The Road Thus Far, The Queer Experience, & Writing The Other

[spiderstars]

Introduction

Because I know most of my f-list doesn’t really follow metafandom. For context, go here: this. The entire debate has become somewhat muddled, mired in fuzzy terminology and defensiveness from all sides. I am going to try to give a breakdown, as far as my understanding goes, here. Corrections and clarifications are more than welcome.

My

Comments

[dharma_slut]

Hai, here from metafandom you lucky thing!

Thanks for your good thoughts. I have a dozen posts probably, half-finished trying to wrap my thoughts up into nice clean sentences.

[spiderstars]

Thank you for reading.

I'd be really interested in a link to such a post if you ever get it organized.

[dharma_slut]

I sure will!

[kazaera]

Here via metafandom and thanks for writing this

[spiderstars]

You know, after I wrote this post I asked some of my friends, including my girlfriend, about their "queer experiences". Everyone in the room was queer, to my mind, in some way, but when it rolled around to a certain person, she said she was probably asexual, and if she wasn't, uncertain where she went on the straight/bi/gay continuum, and therefore not "queer". You see the obvious problem with that, I trust. I find it strange, and uncomfortable, how in a lot of circles, even rigorously academic ones, I see people saying "queer" means the same thing as "lesbian & gay".

At any rate, maybe at a semantic level what people in this debate really mean when they talk about the "queer experience" they're talking about the "gay experience", but even then I think it's a metaphysically vague enough topic that the point still stands.

That said, I read your post, and while I haven't actually written out these things yet, both of my original fiction works have asexual characters. One has three I've really thought about out of a large cast, and

[kennahijja]

*sneaks in via metafandom*

I found this extremely interesting and insightful. Two comments, if I may?

From reading around a lot of the discussions on metafandom recently, I had the impression that part of the elusive 'queer experience' was sex - your points 1 and 5. That it's impossible for a woman (queer or not) to convincingly portray sex between males because they lack the physical traits to experience it?

There’s this really strange assumption going around that women (straight or not) only write male/male couples because they either find them sexually attractive or simply want to appropriate male/male couples to explore female sexuality. I’m not sure there’s a difference between the two lines of thought...From a subjective pov, this had me scratching my head, because I don't find males sexually attractive at all outside the fictional sphere, and am sort of using my slash couples to explore my queer/asexual perspectives on sexuality (well, and power dynamics as uninfluenced as possible by traditional gender roles). Just

[spiderstars]

Thanks for the comments!

On the sex: I think it's fair to state that it is impossible for a cisperson to know what sex is like as the opposite sex. That said, just as virgin writers can sometimes write incredibly hot, convincing sex (at least according to a lot of the feedback on fanficrants), it seems logical that, considering how varied sexual experience is from person to person, a writer who does their research is capable of writing convincing fictional m/m sex as a woman. Besides, as is the case with almost all fictional sex, very rarely is any of it wholly realistic. Also, it's important to note that the "queer experience" is not always a sexual one, so people who're talking about the "queer experience" as if it were are, I feel, misusing the term. So, I think the elucidation you add is an important one, but not one that does not invalidate the main point.

From a subjective pov, this had me scratching my head, because I don't find males sexually attractive at all outside the fictional sphere, and am sort of using my slash couples to

[linkspam_mod]

Your post has been included in a Linkspam.