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kiki_eng(I meant to write about this last year and then I didn’t. I’m writing about it this year.)
For the past two years all of the fannish content I’ve consumed and produced in February has been female-centric, either gen or femslash. [Mostly, anyway – there are icons and teasers that I scrawled past (words like "Arthur is school president" and gifs, gifs are distracting) and the fic I read that turned out to have equal billing time for the slash and femslash couples or the one that was something like queer gen but with varied ships.] My inaccurately named "Femslash February" is something that came out of discussion happening in Fandom in late 2009 and early 2010 focused around and stemming from the idea of slash as appropriation of m/m relationships by women. There were some really interesting discussions in that and among other things I think it’s resulted in increased queer visibility in Fandom.
I have a draft post from that time that is very drafty indeed; I start out bemoaning the lack of citations in that discussion (specificity; I like it) and then proceed to essentially bullet-point vomit "and another thing!"-type reactions to the meta. It was a debate about gender and sexuality. There were issues. They were personal.
My draft is 15 paragraphs long. I use the word "paragraph" kindly; paragraph four is the word "ARRRRRRGGGGH." I use some form of the word "fuck" four times, once in the third paragraph and then once again in each of the final three paragraphs. It is a ridiculous and rage-fuelled thing; there are no citations.
One of the paragraphs in that draft is about the negative portrayal of women in slash fiction. Female-identifying characters are sometimes villainised in a very 2D sort of way as an obstacle to the central m/m love story. At best it’s badfic and at worst it’s misogyny. There’s an episode rewrite fic that substitutes a male character in place of the original female character, turning a het romance into a slash one. The plot is the same and I think that he keeps all of her lines; it’s bad characterisation and lazy writing, but it was incredibly well-received.
There were arguably issues with the writing of the canon that made that fic cathartic for a lot of people and possibly bad fic is a fitting response to bad TV, but it rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t like the erasure. It struck me as misogynistic.
Writing a character out of a world can be genuinely interesting. Sometimes, though, it feels like we’re finding the vulnerable blonde cheerleader in the slasher film and stabbing her ourselves.
I have something like a horror of that blonde cheerleader; she’s never been a character I’ve identified with. Someone wrote that they didn’t like geeks on television, that they looked at these people and went, you are trying to write a geek into this story, you are trying to write about someone like me, and that is not me. I think that’s how some women feel about female characters sometimes and why they react negatively to them; they reject the token female character because they don’t identify with her.
Watching NCIS episodes out of order, that was pretty much my initial reaction to Kate. She grew on me, but I dislike strongly when one character is designated the morality or the conscience. I don’t like Michael of Queer as Folk (US) for this reason, but it’s somehow less offensive when it’s a guy. It’s still annoying, but it’s less personal.
I think there’s a certain amount of validity to the claim that sometimes the writers are just really, truly terrible at writing female characters and that that results in less fan fiction about women is unfortunate. There are gorgeous sweeping epics written about minor characters, people who appear once and have next to no lines; that writers are letting themselves be stopped from writing about women because of the deficiencies of the source material is regrettable. I liked Joss’ solution better, where she kills the fucker herself, in heels if she feels like it. The solution to badly written female characters isn’t erasure; it’s well-written ones.
Sometimes writing about women is harder because of those deficiencies in the source material, but I don’t think that that’s a justification for not writing those stories. Good fic is, after all, harder to write than bad fic; it is still worth doing.
I think that we need to stop treating our women in a problematic fashion. I think that dismissing women in fiction is problematic. Sometimes a character is a canonical obstacle to a slash romance and the best comparison to the authorial response I can make is with this comic. There are some fics that seem to be written with singular purpose, where the zombie is the girlfriend or the wife and she needs to be eliminated as quickly as possible by whatever means necessary so that our heroes can go and frolic in a glorious meadow full of convenient caches of lube and condoms. That beginning of your fic? It is kind of dark and sinister.
I read a lot of slash and some of its tropes are terrible; some of them are awesome. I read mostly slash. The fic that I read is overwhelmingly slash. I speculate that this is related to the fact that this is easy. Recent bookmarks tagged "fic" on delicious are overwhelmingly slash. In the internet spaces that I inhabit slashers seem to be the majority.
Out of that discussion in late 2009 and early 2010 about gender and sexuality in Fandom I decided that I wanted to read more fic about women. I knew that left to my own devices, lazy and surrounded by slash, I would continue reading a lot of slash, though. So I decided that I would read about nothing but femslash and female-centric gen for a month. February had proximity and alliteration on its side. I figured that after a month of reading just that I’d pick up favourite pairings and authors and I’d up my female-centric fic intake in the following months.
It was not, strictly speaking, a roaring success.
That February was seriously hectic and difficult and a number of things that essentially translated into that was not the ideal time for that sort of fannish experiment. Fanwork is my happy place, and I’ve got fics and vids that I go to when I need cheering up, and then they weren’t there when I needed them, because the overwhelming majority of them are slash.
It was actually kind of bad. I stuck with it, though, and I ended up watching the female-centric vids I have saved on my computer a lot, and looking for others. One Girl Revolution became a kind of pick-me-up anthem for me for a while there. I fell on my warm, comfortable, familiar slash Fandom like a starved dog when the month was up.
The one thing that came out of that, really, is that I did the preliminary legwork for a femslash story that summer. (I have been eyeing those notes speculatively this past month.) I wasn’t sure about doing it again this year, but then I started getting all excited, so: Femslash February Round Two.
It was good! There was journal content! I read lots of things! I picked up strange and wonderful new fandoms and pairings and learned things. I have more things to read now. It’s good; I think there’s more female content in the future of my journal now than there was before doing this.
I also growled angrily a fair bit. I had to learn how to find fic again. I decided I wanted gen fic about Ariadne being awesome and didn’t find any. My life, it was full of woe. There was a certain amount of "...and some people do this all the time!" thrown in there and time spent wondering if there was some kind of underground speakeasy for gen fic.
One of the really interesting things I ran into this year came of being subscribed to both a trek and femslash newsletter; I watched people submit trek femslash to the femslash newsletter but not the trek one.
I suspect that there may be a certain amount of fannish privilege in being a slasher. One of the things that has become clear to me in doing this is that while I know my little fannish corner of the internet really well the rest of it is quite mysterious to me. [There is a part of me that is totally not kidding about the underground gen speakeasy. (I suspect that it is a place of merriment and highballs and delicious fruit juices.) I want to know how people find fic.]
February is a beginning for me, a first step, and I’m glad I did it again this year. One of my goals for this year is to actually write femslash, which I guess means that Chelsea/Ms. Dickinson St. Trinian’s fic, or female-centric gen. The future: it beckons. [Apparently. (Help?)]
So. Long entry is long. Please point out my spelling and grammar errors, etc. (It is late/early.) Let me know if you want me to cite the source for something I’ve written or want a link or something and I shall see about digging it up for you.
For the past two years all of the fannish content I’ve consumed and produced in February has been female-centric, either gen or femslash. [Mostly, anyway – there are icons and teasers that I scrawled past (words like "Arthur is school president" and gifs, gifs are distracting) and the fic I read that turned out to have equal billing time for the slash and femslash couples or the one that was something like queer gen but with varied ships.] My inaccurately named "Femslash February" is something that came out of discussion happening in Fandom in late 2009 and early 2010 focused around and stemming from the idea of slash as appropriation of m/m relationships by women. There were some really interesting discussions in that and among other things I think it’s resulted in increased queer visibility in Fandom.
I have a draft post from that time that is very drafty indeed; I start out bemoaning the lack of citations in that discussion (specificity; I like it) and then proceed to essentially bullet-point vomit "and another thing!"-type reactions to the meta. It was a debate about gender and sexuality. There were issues. They were personal.
My draft is 15 paragraphs long. I use the word "paragraph" kindly; paragraph four is the word "ARRRRRRGGGGH." I use some form of the word "fuck" four times, once in the third paragraph and then once again in each of the final three paragraphs. It is a ridiculous and rage-fuelled thing; there are no citations.
One of the paragraphs in that draft is about the negative portrayal of women in slash fiction. Female-identifying characters are sometimes villainised in a very 2D sort of way as an obstacle to the central m/m love story. At best it’s badfic and at worst it’s misogyny. There’s an episode rewrite fic that substitutes a male character in place of the original female character, turning a het romance into a slash one. The plot is the same and I think that he keeps all of her lines; it’s bad characterisation and lazy writing, but it was incredibly well-received.
There were arguably issues with the writing of the canon that made that fic cathartic for a lot of people and possibly bad fic is a fitting response to bad TV, but it rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t like the erasure. It struck me as misogynistic.
Writing a character out of a world can be genuinely interesting. Sometimes, though, it feels like we’re finding the vulnerable blonde cheerleader in the slasher film and stabbing her ourselves.
I have something like a horror of that blonde cheerleader; she’s never been a character I’ve identified with. Someone wrote that they didn’t like geeks on television, that they looked at these people and went, you are trying to write a geek into this story, you are trying to write about someone like me, and that is not me. I think that’s how some women feel about female characters sometimes and why they react negatively to them; they reject the token female character because they don’t identify with her.
Watching NCIS episodes out of order, that was pretty much my initial reaction to Kate. She grew on me, but I dislike strongly when one character is designated the morality or the conscience. I don’t like Michael of Queer as Folk (US) for this reason, but it’s somehow less offensive when it’s a guy. It’s still annoying, but it’s less personal.
I think there’s a certain amount of validity to the claim that sometimes the writers are just really, truly terrible at writing female characters and that that results in less fan fiction about women is unfortunate. There are gorgeous sweeping epics written about minor characters, people who appear once and have next to no lines; that writers are letting themselves be stopped from writing about women because of the deficiencies of the source material is regrettable. I liked Joss’ solution better, where she kills the fucker herself, in heels if she feels like it. The solution to badly written female characters isn’t erasure; it’s well-written ones.
Sometimes writing about women is harder because of those deficiencies in the source material, but I don’t think that that’s a justification for not writing those stories. Good fic is, after all, harder to write than bad fic; it is still worth doing.
I think that we need to stop treating our women in a problematic fashion. I think that dismissing women in fiction is problematic. Sometimes a character is a canonical obstacle to a slash romance and the best comparison to the authorial response I can make is with this comic. There are some fics that seem to be written with singular purpose, where the zombie is the girlfriend or the wife and she needs to be eliminated as quickly as possible by whatever means necessary so that our heroes can go and frolic in a glorious meadow full of convenient caches of lube and condoms. That beginning of your fic? It is kind of dark and sinister.
I read a lot of slash and some of its tropes are terrible; some of them are awesome. I read mostly slash. The fic that I read is overwhelmingly slash. I speculate that this is related to the fact that this is easy. Recent bookmarks tagged "fic" on delicious are overwhelmingly slash. In the internet spaces that I inhabit slashers seem to be the majority.
Out of that discussion in late 2009 and early 2010 about gender and sexuality in Fandom I decided that I wanted to read more fic about women. I knew that left to my own devices, lazy and surrounded by slash, I would continue reading a lot of slash, though. So I decided that I would read about nothing but femslash and female-centric gen for a month. February had proximity and alliteration on its side. I figured that after a month of reading just that I’d pick up favourite pairings and authors and I’d up my female-centric fic intake in the following months.
It was not, strictly speaking, a roaring success.
That February was seriously hectic and difficult and a number of things that essentially translated into that was not the ideal time for that sort of fannish experiment. Fanwork is my happy place, and I’ve got fics and vids that I go to when I need cheering up, and then they weren’t there when I needed them, because the overwhelming majority of them are slash.
It was actually kind of bad. I stuck with it, though, and I ended up watching the female-centric vids I have saved on my computer a lot, and looking for others. One Girl Revolution became a kind of pick-me-up anthem for me for a while there. I fell on my warm, comfortable, familiar slash Fandom like a starved dog when the month was up.
The one thing that came out of that, really, is that I did the preliminary legwork for a femslash story that summer. (I have been eyeing those notes speculatively this past month.) I wasn’t sure about doing it again this year, but then I started getting all excited, so: Femslash February Round Two.
It was good! There was journal content! I read lots of things! I picked up strange and wonderful new fandoms and pairings and learned things. I have more things to read now. It’s good; I think there’s more female content in the future of my journal now than there was before doing this.
I also growled angrily a fair bit. I had to learn how to find fic again. I decided I wanted gen fic about Ariadne being awesome and didn’t find any. My life, it was full of woe. There was a certain amount of "...and some people do this all the time!" thrown in there and time spent wondering if there was some kind of underground speakeasy for gen fic.
One of the really interesting things I ran into this year came of being subscribed to both a trek and femslash newsletter; I watched people submit trek femslash to the femslash newsletter but not the trek one.
I suspect that there may be a certain amount of fannish privilege in being a slasher. One of the things that has become clear to me in doing this is that while I know my little fannish corner of the internet really well the rest of it is quite mysterious to me. [There is a part of me that is totally not kidding about the underground gen speakeasy. (I suspect that it is a place of merriment and highballs and delicious fruit juices.) I want to know how people find fic.]
February is a beginning for me, a first step, and I’m glad I did it again this year. One of my goals for this year is to actually write femslash, which I guess means that Chelsea/Ms. Dickinson St. Trinian’s fic, or female-centric gen. The future: it beckons. [Apparently. (Help?)]
So. Long entry is long. Please point out my spelling and grammar errors, etc. (It is late/early.) Let me know if you want me to cite the source for something I’ve written or want a link or something and I shall see about digging it up for you.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-09 11:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-10 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-29 03:25 pm (UTC)I am disappointed (okay, depending on the fic, livid) when writers bitchslap Samantha Carter because TPTB used her as a beard, and couldn't keep her real. I prefer to deconstruct her bad relationships (because, hell if that doesn't happen in the RL) and the way geeks are structured on SG-1 (no, I don't need Daniel to always be floppy haired. He gets to change, grow and suffer his tribulations. But, I also don't like him coming back in the body of a boxer. Please, that wasn't the fan service I wanted.)
A lot of my fandoms, being buddy genre in ways, do lead me not to write many female characters. In Real Ghostbusters, I'm trying.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-29 07:12 pm (UTC)What do you mean when you say that TPTB used Sam Carter as a beard?
I think I missed Daniel's "Now I am muscular!" transformation (when did that happen?) and just wandered in later and took in the hair and arms, essentially, and went "Huh. Okay." - it's not something that seemed wrong to me because I read it as the scientist becomes more soldier-like through exposure to battle, which is something that showed up really obviously with McKay on SGA and is something that happens on Doctor Who.
Is Real Ghostbusters your icon? (I am unfamiliar and she looks like Tonks, which intrigues me.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-30 12:24 am (UTC)I started reading SG-1 when I had run out of The Sentinel and other fandoms worth of fanfiction. Then I started getting it from the library.
TPTB upped the amount of Carter/O'Neill mooning when slash came up on radar.
I think Shanks spent part of his 'Ascension' away time bulking up, but where it can be seen is when he gets deposited in the all together in Jack's office. (So it's late in the series) It just doesn't 'fit' to me, because Daniel had been transforming through the series, getting more lean muscle and less floppy hair and better reflexes/tactics sense. It's not even a 'medical emergency' aka plot need, it just grandstanding/fan service.
Janine goes through some rough TPTB--they insisted she be drawn 'softer', they changed her voice actress to be less confronting-- basically, more like Muppet Babies Nanny, or April from TMNT (but reminding all the little boys she's "just the secretary"). She is 'home fires', but she's also their fifth when things hit the fan. So, one has to balance her rôle with her humanity. She's not the same, but she needs to be written as a full person. She and Peter are equally mouthy in their special native New Yorker way.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-30 06:24 pm (UTC)Whether naked!Daniel was just grandstanding/fan service is debatable. While some fans appreciated Shanks' lack of clothing, others had little to no interest in it. I think TPTB wrote it in for the lols rather than any attempt at servicing their fans.
I think there's a narrative in slash fandom that goes something like: creators notice slash and retaliate by introducing a heterosexual romance. I don't know how much creators notice or react to their fans or in what ways, though; I'm not sure that there's a real argument for slash causing heterosexual romance.
In the case of the gate-verse Powers That Be I think they had a very interesting relationship with their audience, their perceived audience, and their desired audience.
Watching Supernatural has been interesting because of that creator/audience interaction. (Disclaimer: I haven't watched beyond episode 1 of season 6.) They've had some very meta episodes about television and about fandom.
The gate-verse also had meta bits, and both of them have had a fan character that has been important and done plotty things. A comparison between Eli and Becky would be pretty interesting. [Compare and contrast fans and fan culture in Stargate and Supernatural. ...there should be meta kink memes or festivals or something. (Are there?)] They're writing/have written for different fans, I think. Supernatural sees slashers. I don't know how much Stargate did or wanted to.
I feel like I am rambling, but yeah- TPTB are a can of worms, essentially.
There are issues in source material. I think fanwork to some extent exists to examine and fix those issues, so- "Femslash February".