Comments | alixtii: Meta: Gazes in/and/of Criticism

alixtii

Meta: Gazes in/and/of Criticism

Mar 28, 2007 18:24

This post is a response to melannen's much-recced (and deservedly so) post on the slasher's gaze, but more directly a response to a couple of responses to her post, namelyithiliana when she says, "I'm going to immediately complicate it by asking about 'the femslash gaze' (because although people are convincing me that slash can be f/f as well as m/m, her meta seems ( Read more... )

desire, meta

Comments 43

zvi_likes_tv March 28 2007, 22:43:02 UTC

I think you meant to reference http://ithiliana.livejournal.com/678341.html?style=mine. The post you linked to is laughing at conservapedia.

zvi_likes_tv March 28 2007, 22:48:08 UTC

And I don't think you meant that post by Grace either, but I can't find the one you did mean. :(

cathexys March 28 2007, 23:03:30 UTC

maybe this one? http://kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com/583500.html?style=mine

alixtii March 28 2007, 23:53:26 UTC

Nope! IT was this one:

http://kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com/589280.html

Thread 7

cathexys March 29 2007, 00:27:04 UTC

I'm gonna have to think a bit more about this but I really, really loved a gaze which sees woman as its object from a position within a community of women, which I think actually might work equally for slash if you substitute man. [And I really don't think the sexual orientation of the reader/writer is all that relevant here, b/c straight women have long been pushed into the position of the male gaze, so I think it makes sense to suggest that we all can see objects of desire beyond our default sexual orientation, b/c ultimately they're *textual objects* (or visual at best)...I might even go so far as to say that no real penises ever show up in slash fic...phalluses at best, b/c they're bearers of symbolic power much more than actual RL men... {my spellcheck doesn't like phalluses, but it's a u declination right? not phalli??? *bg ( ... )

alixtii March 29 2007, 10:27:36 UTC

This post came from two places, mainly: Grace's absolutely correct objection that the "slasher's gaze" essay couldn't do what it claimed to do through a textual study alone, and my own struggles with "School of Lost Souls" as the type of story it would squick me to write for any other audience. Rebutting Grace's arguments at to actual sex was less a response to her and more a necessary move as I saw it, considering my own gender.

Also, less so, from seeing the Frank Miller's scans for the first time and immediately (mis)reading them as a deconstruction of the het male gaze, rather than as unironic (as they are generally interpreted). I read them the way I'd read one of wisdomeagle's fics, assuming a feminist community when in fact none actually existed ( ... )

(The comment has been removed)

alixtii March 29 2007, 12:43:47 UTC

Well, for "School of Lost Souls," I never say whether the situation is good or bad, or who is at fault. I know that, given my audience, I don't have to. The scenario is erotic, sure, but so is a woman's rape fantasy; it's not a condoning of the premise of the fic, and that's taken for granted by a community of feminist readers that teachers should not sleep with their teenaged students.

If my audience was, OTOH, a bunch of guys going "Ooh, tap that young jailbait student ass, teacher!" or "Scored with the teacher! Cool!" or "It's the student's own fault she ended up badly, because she had sex" it'd be sending a completely different message, shaping the audience in a completely different way, and I wouldn't be comfortable with it at all.

Thread 19

were_lemur March 29 2007, 07:16:30 UTC

Oddly enough, this post inspired fic: http://were-lemur.livejournal.com/29691.html#cutid1

(The comment has been removed)

alixtii July 20 2007, 22:21:15 UTC

And I need to note eternal search for bisexual slash/erotics in fan fiction (not many out there, sigh).

Not many what out there? I'm assuming you're talking about academic treatments?

wisdomeagle April 30 2007, 19:05:17 UTC

[For someone who's away from LiveJournal, I'm writing an awful lot of too-long comments. Sheesh!]

I tried to respond to this awhile ago but ended up running out of time. Today I have a paper to write, so that's not an issue. I have all the time in the world... :p

if we assume that wisdomeagle is representative of a femslasher's gaze (because if she isn't, then who is?)

While I obviously continue to be happily flattered and indulged by your high opinion of my writing, I really feel that I'm more of an outlier as a femslasher than you allow. Maybe, of course, I'm protesting too much; I've written an insane amount of femslash (as well as het and boyslash and OT+), and surely something in my ouvre is representative. And I do appreciate your using "Gather Paradise" since I feel it's probably the hottest thing I've ever written and it certainly got the "I'll be in my bunk" response. In a sense I feel "Pinpricks" or "Motherhood and Apple Pie" or of course "Incurable" are more representative of my subject position as a lesbian, which ( ... )

alixtii April 30 2007, 22:36:04 UTC

I'm tempted to wait until tomorrow to respond, so I won't have to worry about enabling your procrastination. But I'm even more tempted to respond right away.

I'd be very interested to find out what you see as being at the core of the femslash fandom of which you find yourself to be an outlier. I almost think it is in the nature of a femslasher herself to be an outlier, but you don't strike me as all that different from the other femslashers on my flist, most of whom I friended back in the days of femslash_minis. Certainly you have kinks they do not, and those kinks are made manifest in your ouvre, but I don't see them as all that a defining characteristic. Of course, I not only chose you as an example because a) I have a high opinion of your writing, and b) I thought you at least reasonably representative, but also c) I know your ouvre better than any other femslasher who isn't me (I, technically ( ... )

wisdomeagle May 1 2007, 01:00:39 UTC

I'm tempted to wait until tomorrow to respond, so I won't have to worry about enabling your procrastination. But I'm even more tempted to respond right away.

The paper will still be there tomorrow, too (it's due on Wednesday) and I have other projects (of which you may or may not be the direct cause) to help me not write it. *g*

I'd be very interested to find out what you see as being at the core of the femslash fandom of which you find yourself to be an outlier.In my first response to this, which I never posted and which I don't think is saved anywhere, there was a lot of the lady doth protest too much discussion of how even though I've paired her with half the female population of Sunnydale/LA and Kaylee and Tammy Metzler, I'm really not a Faith-girl after all. [In a now-familiar pattern, I left this comment to go to dinner and thus was a poor dinner companion to my family. I have more to say, though.] So I have a list of several things that I feel separate me from the panfannish femslash community, which I will mention then ( ... )

alixtii May 1 2007, 03:00:22 UTC

I was assuming that you would be leaving for la school. But perhaps the semester is over and you'll be e-mailing.

Also, I've been waiting for you to use that icon.

In my first response to this, which I never posted and which I don't think is saved anywhere, there was a lot of the lady doth protest too much discussion of how even though I've paired her with half the female population of Sunnydale/LA and Kaylee and Tammy Metzler, I'm really not a Faith-girl after all.

I'm not really sure what you intend this to be indicative of, since of course I never claimed you to be a Faith-girl.

And in the sense that femslashdom is polytextual, polyfictional, polyfannish, kidlit-friendly and shortfic-driven, I really am a quintessential femslasher.

That's what I was thinking of, in part. Also, I think of femslashdom in general as polyshippers, although there are enough exceptions (Law and Order, X:WP, possibly Buffy/Faith) that that can be debated. Any given round of femslash_minis produced an incredible number of different and unexpected pairings; a too- ( ... )

Thread 12