I think there’s quite a discussion about the female authorship of slash fan fiction going on right now, and every voice I hear on my dash is incredibly informative and fascinating. It’s truly a pleasure to keep such company, and it brightens my day to have interesting complex ideas as part of my fangirl experience.
A lot of what’s being said, or at least of what I’ve read, tends to address the reasons and the legitimacy of a woman choosing to write two character in love, or in lust, when she can’t identify with the gender of neither. I think it’s being pretty thoroughly discussed, not to say there’s nothing more to add. Personally, I’m still waiting for someone to pipe in and admit that we’re all living in a very masculine world where male sexuality is a much more common tool than the marginalized female sexuality. But that’s not what I wanted to say.
What I wanted to say was that while the whys are interesting enough, what’s really captivating to me are the results. I’d really really like to get my hands on some meaty analysis of the dichotomy of a woman writing a male sexuality. It just seems that it creates a new way of looking at gender, and attraction, and orgasms.
A narrative that’s genderqueer by default in a way.
And while I’m probably too silly to discuss either causes or results, there’s one thing I can do: I will vehemently defend mine and every women’s right to write slash fiction.
Because it’s not about personal experience, or definite knowledge. It’s more than writing a voyeuristic fantasy: it’s a woman in charge, by the power of her pen or keyboard, of two penises. It’s letting ourselves question the line between reality and fantasy for a while just to tell a story. It’s Viola dressed as Cesario, falling in love with Orsino, if you pardon my Shakespeare. And who is to say that a woman getting off on reading two men fucking doesn’t experience a desire and lust that’s male in that moment?
True, I’m more of an actress than a writer. But above all that I’m a storyteller, and as every good storyteller I put on disguises to amuse and entertain my audience. And that’s why in my writing (and on stage) I can be anything and anyone, and I have every fucking right to do it.
Bolded for emphasis.
Oh, I’m so glad you brought this up. I don’t identify as genderqueer or trans (at least not in any way that fits the accepted genderqueer or trans narratives), but my relationship with my gender identity is very complicated, and changeable, and gets snagged almost daily on questions about my body, my presentation, my relationship, my sex life, my reading, my writing, my desires, blah blah blah. It’s getting more complicated, not less, and I can actually thank fandom for that.
And when I say I’m thankful, I mean it sincerely. Experiencing desire secondhand through a body that is unlike my own is a powerful thing, and one that’s allowed me to explore and identify more fully with the masculine aspects of my gender identity.
I didn’t say it in my original post, but I’m so grateful to have found a group of writers and readers exploring such complicated aspects of gender and sexuality and consent and nontraditional relationships and so many other things that I used to spend inordinate amounts of my time pondering by myself. I never would have thought I would find something like this on Tumblr of all places, hiding amongst the kitten gifs.
Thank you for articulating slash-writing in that way. The idea that it’s a genderqueer thing to do is probably something I’ve had in the back of my head but never really understood. Fandom (and Sherlock fandom in particular) has been a huge part of my ability to articulate some kind of confused queer and genderkeysmash (new word I just coined it) identity.
I think when we write slash we often don’t feel like we’re doing a genderqueer or even just queer thing. I know I wrote slash for a long time without it feeling really attached to ideas I might be having about queerness—I was just writing about a relationship; it was almost incidental that it was between two men. But the longer I have spent in this fandom, the more fanfic I’ve read, and the more people I’ve talked to, the queerer it all gets in my head.
The question of women writing about men’s relationships and sexuality is a complicated one. People question whether the female idea and representation of masculinity is “accurate,” but I think writing slash, for anyone, can be a way of writing about gender in new ways, of productively rewriting gender. It doesn’t have to be accurate. It can be somehow visionary, and that’s okay. Men are represented in literature all the time; we don’t always need to write about men as they currently are or as they understand themselves. So maybe what we’re doing or what we want to do is writing about gender via new narratives about men’s relationships. I think there’s a problem with saying “this is about women, so it’s also about gender” (which I hear all the time and am so sick of), and not saying the same thing for stories about men: this can be genderqueer, and it can be exploratory.
So thanks for letting me keysmash my way into a gender that I can live in, fandom. I would be far less comfortable existing if it weren’t for you all.
Bolded for patriarchy. Because one of things forgotten in this whole discussion of women writing about men and men’s relationships is men writing about women and women’s relationships and women’s sexuality is the unquestioned norm. No one ever asks if a man writing about women represents femininity “accurately.” Men write fantasies about women’s sexuality ALL THE TIME, including portrayals of lesbian relationships. These fantasies get rightly criticized for the objectification and male gaze they embody, but no one questions why men have these fantasies to begin with.
Of course, men are still overrepresented in media. What’s a fanfic writer to do? We could all choose to write only female characters and limit ourselves to a very narrow pool of characters, a large number of whom exist to be the love interest, the femme fatale, the cold, calculating bitch and other such lovely stereotypes. We could all embrace genderswap and end any complaints about women writing men by making the men women (and oh, isn’t THAT a major queering of the narrative right there!). Or we can do what fandom has always done, and write all characters in infinite variations. If that means we are writing men with a female slant, well, tough cookies. As I said above, no one ever questions men writing women.
No one ever questions that literature about men represents “the universal experience” either. I mean, male is assumed to be the default gender in most circumstances (fandom being a rare exception, which can lead to occasional hilarity). As Tartan points out, writing by women about women is almost immediately consigned to the gender ghetto, the assumption being men wouldn’t be interested in it. Sometimes it doesn’t even matter what a woman is writing about; J.K. Rowling used her initials on the Harry Potter books because her publishers thought boys wouldn’t want to read books written by a woman.
In light of all of this, why are we even pondering whether women can accurately write men and male sexuality and men in relationships? If fanfic is taking the reins of creation back from corporations and mainstream media creators, then can’t it also be a way for women to turn the tables on the patriarchy and write about men the way that men have been writing about women for centuries? It isn’t even as if we are trying to push out narratives onto men and tell them that they should embrace the masculinity we have created for them, the way patriarchal culture pushes femininity onto women. We are (mostly) women writing about men for other women. “Accuracy” in writing the male experience can be an important part of that, but IT ISN’T NECESSARY. I would say keeping a character in character is more important for fanfic than worrying about whether said character is performing masculinity in line with societal expectations.
Well, no one but feminists questions whether writing women and their sexuality is a thing men can do accurately. Which…does give slash a certain hypocritical slant when you then raise the question of whether women can do it and then say, “Well it doesn’t matter!”
Which isn’t to say I disagree with doing it. Obviously. *looks at her own work* Um. BUT yeah, I’m not sure what to make of that. I don’t feel like a hypocrite for writing slash. I don’t feel like I’m silencing anyone. Well…no, that’s actually not true. I do still feel like I’m giving voice primarily to the same cis white male characters who tend to dominate the narrative anyway.
Except…they’re not strictly cis when I write slash, are they? Hmmm.
So the thing is that I think we tend to focus on these same characters in the narrative because, y’know, they’re kind of the main characters. (Usually.) Stories come with certain built-in elements. One of those elements is that they hand you one or a handful of major characters and implicitly say, “Here, one of these people is the one you should identify with. They’re your ‘gamepiece’ to ride through the story with.” So then, when we write slash, we (usually) write it about the same characters we identified with in the story to begin with, because they’re our way in.
BUT on the other hand, slash is a subversion, isn’t it? I had been getting a bit brain-itchy because it seemed like people were conflating gender and sexuality and using ‘gender’ when I suspected they meant the other, but…no, maybe it’s me who’s got it wrong. Maybe this ISN’T about sexuality so much as it is gender. Because one of the things we’re doing in slash—and I’d love to know if this resonates with anybody else when I say it—is that we’re undercutting the traditional conception of ‘maleness’ that these stories tend to hand us about the main characters.
Right? Because we’ve got this big old bag of HETEROSEXUAL WHITE MALE HERO that stories keep handing us. And isn’t part of all this slash stuff—I know it is for me—the very simple act of rewriting him to open the boundaries a bit? We make him gay. We genderswap him and make him a woman. We make him disabled or disadvantaged and we test what happens to his personality and story if we change those things and slide him into a demographic that isn’t the dominant one. (We never seem to racebend him, though, do we? That may be a whole other topic…)
And this rewriting is a rewriting of masculinity too, because these stories demonstrate to us that the hero is a Real Man. So by changing him in fanfic, we’re testing and questioning the boundaries of Real Mandom, expanding them, and questioning whether that’s even something the hero has to be in the first place.
For me, this is partly out of sheer boredom—oh god, ANOTHER Heterosexual White Male Hero? Seriously, you can only do so much before we’ve seen it all—and part of it is about opening up more space for the rest of us to be able to be the main character of the story. Because once you start questioning the trope, you quickly discover that NONE of it has to stand (and maybe the progressive nature of fanfic is because of that; a lot of people start reading/writing, then get into slash, then find themselves reading/writing the genderswap, etc. etc.).
I think slash is the predominant form this takes, though, because it does allow us as women to remove ourselves from our bodies. Which is an uncomfortable thought, because it implies that we’re not entirely comfortable being women. But…hell, we aren’t, are we? There’s all this bullshit we have to deal with, all these assumptions and expectations that get loaded onto being female, and we get so tied up in dealing with those that we can’t even deal with ourselves as individuals. So…hey, be a man, then, for a little while, and find out what you enjoy and what you think and what you want to be when it isn’t tied up in the rat’s nest of gender.