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lotesseDepartment of Fandom Swallowing Its Tail: the question of whether or not slash is, in fact, gay is going around again. In my most humble opinion, slash is no more gay than it is angsty or all about sex or pesto-flavored, but I’m going to defer to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kattahj, who explains this much better than I ever could.
But I want to jump off of this into some work that I did this past term. I was assistant director/dramaturg for an absolutely fabulous, sexy, wonderful production of “As You Like It.” Gender and performativity and the female experience of the male body were big on my mind. And, oddly enough, I think that I'm doing the same thing with slash that Rosalind does with crossdessing.
If we accept that slash is not really about gayness in and of itself, I think that we can also perhaps say that it’s not really about men, however paradoxical that may seem. IMHO, it’s about the women writing it, and the men are merely the blank canvas, the nearby screen. At least in one view of this drattedly complex thing we do.
Because the female body in literature has been co-opted six ways from next Wednesday, and not in ways that many women would have chosen. Certainly not in ways that I would have. Since writing was for so many centuries something that women just did not do in our culture, men have for all those centuries colonized the semiotics of the female body.
A lot of work has been done in meta-fannishness about the semiotics of the female body—nothing that I can point to specifically off the top of my head, but browsing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metafandom will get you there pretty quickly. Semiotically, the textual space of our bodies is so crowded with messages and equivalences that there is very little room for us there. I mean, in many cultures the bodies of women are so indelibly representative of sex that it’s considered shameful for them to not be completely veiled and hidden.
I think that there’s some truth to the idea that, textually speaking, same-sex couplings are more egalitarian. This is patently untrue in the real world, but the text is not the real world, and it doesn’t operate the same way. Within a text, characters and images take on secondary significance. Things that are no more than normal variation in everyday life become metaphoric in textual space. There’s a bunch of cultural baggage that goes with trying to write about women being sexual, or indeed with being in a relationship with a man, that is removed from the picture when all of the bodies in the text are male.
Because of this removal of baggage, I know that I at least have feel freer to explore issues relating to sexuality and romantic relationships. As a bi girl who practically grew up in the slash community, I’ve found the ability let go of some of that baggage even when female bodies are the ones being written about. Working with the clean slate of the male body allowed me to move back into my own skin, to jettison the meanings that I had not put there. It allowed me to reclaim my self, and to read and write about women without feeling uncomfortable about cultural assumptions. I had to be immersed in slash before I could read and/or live het.
But I don’t know as this is such a very new thing. There’s a long tradition of female characters cross-dressing to find love in stories. How many times have we read (and written) the story of the plucky heroine who runs away from home and lives in disguise as a stable boy or a pirate lad? And, of course, it’s always during this spate of cross-dressing that she meets and falls in love with the young lord of the manor or the dashing pirate captain, who returns the feeling enough to wed her promptly on the discovery of her true gender. And then of course there’s always Shakespeare, who was really rather obsessed with this sort of thing.
Back to “As You Like It” we go—It’s only when Rosalind is disguised as Ganymede that she is comfortable in the position of the romantic lover. She completely unleashes both her passions and her substantial wit. When she met with him as a woman, she could do no more to express her desire for him than give him a token. As a boy pretending to be herself, she can do much more.
Being let out of her female body allows Rosalind to develop and explore her sexual self. She expresses desire freely, and has the agency that would be denied to her if she remained attired in accordance with her gender. Rosalind, while she is presenting herself as a woman, can notice Orlando, long for him, give him a token by the way of expressing her feelings. But when she is Ganymede, she jests with him and commiserates with him and warns him off of expecting her to be tame or submissive: “You will never take her without her answer unless you take her without her tongue” (IV.i, 172). Her speech becomes more directly sexual: “Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?” (III.ii, 231), “But what talk we of fathers, when there is such a man as Orlando? (III.iv, 38). There’s a freedom and a joy to her interactions with Orlando, an atmosphere of play and excitement.
There’s more here, I think, than the escape from the social restrains of being a woman. It’s not just that Rosalind can be romantically daring. It’s that she becomes aware, for the first time, of her own wish to be so. She’s found a blank canvas to live on, one where she can paint her physical desires in the colors and shapes that she wants. Her sexuality doesn’t mean anything other than the meaning that she assigns it when she is dressed as a boy.
The interesting thing about this move into the male body, both for Rosalind and for we slashgirls, is that it is distinctly not a transgendered or genderqueer behavior. There is no desire either within or without the text to become a man, to become masculine. The desire leans rather towards being a self, free of the social constraints inherent in gender normativity. It’s tempting to say that it represents a desire to abolish gender all together. But we also seem to cling to femininity.
Rosalind doesn’t give up her “womanliness.” Far from it. When she is alone with Celia she sighs, longs, and gossips in a terribly stereotypical way. She repeatedly reclaims the female gender for herself: “dost thou think, though I am caparison’d like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?” (III.ii, 194). While she has chosen to foray into the male body, she has kept a hold on the feminine gender, and still self-identifies as such. She shows no interest in leaving her gender behind.
And some of us at least—I’ve learned not to make generalizations about fandom—do much the same thing with slash. A large subset of it tends to be very feminine. Yes, the male body is the image that is being predominantly worked with, but a distinctly [eta: heterosexual--thanks,amazon_syren] female sexuality is patterned over it. The male/male sex in these stories tends to follow patterns more like those of romance novels than gay fiction or erotica, sometimes going all the way to the ridiculousness of the self-lubricating vagina-anus. Penetration is the ultimate sex act, and is lionized in a similar way to that of bodice-rippers.
Beyond this intrusion of female sexuality into a textually male story-space, slash is a very feminine genre. I can think of few better examples of “writing through the female body.” The writing tends toward circularity, and certainly plot is overlooked for character work. It’s never so much what happens as it is to whom it happens. Slash pieces are often more concerned with emotional narratives than with physical or action-oriented ones, and there’s an awful lot of talking about people’s feelings. If we postulate that there may be a stylistically feminine counterpoint to the masculine, mainstream style of writing, a yin to its yang, I think that it would look a lot like slash--at least, some of it.
So, if slash is partially based in the desire of women to escape the male-dominated image of the female body, what happens as we start to fix the system? If women weren’t alienated from their bodies, will this continue? In the time that AI’ve been in fandom I’ve watched the pendulum start to swing back—het is coming back into fashion. A lot of it relies on the stylistic tropes and patterns of slash, and is read in the same way by the same people, i.e. the whole bloody “hetslash” terminologically awful debate. And I think that, ideally, this will continue to the point where gender won’t be anything that matters at all.
kattahj, who explains this much better than I ever could.But I want to jump off of this into some work that I did this past term. I was assistant director/dramaturg for an absolutely fabulous, sexy, wonderful production of “As You Like It.” Gender and performativity and the female experience of the male body were big on my mind. And, oddly enough, I think that I'm doing the same thing with slash that Rosalind does with crossdessing.
If we accept that slash is not really about gayness in and of itself, I think that we can also perhaps say that it’s not really about men, however paradoxical that may seem. IMHO, it’s about the women writing it, and the men are merely the blank canvas, the nearby screen. At least in one view of this drattedly complex thing we do.
Because the female body in literature has been co-opted six ways from next Wednesday, and not in ways that many women would have chosen. Certainly not in ways that I would have. Since writing was for so many centuries something that women just did not do in our culture, men have for all those centuries colonized the semiotics of the female body.
A lot of work has been done in meta-fannishness about the semiotics of the female body—nothing that I can point to specifically off the top of my head, but browsing
metafandom will get you there pretty quickly. Semiotically, the textual space of our bodies is so crowded with messages and equivalences that there is very little room for us there. I mean, in many cultures the bodies of women are so indelibly representative of sex that it’s considered shameful for them to not be completely veiled and hidden.I think that there’s some truth to the idea that, textually speaking, same-sex couplings are more egalitarian. This is patently untrue in the real world, but the text is not the real world, and it doesn’t operate the same way. Within a text, characters and images take on secondary significance. Things that are no more than normal variation in everyday life become metaphoric in textual space. There’s a bunch of cultural baggage that goes with trying to write about women being sexual, or indeed with being in a relationship with a man, that is removed from the picture when all of the bodies in the text are male.
Because of this removal of baggage, I know that I at least have feel freer to explore issues relating to sexuality and romantic relationships. As a bi girl who practically grew up in the slash community, I’ve found the ability let go of some of that baggage even when female bodies are the ones being written about. Working with the clean slate of the male body allowed me to move back into my own skin, to jettison the meanings that I had not put there. It allowed me to reclaim my self, and to read and write about women without feeling uncomfortable about cultural assumptions. I had to be immersed in slash before I could read and/or live het.
But I don’t know as this is such a very new thing. There’s a long tradition of female characters cross-dressing to find love in stories. How many times have we read (and written) the story of the plucky heroine who runs away from home and lives in disguise as a stable boy or a pirate lad? And, of course, it’s always during this spate of cross-dressing that she meets and falls in love with the young lord of the manor or the dashing pirate captain, who returns the feeling enough to wed her promptly on the discovery of her true gender. And then of course there’s always Shakespeare, who was really rather obsessed with this sort of thing.
Back to “As You Like It” we go—It’s only when Rosalind is disguised as Ganymede that she is comfortable in the position of the romantic lover. She completely unleashes both her passions and her substantial wit. When she met with him as a woman, she could do no more to express her desire for him than give him a token. As a boy pretending to be herself, she can do much more.
Being let out of her female body allows Rosalind to develop and explore her sexual self. She expresses desire freely, and has the agency that would be denied to her if she remained attired in accordance with her gender. Rosalind, while she is presenting herself as a woman, can notice Orlando, long for him, give him a token by the way of expressing her feelings. But when she is Ganymede, she jests with him and commiserates with him and warns him off of expecting her to be tame or submissive: “You will never take her without her answer unless you take her without her tongue” (IV.i, 172). Her speech becomes more directly sexual: “Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?” (III.ii, 231), “But what talk we of fathers, when there is such a man as Orlando? (III.iv, 38). There’s a freedom and a joy to her interactions with Orlando, an atmosphere of play and excitement.
There’s more here, I think, than the escape from the social restrains of being a woman. It’s not just that Rosalind can be romantically daring. It’s that she becomes aware, for the first time, of her own wish to be so. She’s found a blank canvas to live on, one where she can paint her physical desires in the colors and shapes that she wants. Her sexuality doesn’t mean anything other than the meaning that she assigns it when she is dressed as a boy.
The interesting thing about this move into the male body, both for Rosalind and for we slashgirls, is that it is distinctly not a transgendered or genderqueer behavior. There is no desire either within or without the text to become a man, to become masculine. The desire leans rather towards being a self, free of the social constraints inherent in gender normativity. It’s tempting to say that it represents a desire to abolish gender all together. But we also seem to cling to femininity.
Rosalind doesn’t give up her “womanliness.” Far from it. When she is alone with Celia she sighs, longs, and gossips in a terribly stereotypical way. She repeatedly reclaims the female gender for herself: “dost thou think, though I am caparison’d like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?” (III.ii, 194). While she has chosen to foray into the male body, she has kept a hold on the feminine gender, and still self-identifies as such. She shows no interest in leaving her gender behind.
And some of us at least—I’ve learned not to make generalizations about fandom—do much the same thing with slash. A large subset of it tends to be very feminine. Yes, the male body is the image that is being predominantly worked with, but a distinctly [eta: heterosexual--thanks,
amazon_syren] female sexuality is patterned over it. The male/male sex in these stories tends to follow patterns more like those of romance novels than gay fiction or erotica, sometimes going all the way to the ridiculousness of the self-lubricating vagina-anus. Penetration is the ultimate sex act, and is lionized in a similar way to that of bodice-rippers.Beyond this intrusion of female sexuality into a textually male story-space, slash is a very feminine genre. I can think of few better examples of “writing through the female body.” The writing tends toward circularity, and certainly plot is overlooked for character work. It’s never so much what happens as it is to whom it happens. Slash pieces are often more concerned with emotional narratives than with physical or action-oriented ones, and there’s an awful lot of talking about people’s feelings. If we postulate that there may be a stylistically feminine counterpoint to the masculine, mainstream style of writing, a yin to its yang, I think that it would look a lot like slash--at least, some of it.
So, if slash is partially based in the desire of women to escape the male-dominated image of the female body, what happens as we start to fix the system? If women weren’t alienated from their bodies, will this continue? In the time that AI’ve been in fandom I’ve watched the pendulum start to swing back—het is coming back into fashion. A lot of it relies on the stylistic tropes and patterns of slash, and is read in the same way by the same people, i.e. the whole bloody “hetslash” terminologically awful debate. And I think that, ideally, this will continue to the point where gender won’t be anything that matters at all.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-29 09:42 am (UTC)It's only through such fic as PGY and Danafic that I've become aware of the way this story can be told through entirely emotional upheavals rather than ones based on act, and find the emotional writing much easier, like wading through water, as opposed to sculpting.
I must point out what is possibly just a badly-chosen expression: penetration, to my mind, is not the ultimate sex act. The ultimate sex act is orgasm. If there's penetration but no orgasm then it seems kind of pointless, don't you think? Although I suppose you could argue whether or not an orgasm is an act or a reaction that's intentionally coaxed. But yeah - penetration doesn't satisfy alone, and sex is perfectly possible without it, so it's not very ultimate after all.
I've always thought het-slash-slashfem-hetslashfem to be a personal journey, rather than a fandom-as-a-whole change. I go from writing het (and careful lesbian love stories) because I see it as the only option, to writing slash, to writing slash and femslash, to writing all sorts quite merrily without prejudice. It's because at first slash seems like new and naughty and exciting and special, then it becomes normal, and one desires new forms of titillation. Having gone through all, one is free to look simply into the personal interactions of the characters to find a spark or something to hold on to that makes that one pairing special and interesting.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-29 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-29 07:24 pm (UTC)And anyway, hetporn usually ends in the guy splattering cum on the girl, which is really rather an anti-climax, if you ask me.
I wouldn't be surprised if, when asked what the main sexual act is, most people would point to penetration.