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

[guanin]

Here's the way I see it. Saying that women (straight, lesbian, or anything in between) can't write about gay men because we can't experience it ourselves is the same thing as saying that men can't write about women. Or women write about straight men, for that matter. So no one then has the right to write any characters that don't match their own sexual orientation, gender, race, etc. and how is anything supposed to be written in that case? People get characters from different backgrounds than theirs wrong all the time, but not everyone does. A lot get them very right. Even though I may sometimes complain that a particular male writer has no idea how to handle his female character, that doesn't mean that I'm going to start crying that men should not write women ever, because that's ridiculous.

Do gay men have a right to dislike the way they are being portrayed? Of course. Just like I don't like many representations of women in the media. And there we go back to writing it right versus writing it wrong. The main problem I have with this debate is that some gay men (not all, thankfully) are invalidating us (poor, ignorant women *sarcastic voice*) from writing about them simply because we are not literally in their heads. If I were using an argument that inane in my academic papers, it would torn to shreds within seconds. And I've seen some bad ones.