SLASH! this is the thread where we talk about fan inspired pornographic fiction. why? bc it raises issues of gender and politics maybe idk

bc what we were talking abt on the 13 going on 30 thread was getting a little off topic?

i guess we have to wait for k8 to come back from her meeting?

okay!

i wanted to draw a comparison between slash and yaoi manga / art on the other thread but didn't want to drive the discussion even more off-topic (from mark ruffalo)

v. gracious of you.

Elucidate yr comparison, please.

well -- both feature romantic relationships between male characters (though yaoi only sometimes uses characters from other pop-culture sources), and both have a primarily female authorship and audience

the first time i heard of yaoi it was in a doc. about japanese porno culture and the female journalist was like "why would women want to watch gay characters have sex"

i also think its interesting in relation to that thing where we're always told that when women watch porn they are most turned on by the parts that show the woman enjoying it or w/e? (obviously i think those kinds of statements are bs i just mean its interesting to think abt those two kind of *ideas* of "female sexuality" in relation to each other)

Maybe that is because in a lot of porn when the guy is shown enjoying it he is usually doing something really objectifying and almost violent to the girl.

Let's Party!!

see is that really true? (actual q. i dont really watch porn and def. not any w/ women in it blech omg -joke) Its somethink I read a lot in feminist attacks on porn but idk I just cant really picture what its like (not that i'm on the hunt for depressing violent toward women porn to satiate my curiosity btw)

My meeting is finished now.

But I have to write up a bunch of stupid shit about stupid statistical findings and I really don't want to. I'd much rather talk about Slash and stuff.

(Actually, I could talk about so much more than that, like why does *Slash* fic get so much more attention than any other kinds of fan fiction, really, when it's only part of the fan fic universe and all)

((Especially given that slash has come to mean only the same sex romantic/sexfic when there's so much more than just that))

(((And like, really, it's just because female roles in SO MANY geeky fandoms are so shit you kinda have to have the boys getting with each other because there are so few decent females to be projecting yourself and your desires into anyway)))

((((But you know, boys kissing each other is totally hott in just a wow, boys are hott, if you find boys hott, looking at two of them is exponential hottness))))

But stupid meeting was stupid and I have to do some dumb stats burning now.

btw i read your blog post about this kate and I def. agree more with the things you say in the comments but yeah, its an interesting post and the people who comment at the bottom are sane and smart.

Also would it be Queer for me to have this picture as my desktop wallpaper at work, yes/no and I'm still not sure how I feel about it but I'd like to think about it...

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/46906247/Aphex+Twin+AT.jpg

more a case of making a female face male there tho

I have been trying to puzzle out the whole gender bending and queer implications of that video/single promotional campaign for over 10 years now and I'm still no closer to understanding it, really.

It's kinda painting male bodies female, as well. I don't know what it is.

fwiw came across this relevant video last night:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o38PTd27LUg

i'm interested in your emphasis on authorship wrt slash -- but i'm wondering about the author as reader. i'm not sure whether slash is implicitly queer or not but the way a slash writer engages with the source text seems pretty queer to me, inasmuch as it exploits the gaps and ambiguities of the source and transforms subtext into text

I feel kinda bad now because I've been talking about Slash for so long at this point I'm not sure I have anything left to say about it.

It's kinda like... yeah, I enjoy it for jollies and hottness and I'll read it if other people write about it.

But I have got to the point where I'm just kinda sick of having to create these imaginary romances between male characters because the female characters in those worlds are so shitty. I WANT NON SHITTY FEMALE CHARACTERS, DAMMIT.

But that is a different issue from finding it really hott when men act in those all emotional intimate ~~~bonding~~~ moments with each other where they're so buddied up you think they'll turn around and kiss. That is a complete turn-on. But I am conflicted about it when it's a substitute for writing any female roles with any depth to them.

what elmo said is a way better way of putting what i wanted to say i think, its only of minor consequence to me that it ends up being guy on guy action tbh.

but I totally understand the problem of identification for female fans who only have male protagonists to relate to, i think that's a good point u make

my only sustained fandom is for buffy and i don't really know the extent of fanfic out there but -- it's interesting to note that the vast majority of buffy slash i've seen is m/m, though the show has had plenty of interesting female characters

out magazine just had an article about romance fiction written by and for women about gay men

http://out.com/detail.asp?id=27242

http://gawker.com/5615899/why-are-straight-women-so-obsessed-with-gay-sex

(i actually just rewatched buffy in it's entirety and it's funny to see how the writers create dialogue and plot scenarios that, it seems, deliberately invite slashy interpretations.)

See, my problem is, I just think of gender as something that is just *naturally* quite fluid and ambiguous (or at least, it would be if societal gender roles were not so emphatically policed) and I get annoyed at people who try to squish this into a little box labelled "genderqueer" rather than just admit that all humans have bits of female-coded genderstuff and male-coded genderstuff in them and display them to different amounts depending on their personality and what their culture will permit.

And because most of my life has been spent around people who feel the same way (or actively ignoring or disregarding those who don't) I have come to think of this fluidity as the normal default position and strictly delineated roles as being something odd and weird and strange.

So when people try to tell me that the fluidity is "Queer" I want to say "no it's not. It just *IS*." Fluidity is normal. Strict gender roles are something that have to be policed really carefully in order to be trained and enforced. Strictness is "unnatural" if you want to be technical about it.

It's only really recently that I've come to realise what a minority viewpoint this is these days. I thought it was just taken as granted.

I am probably contradicting myself, but I honestly think that most of Slash is m/m because most fan fiction is written by (straight or bi) females - or at least females that find the male body sexually interesting and male emotions, erm, emotionally appealing and worth exploring.

Also, many many slash writers I've known over the years have talked about how you just kind of get a... slashy eye. That once you've started seeing the world in that way, you can't *unsee* it. That you just become kind of coded for it, and you start to interpret everything on a slash level.

from the article max linked:

"Since women are not equal to men in society, a straight romance narrative—the usual machinations that bring a brutish alpha male and a wasp-waisted young female beauty to the point of bodice-ripping penetration—can't deliver the same heady emotional frisson as a "bromance," which slashers and M/M authors alike view as a courtship between equals, which culminates in the emotional jackpot of a true love based on loyalty, trust, caring, and mutual respect."

hm.

wz reading ages ago an article about fujoshi (means sth like 'rotten girls' iirc) who are the japanese women who are v into yaoi manga &c - there was this binary posited between women who are fujoshi and men who are into moé manga/games (feat. underaged-seeming female characters abt whom the reader has a vaguely sexual vaguely protective feeling (i think there is also an element of empathising that is too often ignored by people who are hung up on the creepiness aspect)), the idea that there are these two otaku groups who each think the other is awful and perverse and are a great deal more similar than either side would like to admit. and the rather charming idea that, in the way that e.g. dudes who fell in love w the male kabuki actors who played female parts fell in love with the actors in their femininity, in their more-female-than-a-woman-could-be, the fujoshi also loves yaoi manga characters bcz they have a great love for the male gender which is not satisfied by real-life examples of that gender.

iirc slash is more tied into ideas of ~queerness~

That smells of truth to me. x-post

i think female authorship is a notable feature of slash but what about readership? i think it stands to reason that (gay) male readers can appreciate slash as well -- whether or not they read it the same way is another question

hard to tell the authorship of these stories here but the implied readership of this site is male:

http://nifty.guiltygroups.com/nifty/gay/celebrity/index.html

(NSFW ads)

Ugh, I can't read articles like this...

What has been a relatively recent and surprising revelation is that the majority of slash creators (known as “slashers”) and fans are heterosexual, college-educated women -- and that for a rather large number of them, gay erotica is the pornography of choice.

Relatively recent and surprising TO WHOM??!?! This article was written when, '09? How have I known about this phenomenon for, I dunno, 15 years at least (despite having written it for about 25) and yet this is supposedly recent and surprising?

I suppose it's recent that it's gone overground and commercial but ... ugh.

OK, the full article turned out to be better than I was expecting from the "OMG, like, GURLS do this>?!?!?" beginning. But there's so much in there that's ... hrrmmm. OK, more than I feel comfortable addressing on ILX.

The answer is only ever "people, well, they're *complicated*"

Will get back to this thread later on tonight (and boy, do I ever have opinions on it), but I would like to say that not all slash is pornographic, and the Nifty site is actually a gay porn site that was used by slashers for a while until we realized just how much the webmaster hated us.

see is that really true? (actual q. i dont really watch porn and def. not any w/ women in it blech omg -joke) Its somethink I read a lot in feminist attacks on porn but idk I just cant really picture what its like (not that i'm on the hunt for depressing violent toward women porn to satiate my curiosity btw)

not to spin this off topic, but : I don't know if it is really true, it's just been my experience.

"Since women are not equal to men in society, a straight romance narrative—the usual machinations that bring a brutish alpha male and a wasp-waisted young female beauty to the point of bodice-ripping penetration—can't deliver the same heady emotional frisson as a "bromance," which slashers and M/M authors alike view as a courtship between equals, which culminates in the emotional jackpot of a true love based on loyalty, trust, caring, and mutual respect."

can women have the same kind of relationships in slash? What is f/f slash like and is it as popular as m/m? Is there a problem of not having enough decent female characters? Maybe Mary and Rhoda could have a good go round?

i don't necessarily think it's just that the characters are of the same sex -- but specifically that they are men, having sexual agency that is typically assigned to men

"femslash" does exist tho

ohhh. hm.

idk now that i'm looking i feel like the genre of erotic fanfiction is so broad and diverse as to defy attempts to comment on it as a whole

i am obviously lacking evidence but i really wonder why / if there is a special relationship between slash and scifi / fantasy / speculative fiction -- is it just because those types of stories generate the most fandom or is there something else?

Well - the first known slash was Kirk/Spock* - obviously that kind of precedent is totally over-ridable but it exists! (Obviously it does not answer the question of, y'know, why)

*: It said, in a book, when I was studying this!

WINCEST

idk there's also a really strong relationship b/w those genres and like roleplay/cosplay. like again idk what it is abt those genres but there may be a clue there?

frodo-samwise to thread

idk but maybe there's something -- there's the idea of young women identifying with male (sexual) agency and then there's the way that fantasy & scifi exaggerate male agency by supernatural / technological means?

idk, like I said i have no evidence on this

i've noticed a lot of m/m slash is non-con, too--I recently looked at FF.net for Heavy Rain fanfiction out of curiosity, and almost all of them were about Carter Blake beating the shit out of Norman Jayden and pretty much raping him.

And--again, all female authors. What's that biz?

I've never read any slash fic, actually, but I know that in my own exp of thinking about sex, there is this issue: I, and probably some % of other women too, frequently don't really get much strictly physical feeling out of sex. I'm jealous that men do this so easily b/c my experience is like 80% mental prob. I can imagine that the experiences (or the author's imagined experiences) of two men together would be less processed, more..visceral? than I can ever have.

"pretty much raping him"

yeah it's def worth noting that not all slash out there is about mutual respect

I'm always saddened by the essential conservatism of fanfiction, and wonder if this extends into the writers' politics on any level.

i don't get 'conservative' from this stuff at all -- what do you mean?

it's hard to explain but it feels like, at least from what i've read, that the fanfictions conform to some idealization of the show, in I suppose the same way conservatives yearn for some idealized 1950s America, but with less humping.

idk there's also a really strong relationship b/w those genres and like roleplay/cosplay

^^^ding ding. and wrapped up within that is the empowerment of transgression - like, it provides a more suitable venue for what would in other milieus be unacceptable (ie. "hey they're already in outer space doing completely unrealistic silly stuff, throwing in some hotttt m/m action is just taking that one step further...")

also I dunno what porn peacock's watching but I think in general it's really ridiculous to make generalizations about porn because, well, there is a LOT of porn. catering to every and any viewpoint and fetish and taste, afaict.

sorry, not following u at all on this xp

btw really enjoyed some buffy slash today. couldve done w/o the sex tho maybe!

this isn't an actual example, but if there was yogi bear fanfiction, and yogi, instead of looking for pic-a-nic baskets, decided to explore the roots of this kleptomania through scream therapy, this would be frowned upon more than, say, a three-way with ranger smith and boo-boo.

idk pornography needs to maintain its functionality to be pornography, it seems like ur criticising apples for not being carrots.

that they're conservative in the aesthetic sense, that they hew really closely to the pre-set conventions of the characters and their environments seems perfectly understandable to me - after all, those are their main signifiers, that's what makes them identifiable and powerful, they're archetypal functions as icons.

like yogi exploring the roots of his kleptomania through scream therapy violates a few too many defining characteristics of the cultural icon that is Yogi Bear.

i'm speaking of fanfiction in general, but my understanding is that aside from carrots, there isn't much difference between porn/non-porn fanfiction?

re: hewing closely -- yeah that's it! it's as if fanfiction only has worth as a type of veneration, which I guess is embedded in the name, but is there such a thing as not-really-a-fan-fiction?

but yeah, why inhabit these worlds just to dismantle them really?

empowerment? wrestling control from a seemingly uncaring/incompetent creative force? haha L O S T.

i feel like ur just imagining the slash nabisco would write tbh

i really wonder why / if there is a special relationship between slash and scifi / fantasy / speculative fiction -- is it just because those types of stories generate the most fandom or is there something else?

Some (by no means all) SF/fantasy has themes of alternatives to (or escape from) The Patriarchal Establishment(TM), so divergence from "obligatory heterosexuality" makes sense in such a context.

they hew really closely to the pre-set conventions of the characters and their environments seems perfectly understandable to me - after all, those are their main signifiers, that's what makes them identifiable and powerful, they're archetypal functions as icons.

Except that some fanwriters take characters and warp them into something that only shares a name with the canon original.

if there was yogi bear fanfiction, and yogi, instead of looking for pic-a-nic baskets, decided to explore the roots of this kleptomania through scream therapy

I would be soooo so interested in this! I am not joking, at all. But not because it sounds like it would offer psychological insights, or really say something real about the Jellystone Park universe. It just sounds like a worthwhile read.

Actually I bet when John K dies he has notepads and notepads full of that kind of shit from working out his inner world. "Heckle and Jeckle feel ennui three days after their est encounter group showed so much inner promise."

The thing about hewing closely to the show though - it's kind of hard to do! There's definitely an element of displayed skill there - like, I used to write fic and it's just way *harder* to convincingly replicate a tone than to, like paste the character names into your short song? There's definitely a formalistic pleasure & sense of achievement to it?

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x18/gr8080/RedAlertandInferno.jpg

Which is why it's hard to imagine much, say, Twin Peaks slash - it'd be seen as virtuoso rather than erotic! But maybe I'm wrong?

xp hahaha

I'm wondering if a lot of it isn't "Fantasy/Sci-Fi" so much as "smart/weird person shows"*? Like, I would imagine Daria, say, had a bigger fanfic community than, say Friends?

So you know, Leafy Green Dragon, if you ever come back and read this thread again - this is why people end up writing impassioned defenses and apologies and justifications for slash and fan fiction - because reading people who have never read it, and who don't really understand it, and have no real interest in it, is really realy depressing to the point where you feel like "please stop not getting this thing I rather care about."

Slash contains multitudes. Just like every other aspect of human sexuality or eroticism.

Certainly there's a skill and pleasure to take in that kind of re-enactment, doing your best to bring a verisimilitude to it, but I feel like that's the same impulse to do Civil War re-enactments, and I wish that someone would do one that isn't motivated by nostalgia -- like they'd re-enact the dysentery that killed most people, and de-emphasize the heroic brother-on-brother shooting.

re: john K, wasn't that John K version of feral Boo Boo universally reviled?

re: TF, transformers fandom is weirdly and disappointingly (but maybe not surprisingly) super-republican, fanfiction aside.

re: TF, transformers fandom is weirdly and disappointingly (but maybe not surprisingly) super-republican, fanfiction aside.

― Philip Nunez, Friday, August 20, 2010 12:44 PM (38 seconds ago) Bookmark

i consider myself an expert in the field of Transformers Slash and have never come across this finding-- care to elaborate??

there's the freakish examples, like the dude in the military who changed his name to optimus prime (I'm assuming he's republican but if he's not, forgive me, carrier of the matrix!), and there's one lady who identifies herself as a decepticon and has apparently written long treatises on how decepticons have superior foreign policy and she's got a thing for snakes or something (so I suppose she's with COBRA as well), but apparently (and this is all second-hand but my friend who has about 100 transformers so I'm inclined to trust him) the online TF community skews way to the right.

Question to Kate and CLGD (and anyone else who's been actively involved) - how much of the actual slash stuff comes out of 'general slash' communities versus 'fanfic for that particular show' communities? Like, is a slash Sopranos story more likely to be by a devoted Sopranos fan or a dedicated slash writer who just likes the show?

It depends.

People generally will write within their chosen fandom(s).

But a lot of writers will take calls for suggestions if they're doing Drabble or Crackfic or just writing for kicks or to improve their chops. And if you put out a call for anything, you have to write whatever wackiness comes up.

(I got one of my favourite writers to drop in an RDJ/Chris Cunningham drabble which is one of my favourite things ever, for obvious reasons.)

Thanks! That is informative to me.

i guess i'm not that much of an expert at all

(Another question if you can bear it - and I know I'm asking for generalisations here - how much alliance is there between the slash and yaoi communities? Do they communicate?)

The thing that often gets missed out is just how hugely social it is, and collaborative. I've never experienced any other artform where people are so willing to get participatory and collaborate on pieces, and exchange criticism and beta reading and editing and everything. I suppose because you're writing within a fandom which belongs to everyone, people don't get quite *so* precious (although they do kinda get precious, comparing different visions of the same character) as they do in entirely original fic.

It is fun the way some writers will be all "set me a task" - the only thing that's anything like it, it reminds me a bit of remixing culture.

Slash v Yaoi I can't help you with due the nature of mine own fandoms but others might be able to give you an answer on that.

(Will be back to reply in a couple hours or tomorrow morning....)

i came across a whole hell of a lot of explicit spy vs. spy slash fanart just the other day which was so, so much more confusing to me than all the supernatural incest fanfic in the whole world put together

i'm really interested in this community aspect of slash, esp. w/r/t what other writers consider to be the benchmark of quality - i remember reading an article about early star trek fanfic where some writers argued that a kirk/spock relationship would make no sense based on their personality types or whatever (i can't recall the actual argument) - especially when a lot of slash is so intensely personal insofar as it represents a particular writer's organization of their own erotic/affective impulses but also steeped in these larger pre-existent character narratives - i guess what i'm getting at is trying to imagine a field of 'slash criticism' and what schools of thought there are/may be behind it (i only read this stuff once in a blue moon and am largely unaware of the conversations that take place among the writers behind the stories)

xxxxxxxxxxxxxpost

Jay Cantor's Krazy Kat is basically novel-length slash of the kind Philip Nunez is talking about. I don't like that argument about criticizing apples for not being carrots. If you criticize something for being slight or one dimensional, that's a valid personal evaluation, isn't it, whether or not rectification would break the bounds of the genre or character? Don Quixote is like a character taken to extremes, beyond his original parodic bounds. Not that Yogi's a great example, because I think that the Yogi-Ranger-Booboo dynamic is better open to Krazy-style permutations, whereas Krazy Kat itself was so exhaustive that it had nowhere else to go but inward and elsewhere.

You could write a novel of Star Trek slash where Kirk and Spock have life-changing experiences and near the end their penises touch and they give each other a knowing look.

This thread is already so informative! Thanks, Kate, et al.

p.s. I've only seen the quicktime, but I like John K's Yogi and Ranger UFC grapple and accompanying essay.

Ha ha, every slash community itself seems to function as its own "slash criticism" (or at least the good ones do) and then there's metafandom communities that critique the critiques.

It really kinda seems to me that, although most people's impression of fan fiction is that it's written by 15 year old girls who can't spell (and sure, there's an element of that) - the overwhelming majority (in my experience) is highly educated women who like to critique texts and critique their engagement of the texts on a sometimes frustratingly navel-gazing level. And different people appreciate different parts of it. Some people want writers to remain as true to Canon as possible (and yeah, there are people who criticise slash on that level - "OMG, this character would never ever DO that!") - but even fan fiction writers can have completely different interpretations of the same character before they even get to writing. It can be a jarring disconnect that can pop you out of the story, but at the same time, you kind of accept when you read the label on a story that if you are reading a slash story or something really wacky like an M-preg story or something, you accept that you are willing to suspend your disbelief in order to fulfill your particular jolly.

I wish that someone would do one that isn't motivated by nostalgia -- like they'd re-enact the dysentery that killed most people, and de-emphasize the heroic brother-on-brother shooting.

dunno much about slashfic, but this seems like an almost totally unrelated enterprise. fandom (of whatever sort) arises out of shared devotion to an ideal, and the aggressive demythologization you're talking about would run counter to it, essentially amounts to an attack on it. same with the (ironic?) psychoanalysis of yogi bear you mentioned earlier. that kind of thing is motivated by a different impulse and would appeal to a different group of people.

also wanted to address the "why sci-fi/fantasy" question. i don't have an answer, but it's not limited to slash. furry & sci-fi/fantasy overlap is significant, same with poly & kink communities.

Some (by no means all) SF/fantasy has themes of alternatives to (or escape from) The Patriarchal Establishment(TM), so divergence from "obligatory heterosexuality" makes sense in such a context.

― Charlie Chaliapin (j.lu)

maybe this, but there's also that fantasy & sci-fi are profoundly escapist (or if you wish, creative, or even queer) by nature. they depend on the construction of alternatives to this, to the here and now. better worlds, better lives, better selves. they therefore attract fans who want out on some level, people who are dissatisfied with or alienated by consensus reality, and moreover, they encourage their fans to think in terms of how the world might be remade. my take as an inveterate sci-fi fan...

i'm not sure - it seems like you're trying to pin down the essence of "fandom" here, c. I've always had an uncomfortable relationship with that term, because I'd always feel like my devotion is significantly less than other "fans" of whatever.

My college roommate is really into various slash/fan-fic communities (though i'm not really in touch w/her anymore - we were roommates over 15 years ago) - and she definitely fits Kate's description of the overwhelming majority of fan-fic writers.

i'm not sure - it seems like you're trying to pin down the essence of "fandom" here, c. I've always had an uncomfortable relationship with that term, because I'd always feel like my devotion is significantly less than other "fans" of whatever.

yeah, that's fair. any broad summation of something so popular, personal and varied is gonna be wrong at least as often as it's right. and i'm sure i'm projecting to some degree. but given those big caveats, i stand by my take on sci-fi/fantasy as a whole, what it offers those to whom it most strongly appeals. this is kind of a james tiptree jr. read on fandom as whole.

One thing I've wondered about is if/what relationship TVtropes has to fanfic communities. Do numerous fanfic communities compose TVTropes (such that you get these obsessive fanfic references throughout the website, plus exhaustive detailing of creative property canon-minutae), or are there different communities with little crossover?

i mean the aggressive demythologizing, the would-be carrots that don't exist, those things are interesting to me - more so than what generally gets written under the auspices of fan-fic or slash, but i'd question whether i'm a proper "fan" - like, you may be correct, and that's just how fandom communities work in practice, i don't know.

one too many uses of "as a whole" in that post:

...i stand by my take on sci-fi/fantasy fandom as a whole, what it offers those to whom it most strongly appeals. you could call this the james tiptree jr. read on such fandom.

i have no idea who james tiptree jr is

i mean the aggressive demythologizing, the would-be carrots that don't exist, those things are interesting to me - more so than what generally gets written under the auspices of fan-fic or slash, but i'd question whether i'm a proper "fan"

yeah, i'm with you on that. and although science fiction & roleplaying games were important to me in my youth, i was never really a "proper fan", either. i didn't enjoy the company of fan communities (cons, gamer's groups, etc.), didn't venerate particular imaginary worlds or even authors. the fidelity and thematic narrowness of the (admittedly little) fanfic i've encountered hasn't appealed to me. i'm not really equipped to comment on that, specifically, so i'm just talking about fandom in general. misuse of thread, i'm sure...

no, i think a discussion of fandom, in general, is actually really interesting in a discussion of gender and gender politics.

(is there anyone here willing to defend tvtropes, by the way? I am very very pro-fanfic yet I find it one of the most annoying sites on the entire internet)

what is it exactly? can it be easily summarized?

"james tiptree jr." = the pen name alice sheldon, a science fiction writer of the 60s/70s/80s. she committed suicide in '87. one of her early stories concerns the intense longing to inhabit the world described by star trek, a longing rendered crushingly poignant by its impossibility.

interesting short summary of her life: http://cabinet-des-fees.com/?p=2167

sheldon = the first significant female science fiction writer in the US - the first, at least, to be accepted as part of "the community" (ironically under a masculine pseudonym). one of the best of her era, too. her stories are very bleak and misanthropic, even nihilistic. in some ways seemingly feminist, though she never aligned herself with feminism. seemingly queer herself, though she was married all her life.

and yeah, i've never heard of TVtropes.

(I am enjoying the current thread of discussion, but I would just like to pop in with another "not all fan fiction is... X" caveat because, although I've been a fan of sci fi since, well, birth, the vast bulk of my fan fic experiences have not been within sci fi - or even television and film. There are also huge music fandom based fanfic and slash communities which, although they share major structural similarities are again quite different - in fact, in many fandoms, "real person slash" or RPS is really looked down on as highly inferior and possibly even questionable ethically.)

all the acronyms and abbreviations and, i know it has pejorative connotations, but "jargon" is kinda alienating to me about it, in general

james tiptree sounds like something i would check out? I've never read sci fi and i kind of feel like I'm more open to the idea of genre fiction now than ever.

tiptree is definitely worth checking out, her many short stories more than her two novels, though they're good too. the short story collections ten thousand light-years from home, warm worlds and otherwise and out of the everywhere are also worth tracking down.

at the same time, if you're at all interested in science fiction (and philosophy, and queer theory), samuel r. delaney, by all means. dhalgren, the einstein instersection, neveryon, etc.

contenderizer u see inside me

I don't want to be too off-topic on this thread because it is a fascinating look at a subject I don't know much about (slash) in terms of subjects (gender politics) I have FEELINGS but little book-learning about (would like more of the latter but am bad at getting round to it + don't know where to start - admittedly mainly the not getting round to it, given the wealth of starting point links on recent ILX threads)

but anyway, as a result of googling a little aside in that James Tiptree Jr article (also interesting, thanks), I have found that last year Vice magazine interviewed Ursula LeGuin, and this juxtaposition is blowing my mind a little! I mean, Vice! so I had to remark on it here

ok, now please to carry on with little regard to my wandering in and waving my arms around excitably and leaving again

hogg seems to be the only delaney book in print in this part of the world.

just wanted to post this again cuz i think it's very relevant --

that fantasy & sci-fi are profoundly escapist (or if you wish, creative, or even queer) by nature. they depend on the construction of alternatives to this, to the here and now. better worlds, better lives, better selves. they therefore attract fans who want out on some level, people who are dissatisfied with or alienated by consensus reality, and moreover, they encourage their fans to think in terms of how the world might be remade.

i'm maybe a little wary of the emphasis on escapism as i do not want to unfairly promote any stereotypes of speculative fandoms / slash communities as being isolated, outcast, or out-of-touch with reality.

because -- at best, i tend to think of speculative fiction as having an important, productive role in our culture of exploring the assumptions of consensus-reality, as well as offering commentary on it.

but overall, i think the idea of *alternatives* is v v important

The other week Jeanette Winterson told me (I was interviewing her) that feminists LOVE spec fiction because they're attracted to utopias.

yeah, i guess what i mean to say is that spec fiction can just as well be used to engage with consensus reality as to escape from it

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