silencing of some queer voices that I find really troubling - and that they touch on issues of biphobia/bisexual invisibility and problematic conceptualisations of female sexuality that I really don't think should go ignored, not even in the service of an overarching pertinent critique.
Even with all those words, I don't think I've even scratched the surface of what interests and excites and worries me about these issues, and I'm definitely still at a preliminary stage in my thinking, open to discussion and revision. It's inspired me to dust off my queer theory brain, though, and I might end up channeling the churning of my thoughts on this into some kind of paper on queerness and fandom for a Call for Papers I saw recently that may or may not involve an exploration of Sherlock Holmes and the issues that converge on the concept of "bromance" ¬_¬
Speaking of work, I am currently thoroughly embroiled in a mid-thesis crisis which I am struggling to keep on top of (essentially: I've been forced to come to the conclusion that while the content and ideas I've got are fine, the structure I've been working to for the past year and a bit is fundamentally ill-suited to producing useful work in a field that's moving as fast as mine is), to the point that I've actually requested an emergency meeting with my supervisor :/ I have been working on ways of resolving the issues that I think might work, but as my supervisor by a cruel twist of fate is away next week I can't okay them with him for a little while; if I seem absent, stressed, irritable or glum in the near future, then, that's why.