huh. we sure are homosocial around here: the homosocial in fandom

[cimorene]

last night and this morning i read two works of radical feminist dystopic science fiction from the 1970s (walk to the end of the world and motherlines, by suzy mckee charnas).  "Imagine the worst and then read Suzy McKee Charnas' Walk to the End of the World. The horror of its 1974 post-Apocalyptic, radical feminist vision will surely exceed your wildest expectations," says one review. 

the radical feminist perspective forces them to be highly homosexual and homosocial, and that riveted my attention and got me thinking about those things again. 

in charnas's text the male and female societies are both completely homosocial;  homosexuality is a natural consequence of that, since members of the other gender are seen as unfit for emotional attachment.  the homosociality is completely explicit there, inherent in the universe charnas creates

"Walk to the End of the World is a post-apocalyptic dystopia, based on the idea that a small group made it through the apocalypse in a shelter and in the process developed a philosophy of extreme sexism and racism. The non-white races are (to the best of their knowledge) wiped out, so the racism is mainly theoretical, but women, or fems as they're called, are kept as slaves and for breeding purposes and believed to be completely subhuman. While there's a faint plot, it's mostly an excuse to explore the world and culture, which is a catalog of the worst that one could imagine coming out of extreme misogyny."  [from here]  "In Motherlines, her sequel to Walk to the End of the World, Charnas faces head-on the question ducked by most revolutionaries and social visionaries: what about the baggage that all of us raised in imperfect times will almost certainly carry into the halcyon future? The Riding Women of the Motherlines tribes are unscarred by oppression; the Free Fems are shaped by their horrific experiences as slaves."  [from here]

, in a way it isn't in slash.  but slash is also much concerned with the homosocial (as a consequence of its concern with the homosexual), though often in a less explicit manner.  in a meta way, gender division and the homosocial are overwhelming participants in slash--here we are, a group of women in our cosy, almost entirely homosocial society, writing porn/romance with the male homosexual/-social as the focus.  regardless of our reasons for doing that, gender is problematised. 

that might have been more rambly than i intended to be.  my point was this: 

the radical feminist perspective

[allow me to take a little background here directly from my lecture notes from introductory political science and sociology.  obviously, only the most vague and general superficial glance at it, disclaim, disclaim.]  the radical feminist tradition is associated with marxism because it's a conflict-based view of human society which sees gender as the most meaningful social class and the systematic and violent oppression of women as the driving force in history.  one of the defining characteristics of the conflict-based understanding of society is the belief that the only way to bring about social change is revolution, as opposed to gradual change and measures like affirmative action.  i'm not sure how many radical feminists actually wanted to separate women entirely from male society, but the trend did exist--and it clearly influenced charnas.  as the first linked review said, "Charnas proposes that [brutal] savagery is intrinsic to men and thus all male relationships. The take home message is that women can escape brutalization by men only when avoiding men entirely."

on homosociality focuses on the alienation of male from female.  in fact, that's arguably the entire basis of homosociality--men in ancient greece had meaningful relationships only with other men because only other men were their equals (according to aristotle, women had more in common with animals than with men).  but slash fandom identifies female with male through the homosocial and the homosexual, often projecting homosocial relationships/dynamics within fandom onto the characters. 

out in the wilds of profic there's a widespread debate over whether men are capable of writing convincing female characters (or protagonists, or points of view) and vice versa.  i'd guess that the more popular view nowadays is that it is possible for men to write women and vice versa, but that it takes talent, or skill, or work, or insight, or a special touch;  but that view hasn't won;  people will still fight with you over it.  that debate has, of course,  penetrated slash fandom too.

but actually, what slash fandom intrinsically does is ignore that argument and focus on queerness/desire instead.  even in stories with no "coming-out" element--stories in which the sexuality of the principals is never questioned or never mentioned--sexuality, romance, desire, is the special of the day.  and every day is the same special.  we might debate in the background whether our characters have been girlified and whether that's acceptable or desirable and how a character should go about acting like a real guy, anyway;  but we're going right along anyway in our society whose whole existence is founded on the presupposition that through queerness (homosociality/homosexuality), through desire, we're perfectly qualified to write and understand the experience of male homosexual desire, male homosocial love.  men aren't aliens or a different social class, they're analogies.  they're us. 

and it seems to me, thinking about it, that this fannish queer homosociality is so fundamentally different from the homosociality of the greeks and romans as to almost require a completely different word, that they're almost diametrically opposed.  slash fandom might glorify the homosocial.  but even if we say for the sake of argument that slash fandom actually universally considers homosociality superior to heterosociality, that identification across the gender gap changes it completely.  it's not just a side-effect of our taste in porn that doesn't happen to have been a side-effect of the romans'.  i see it as mutually exclusive with the class-stratification/radical feminist model of the homosocial, at the most basic level. 

  ultimately, charnas shows the negative male-like traits in the female societies being grappled with, possibly overcome, by the women's own natures.  more than that:  her ultra-female society of riders was designed and built from the ground up by women without the slightest participation of men throughout its history, and she makes it completely fundamentally different and rather superior in that particular in-touch-with-the-earth way.  there's some compare and contrast floating around, sure, because the similarities to male society are flaws in the female, and the differences are rather exciting.  but analogy or identification with the alien is impossible.  the unbridgeable gap, the alienness of the sexes, is the foundation of classical homosocialism.

i think there's another post in here about the gap of alienness between the genders in fannish queer homosocialism too, possibly focusing on the exaltation of likeness with reference to isilya's fandom homosociality essay "where your treasure is, there also your heart will be" and to her particularly well-chosen quote from "oblivion" by shalott.  maybe i'll want to spend a few hours writing it some other day.

Comments

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

*bookmarks for later reading* My brain just can't process anything right now. But I'm thinking of working on some kind of essay/presentation/thingy about gender roles in slash authorship/readership/characterization, for a sexuality/textuality workgroup I'm in.

Okay, that was way too many slashes even for a sentence about slash.

[arallara.livejournal.com]

Wow, I just randomly found this post through friendsfriends, and lucky me, because this is totally fascinating stuff. :) I've got to bookmark, also, for future thought, but I do have a few relatively brief comments following a first read-through.

i see it as mutually exclusive with the class-stratification/radical feminist model of the homosocial, at the most basic level.

I really, really agree with this. I get frustrated with much of the scholarly literature on slash because it relies on the same notion of fixed, stable gender identities that produce those radical feminist discourses of that "unbridgeable gap, the alienness of the sexes." So much of the theorizing about slash then becomes about explaining the "problem" of so many women, many of them identify as heterosexual, producing these fantasies about male/male relationships. If you're not invested in that idea of gender identity as something essential and stable, and in the heteronormative coherence of sex, gender, and desire (thank you, queer theorists and poststructuralist feminists! *g*), then the fact that we're a bunch of ladies getting off on stories about male/male relationships, even though many of us identify as heterosexual--well, it doesn't seem so problematic. *g*

possibly focusing on the exaltation of likeness

I haven't gone to read the essay you linked to yet, so I don't know how relevant this is, but something I've thought about is the constant negotiation between likeness and difference that I see over and over again in slash stories. We exalt "likeness," but the relationships we seem most often drawn to are those between characters who are constructed as contrasts to each other. We like the tension that difference produces, but we ultimately want that tension resolved (through, er, sweaty sex and romantic declarations) through the ways they find that the characters find they are the same.

And, a final quick comment: I've heard over and over again from other women in fandom that this is the first female homosocial space in which they've ever felt comfortable, that they've always been "one of the guys" and had few female friends before fandom. Not sure where that fits in with what you're talking about, but it occurred to me as another interesting wrinkle. :)

Anyway, thanks again for this post. Totally thought-provoking!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I loved reading this and can't think of anything to disagree with.

[randomblade.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting. I think one thing for me about reading anything is that I identify with the characters. And because I was brought up reading books with male protagonists, I have never found gender problematic in literature. To me, on the page, sexuality is totally a matter of character, because these characters are not physical constructs to me. They are constructs of personality. I have never had a problem, while reading, identifying with a male personality. In life it becomes much more charged, because the issues are embodied and circumscribed by matter. I don't know if this massive disconnect is a totally individual outgrowth of my crazy brain, but it is why I never really 'get' the arguments about exploitation of gay male culture for our jerkoff fantasies. For me it's not about gay males at all.

For me there's a very clear and indisputable line between fiction and reality.

[copracat]

You've given me a lot of interesting things to think about - not the least that there might be some value in feminist utopia/dystopia fiction.

[galadhir.livejournal.com]

I think the main problem with the sheer hopefulness of that is that, as far as we know slash fandom = mostly women and some gay men. Again, as far as we know, women may *always* have been able to identify with/understand men not as aliens but as fellow human beings. My main quibble is that none of this proves that straight men have become any better at identifying with/understanding women.

The ancient greek homosocial ethic was a male one. The fandom homosocial ethic is a female one. It may be that the difference in them is precisely the difference between male and female: we understand them and accept them as human, they don't understand us, or accept us as entirely human at all.

Damn, I didn't mean to be that depressing!

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Things may be a little more hopeful, though--more than a few slashers have close, warm, intellectually challenging relationships in the homosocial slash space but ALSO RL close, warm, and intellectually challenging relationships with both women and men in other spaces including, god forbid, Real Life. I mean, "I value the friendship of women" CAN but doesn't have to mean "Euwww, boy cooties."

[heartofslash.livejournal.com]

Wow. I heart you to death.

I like your analysis.

I consider slash to transcend societally-induced sexual identity. I like a good comin-out story as well as the next gal, but I love the freedom of a world where what attracts one person to another person is not first and foremost dependent upon gender. In real life, I think there are a gajillion personality traits that are far more important than which kind of genitals a potential partner happens to possess. (Similarly, I feel that skin colour, height and other physical characteristics are nowhere near as important as intelligence, sense of humour and desire to live in a truly free and fair world.)

When we slash, we are often writing of a perfect world. A world in which it's okay to be gay, or whatever one wants to be, without fear of repercussion. We often write of the difficulties those who want to be free encounter as they live within a world that is not free, but it is always with the vision of that better world in mind. That makes slash a bit revolutionary, in my book.

I'm friending you, BTW. Nice to see you on LJ. And, *g*, love the icon!

- Haleth