Complex visibility of asexuality in fandom.
A addendum to yesterday's post about asexuality in fic:
The first thing to state is that I am not opposed pointblank to the recent attention being focused on asexuality in fandom. Rather, I am arguing that this new visibility is still very simplistic, and often being driven by writers who are themselves not asexual and do not have a complex notion of what it means.
So how do you achieve complex visibility? This is where the challenge comes from, and where my reservations about the sudden increased attention arise. In a culture where we are habitualised to think that everything is related to sex (consider what the existence of a statistic like "The average male thinks about sex every 7 seconds," however hyperbolic, says about our culture and society?), and where fandom is trained by this stage to read sexuality into situations and characters even when it is not explicitly presented (e.g. slash goggles, the presumption that all humanoid characters are enthusiastic sexual beings even if the fic is gen, etc.*), it may be that the only way to give visibility to asexuals is to address their asexuality in an aggressive way. To put it bluntly, when sexuality is implicit, asexuality is forced to become explicit, just to be noticed.
But is this a contradiction in terms? Is it possible to be explicit about a general lack of sexual interest or attraction (in order that the character is not mistakenly presumed to be a sexual person in what happens to be a gen story), whilst still remaining true to the asexual POV?
My answer: I'm still working on it.
lab said: I was thinking about how in many of the stories I've read or skimmed or skipped, asexual characters always think about sex, how it fascinates, or repulses them, how they don't understand it or wish they could feel sexually attracted to X or Y, but it's always there, mostly nestled at the heart of the main character's emotional life. So I would LAUGH SO MUCH if in a 5x story, there would be 1 passage where sex isn't mentioned, not even in the narrative, because ... pffff.
I wholeheartedly agree with her. Some sort of balance, it seems, needs to be stuck.
*As an asexual, I am not immune to this habit. The fact is that it is impossible to be engaged in fandom without picking up the default reading of fannish works, which is a sexualised reading. This "school of interpretation" understanding of how fannish works are approached might also help explain how being asexual is not necessarily at odds with being a shipper or a slasher as well. An analogy, though imperfect, might be how you can be experientially male, yet still be a feminist.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/971258.html and has
comments.
The first thing to state is that I am not opposed pointblank to the recent attention being focused on asexuality in fandom. Rather, I am arguing that this new visibility is still very simplistic, and often being driven by writers who are themselves not asexual and do not have a complex notion of what it means.
So how do you achieve complex visibility? This is where the challenge comes from, and where my reservations about the sudden increased attention arise. In a culture where we are habitualised to think that everything is related to sex (consider what the existence of a statistic like "The average male thinks about sex every 7 seconds," however hyperbolic, says about our culture and society?), and where fandom is trained by this stage to read sexuality into situations and characters even when it is not explicitly presented (e.g. slash goggles, the presumption that all humanoid characters are enthusiastic sexual beings even if the fic is gen, etc.*), it may be that the only way to give visibility to asexuals is to address their asexuality in an aggressive way. To put it bluntly, when sexuality is implicit, asexuality is forced to become explicit, just to be noticed.
But is this a contradiction in terms? Is it possible to be explicit about a general lack of sexual interest or attraction (in order that the character is not mistakenly presumed to be a sexual person in what happens to be a gen story), whilst still remaining true to the asexual POV?
My answer: I'm still working on it.
lab said: I was thinking about how in many of the stories I've read or skimmed or skipped, asexual characters always think about sex, how it fascinates, or repulses them, how they don't understand it or wish they could feel sexually attracted to X or Y, but it's always there, mostly nestled at the heart of the main character's emotional life. So I would LAUGH SO MUCH if in a 5x story, there would be 1 passage where sex isn't mentioned, not even in the narrative, because ... pffff.
I wholeheartedly agree with her. Some sort of balance, it seems, needs to be stuck.
*As an asexual, I am not immune to this habit. The fact is that it is impossible to be engaged in fandom without picking up the default reading of fannish works, which is a sexualised reading. This "school of interpretation" understanding of how fannish works are approached might also help explain how being asexual is not necessarily at odds with being a shipper or a slasher as well. An analogy, though imperfect, might be how you can be experientially male, yet still be a feminist.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/971258.html and has
comments.