Because I've been considering doing this, and talking about it, and I need to just stop being afraid and post it. I'll just pre-emptively tag this with "they should have left me in the ice," shall I?

If the mods at linkspam get ahold of this and feel that it's derailing, I ask that it NOT BE LINKED IN THAT CASE because that would only enhance any derailing effect.

Currently, everyone's discussing the ever-widening definition-creep of derailing, and before that, they/we were all talking about misogyny in slash. Unless we consider "slashers: there's something wrong with them" to be the general point of the discussion, with detours into "bisexual slashers: they're all liars, and even if they aren't their sexuality doesn't matter, and if they try to say it does, that's derailing," we've drifted away from the original topic of "slash and m/m romance: some of it has harmful stereotypes in it."

Since I don't think I can contribute in any meaningful way to the derailing debate, and since I've read at least three rounds of "slasher misogyny" debates over the past nine years, I'd like to get back to the original topic for a while.

Some fiction has homophobic or heterosexist stereotypes in it.



Fandom is generally very good at pointing out sexism and misogyny in texts. We're less good at pointing out more subtle forms of homophobia/heterosexism in texts, possible because as of right now, any movie where there's a gay character and they're not either explicitly condemned as an evil pervert by the text and/or dead at the end pretty much counts as a win.

So, while people are arguing elsewhere about what is and isn't derailing and so forth, I think it would be useful for LGBTQ slashers to analyze, not our "internalized homophobia," which implies that the problem is *us* being "bad queer people," but published m/m fiction and female-authored or straight person-authored fiction with male/male and/or female/female relationships in it, and figure out what we shouldn't be doing. Straight slashers can do this too, obviously, but I'd ask that y'all limit yourselves to analyzing other straight writers in the comments on this particular post.

Because I've realized over the course of this debate that I'm better at spotting racist and sexist tropes in fiction than I am homophobic ones, despite being bisexual. Because I've seen people in fandom discuss sexism and racism in source texts in excruciating detail, but not so much with heterosexism/homophobia, beyond the obvious Dead Lesbian/Dead Gay Guy thing (hi, BSG 2.0).

The Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books romance blog has a regular feature they call "good shit vs. shit to avoid." Consider this an LGBTQA-themed version of that.

So, Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel trilogy, Lynn Flewelling, Mary Renault, Libba Bray, erotic romance with f/m/f or m/m/f relationships, the published* m/m novel of your choice (that's not by someone who has publically IDed as male): anyone have any thoughts about what those writers and books do well/do badly in terms of the depiction of same-sex relationships and queer people? (obviously, some of them might contain other kinds of fail, but we're specifically diccussing queerness here).

I'll start:

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series contains several background f/f relationships between very minor characters. On the one hand, I found this awesome, because any queerness in epic fantasy is awesome (I also appreciate the fact that Jordan's books have multiple prominent female characters and consistantly pass the Bechdel test, even if he did have some, ah, interesting ideas about women, such as apparently believing they were a seperate species that men are fundamentally incapable of understanding, and vice versa) but on the other hand, I can't help but notice that the "pillow friends" among the Red Ajah/Sea Folk/Seanchan damane have no male equivalent. The f/f pairings don't feel to me as if they exist to titiliate male readers -- there's no onscreen girl-on-girl action, for one -- but still... why no male pillow friends, Jordan? The end result is a fantasy world that explicitly has queer women in it, but where queer men are invisible.

And another:
I sadly don't have a book citation on hand, but in one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books, in return to a sneering comment about her husband Aral's (canonical) bisexuality from someone who intended her to be shocked and horrified, Cordelis Vorkosigan says, "He was bisexual. Now he's monogamous."
Let's all wince together now. I love you, LMB, and your Miles books, but gah, that one sentence has bugged me for years.

edited to add: Logophilos brings up below that I don't actually mention any m/m romance stuff from the m/mromance genre per se here, which is true. I've actually read relatively little published m/m fiction in comparison with SF stuff with LGBTQ themes like Lackey's Vanyel books, and a lot of what I have read is available online for free, which makes me :\ about discussing it critically, for the same reasons that I don't feel comfortable critically discussing fanfiction in a formal atmosphere.

A lot of the unpublished, free stuff I've read has been heavily influenced by yaoi, which has a very strong top/bottom dynamic with the sexual roles carrying over into the characters' day-to-day personalities and interactions, usually with at least one man being both young and androgynously beautiful. This has some of the same issues as both Pern (fixed sex roles that double as a sort of heteronormativity-imposing gender role, though without the Dragon-ex-machina doing the fixing) and the Vanyel books (Vanyel basically = every tragic yaoi/shonen ai uke ever), and is often not making any effort to actually realistically depict what actual gay or bi men are like. I suspect some of this is what people may be talking about when they talk about m/m sometime being just so much wank fodder for straight women. Some of the sites I've been to say "this is a heavily stylized yaoi fantasy." Most don't, and you have to be at least a little familiar with yaoi to know going in that that's what you're getting and reality is back that --> way.

edit the second: Um, not that I don't still love a lot of yaoi manga and have about a gigabyte of old Gundam Wing fanfic lurking around my hardrive, and haven't spent the past week mainlining Metal Gear Solid fanfic. I got into fandom at least partially via anime fandom as a college student.



*I'd like to limit this to published books, because the conversation began with criticisms specific to the m/m publishing industry and their depiction of gay and bisexual men. I think that fanfiction and slash are a different conversation that it would also be useful to have, but I'd prefer to let someone else host that.

This post is mirrored on LJ
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

From: [personal profile] melannen


That line in Bujold really annoys me a lot. And I've seen people in fandom talk about it as a favorite line, which bothers me *even more*. It works in the story - Vordarian wouldn't've exactly been up for a Betan-style discussion of fluid sexual identities, and it serves Cordelia's purpose - but it's a quite, quite bad out of context, and really not great in context.

Honestly, a lot of the stuff around Aral's attraction to men in Barrayar bothered me; the correlation of homosexual behavior with being self-destructive and/or evil, the statement that Cordelia "solves a problem" for Aral as if *that's* a basis for a relationship, and, yeah, the "was bisexual" line. I'm also somewhat annoyed by her repeated use of "sexual sadist" to mean "sociopathic rapist and serial killer" without ever acknowledging that actual s/m players aren't, um, sociopaths, but that's a bit OT. Though I didn't find anything in Ethan of Athos too terribly winceworthy, except the science (though it's been awhile since I've read that one.)

I'm looking through my catalog to try to remember books with glbt characters, and it says *something* about the SF genre that there are a lot more books on the list with genderqueer or non-gender-binary characters than there are with cisgender-but-not-heterosexual characters. I guess part of that could be that if you're working with historical conceptions of gender and sexuality, the two do blend in to each other a little. I suspect a lot more of it is that some SF writers will write about trans characters as a purely speculative thing without ever actually connecting that to trans *people*, though....


I still really do like the "Tale of the Five" series by Diane Duane, though. It certainly doesn't confront a lot of "gay" issues, since it's deliberately set in a world where sexuality *isn't* an issue, but it normalizes bisexuality really convincingly, I thought, without blurring the wide spectrum of sexuality completely out.

And I remember really liking Delia Sherman's "Through A Brazen Mirror" when I first read it a long, long time ago, but, mmm, it talks about homosexuality through a mirror built on genderqueerness, too, and doesn't really do anything with the genderqueer stuff *except* use it to reinforce her gay character's binary sexuality, which bothered me at the time.

I've read "Swordspoint" and "Point of Dreams" - both not too long ago, as a result of seeing them talked up by slash fans - and I liked them both okay but wasn't really enthusiastic, and I'm not sure why - there was nothing about the handling of the central relationships that stuck out as terrible, I just didn't find them - interesting? Itchy? I dunno. Maybe the style/mood/atmosphere they both kind of share just didn't really do it for me.

Though Elizabeth Willey's "Well-Favored Man" books have a bi main character and a gay secondary character in a similar urbane-fantasy-of-manners series, and I love love love them. If you read them in chronological order, they come off at first as an evil bisexual and an effete prince stereotype, but it very quickly becomes clear that both of those things are fronts and nothing it what it seems. Plus, the two of them have a really great relationship, that's built on mutually-but-not-publically-acknowledged-attraction, but isn't actually about them being in love (they are so not MFEO and they know it. Plus it turns out that they're totally cousins, not that that stops anyone in that series.) And the series isn't really about sexuality - it's just a Chronicles of Amber/The Tempest crossover fic high fantasy that has some quietly queer people in it, which is wonderful. (What it doesn't ever do is specifically address *why* the characters have to all keep the m/m sex on the down low, or have any of them really objecting to that. Though really in that world any publically acknowledged affair is just asking for somebody to use it as a weak point to take you down, so the m/m relationships actually come off better for being below the radar.)

And all of those are stories where the main queer characters are gay or bi men written by straight women. That might be 'cause there are so few books SF books about lesbians, period, and that lately I read mostly books by women writers. Or it might be something I'm doing wrong in my self-filtering that I should look at. Hmmm.
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

From: [personal profile] melannen

Re: reposted reply down here where it belongs


Actually, I'm pretty sure I read that before I read Amber, so when I first met Benedict and Julian and Caine I was like "...oh, so that's what that was." :D ...but my public library only had "Sorceror and a Gentleman" so I re-read that one about five times while desperately searching for the other two, which gave me an interesting perspective on the series.

Dewar/Freya! Healing waterfall soulbond sex! hurt/comfort huddling for warmth in a Canadian shack! ...and yet my favorite moment for them is actually that the one bit that *isn't* ridiculously tragic and OTT and ~destined~ is the abortion, because abortion is a perfectly reasonable medical procedure for a woman to choose. ♥ Actually, though, in general, the het relationships in that series are deeply angsty and screwed up and doomed, and the gay relationships in contrast seem refreshingly healthy and drama-free, even down to the lesbian couples among the Argyllites. Which is problematic too, really, but at the time was like a breath of clear water.


Yeah, especially in SF, the characters seem to almost always be not really connected to modern trans / intersex / genderqueer people. They can be well done in their own way, especially when the people involved are nonhumanoid, but it's not really the same thing, and it drowns out characters who are actually trans.

Though I can come up with a small handful of fantasy characters who are pretty explicitly some equivalent of man-hearted women or sworn virgins or similar, and (to me, as a cis person) not obviously poorly done, though I can't say for sure how they'd read to a modern-society trans person. Also, in my not-badly-done lgbt main characters list, I am still coming up with almost entirely gay men and FAAB trans or genderqueer people. Argh.

From: (Anonymous)

Re: reposted reply down here where it belongs


Oh, if you're interested in a good fantasy trans person, Poison Study is really good - there is a truly badass character who is revealed (by telepathy/mindmeld) to have been FAAB in a very patriarchal society, and assumed a male identity and pushed off to help make a better society someplace else.

The series later tries to 'explain' this in a weird two-souls way, which made me headtilt a bit, but Poison Study taken as is pleased me greatly.
valtyr: (Default)

From: [personal profile] valtyr

Re: reposted reply down here where it belongs


Mm, I didn't have issues with the coercion as it was so clearly non-gendered - and the heroine, despite her past, never feared that she'd be raped or abused while in the power of authority, if I make sense. I mean, she clearly trusted the people whose power she was in to play by their own rules.

Yeah, the Commander was awesome, and I really enjoyed seeing such a novel social structure in a fantasy novel! Sadly the books suffered from the law of diminishing returns.
.

Profile

elspethdixon: (Default)
elspethdixon

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags