Queerness in Fandom: Does it Matter?

[nos4a2no9]

brooklinegirl has an interesting post over here about fandom and sexuality. She brings up a lot of points that really struck home with me, and I think it's fascinating how the complex issues of gender and the sexual orientation of fanfic authors get worked out in various fandoms. Judging from both my own experience and having read anecdotes from others, I've

Comments

[alchemia]

Therefore, m/m written by a gay man or f/f written by a lesbian is... something else. Still slash, but not slash as it is generally accepted to be. Or rather, there is a set called "slash" and in it there is the subset "fantasy due to not having the bits" and the much smaller subset "fantasy with the bits".

in my experience, most readers don't know who/what the author is. Someone did a 'test' in their lj a while back where they posted bits of fics written by men and women with the character names changed and most people couldn't accuratly guess which were written by which gender. People dont infrequently make incorrect assumptions about my gender/sex when mentioning my fics.

If stories, on their own, are interpretted as the same, that is, m/m fanfic is seen as slash, why shoudl the author's sex and gender matter? when I come across the argument it seems to imply that slash written by a person of the sex of the characters in the fic are 'fakes' or 'less genuine' than m/m slash by females; it also appears to be a way for some fen to justify deliberately excluding men/trans/intersexed/etc persons from fandom.

[suzycat]

Ah, you're absolutely right from a reading perspective. From a writing perspective, obviously each individual writer creates for his or her own reasons, and I think a lot of energy has been given over as to *why* a given kind of person (stereotypically, white, straight, middle class, middle aged female) would want to *write* slash. I've been raised on a lot of academic material that asks what fans do and why they do it, and the default concept of "doing" is, I suppose, writing/vidding/making art - so I apologise for thinking about writing rather than reading.

In my experience slash has been an overwhelmingly female-dominated part of fandom, and men have tended to be marginalised within it because the women feel it's "their" space in a male-dominated world. As for transpeople, I've certainly *met* more transpeople in fannish spaces than anywhere else, and I think it's been good for me.

But I think anyone trans is in a uniquely difficult position *anywhere*, not just in fandom. Gender really does seem to be the last taboo. If you don't know what gender someone is, you ascribe them one based on name, physical characteristics that suggest sex (and "therefore" gender), general feeling of what they are. When you just *can't* determine their gender, as a rule it's very unsettling, because we grow up responding to people in subtly different ways on account of their gender.

Because I have no experience of my online friends' and interactants' bodies, it's much easier for me to respond to X who is trans or intersexed etc just as a person, and as their preferred gender. I don't see how someone's preferred gender *should* marginalise them in fandom, especially online fandom, at all. But it is true that men do tend to get it in the neck from slash fans (especially men who dislike slash), and that would hold true for men who weren't born with male bodies.

[alchemia]

From a writing perspective, obviously each individual writer creates for his or her own reasons, and I think a lot of energy has been given over as to *why* a given kind of person (stereotypically, white, straight, middle class, middle aged female) would want to *write* slash

A problem I see with this though is in the asking why a given kind of person would write slash (as opposed to why people (kind not specified) write it). By asking why people of a certain sex/gender/sexuality/class etc write it- the question invites comment from such people while discouraging comments from others. It also leads people to think of and answer according to reasons related to the stereotypes of the "kind" (eg: women's sexuality) given, so that other reasons (eg: challenge to write out of experience, political reasons, identification with characters, plot reasons etc) may appear less important then they are to people, or may get lost all together in the discussion and what essays come out of that.