Slash meta #1: please discuss!

[thrihyrne]

Okay! I've begun reading a couple of recent-ish articles so I can have some non-anecdotal references for this article I'm writing, and came across this rather stunning sentence:

In fact, it has been argued that slash is not really about male homosexuality at all; rather, it is about a female fantasy of heterosexual sex acted out via ostensibly male bodies.

I'll be getting the book from interlibrary loan that has the essay that made this argument. I had an instant response to the comment, but rather than put out my thoughts, I'd like yours. I probably won't respond to these as I'm positing myself as an observer and will organize and interpret what happens later, but for anyone who has a thought on this who would like to share it, please do, and comment among each other. But play nice!!! No bashing on my LJ. Everyone is allowed to her own opinion.

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For those who are interested, that argument came from an essay contained in the book Magic mommas, trembling sisters, puritans & perverts: feminist essays, edited by Joanna Russ and published in 1985. It's a bit older, but that premise still stunned me. And with a title like that, why wouldn't I want to read all of the essays?!

Comments

[sanguinity]

NB: I have extremely low participation in fandom and/or slash communities. Make of that what you will.


That Joanna Russ quote is pretty much what I always understood to be going on. If I may use Star Wars and The Princess Bride as examples, the characters are archetypes: rogue, wholesome farm boy, the clever one, the strong one, the dangerous one, the girl.

And right there, if you're female, you hit this huge problem. If you're female, that means in any given story you're "the girl." Female isn't an attribute; it's an archetype. You don't get to be the rogue. Or the farmboy. Or the strong one. Or the clever one. No, you're "the girl." Other stories may be less bald-faced about it than these two, but really, most of them aren't. So this is internalized knowledge most women have: as long as you're female, the only thing you get to be is female. There is nothing else available to you. You can't be female and something else. You're female, and that's the only interesting thing about you.

Slash has always read to me as a rebellion against the societally imposed limits of female being an archetype. "I'll be the rogue and you can't stop me. And the way I won't let you stop me is that I'll keep the male body that goes with it. Because I know that if I try to put my rogue in a female body, you'll keep trying to shove me back into 'the girl', so fine, I'm keeping the male body." In some sense, male bodies are "ungendered", by which I really mean unmarked. They're neutral. Female bodies are constantly under narrative tension to be "the girl", but male bodies can be whatever, more or less without limit or tension.

So yeah, what I see happening is that women tell the stories they want to tell, but they keep the male bodies because the male bodies have a freedom to them that female bodies don't. And then they do whatever they want to do -- including having sex with other characters -- but keep right on with the male bodies. And yes, the logic continues to follow there: because all the bodies are male, you can have sexual fantasies/interactions that are unencumbered by the sexual/sexist baggage of "female". What better way to escape the sexist narratives of society than to use a male body?


Re the assertion that these stories have nothing to do with homosexuality: if I may be terrifically blunt, they don't. There's nothing about most of these characters (as they are portrayed within many slash stries) that I recognize as being gay men. For the most part, that's just not what gay male society looks like.

What these stories read like is women's fantasies of getting to have sex in bodies-unencumbered-by-gendered-narratives. That is a really different thing than being a gay man.


NB: I should have done a better job throughout with qualifiers. I by no means to imply a universality that binds all slash into one grand "this is what is happening." A lot of stuff that I run across randomly (as opposed to what gets rec'd to me) reads to me as if this is what is going on. And to be sure, one of the reasons that I read so much of it this way could be because I've been doing this with characters since I was five or so. "I'm the rogue, and I'm keeping the male body, too, because without the male body I just become 'the girl' again."