Meta-Geek

[daemonluna]

This morning, I meant to do many productive and potentially useful things. Answer email that's been sitting in my inbox far too long. Do dishes. Rearrange contents of freezer so that opening it, I do not run the risk of alternately getting a concussion or breaking toes due falling bags of frozen chicken breasts and salmon steaks. (Mmmm, barbequed salmon steaks...)

So I started with the obligatory email check, online comic check, scan lj, only to discover a fascinating, lengthy discussion on slash and sexual identity from thete1.

Which lead to this article about slash and female desire and body identity.

And queer female space andslashing the slashers panel summary and slashing the slashers pseduo-transcript and cesperenz on slash and female friendship.

Which sent me to all sorts of happy as-of-late-neglected gender theory geek places, and several blindingly revelatory moments of "Yes! That's it exactly!"

Many (read: several) years ago I wrote an undergrad thesis on slash, fanfic, and subverting and redefining gender roles. In retrospect, I felt the need to spend 2/3 of it explaining and defining slash and fandom, and it will never again see the light of day. It did mean, however, that I did capital-R look-things-up track-things-down Research. (Note to self: ignore thesis, but put bibliography on webpage one of these days.) And in reading the obligatory Henry Jenkins, and Constance Penley (there's an interesting photocopying story there) and Camille Bacon-Smith, and yes, that IMHO incredibly erroneous essay by Joanna Russ from the seventies... it was all about the texts.

It was all about scrutinizing the source material and dissecting the actual fic and connecting the hurt/comfort and the curtainfic and the mpreg to some vague, nebulous theories about female desire in general. (I do realize this may be a huge generalization, but after a few years, this is the overwhelming impression I'm left with.)

And here's the big realization, it's about the community. Not entirely, but the fannish interaction is a huge part of it all. And I think the reason that it's not a big part of all the academic writing (of course, it might be right now, I need to play catch-up a bit) is that 1) most of said writing, or at least what was available back in '99, was from the days when internet fandom was just hitting its stride and most of the academics were more familiar with older forms of fandom, and 2) that integral connection isn't necessarily apparent to those outside the community.

Because really, it's hard enough to try and explain to an outsider why self-identified straight girls are into the slash. Why lesbians were at all interested in two guys together seemed to be this anomalous exception to the rule that was ignored in favour of the Straight girls! Gay Porn! dichotomy, sicne, at least on the surface or to the outside eye, most slash fans are straight women.

So yes. Slash as a queer space makes a large amount of sense to me. And it's nice to be able to subsume that niggling sense of being a freakish exception to the rule (as usual *g*) that's been vageuly present in the background for me since coming out in a genuine sense of community. (Ironic, innit? That reconciling myself as a slasher with my sexual orientation's been one of my biggest personal issues after coming out? Albeit something I was having articulating until now.)

Or, you could just go snarf at this cartoon summary of Prisoner of Azkaban.

Alternately, go get your weekly language geek quotient.
In 1507 a cartographer published a map and a new feminine proper noun was born. If he had chosen the masculine form, what would the noun have been?

And I am inadvertently over-caffienated and need to scramble to get ready for work now. Oops.

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

hey *waves at you*

it's the most fascinated topic, isn't it? I've been obsessing about it for quite a while now and cannot believe that noone really focused on this for so many years! [though Bacon-Smith does have a sense of female community in her book...not eroticized however!]

re bibliography...would you mind checking out the sadly outdated one at virgule (link in my memories if those darn things work again) and check if you have anything we missed???

and now you gotta share the photocopying story :-)

[daemonluna.livejournal.com]

I think the reason I keep coming back to all the meta is those moments where you realize that you've hit on something that feels true. Plus the added coolness of the discussion it inevitably provokes. *g*

I would be more than happy to fill in bibliography blanks, if you could give me the link. (In my other life, I'm a librarian. Heh. No, really.) I poked around a bit but didn't come across it in your memories.

The photocopying stoy basically boils down to: when photocopying academic essays on slash (one by Constance Penley that later ended up incorporated into NASA/Trek, I think), and using library photocopiers to do so, one should always be sure to check first for explicit fan art illos of anatomically improbable Vulcans. Failing this, one should be glad that it was the first week of classes and there were no excitable sorts hanging about.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

oh i suck...sorry...i should have just included the link.

there are a few things missing, like the fall 03 essay i address on my minilist, but i can't update since it wasn't my post

[ajinamoto.livejournal.com]

Surfed in from a friend's friends list:

Hmmmm... I followed the link diaryland and was fascinated. The thing that got me, a formerly slash-friendly genner, was the part about hurt/comfort, which is my kink.

Thanks for the link. I've actually been looking for essays on slash, because I have trouble understanding it as well.

[daemonluna.livejournal.com]

Heh. Hurt/comfort is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, when I'm in the right mood. There's a bunch more meta stuff over on the Fanfic Symposium, too.