Follow-up Meta: Thank You
Just a (hopefully) quick note to thank everyone who responded so thoughtfully to my navel gazing about slash and feminism -- you've all given me so much to think about, and everyone managed to comment in a way that was (a) niether dismissive of the concerns I raised, nor (b) dogmatic about their own position. You've all really helped me work through the things that were bothering me, and I feel a lot better now (even though making me feel better shouldn't be the goal of such discussions -- that's just a happy side-effect, really).
I've come to the conclusion (insofar as it's possible to come to a conclusion on something like this) that slash will always be problematic from a feminist perspective, but that that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just about everything is problematic depending on the way you look at it, and the really important thing is the extent to which you destablise the assumptions that result in harmful things like rigid gender binaries (as opposed to lovely squishy gender multiplicities). And as part of that process of destabilisation, sometimes certain assumptions will come into play -- such as the penetration=power paradigm that I was wangsting over in my previous post -- and the important thing is that they are kept in play, rather than set in stone. And I do believe strongly that slash is good at keeping those things in play -- many authors don't put them into play, which is a damn shame, but there are a lot that do, and I really hope that I am in the second group -- I try to be, at least, although I am sure that there are points on which I fail at this (and I'm not saying this as an attempt to get you all to say "Oh no, you don't fail" -- I think that even the very best authors probably fail at this sometimes, because we are all imperfect beings navigating our way through a whole bunch of stupid assumptions about gender without a map or a compass).
So, to finish up, what I'm trying to say to you all is ♥. :)
I've come to the conclusion (insofar as it's possible to come to a conclusion on something like this) that slash will always be problematic from a feminist perspective, but that that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just about everything is problematic depending on the way you look at it, and the really important thing is the extent to which you destablise the assumptions that result in harmful things like rigid gender binaries (as opposed to lovely squishy gender multiplicities). And as part of that process of destabilisation, sometimes certain assumptions will come into play -- such as the penetration=power paradigm that I was wangsting over in my previous post -- and the important thing is that they are kept in play, rather than set in stone. And I do believe strongly that slash is good at keeping those things in play -- many authors don't put them into play, which is a damn shame, but there are a lot that do, and I really hope that I am in the second group -- I try to be, at least, although I am sure that there are points on which I fail at this (and I'm not saying this as an attempt to get you all to say "Oh no, you don't fail" -- I think that even the very best authors probably fail at this sometimes, because we are all imperfect beings navigating our way through a whole bunch of stupid assumptions about gender without a map or a compass).
So, to finish up, what I'm trying to say to you all is ♥. :)