kalpurna

Note: terminology is kind of confusing. For the purposes of this post, "fandom" is being used to mean "media slash fandom." Or, well, media slash and RPS. And het written by people who also write slash or interact with slashers. Basically, if your fandom operates in some way remotely analogous to the way SGA or Bandslash or Due South fandom operates, then I'm talking to you.

Second note: This is my experience. This is how I feel. If you feel differently, I would love to hear about it, but please don't tell me angrily that I don't speak for you. I know. That's why I posted it in MY journal.

Third note: Uh, this is pretty long. Just so you know.






FANDOM AS QUEER FEMALE SPACE, WITH A BANDOM DIGRESSION, AND INCIDENTAL VICTORIANS.


In my experience, for me, fandom is a fundamentally and profoundly female space. It is overwhelmingly female, to the extent that most fangirls I know have only one or two men on their flist, if any. I was stunned to read a post once that talked about "just not noticing that there were lots of women," because my experience is so overwhelmingly feminine. So I started thinking about what it means to me that fandom is female.

I don't mean to say that it's a very femme place, or that it's only meant for people who strongly identify as female. Certainly it has more space for genderqueer individuals than most female spaces; that's because it has more space for queer individuals. In fact, it has very little room for the *non*queer. It has always confused me that the standard goggle-eyed magazine description of slashers is "straight women writing about gay men," for two reasons - first of all, isn't it a lot weirder to write about gay men if you're a lesbian? And secondly, it's just not true. There are some straight women on my friendslist, some lesbians, one gay man, and quite a lot of bisexuals or otherwise queer individuals. It can be pretty damn hard to be a straight woman in fandom, according to my friends who are.

I even think it's fair to make the argument that no matter how straight you may be – no matter how little interest you have in having sex with or dating a woman – if you are participating in slash fandom, you are, on some level, queer. You are participating in an erotic activity with other women. You are interested in, almost obsessed with, queerness and queer themes. Nobody who reads or writes slash isn't a little bit queer.

The eroticism of relationships between fangirls is incredibly interesting to me. It's not just that cons are full of girls making out, although in my experience (ahaha, seriously) they are. It's not just that there are three or four couples on my flist alone. It's that everything we do, the entire experience of writing porn for a female audience, constitutes some kind of homosexual contact. It's in the definition. You're writing something that will hopefully get someone else off - and that someone is a woman. This isn't even approaching the level of homoeroticism involved in something like co-writing, in which women collaborate on producing a sexual artifact, competing to turn each other on and then displaying the result to a female audience.

Even if you're writing PG stuff across the board, even if you're not reading any porn, you're still interacting romantically with women. You're forming homosocial bonds through descriptions of homosexual romance. The great drama of fandom, for me, at least, has never been between me and the male writers/actors/musicans; it's between me and my flist. I flew to England partly to see DecayDanceFest, but I would have been much, much more upset by calathea and airinshaw not making it down to London than by Brendon Urie canceling with a throat infection. The men in my fandom life pale before the women.

I found myself reacting with a great deal of discomfort to ficbyzee's post about us idealizing our fanobjects in bandslash, to the point of excluding ourselves from that plane of being. Partly, my discomfort had to do with my feeling that she hit very close to the mark with regard not only to how we feel about ourselves, but to how young non-slash fans feel about these bands, and even how the bandmembers feel about their female fans. It makes me incredibly angry to think about, as she pointed out, lyrics about "a whole subculture of boys driving around in vans." I have the uncomfortable feeling that it is impossible for some of the FBR bandmembers to imagine girls lying around in a shitty van with their heads in each others' laps being creative.

Uh, but you know what? That's kind of what we're doing. I mean, minus the van and plus a livejournal. The other thing that bothered me in ficbyzee's post was the unstated implication that what we're doing somehow isn't as good as what they're doing. I'm not a musician. I have, to be completely honest, less interest in music than most people I know. But I am a fangirl. It's a huge part of my identity. And what that means is that I form tight creative and social bonds with other women. We're a whole subculture of girls fucking around on the internet, and I wouldn't change it for anything.

I really, really hope that the girls who are fans of these bands, and the bandmembers themselves, are not as convinced as I think they might be that women are incapable of loving each other the way the bandom boys love each other. I get the feeling they think that boys love each other, and girls love boys. The idea of intrafemale bonds is basically completely absent from their lyrics and conversation. It's just not part of the narrative, and while that's partially cultural, it's also fucking bullshit that needs to end.

Few things drive me as crazy as the assertion that "girls are vicious to each other." Girls are backstabbing, right? Especially in middle school, it's the fundamental nature of girls to form cliques, to fight and compete over boys, to be jealous and catty. That's the way it is.

Bullshit.

This is a new idea, this concept of women as fundamentally hostile to each other. In Victorian England, women's fundamental nature was to love each other, to admire each other physically and intellectually, to form bonds which no man could touch. An extremely common conceit in the Victorian novel was for two female rivals to have a touching encounter and fall into each others' arms weeping, upon which one of the rivals *gives* the man to the other woman. Even when this doesn't happen, it's almost always true that in the Victorian marriage plot, the heroine must form close attachments with other women before the marriage can occur.

And you know what? That fits a lot closer to my experience than the more recent, competitive model. I'm not saying that the new cliche doesn't have some truth to it, or that the old one was without flaw, but most of the important relationships in my life have been with other women. I spend a ridiculous amount of time interacting with other women, comforting friends, laughing, eroticizing both men and women, having intellectual conversations, complaining, squeeing. Women are my closest friends.

Oh, huh, look at that! We're right back at fandom.

When I say fandom is a female (safe) space, what I'm saying is that fandom is a place where I can come to talk about my depression, my vagina, my celebrity crushes, slash, sci fi, my thoughts on religion, my period, my vibrator, my political views, my erotic fixations, etc, etc. And then we all share our creative output with each other and talk about it. And NO ONE shuts it down. That's unbelievable, you guys. That's ridiculous. There are spaces on the internet where women are in the minority, and that is not the way things are there. Ask any female gamer. This is a place we've hacked out for ourselves where it is actually possible to carry on this kind of conversation without being shut down or yelled at for being gross or off topic or oversharing (as long as we put it behind a cut-tag *g*). That's unbelievable, and I fucking love it.

I recognize that what I've said here might not ring true with everyone, especially those readers who are not clear-cut in their gender identification, or whose fandoms (comics, for example) contain a higher percentage of men. I also really, really don't intend to make men or genderqueer persons uncomfortable, and you're just as welcome to be here as any woman. Provided you don't shut down that ongoing conversation – a conversation which was built by women. I sincerely believe that it would have been impossible for (slash media) fandom to develop as it has developed if it hadn't been developed by an overwhelmingly female group.

Because we're (almost all) women, and all (to some extent) queer, and (nearly) all nerds, we're used to being shut down in conversations. We're used to our opinions and emotions being marginalized or cast as abnormal. We're freaks, you guys. And oh my God, you know what? We're not alone. We can open up a laptop and be surrounded by other outsiders, we can read and write stories where the characters whose emotional lives capture us also deal with otherness. We can take the whole heteronormative patriarchal THING that is popular culture and transform it into something that's ours. And then we can turn to our friends, our friends who understand us, and say, look! Look what I've done. And they embrace it with open arms.

That's the real romance of fannishness, for me, not self-insertion stories. I would really, really love to drop Pete Wentz a note sometime that said, "Look, you know you're kind of marginal in this, right?" I would love to tell Bill Becket, just FYI, we're good on our own here. Most of us aren't really trying to get closer to you. We're trying to get closer to artistic truth and to orgasm and to each other. You're just a stepstool on the way.

I've heard people complaining about the Organization for Transformative Works, for many reasons (how dare they expose us to the light! Who asked them to talk for me!) but the one I cannot accept is the complaint that the language of the mission statement mentions that our fandom is female. That's a fundamental part of who we are, that's our history, that's our reality. If fandom weren't a female space, I wouldn't want to be here, because it wouldn't be what we have.