This is also a problem with the lesbian and gay community--or rather, the lesbian and gay communities, because most lesbians and gay men have nothing in common except that homophobes hate both of us, and funding groups won't fund us separately.
I prefer to reclaim the word gay in general usage (when coming out to complete strangers, for example), so I would probably be wont to use the "generic" slash when talking to people who've never heard of fanfic. On the other hand, I've recently taken to using f/f, m/m, and f/m when indulging in meta (unless I'm ranting about slash or het fans).
In my gender studies class we read a article (written in the 80s) that's main point seemed to be the female doctor problem. Only I have never in my life heard someone call a woman doctor that. Maybe its because I'm a female so people would be nervous about saying that in front of me?
Is it still a big issue?
The point I made was that I hear male nurse all the time, but I don't think I've ever heard "female" in front of a profession, so sexism in that way still exists, its just different than we expect.
Well, I concede the point that the "female doctor problem" isn't so much of a problem as regards actual female doctors, but you instantly knew what I meant when I mentioned it and was able to connect it to a body of academic literature, so that's probably the best name to call the issue by
( ... )
A friend of mine calls female restaurant managers manageresses, and while I'd never heard it before, no one else seems to notice when he does it. He does not call female doctors doctresses.
And an extension of the female doctor problem that no one ever seems to notice is the distinction between actors and actresses.
In addition to the gender of the objects of desire (a not insignificant difference, obviously!), the tropes, the communities, the ethoses (ethoi?), and the dynamics of the fic are all so incredibly different that one can't help but ignore one or the other when using the term "slash"--the two types of fic are just too disparate to fit comfortably under one label. See, I really kind of disagree with all of this. I don't dispute your experience, of course, but I also don't think things are (or need to be) quite so disparate/polarized as you're portraying them here. So please take the following comment as an attempt to sort out my own experience and expectations.
I mean, I'm coming from a fandom context where most people write boyslash, het, girlslash, and threesomes; there's not the divide there that one might find elsewhere, and its absence is probably one of the things I like most.
My disagreement falls into a couple of slots: - gender of the objects of desire (a not insignificant difference, obviously!): It's not a big difference
( ... )
It's not a big difference for me, nor for a lot of writers I like. I kind of wish you'd qualified this statement more.
I'm not claiming that people don't base their reading and writing on enjoying a specific type of relationship (i.e. queer), because I know that plenty of people in fandom do, but I think basing it on the presence of the gender(s) to which one is attracted is more common. Furthermore, I'm making the argument that since so much f/f and m/m isn't about "gayness" as we know it in RL, and because same-sex relationships are generally less subversive both in terms of society and specific fannish texts, there's less of an impetus for a fanwriter/reader to say "I like reading/writing about same-sex relationships" rather than "I like reading/writing about men/women/both/neither/&c." If you ask the average m/m writer why she slashes, I'd expect she'd put forth men as the objects of her desire first, before any other explanations. (IOW, the "one man good, two men better" argument never falls out of favor.)
I can't speak for either your or glossing's experience, but I do wonder whether there's a temporal aspect to this as well. As I've been told numerous times over the past couple of years, "my" perception of slash is fairly restricted to a certain generation of writing (if not writers), and while these types of stories still exist, their dominance is decreasing as we speak type.
Otoh, setting Cagney and Lacey aside, I think we're looking at f/f slash coming into its own a near two decades after m/m slash, and, esp with XWP nearly independently and with its own rules/norms/tropes/terms... So, I wonder whether we're really comparing apples and firetrucks, i.e., when I describe a certain type of m/m, that may not be the type that you should be comparing f/f to...the context, writers, etc may be very different.
Maybe glossing's closer to the truth by looking at writers who move back and forth and share very similar goals/ideas/approaches...
Now, of course, I want to see theearly nineties m/m vs f/f slash trope comparison :D
This is rather random, but I sat staring at the sentence "I know fpreg exists, but it's not exactly as common as mpreg" for some time before it made sense to me :)
Anyway: I've read very little femslash, but would assume this particular trope would be avoided since the partners immediatte reaction would probably be "You've cheated on me!" not "WTF pregnant man, yay now we can make babies". (I realise this is a gross oversimplification but hopefully you get my point :)) Otherwise, I have nothing intelligent to say about your actual point, so will vanish again into the aether.
When I was a tiny wee pervert, I lived in Boston, which at that point had mixed gay bars, and I always think about events as occurring at LGBT center or under LGBT auspices. I think it's fair to say that lesbians have done a damn sight more for AIDS issues than gay men have done for any women's health issue, but in a homophobic world (real or fictional) hanging together beats hanging separately. (OB Disclaimer: yes, I think slash is about exclusively gay characters and bisexual characters.)
BtVS fandom has always had approximately a bazillion pairings, but then so does BtVS canon (and some of them actually coincide!) I know that Buffy/Faith is a popular pairing, but my limited experience with Buffy fandom is that it's fairly civilized vis a vis pairings, and nobody will poison your dog just because you write stories that break up their OTP. (I could be wrong about this, of course.) I've never seen any OTP-related wank in Firefly fandom.
This post is once again making me think about how odd it is that I, a dyke, tend to find myself so much more drawn to m/m slash than f/f. I *like* f/f slash, but I don't get obsessed with it the same way. I had always tended to attribute that to my general liking for m/m porn and sexual fascination with queer masculinity: for me the queer is way, way more important than the masculinity, and when I desire a male body it's usually through identifying with another male body. Plus there's the fact that I know what lesbian sex is like and if the porn doesn't read pitch-perfect hot to me I drift off into thinking about other personal sexual matters
( ... )
Comments 63
This is also a problem with the lesbian and gay community--or rather, the lesbian and gay communities, because most lesbians and gay men have nothing in common except that homophobes hate both of us, and funding groups won't fund us separately.
I prefer to reclaim the word gay in general usage (when coming out to complete strangers, for example), so I would probably be wont to use the "generic" slash when talking to people who've never heard of fanfic. On the other hand, I've recently taken to using f/f, m/m, and f/m when indulging in meta (unless I'm ranting about slash or het fans).
Reply
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In my gender studies class we read a article (written in the 80s) that's main point seemed to be the female doctor problem. Only I have never in my life heard someone call a woman doctor that. Maybe its because I'm a female so people would be nervous about saying that in front of me?
Is it still a big issue?
The point I made was that I hear male nurse all the time, but I don't think I've ever heard "female" in front of a profession, so sexism in that way still exists, its just different than we expect.
Reply
Reply
Reply
And an extension of the female doctor problem that no one ever seems to notice is the distinction between actors and actresses.
Reply
See, I really kind of disagree with all of this. I don't dispute your experience, of course, but I also don't think things are (or need to be) quite so disparate/polarized as you're portraying them here. So please take the following comment as an attempt to sort out my own experience and expectations.
I mean, I'm coming from a fandom context where most people write boyslash, het, girlslash, and threesomes; there's not the divide there that one might find elsewhere, and its absence is probably one of the things I like most.
My disagreement falls into a couple of slots:
- gender of the objects of desire (a not insignificant difference, obviously!): It's not a big difference ( ... )
Reply
I'm not claiming that people don't base their reading and writing on enjoying a specific type of relationship (i.e. queer), because I know that plenty of people in fandom do, but I think basing it on the presence of the gender(s) to which one is attracted is more common. Furthermore, I'm making the argument that since so much f/f and m/m isn't about "gayness" as we know it in RL, and because same-sex relationships are generally less subversive both in terms of society and specific fannish texts, there's less of an impetus for a fanwriter/reader to say "I like reading/writing about same-sex relationships" rather than "I like reading/writing about men/women/both/neither/&c." If you ask the average m/m writer why she slashes, I'd expect she'd put forth men as the objects of her desire first, before any other explanations. (IOW, the "one man good, two men better" argument never falls out of favor.)
I'm not quite sure ( ... )
Reply
Otoh, setting Cagney and Lacey aside, I think we're looking at f/f slash coming into its own a near two decades after m/m slash, and, esp with XWP nearly independently and with its own rules/norms/tropes/terms... So, I wonder whether we're really comparing apples and firetrucks, i.e., when I describe a certain type of m/m, that may not be the type that you should be comparing f/f to...the context, writers, etc may be very different.
Maybe glossing's closer to the truth by looking at writers who move back and forth and share very similar goals/ideas/approaches...
Now, of course, I want to see theearly nineties m/m vs f/f slash trope comparison :D
Reply
Anyway: I've read very little femslash, but would assume this particular trope would be avoided since the partners immediatte reaction would probably be "You've cheated on me!" not "WTF pregnant man, yay now we can make babies". (I realise this is a gross oversimplification but hopefully you get my point :)) Otherwise, I have nothing intelligent to say about your actual point, so will vanish again into the aether.
(Here from metafadom btw)
Reply
BtVS fandom has always had approximately a bazillion pairings, but then so does BtVS canon (and some of them actually coincide!) I know that Buffy/Faith is a popular pairing, but my limited experience with Buffy fandom is that it's fairly civilized vis a vis pairings, and nobody will poison your dog just because you write stories that break up their OTP. (I could be wrong about this, of course.) I've never seen any OTP-related wank in Firefly fandom.
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