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Queer goggles vs. slash goggles
I've been mulling a lot recently about the way I read slash, and how different it is from the way I watch a lot of mainstream entertainment with gay characters in them. And then I wrote a long rambly post on the subject. Surprise fact: this is that post.
About a year ago, in a post I never posted about the portrayal of homosexuality in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I wrote:
At the point in time I wrote that, the different ways I read material depending on the hat I was wearing was had been bothering me for a while. Why was it that I was so much more willing to put up with, and even enjoy, gay stereotypes in my slash than I was with anything else that I read? Was it a general disrespect for fic that kept me from holding it to the same scrutiny? (No, because my scrutiny level was high for any fic involving canonically gay characters--I actually avoid fic involving canonically gay characters because I know in advance that they'll probably piss me off, through no particular fault of the authors.) Was I disrespecting straight people, being willing to see their sexuality played with when I wasn't ok with the same thing for the gay characters? (Why, for instance, was I ok with Keith Olbermann being shipped with Stephen Colbert, while at the same time being filled with a TOWERING RAGE if he was shipped with Rachel Maddow?) Why was I so protective of gay characters--surely they could stand on their own two feet as well as the straight ones could? Surely Adam Lambert and Ianto Jones didn't need me to fight off the fangirls from fetishizing their identities.
Having been rolling this idea around in the tumbler of my brain for some time now, fussily poking at its edges until they've been worn smooth, I am now pretty sure I know what's going on. Ironically, it took the irritating "why we don't like female characters" discussion in slash 201 at WisCon to help me figure it out, and so I thought I'd share what I've come up with. I don't know what's going on in other peoples' heads when they read slash, but I am pretty sure I know now what's going on in mine.
The baseline of my theory is actually a pretty standard one: straight white male characters on TV are unmarked, and are free just to be characters. Meanwhile, I wind up reading female characters, and queer characters, and characters of color, through the lens of their role in the kyriarchy, in a way I'm coming around to thinking is pretty unfair to them. (Note: I just brushed past large swaths of the kyriarchy, but I'm going to spend the rest of this post talking just about homosexuality, because it's the one that slash is about.)
Because while I might be telling myself that what I'm doing is paying attention to how the Evil Media is managing its portrayal those characters, what I'm doing in reality is reducing them to a fixed set of positive and negative tropes in the media and seeing how well they line up against them. In the panel at WisCon I asked a meandering question related to the "girls are bad at math" strip in XKCD in an attempt to point out the problematic aspects of certain panelists' attitudes towards female characters. But, for better or worse, I'm starting to think that every time I, as a reader or viewer, spot a psycho lesbian or a pet homosexual, etc. etc. etc. I, as a reader/viewer, stop reading the character as fully as I might have otherwise the instant I spot the trope. The Evil Media has put the trope there, and that is bad of them. But when I let the defense mechanisms I've built up around the tropes spring into place, I too am closing my eyes. My queer goggles have a bad tendency to bump up the contrast on the media I consume a bit too high and wash out the details. I can't even watch Velvet Goldmine comfortably anymore. It's really sad, guys.
But the thing about slash, for me as a reader, is that as unrealistic and full of silly tropes as it is, it's a place where homosexual relationships are normative. Where there really is no default expectation for who a given character will sleep with on the basis of their gender. A character who winds up with a man in one story is equally likely to wind up with a woman in another story, and there's no value judgement in either case. There used to have to be an in-story excuse for the lack of stigma ("it's the future, there's no gay stigma", "it's the wizarding world"), but fandom hit the fourth wave of gay acceptance a long time ago, and most of the time slash doesn't even bother to focus on the existence of the stigma in their universes. Look, for instance, at the Star Trek Harvard AU. You've got a group of four men and four women who are only a decade younger than my grandparents. By the end of the story they wind up in four couples--two male-female, one male-male, and one female-female, and they deal with very little homophobia along the way. Is that realistic or even statistically probably? No, because it's slashview. It's in the 20th century US, but even if the author didn't intend it, it's in the parallel slash world where characters just accept any relationships and move on.
Sure, some are set in times and places where homosexuality is forbidden, and where homophobia exists. But when they are, they're written in as plot elements for the characters to overcome, and they just don't carry the sting of day-to-day casual heteronormativity. The big issues with wide scope are there, but the little stuff isn't. Characters in Age of Sail fandom spend some time worrying about the fact that sodomy is punishable by the death penalty. But they don't spend all their time worrying about it, and they're never caught. And more than that, the elements of homophobia are introduced intentionally by their authors, and are well-thought out. (And, to be fair, I tend to avoid slash that digs particularly deeply into the reality of being gay, because I am usually looking for a fantasy rather than my lived experience, and also because it sends me into queerview, where as we have previously established, I am not able to enjoy what I'm reading in the spirit it was intended.)
So, I'm wondering. Does anyone else find that they have separate goggles for when they're reading slash than they do when they're reading other material? Does anyone have any recommendations of mainstream things I can read that are in fourth-wave homosexuality acceptance? Because I want to see more gay people in my media, I'm just sick of getting heavy-handed lessons or thoughtless stereotypes every time they show up. (The show I've seen pieces of recently that was shockingly good on this front was Brothers and Sisters--the episode I saw was treating them with the same sort of soap opera drama as all of the other characters instead of special gay soap opera drama, and I loved it.)
About a year ago, in a post I never posted about the portrayal of homosexuality in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I wrote:
There are two related hats that I wear just about any time I'm engaging in a source material. One is the slasher hat, which is on the lookout for any subtext that could possibly be read as homosexual. The other is the "queer person watching how queers are portrayed in the media" hat, and it's a lot more discerning. Periodically source material startles me by switching up my hats. I can be idly reading a book slashing up a storm, when suddenly what I'd been assuming was subtext turns out to be canon. With a jolt the slasher hat falls off and the queer hat takes its place.
At the point in time I wrote that, the different ways I read material depending on the hat I was wearing was had been bothering me for a while. Why was it that I was so much more willing to put up with, and even enjoy, gay stereotypes in my slash than I was with anything else that I read? Was it a general disrespect for fic that kept me from holding it to the same scrutiny? (No, because my scrutiny level was high for any fic involving canonically gay characters--I actually avoid fic involving canonically gay characters because I know in advance that they'll probably piss me off, through no particular fault of the authors.) Was I disrespecting straight people, being willing to see their sexuality played with when I wasn't ok with the same thing for the gay characters? (Why, for instance, was I ok with Keith Olbermann being shipped with Stephen Colbert, while at the same time being filled with a TOWERING RAGE if he was shipped with Rachel Maddow?) Why was I so protective of gay characters--surely they could stand on their own two feet as well as the straight ones could? Surely Adam Lambert and Ianto Jones didn't need me to fight off the fangirls from fetishizing their identities.
Having been rolling this idea around in the tumbler of my brain for some time now, fussily poking at its edges until they've been worn smooth, I am now pretty sure I know what's going on. Ironically, it took the irritating "why we don't like female characters" discussion in slash 201 at WisCon to help me figure it out, and so I thought I'd share what I've come up with. I don't know what's going on in other peoples' heads when they read slash, but I am pretty sure I know now what's going on in mine.
The baseline of my theory is actually a pretty standard one: straight white male characters on TV are unmarked, and are free just to be characters. Meanwhile, I wind up reading female characters, and queer characters, and characters of color, through the lens of their role in the kyriarchy, in a way I'm coming around to thinking is pretty unfair to them. (Note: I just brushed past large swaths of the kyriarchy, but I'm going to spend the rest of this post talking just about homosexuality, because it's the one that slash is about.)
Because while I might be telling myself that what I'm doing is paying attention to how the Evil Media is managing its portrayal those characters, what I'm doing in reality is reducing them to a fixed set of positive and negative tropes in the media and seeing how well they line up against them. In the panel at WisCon I asked a meandering question related to the "girls are bad at math" strip in XKCD in an attempt to point out the problematic aspects of certain panelists' attitudes towards female characters. But, for better or worse, I'm starting to think that every time I, as a reader or viewer, spot a psycho lesbian or a pet homosexual, etc. etc. etc. I, as a reader/viewer, stop reading the character as fully as I might have otherwise the instant I spot the trope. The Evil Media has put the trope there, and that is bad of them. But when I let the defense mechanisms I've built up around the tropes spring into place, I too am closing my eyes. My queer goggles have a bad tendency to bump up the contrast on the media I consume a bit too high and wash out the details. I can't even watch Velvet Goldmine comfortably anymore. It's really sad, guys.
But the thing about slash, for me as a reader, is that as unrealistic and full of silly tropes as it is, it's a place where homosexual relationships are normative. Where there really is no default expectation for who a given character will sleep with on the basis of their gender. A character who winds up with a man in one story is equally likely to wind up with a woman in another story, and there's no value judgement in either case. There used to have to be an in-story excuse for the lack of stigma ("it's the future, there's no gay stigma", "it's the wizarding world"), but fandom hit the fourth wave of gay acceptance a long time ago, and most of the time slash doesn't even bother to focus on the existence of the stigma in their universes. Look, for instance, at the Star Trek Harvard AU. You've got a group of four men and four women who are only a decade younger than my grandparents. By the end of the story they wind up in four couples--two male-female, one male-male, and one female-female, and they deal with very little homophobia along the way. Is that realistic or even statistically probably? No, because it's slashview. It's in the 20th century US, but even if the author didn't intend it, it's in the parallel slash world where characters just accept any relationships and move on.
Sure, some are set in times and places where homosexuality is forbidden, and where homophobia exists. But when they are, they're written in as plot elements for the characters to overcome, and they just don't carry the sting of day-to-day casual heteronormativity. The big issues with wide scope are there, but the little stuff isn't. Characters in Age of Sail fandom spend some time worrying about the fact that sodomy is punishable by the death penalty. But they don't spend all their time worrying about it, and they're never caught. And more than that, the elements of homophobia are introduced intentionally by their authors, and are well-thought out. (And, to be fair, I tend to avoid slash that digs particularly deeply into the reality of being gay, because I am usually looking for a fantasy rather than my lived experience, and also because it sends me into queerview, where as we have previously established, I am not able to enjoy what I'm reading in the spirit it was intended.)
So, I'm wondering. Does anyone else find that they have separate goggles for when they're reading slash than they do when they're reading other material? Does anyone have any recommendations of mainstream things I can read that are in fourth-wave homosexuality acceptance? Because I want to see more gay people in my media, I'm just sick of getting heavy-handed lessons or thoughtless stereotypes every time they show up. (The show I've seen pieces of recently that was shockingly good on this front was Brothers and Sisters--the episode I saw was treating them with the same sort of soap opera drama as all of the other characters instead of special gay soap opera drama, and I loved it.)