Predatrix said:
In K/S's case, I suppose the writer has to retcon the Dead-Girlfriend-of-the-Week thing *somehow*.
Hey, maybe that's why Blake never goes to bed with Jenna--because if he did that the scriptwriters would have to kill her (as per Bonanza Syndrome).
Nowadays, there are any number of ways to deal with sexual identity--and slash writing does sometimes deal with them. Read Executrix's Pink-Triangle-Avon stories for writing where sexual identity is the heart
of
the story, for example. There are quite a few Julia Stamford stories where the politics of sex are an integral part of the story. My stories tend to assume that Blake is gay or bi and Avon is bi and leave it like that, I suppose, because I'm more interested in sex than politics and I find the concept of bisexuality more understandable than the sort of writing you're talking about where neither of them has ever thought about another man
until
they're in bed together.
and doesn't give much of a voice to lesbians, or address the real
political issues
It's very tough to do a good lesbian story when you don't have good female characters to work with...
Am nonplussed. I'm straight myself, but I know of several gay women (including the writer Joanna Russ, viz one of her essays) who have been known to turn on to slash, because slash is a mental kink (like h/c or torture or rape-fantasy) which isn't clearly about what one wants to
happen
to oneself.
There's the whole Twelfth Night thing of being simultaneously one'sself and other-sex sibling though--and the question of whether the reader of any kind of pornography considers him/herself a spectator or a participant
I'll admit that slash sensibility is much more to do with the women
writing
it than it's to do with gay sensibility in writing by gay men, but is that really so bad?
On the Other List, whenever somebody says "Gee, your story should have said this or been about that" the answer is "OK, then YOU write it."
-(Y)