no boys allowed? (femslash meta roundup)

Thanks muchly for this roundup; there are several pieces new to me.

I want to engage your question/thesis - I wonder, sometimes, whether femslash isn't more heteronormative than mslash because it takes gender (female) as stable and given - but I'm having a little trouble. I do take your point regarding the presumed alignment between the gender/sexual identity of the readers/writers and the gender/sexual identity of the characters, but you lose me when you say I have a problem with calling mslash "more queer" for that reason. I guess - and I've been working for three days on a girlslash romcom, so my brain is addled, forgive *g* - I just don't follow? Or see the connection?

As something of a digression, I tend to find the mslash rationale - women like cock! Two cocks are better than one! - to be much more heteronormative than anything I've yet seen in fslash fic or its fandom(s), because it presumes that women by default desire men, you know?

I tend to find the mslash rationale - women like cock! Two cocks are better than one! - to be much more heteronormative than anything I've yet seen in fslash fic or its fandom(s), because it presumes that women by default desire men, you know?

Ditto that. (I also find it kind of uncomfortable reasoning on my end because, while I am a hetero gal, guyslash does absolutely nothing for me at all.)

I have a problem with calling mslash "more queer" for that reason

this is partly pursuant to a flocked discussion elsewhere, so that may be why it seems out of context, sorry. but to explain further: I don't think there would have been decades of theorizing about the apparently outlandish phenomenon of slash fandom if the answer were as simple as "women like cock!" -- that's what people started saying, I think, when they got fed up with being endlessly asked to justify slash. there's a cross-gender identification implicit in it: imagining what it's like to live in a male body, meditating on the constructedness of masculinity and finding its fissures. not to mention the homosociality of the community (I left slashing the slashers/queer minstrel show out of the meta list because it seemed tangential, but it's been an important debate). so there's a sense of blurring and play that may be absent from the world of femslash where gender and sexuality are presumed to neatly align.

this is my sense of this position as a complete outsider to mslash -- not my own argument! I was trying to refute it (or at least propose a stance that would refute it).

there's a cross-gender identification implicit in it: imagining what it's like to live in a male body, meditating on the constructedness of masculinity and finding its fissures. not to mention the homosociality of the community

There's a half a dozen web comics that deal with MtF involuntary transgenderism, an the experience also manifests infrequently but regularly within professional comicdom. Involuntary MtF transition and MtF transvestism have their own niche within popular culture, numerous examples of which deal with the experience as a karmic and comedic exercise.

Where's the reverse? Where's the FtM transgenderism, voluntary or otherwise? Where's the tranvestism?

As something of a digression, I tend to find the mslash rationale - women like cock! Two cocks are better than one! - to be much more heteronormative than anything I've yet seen in fslash fic or its fandom(s), because it presumes that women by default desire men, you know?

There are drastically more straights than there are queers.
There are drastically more women writing than men.

Even allow for population skew, from a statistical probability standpoint that does indeed seem rather heteronormative to me. In relation to creation of content, anyway.

In terms of content, I think it's logically impossible to describe a genre where the default pairings are same-sex as, in anyway, heteronormative.

MSlash with its assumption of female authorhood avoids the problem of obvious authorial transference - the Mary Sue Effect - which is generally viewed as the literary equivalent of serving yourself before your guests at the dinner table. Or maybe something akin to public masturbation. Or maybe trying to play above your grade - there is an arrogance to creating your own character in someone else's sandbox, to saying the toys you've been given aren't good enough on their own. Original characters are lone eddies of capitalism or even iconoclasm in an essentially orthodox socialist current.

And if you can't join in the fun, then consensus of making the guys interested in other guys is an acceptable means of making sure you've salted the game not only in terms of other writers playing with toys you'd rather they didn't because you can't, but it also similarly removes female inhabitants of that universe as competition. In many respects it could be looked upon as a strange sort of eusocialism.

This very stream of consciousness.

Fslash is different. The implications of playing with an original character remain the same. But with its assumed female authorhood, rather than create an essentially competition free zone where one indulges vicariously in the object of desire, fslash instead inducts those objects into the community to which the authors already by inference belong. While it might sound, well, heteronormative, this could be read as the effect of the lack of a reproductive target (artificial insemination of whatever sort aside).

Women can share women, but they can't share men. The social conditioning of reproductive biology.

Again assuming female authorship, In Mslash author and object are discrete, while in Fslash they are identical. Introduce a male into the former environment and the status quo remains unchanged - a man playing with men presents no inherent reproductive challenge. Reverse the scenario and suddenly there's the inherent implication that a man playing with the female object is a threat by introducing even the possibility of reproductive competition, thereby dirupting the competition free status quo.

I think that gender shouldn't be a criterion for how people are allowed to participate in this community

Thanks for saying that. I want to share stories and art and discussions etc and be judged for that, not what people think I have in my pants.

Huh. I've never really thought about it. Perhaps women don't write femslash for women so much because it's too close.

I'm going to make a pretty stretched analogy now. I hope it works for someone other than me, but it makes sense in my head, so here goes...

There's this game in theatresports called 'classic in a minute', where a member of the audience calls out a classic storyline/novel or film, and then you play it out in a minute. It's the highlights... the bits everyone remembers or knows (say in snow white). It's almost impossible to do straight up, because everyone in the audience 'knows' certain things about that storyline, and if you don't 'play' those things, they feel like 'their' story isn't being told, that the bits they most remember are being left out (where was the poisoned comb? Where was the woodsman?).

The way it can be played so that the audience likes it, is for the players, once they get their 'classic', to ask for a brief rundown to remind them of the story (snow white, jealous stepmother, mirror, forest, seven dwarves, 3x poisoning attempts, prince comes along). That brief synopsis, whatever points are related, becomes the new template of what the audience 'knows', and the players can play with those handles, secure in the knowledge that the audience is coming along with them. It's one remove from the original story, but everyone has the same referents, and no-one watching is isolated.

Hi, here from metafandom

Thanks for the summary. There are a few comments that perplex me, though. When anna_maria said, "If you like m/m, and you like m/f, but you don't like f/f, you have issues with sexuality and/or gender that you need to deal with on your own," I thought, "Huh?" One's sexual preference in reading erotica implies "issues with sexuality or gender?"

tehlils says something similar, "We're faced with assumptions and a need to be comfortable with our sexuality in order to write f/f fiction." I'm very comfortable with my sexuality; have no problems with f/f if that's what others want to write, and I've read a few good f/f short stories in my fandom (Phantom of the Opera.) It's just not on the top of my must-write to-do list, because I draw a lot of my writing energy from internal erotic/sexual energy.

I can relate far more closely to volsi's comment, "I primarily read femslash. This may be because, as a lesbian, endless cock has limited appeal for me..." Exactly. As a straight woman, (some, not all) sexual depictions of men have a lot of appeal for me - whether the men are in bed with women or other men. Of course, it's not just "being in bed with" - the slash I like covers questions of character, hidden dramatic conflicts in the original narrative, etc.

She then goes on to say, "So what is it about femslash that dissuades writers?..." Uh - maybe because most women fanfic writers are straight, and that's their preference, to focus on men, especially in sexually-oriented writing?

Also, "No" to runetraverse's question, "Do you have to be a lesbian to write femmeslash?" I wouldn't think so. Gay writers write straight sex; a lot of people have sexual experience with both genders, whether they identify as gay or not; some writers have really good imaginations and a kind of "polymorphous" sexuality which they can draw on for writing. I think it all comes down to the power and effectiveness of the writing.

here via metafandom

I've written erotica in every flavor by now. Mostly original, but fan fic is much fun too.

My more pron-oriented friends say that femmeslash just isn't as hot as boyslash is. Time and again, I say that's all in how you write it, and the fact that women write such hot boy-sex certainly means they are capable of those same volcanic feelings themselves. And then I write some as illustration. *grin*

What do we write, after all, that makes our own pron so sexy to us? It's not just the hard-as-wood muscles and lush arse of some boy-- it's the emotions that the sight engenders in his partner. Most particularly a raging river of lust that never runs dry. Something that women, physiologically, are more capable of then men are. Guys go soft and uninterested for a bit while women are still rarin' to go!

I have to admit, my female characters are mostly originals, and not from any fandom -- but that's because I have had no tv for about six years, and have ignored most of the fan-worthy series along with everything else. I'd probably write a ton of "Firefly" fic, though.

I've just found this gorgeous entry (probably that's not the best word but I feel like it) and it's gone right to my memories. I'll take a closer look other day and probably comment. It's a very interesting topic, why hadn't I thought of it before? ^^

hey thanks! I didn't do much -- just compiled a bunch of posts that I wanted to keep track of. glad you found it helpful too.

Frankly, I write het and femmeslash and don't write manslash (except in very rare, non-porn instances) because I'm not remotely attracted to men in a physical way, and very little in an emotional sense. It really is that simple for some of us... but I can understand it being more complicated for others. It's all about the individual, isn't it?

I have to say, though, that I find the manslash community as a general thing to be much more heteronormative than the femmeslash side, primarily because the majority of manslash fandom participants are heterosexual females. Homosexual males, whom one might automatically presume wrote the most slash if you knew nothing about fandom, make up the most minor of the minorities in fandom. I know a gay guy who writes some of the best SG-1 femmeslash I've ever read, but he is an exception to the rule.

This question was recently rehashed here, in a series of anonymous threads on Dreamwidth's girlgay community. Thought you might like to see for yourself what's on there, for completions' sake. :)