MOAR STUFF

[lefaym]

How are we all today? I find myself, right now, still in my pyjamas, although I should be at uni working on my thesis. I'm telling myself that I'll go in one day weekend to make up for it, and that I'll let myself stay home today to work on writing.

• Speaking of this weekend though -- there's a rally on Saturday in support of marriage equality -- are there any Sydney(-ish) people who would be interested in going to that with me? I'd like to go, but I don't fancy going in alone, and protests/rallys aren't really misanthropy_inc's thing -- he doesn't do crowds well. Anyway, let me know if you're interested in going!


• I commented at After Elton for the first time yesterday. Normally, I don't comment there because I figure that it's a space for gay/bi men and since I am neither of those, it's not really my place. However, as Brent Hartinger's article on Has Slash Made the World a Better Place for Gay Men? does directly pertain to me (being as I write slash and all), I felt that it was okay for me to speak up in this instance. You can find my comment on the second pages of comments (I posted there as "Lefaym"), and I made four points:
  
  
  1. That I think slash fiction is more comparable to romance novels than lesbian porn for straight men, in that slash, although often unrealistic (sometimes damagingly so), does ask its readers to connect emotionally with the characters.
  2. That I don't think women who write slash, in general, prefer to slash canonically straight characters over canonically gay/bi characters -- it's just that canonically straight characters are more common in the types of texts that lend themselves to fanfiction -- that is, serialised texts that are enjoyable, rely on character, and are often full of plot holes. As Torchwood shows, when these ingredients coincide with canonically queer characters, slash writers gobble it up. (This part of my comment was more in response to other comments rather than in response to the article itself.)
  3. That I do not think that the existence of slash fiction has resulted in more canonically queer characters on our screens. I think it has resulted in more explicit attempts to incorporate homoerotic subtext in order to please slash fans (see: Merlin, Sherlock Holmes 2009), but that isn't actually a positive thing, because although slash writers will often reinterpret these relationships in queer-positive ways, your average heterosexual viewer is more likely to read it as "LOL, GAY (but don't worry, it's all safe and heterosexual, really)". Representations of ACTUAL queer characters on our screens are more down to writers like RTD and Alan Ball who are doing it for themselves and NOT to cater to slash fans (as much as slash fans may often enjoy their work).
  4. Having said that, the existence of slash culture does lead many people to become allies and/or to become more comfortable with their own LGBTQI identities, and this is a good thing. Slash may not be activism in and of itself, and certainly there is homophobia within slash fandom, but I do think that people who read and write slash are more likely to be/become activists for LGBTQI equality.



• I have a new post up at
  lesley_hastings about writing original fiction, developing characters, and the way that television is affecting my writing structurally. As always, I'd love it if anyone has any thoughts to share.


• I had a nightmare last night that the Liberal Party (which in Australia is our conservative party, becuase we're fucked up like that) won the election, although they lost the popular vote. For a nightmare, it was not particularly unrealistic (well, okay, the part where I accidentally got mixed up in a feud between Julia Gillard and one of her nephews was unrealistic, but the bit about the Libs winning the election and losing the popular vote was not). Tony Abbott, the leader of the Libs, is SCARY. He is on the record as saying that he feels "threatened" by homosexuality, as saying that he doesn't think women have the inalienable right to withold sex from their husbands (in his little heteronormative world), he's referred to the idea of women's equality as "a folly", he is completely dismissive of Indigenous Australians, and he is totally anti-choice. Here are a whole heap of quotations from the last six years, so you can see it for yourself. I AM REALLY TERRIFIED.