Considering how hard I’ve been on slash of late, it’s marvelous and timely that my article “Writing Our Own (Alternate) Histories: Fanwork as Folklore” should happen to be in issue 15 of Crossed Genres, which comes out today. (PRC – PDF – Print – Subscribe)
Really, at the end of the day, I do love fanwork. I think it’s one of the most significant, deep, and intimate ways a person can interact with extant material, and the community is a place where people can play and enjoy language in ways they might not wish to or feel empowered to otherwise. That, to my mind, is a social good.
~*~
I found out last week (and then promptly failed to post) that people who pre-ordered are starting to see copies of Idol Musings. Fey has confirmed it, and at least one reader has said some very nice things.
While I haven’t held it in my hands yet, I’ve got it on good authority that this thing is a 600+ page behemoth of awesome.
~*~
Don’t ask how I found this:
eBay – The Sun, by C.A. Young, 1897 edition.
Tags:
So this weekend’s publishing industry fracas seems to have resolved itself, at least for now. Macmillan, which is enormous and has imprints for everything from textbooks to science fiction, threw down with Amazon over ebook pricing. Macmillian wanted variable pricing at $14.99 or less, while Amazon dug in its heels and demanded a $9.99 cap. Macmillian refused, and Amazon pulled all of Macmillian’s books (print and electronic) from the virtual shelves until late today, when Amazon agreed to Macmillian’s terms.
Amazon is, unsurprisingly, trying to look as populist as it can and making an effort to paint Macmillian in a negative light by calling them a monopoly (which, seeing as this is Amazon, is kind of like Mussolini complaining that somebody is a fascist).
Of all the commentary I saw on this, probably the most useful was Tobias Buckell’s, in which he explains why Macmillian isn’t being unreasonable. It’s a long read, but worth it. Also worth reading is Catherynne Valente’s post about how Amazon’s strong-arm tactics harm writers in the long run.
I’m a bit uncomfortable, though, at the resurrection of the #amazonfail hashtag on Twitter. (If you’re unaware, #amazonfail was previously been used to describe the de-listing of LGBTQ books on Amazon early last year.) I’m trying to draw an analogy of why I found it disconcerting, but coming up blank.
~*~
Okay, so I confess I’m still working through comments on the last post, which turned out to be so much more about slash than the pro m/m romance and erotica market in the end. That being said, Ann Somerville appeared as if by magic and linked me to her breakdown of authors by m/m romance imprint, which is very interesting indeed.
~*~
Other things I can’t help but share:
- Out In Print – All queer book reviews all the time.
- Galco’s Soda Pop Stop – I just want to order a ton of juniper berry soda, Fentiman’s dandelion and burdock, or some shandy.
- N.K. Jemisin’s article about sex, religion, and the gods – I confess, I’m not familiar with Jemisin’s work, but this article’s great, which means I’ll be checking shelves when I’ve got disposable income.
- Offered without comment: The True Risk of Airborne Terror.
- CRAP!
I should be working up a couple of writing samples and composing some initial comments on a work in progress for someone, but a whole knot of friends are having an incredibly impassioned discussion on Twitter about the m/m fiction debate, and I can’t condense my feelings on the issue into 140 characters or less.
So here I am.
A few days ago I made a post with some initial thoughts on the issue, but managed somehow not to incite any riots. To recap:
- I believe that anyone should be allowed to write anything, but that writers who step outside of their own experience and into someone else’s needs to tread carefully and with respect.
- There are fewer queer people than straight people, and the success of queer fiction depends to some extent on straight people being interested in it.
- I am troubled by the double-standard in which m/m written by women is treated as more mainstream and more broadly marketed than m/m written by men.
- Not every story about a same-sex pair (or threesome, or whatever) is queer literature, nor is every person writing it an activist, or even someone with the LGBTQ community’s best interests at heart.
- I have reservations about making a lot of noise in this debate because my voice doesn’t fit neatly into either “side” as a queer transman, and I’m not about to appropriate gay cismale experience in order to obtain legitimacy in the debate any more than I’m going to put on the lady hat.
Fast-forward, then, to tonight and my friends tweeting about this post that asserts that m/m slash fiction is anti-gay and its follow-up about femslash (i.e. f/f fiction) and lesbian experience. They were upset. They found these posts faily and angrymaking.
The reason, as they related to me, was that the original poster glossed the experience of queer women (including female-identified or genderqueer people living as women) who write m/m fiction and appeared to assert that these women either don’t exist in fandom in any quantity, or that m/m fiction isn’t interesting to them.
Which is, in fairness, an interesting and complicated point. According to at least one person who’s collected some of the extant data and done some simple analysis, fandom may be significantly female, but may also be significantly queer. Which, based on my experience of fandom, seems plausible. A majority of the fanfolk I know are women (or present/live as women a significant amount of the time), but virtually all of them are lesbian, bisexual, or gender non-conforming.
So I see why the first post made them uncomfortable. Feeling invisible often isn’t any nicer than feeling blamed or guilty, and any combination of the two is miserable. I’m uncomfortable, though, that the discussion has to be about ’she missed out queer women!’ instead of taking the salient points of the first post to heart.
When a marginalized group is the object of discussion, and another group takes the discussion and turns it into a discussion about its own members, that’s derailing.
It’s derailing when women are talking about their experiences of rape and someone makes it a conversation about how men are also raped. It’s derailing when people of color are talking about economic disparity in their communities and someone turns it into a conversation about the realities of white poverty.
Please understand, I’m not saying this because I don’t love my friends very much, or think that pointing out that many of the women writing in fandom are not, in fact, perfectly straight is an important thing to do. I especially don’t think they had malevolent intentions. What I am saying is that a lot of what I’m seeing in this debate — not just this evening’s discussion — has been about the rights and intents of women who write m/m fiction, the benefits of writing and sharing m/m fiction among women, and the discomfort of a group of people who view themselves as reasonably progressive at being called out on a culture of appropriation and asked to recognize it and be mindful of it.
Yeah, hi.
(All of which is tangential to the actual commentary I couldn’t condense into tweet-friendly nibbles, but there you go.)
In her post, freifraufischer makes a case that slash is fundamentally anti-gay. She supports her view by pointing out that slash fiction is not a significant factor in queer culture, that the slash community is a female space, that slashers write stories in which characters’ attitudes and behaviors don’t match the attitudes and behaviors of actual gay men, and that women who write slash defend their pastime by declaring that their detractors are homophobes. She also points out — as I and others have elsewhere — that merely writing slash does not make one an activist.
That last point is the only one that I can accept without reservation.
On the whole, I find the position that slash (or mainstream m/m fiction written by or for women) is anti-gay hard to sustain.
I agree that it’s problematic in that there’s a tremendous amount of appropriation going on, and that there’s a significant amount of factual error and projection happening, but slash doesn’t arise out of some sort of hostile impulse.
Practically speaking, slash exists virtually independently of Actual Gay Men. The only necessary thing that Actual Gay men and slash have in common is the idea that men can be attracted to one another emotionally and/or sexually. If Actual Gay Men were a significant factor for slash to exist (or if slash were a significant factor for Actual Gay Men), there would be more of a connection there.
Side note: one of the first slash writers I ever met is a gay man. We dated. He’s a fantastic guy and I love him to bits. I know several other men who write slash as well, and they run the gender identity and sexuality gamut. It’s delightful. It also brings me to my next point.
Fandom and the slash community are not a “women’s space.” That’s ridiculous. It may be a space where the population skews heavily female, and where the men involved sometimes struggle to be acknowledged (pet peeve: things which should be inclusive that start with the word “fangirls”), but fandom isn’t the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I can’t speak for all the men I know who write slash, but I’ve certainly never been made to feel unwelcome or like a guest instead of a full participant when I do get involved.
The appropriation aspect is a concern, especially when a group of not-gay-men use gay men to elevate themselves, as a defense, or to enhance their credibility, but like I said in my original post, some of this comes down to the matter of the numbers game and the fact that the actual material itself is not necessarily queer lit. The slash itself is not the problem. It’s the attitudes of the slashers who are appropriating the gay male experience and believe that writing slash is inherently activist/pro-gay who need adjustment and correction.
On the whole, though, I do agree with freifraufischer that there is a Problem in the slash subculture. I agree that the community is dominated by people writing experiences that are not their own (and doing so while giving their own wants more weight than someone else’s reality). I disagree about other elements of the argument, though, and I think she and I have different opinions about what slash and the mainstream m/m fiction markets are all about. And this is, I think, perfectly okay.
(Disclosure: My own experience is so atypical that it’s hard to write overtly to my own experience in anything by original fiction without diverging wildly from canon. Except when it isn’t. Transness is complicated, masculinity is complicated, conditioning and social experience is complicated. Blah, blah, blah.)
Does this make sense? Am I insane? Am I missing some critical point? Did I misunderstand this evening’s outpouring of rage because I’m a guy, or because my viewpoint on this problem is nearer the queer guy’s side rather than the female slasher’s side?
(Also, if freifraufischer is reading this: Michel Foucault. Post structuralism. Deconstruct. Simulacra. Sarrasine. Dyads. Authorial intent. Cyborg. Bingo.)
Tags:
Between taking the rats out for an adventure and building them a mezzanine, deciding that Zebulon’s bowl needed a date with the plant lamp, and being nearly mauled by an ex-colleague’s incredibly friendly (off-duty) seeing eye dog, yesterday was animal day for sure.
It’s also been a deeply weird couple of weeks in the land of writing. My plan for January has come entirely apart on account of a couple of really interesting opportunities, neither of which are really appropriate to discuss unless something happens with them. Suffice to say, though, my flash prompt plan has been scrapped and my entire routine has come apart on account of research. I don’t feel half crazy.
And really, I should be writing right now. Instead, though, I’m blogging and reading about Moscow’s stray dogs.
Oh, and thinking about a song from “The Mikado” (lyrics here) that a friend linked me to early this morning, and how he’s right that it should absolutely be used for nefarious purposes at some point.
And now, some other things, somewhat random, which include links:
- Credit where credit is due: Bloomsbury has announced that Magic Under Glass is getting a new US jacket, and issued a short apology. Jaclyn Dolamore has posted in brief about the situation here and here on LiveJournal.
- A story that I’m working on has had me thinking about death on a practical level. In particular I’m interested in how a future deceased can mediate his or her post-mortem interactions with living individuals who are in a position to judge someone and make inferences based on that person’s corpse. It seems to me that marginalized groups continue to have less power in death, and that gender variance is a particularly tricky area. I keep coming back to issues with physical sex v. gender, bodies in transition (and bodies which never received treatment because there wasn’t enough money), transphobia and cultural adherence to gender binaries that may play out among coroners and other staff, laws which require the dead to be buried under legal instead of common or preferred names, public records which “out” the dead and/or mis-record them, and so on. It’s got me shopping urns. My inner goth can’t decide if he loves the idea of me keeping one on a shelf in my office, or if he’s disappointed and angry that I live in a world where coffins and gorgeous monuments feel too uncertain, and that I haven’t got just as much right to be as fabulous as everybody else.
- A friend just wrote a post about intersectionality and her experience as a queer woman in fandom that I think contributes immensely to a lot of conversations and needs to be read.
Right. I should really get back to working on this story. Right after I shower. And do laundry. And, uh, clean something. Oh, and I’ve got D&D tonight…
So as of this morning, it looks like I’ll be on the “Where The Hell Can Torchwood Go From Here?” at Gallifrey One this year.
I am ridiculously excited about this.
On the list of things I love dearly, the Whoniverse is definitely near the top of the list. It’s this great and complex thing that’s existed longer than I have, and Torchwood in particular spoke to me in ways most television doesn’t. I’ve made some wonderful friends playing in that sandbox (for fun — I’ve got no pro credits in Doctor Who or its spin-offs, though I’d love to if anybody asked), so to be able to chat about it with one of the writers for “Children of Earth” is absolutely brilliant.
So, you know, there’s that trip to California justified, then.
So apparently Bloomsbury didn’t get the hint last time about how hiding PoC protagonists between white covers is offensive. Witness Jaclyn Dolamore’s debut novel, Magic Under Glass, which has a very pale figure on the cover indeed.
I’m thinking I’ll be making like Ellen Datlow sometime this week and dropping them a complaint. If you feel so moved, it couldn’t hurt to do the same.
So this was definitely not the weekend I’d planned. One empty house and three days with lots on my plate should have been obscenely productive in the finished writing column. I should have an essay and five or six flash pieces finished. I could even be plotting out something I want to write in February.
What really happened is that I spent three days thinking about things, making notes, and filling the well.
This happens once or twice a month. When I’m working at full capacity, I write for 20+ hours a week, netting somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-1500 useable words a day. There’s no denying that it’s work, and that it takes a lot out of me. I dip, and I dip, and I dip until I scrape the bottom of things (or fall over, whichever comes first). And so I end up taking time to think and plot more than put fingers to keys because I’m trying to build ideas. Ideas generate the energy and the words that fuel those 20+ hour weeks.
So this weekend I watched disc one of TransGeneration, started knitting a glove, started thinking about the novel and a story I want to write in February, made some notes, repackaged a LONG overdue item for somebody, read article upon article on the Internet, read part of Jitterbug Perfume, scribbled some more, and played more World of Warcraft than I’m entirely comfortable with admitting.
One thing that’s been weighing on my mind is the current sort of furious discussion going on in some quarters I inhabit about straight women co-opting gay fiction, and whether that’s actually the case, and who should be allowed to write what, and so on.
In short, my feelings are thus: anyone should be allowed to write what one is moved to write, but when stepping into new territory one should write carefully and with respect, as if as a guest in another’s house. Things which are not yours do not become yours just because you love them, but the muse can make expatriates of us in strange and terrible ways.
As a friend so wisely pointed out, queer fiction will always be something of a numbers game. Our stories have to be interesting to straight people in order to get a toe-hold in mainstream culture. It gives me pause, though, when men writing m/m romance are less visible and well-marketed than women writing m/m romance, or when some elements in the debate begin to claim that m/m fiction was a women’s genre all along.
In particular, it troubles me that m/m romance is mainstream when women write it, but niche when men do. That direct experience should be something valued, something sought out and discussed in the daylight instead of being relegated to a dusty shelf because men desiring men makes the mainstream uncomfortable except when women are fantasizing about it.
Because — and I say this with respect because I know there are wonderful instances of writers of all genders and orientations hitting the nail on the head beautifully — not every story about men (or women) getting it on with one another is queer literature. Women writing man-on-man in the mainstream is culturally significant, but an author who pens the stuff isn’t automatically an LGBTQ activist, or necessarily doing us all a favor.
And as I write that, I write it with some discomfort because as a transman, my voice doesn’t fit neatly into the discussion. My stake in all of this is different. M/M fiction, queer stories of self-discovery and coming out, and stories about gay men in general are so much closer to being my experience, but I’m leery of commandeering the All Gay Men Together banner because that’s not quite my experience, even if I typically prefer men. Authentic as my masculinity is, I grew up differently, and my coming-out and life so far is distinct from what a queer cisman might experience. To lay claim would do all sides a disservice.
And it’s this line of thinking that’s had me thinking about the novel, and also about Dead Souls, which in spite of being about a love triangle among three men, is really a story about being in the wrong body. That’s definitely something I’d like to write about at length, though tonight is definitely not the night for that.
The dayjob ramped up in intensity this week, which has been rough on my writing life. I’m a couple of days behind on prompts, but I’ve got a three day weekend and enough time and quiet that I’m pretty sure I’ll not only catch up but hopefully finish some work that’s been gathering dust in the wings.
And yet, tonight I’m working on some character sketching for the novel because I ran slap-bang into my protagonist on Wednesday afternoon and need to get him written down before he wanders off to be in someone else’s book.
I feel bad about this because I owe things to four people — one thing in the mail, two things in public pixels, and one thing in e-mail — but none of those things are things I can do/send/finish tonight. Putting an hour’s work off because of things I’m better equipped to tackle when I’m fresher is no less guilt-inducing, and definitely more crazy-making. SO.
And now, to clear some tabs:
- If you’re a creative type, or if you’re the sort who loves to read amazing things by people who’d like you to make donations to charity, please check out Crossed Genre’s donation drive, Post a Story for Haiti.
- If you’re a fannish type, check out the Help Haiti auction on LiveJournal.
- Dreamwidth’s business is sustaining an organized attack similar to the efforts that perpetuated the LiveJournal Strikethrough a couple of years back. They’re not asking for financial support, but PayPal has withdrawn their services and DW is having to seek another merchant processor. I’m not an avid Dreamwidth user, but I believe in what they do, and want to show my support for them as advocates of free speech by boosting the signal.
- Google may be backing out of business China after a hack attack that appears to have targeted Chinese human rights activists. According to the Official Google Blog, “These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.” This is…well, it’s a big deal in terms of free speech advocacy and exchange of ideas. I have to applaud Google for having a sudden attack of principle on the topic, and will be curious to see how this pans out.
- Sam Starbuck, a shadowy, accident-prone presence who lives, works, and produces extribula (like Nameless) in the Chicago area, confessed to cheating on his current work in progress so that he could work on something else: a novel about the non-profit sector called Charitable Getting. I love Sam even though I hate him for being a goddamn genius. Go read his stuff. He’s good.
- I just found out today that Miep Gies has passed away. Gies was the last surviving member of the household that took in Anne Frank’s family, and was instrumental in keeping her diary intact. She was 100.
- Mighty Joe Rollino, one of the last of a generation’s carnival strongmen died at 104 after being struck by a minivan during a morning walk earlier this week. His whole story feels historical and alien, and yet there’s a photo of him from last year looking (to me, at least) barely a spry seventy.
And now, back to my (ir)regularly scheduled character sketching.
January continues apace. I took it easy(ish) on Sunday and took last night off entirely because I’d managed to run myself into the ground and needed an extra hour or two of sleep. That means I’m a day behind on prompts — I’ve got 31 for the month of January that I’m banging around with — but I figure I can get that sorted at the weekend.
It looks like the matter of the Women in Fantasy issue over at Realms of Fantasy has developed somewhat, with Douglas Cohen posting an apology and a new call for submissions, and with Shawna McCarthy’s new online presence. (Note: it looks like she’s posting both there and at the RoF site, but the LJ blog looks to be the most up-to-date. If anyone wants to point me to a preferred link, though, I’ll be glad to change it.)
I think that I’m supposed to say that the editorial staff’s shift in position is encouraging, but aside from being pleased that Cohen was receptive to a friend’s good advice on how to speak of women using terms which describe them as equals, not much has changed. There has been no about-face, and no real change in direction. The issue is still problematic for many of the same reasons people have been citing all over the place (namely that one issue on the topic doesn’t represent any kind of sea change, and that the execution is problematic), and while I am cautiously optimistic that some consciousness got raised, RoF still has a hell of a lot of work to do.
For the record, I don’t think that anyone at RoF spends time sitting around in a darkened room with steepled fingers dreaming up new and exciting ways to oppress women. I believe Cohen when he writes that he didn’t intend to offend anyone. I also believe that when someone says something insulting without meaning to, it is because they’re missing a crucial bit of data somewhere in their worldview. Sometimes more than one.
It’s that unconscious bias — that gap in knowledge — that’s so insidious because when we fail because of it we don’t mean to. We think we are being good people, and having our failures pointed out to us is both painful and comes out of nowhere. It’s hard to listen when that happens, or to change, because it can challenge some pretty fundamental things that we carry in our heads.
So, you know, credit where credit is due. Just not ‘job done’ just yet.
A couple of days ago a little bird mentioned that Apex Books has the upcoming Dark Faith anthology on pre-order for $20, and that the first 500 preorders get an additional chapbook to sweeten the deal.
I’m ridiculously excited about this book, not least because J.C. Hay (one of my dearest friends and one hell of a writer) is in it, as are Catherynne M. Valente, Brian Keene, Richard Dansky, Jennifer Pelland (whose Unwelcome Bodies anthology is also a must-own), Lucien Soulban, and a whole heap of amazing people. This is seriously the most diverse Table of Contents I’ve seen in a long while, and the idea behind it had my attention months ago.
So yes. Go. Order.
~ * ~
A few people I read (including Jim C. Hines and Catherynne M. Valente) pointed out that Realms of Fantasy has announced that they’re doing a “women in fantasy” issue in August 2011. Specifically, their guidelines:
1. For this issue the sign on the proverbial door says “girl writers only.” Sorry gents.
2. While being a woman submitting a fantasy piece to us is enough to get your manuscript considered for this issue, submissions dealing with gender, sexism, and other areas important to feminist speculative literature are particularly welcome.
3. If you’d like to have your story considered for this issue, stories should be postmarked no later than November 15th, 2010. This will provide enough time to find the right artists (ladies, of course) for the stories. I’ll provide periodic reminders about the submission deadline as we move along.
Oh, the mixed feelings.
There’s a reason many female writers (J.K. Rowling being just one of many) mask their gender by using initials, or why James Chartrand’s story isn’t as unbelievable as it could be. It’s because gender bias is alive and well in publishing. We saw it last year, we’ll see it again this year, and we’ll keep seeing it until editors start working proactively to offset assumptions (conscious and otherwise) that undermine equality in the industry. I’m supportive of well-considered, well-applied affirmative efforts to manage disparities until women writers are broadly assumed to be equal to their male counterparts. This is why organizations like Broad Universe are so necessary. There is still work to do. A lot of it.
Realms of Fantasy making a visible commitment to do the work, especially in light of their long-standing reputation for gender bias and consistently utilizing cover art targeted at the (heterosexual) male gaze, would be incredibly welcome.
A “girl writers only” issue isn’t going to achieve that. It’s particularly not going to achieve that when the call for submissions makes it sound like they’re setting the bar low, is badly worded, and is full of diminutive language (ladies, girls). They want girls to show up and write about girl stuff. It’s condescending, and considering how often RoF’s Table of Contents trends male, I’m not surprised that some women writers have already said they feel like it’s an empty gesture that they can point to later and say “but we did a girly issue!” when people complain.
It’s galling, because the editors appear to have good intentions, but still aren’t hearing the feedback they’re being given. Until they do, though, RoF is going to keep running into this kind of thing. And that’s a shame, because with the sort of circulation RoF does, they could be turning their audience on to some seriously brilliant writers without resorting to a ladies’ night approach.
At the end of the day, I sincerely think RoF can be so much better than this. To do that, though, they need to make a real and constant commitment to improve their practices year-round, not just for one issue.
