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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 ), 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 ) 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. ) 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.
( charnas doesn't shrink from portraying the weaknesses of her female homosocial societies, nor from comparing them to the male; but i kept searching for a more prolonged analogy between the societies without finding one. )
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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 ), 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 ) 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. ) 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.
( charnas doesn't shrink from portraying the weaknesses of her female homosocial societies, nor from comparing them to the male; but i kept searching for a more prolonged analogy between the societies without finding one. )
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.
