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The topic that will never, ever die
So Tumblr is, once again, alight with discussion of slash versus femslash versus het, and all the various reasons why so many women chose to write slash, thereby focusing on male-centric narratives rather than female-centric ones, and people are accusing each other of sexism and homophobia and internalized misogyny, and I don't know why I am always compelled to comment on this topic, but... here we are.
The first thing I want to say, as always, is that it is the opposite of helpful for anyone to attack anyone else for writing what they write, 'shipping what they 'ship, loving what they love. People have a multitude of reasons for their preferences, all of which are very personal. And the "problem", such as it is, isn't about what any individual person writes/ships/loves, etc. It's about patterns and trends, and where they fit within our wider culture. So I hope no one ever takes anything I write on this subject personally, because that's not, and never has been, the point.
I could link to all kinds of things, but I'll start with this post, which focuses on the historical context of m/m versus f/f erotica and how differently they have been portrayed in the mainstream media. It's worth reading and not too long, but the quick summary is that men having sex with men has historically been positioned as shameful and degrading, when it's visible at all, whereas women having sex with women is presented almost exclusively for the male gaze. The author then suggests that the different contexts make it revolutionary to bring positive and joyful depictions of m/m sex into the spotlight, whereas shining the spotlight on f/f sex is more problematic.
I certainly understand where the author of the post is coming from, and agree to a certain extent, but whenever someone concludes that the solution to problematic depictions of women in the media is to write more about men, I get edgy. Why are women so quick to erase ourselves from the narrative? In a world that is so focused on men and their stories, why is our first instinct to perpetuate that imbalance rather than reclaiming the story for ourselves? It bothers me.
As always, I don't have any easy answers -- and I think it's more important to raise the questions, anyway, to think about them and keep them in mind as I make my own choices about what stories to tell. That's all I can really do, anyway.
As long as I'm on the topic of meta, I want to point the folks who don't follow me on Tumblr to these two really great bits of fandom meta: meta vs. criticism vs. critique and slash fandom and queer fetishization. These are some of the best pieces I've read on those topics in a very long time and can't recommend them too highly. They're both going into my toolbox of references, for sure.
The first thing I want to say, as always, is that it is the opposite of helpful for anyone to attack anyone else for writing what they write, 'shipping what they 'ship, loving what they love. People have a multitude of reasons for their preferences, all of which are very personal. And the "problem", such as it is, isn't about what any individual person writes/ships/loves, etc. It's about patterns and trends, and where they fit within our wider culture. So I hope no one ever takes anything I write on this subject personally, because that's not, and never has been, the point.
I could link to all kinds of things, but I'll start with this post, which focuses on the historical context of m/m versus f/f erotica and how differently they have been portrayed in the mainstream media. It's worth reading and not too long, but the quick summary is that men having sex with men has historically been positioned as shameful and degrading, when it's visible at all, whereas women having sex with women is presented almost exclusively for the male gaze. The author then suggests that the different contexts make it revolutionary to bring positive and joyful depictions of m/m sex into the spotlight, whereas shining the spotlight on f/f sex is more problematic.
I certainly understand where the author of the post is coming from, and agree to a certain extent, but whenever someone concludes that the solution to problematic depictions of women in the media is to write more about men, I get edgy. Why are women so quick to erase ourselves from the narrative? In a world that is so focused on men and their stories, why is our first instinct to perpetuate that imbalance rather than reclaiming the story for ourselves? It bothers me.
As always, I don't have any easy answers -- and I think it's more important to raise the questions, anyway, to think about them and keep them in mind as I make my own choices about what stories to tell. That's all I can really do, anyway.
As long as I'm on the topic of meta, I want to point the folks who don't follow me on Tumblr to these two really great bits of fandom meta: meta vs. criticism vs. critique and slash fandom and queer fetishization. These are some of the best pieces I've read on those topics in a very long time and can't recommend them too highly. They're both going into my toolbox of references, for sure.
no subject
I do agree that a lot of people use fandom for escapist writing/reading, which might mean less of an audience for "problem" stories. (Although I disagree that candy and literature are necessarily exclusive of one another. There is some brilliant lightweight stuff out there.) And I fully cop to writing mostly lighter stuff myself -- not fluffy bunny stories, necessarily, but ones that don't closely engage with socially problematic issues raised by the source material. I have meta for that.
no subject
I guess it is a matter of picking nits, but I'd shelve the brilliant lightweight fic in the literary bucket. To me, the "candy" is the stuff that does *nothing more* than clearly follow a well-known, accepted, popular genre such as genre romance, action-adventure, etc. Anything that subverts a popular genre or knowingly adds a "wink-wink" knowing layer on top of the genre gets reshelved as lit in my fanfic card catalog system.
For the past six years, 90%+ of my fic directly engages with socially problematic issues and, after writing a half million words, I feel safe saying that at least for the fiction I write, if I want to attract an audience in the US and CA (and, to a much lesser extent, UK, AU, NZ), I need to keep my socially problematic issue stories focused on m/m relationships and I need sprinkle some irony and knowing-author into it.
On the other hand, if I write for a continental European audience, I can get away with writing straight up psychological/sociological realism with m/f or a mix if m/m and m/f.
All I know is that I have 6 years of tracking data on my stories, including 250k words of stories that are now unavailable, and this is what the analytics plus comment count tell me.
When I compare this to best seller lists in north america versus europe, current trends in publishers weekly, differences between prize winning fiction in the commonwealth versus the U.S., etc., the little trend I see in fanfic makes sense from a larger demographic standpoint.