Slash and the appropriation/objectification of The Other

[herongale]

This post, on the topic of female slashers writing about gay men, really struck a chord with me. A kind of annoyed, exasperated chord. So I started writing up a response, and as it got longer and longer, I realized that the most appropriate place for me to post this was in my own journal. I don't post about my opinions as often as I should in my

Comments

[mothwing]

But when it comes to the greater overarching issue of general harm caused by cumulative effects of ignorance... I have no answer as to how to fix it. I don't know that it can be fixed, at least not on its own.
Nor do I. But I don't think that continuing the way things are going can.

All I can say is that I don't think such ignorance in fanfiction drives stereotypes in society so much as it is a product of stereotypes that already exist.
Exactly! And it does provide an interesting corpus of prevalent stereotypes. Still, even though fanfiction is so, SO much better in dealing with topics relating LGBT characters than at least the real-life society I live in, it does perpetuate its own share of stereotypes. Stereotypes which are harmful if they are perpetuated.

I think that it is society in general that needs to be fixed, and hopefully as that happens, the amount of prevailing ignorance will become less, and then those remaining outliers who choose to be willfully ignorant will at least become the minority, in the way that outspoken racists are becoming the minority now, and that people with stereotypical views will be the ones forced to closet themselves for self protection.
That's what I hope. I have no magic wand that can fix this, but I do hope that strengthening the voices of harmed minorities so that they can be heard, so that they get to tell their own stories, is a way to do this.

Someday, of course, I'd like to see all racism and sexism and anything-ism abolished. But until then, what I mostly want is for the power dynamic in society to shift in favour of enlightenment. And that is something that is driven by interpersonal relationships a lot more than it is driven by fictional works.
Fanfiction especially is social fiction in many, many respects, and fiction is not free of interpersonal implications, either.