Slowly catching up...
From: Shane Little littles@angelfire.com
And yet you say you're not interested in what a gay male relationship is
really like. This sounds a bit like those > straight men who watch "lesbian" porn movies.
It's a comparison I've drawn in the past, and I think it's a very valid one. (Well, I would, wouldn't I, having drawn it myself?) Whilst obviously never having been privy to real life lesbian relationships, I wouldn't mind betting that the male-oriented porn bears precious little comparison to the reality. Slash, in its turn, is largely unrepresentative of real life homosexual relationships, at least based on what I know (admittedly not that much).
Pseudo-lesbian porn, made by men for a male audience, exists to do more than merely titillate. It serves to distort, corrupt, contain, ridicule and ultimately deny the reality of the single biggest challenge to patriarchal hegemony. Lesbianism threatens a fundamental axiom of patriarchal ideology, the dependence of women on men, and the pornographic depiction of lesbianism deliberately seeks to subvert that threat by reconstructing it within ideologically permissible limits. Homophobic? Not as such. Heterosexist? Yes, very. Oppressive? Definitely.
Slash differs from male-oriented porn in that it does not serve the interests of the prevailing ideology. Quite the reverse, since it challenges the presumed heterosexual norm on which that ideology is founded. Furthermore, it roots that challenge within fictional characters who intentionally or otherwise were initially created as representations of that ideological norm. This is nothing less than subversive. Slash is political dynamite, and my single biggest reservation about it is the cavalier way in which its afficionados tend to handle explosives.
But just as m-o porn seizes control of female sexuality (straight or otherwise) for re-representation in the ideological interests of its consumers, so slash does likewise with male sexuality. Both are exercises in the creation of sexual myths with the end purpose of obscuring rather than revealing sexual truths. Both are intensely politicised, yet draw short of acknowledging their political dimension (more true for m-o porn than slash, which as has been pointed out can extend beyond the purely pornographic - as and when the writer chooses to do so).
Is slash homophobic? No, I don't think so. The reconstruction of homosexual reality (which, as Shane has asserted time and again, is only tenuously related at best to slash) to suit the preferences of the target audience does not represent a phobic attitude towards homosexuality per se. Is it heterosexist? If it were written and read solely by straight women, then I might be inclined to say yes, but this is clearly not so. Oppressive? It seems to me we have one marginalised faction of society (ie; women, specifically white, western, largely middle class women, not half as marginalised as some) using a smaller and even more marginalised faction (gay men) as a means of deconstructing the myths imposed upon them by a heterosexual and heterosexist patriarchy. Not oppressive as such, perhaps, but the first analogy that springs to mind is the old Red Army practice of using peasants to clear German minefields.
Neil