The Savoyard in me wants to say something about toffee, but I'll try to resist.
Susan Beth:
By the same token, then, is every piece of het fic written about the lifestyle of every person who is in a het relationship? Should people in het relationships get upset every time they read a book in which some het couple does something that that reader would never do? "My husband and I never have sex outdoors...how *dare* that writer imply het couples do! It's just cheap masturbatory writing, it degrades me and all other hets."
Exactly. I don't place any burden on femmeslash stories to accurately represent *my* "lifestyle." Arthur Dent like, I'm having immense problems working out what my own lifestyle is anyway. (Perhaps there's actually a lot of other bisexual women out there monagamously committed to other bisexual women living in different countries - if so, I'd love to talk to you...) Criticising slash for not according with steroetypes strike me as a dangerous process at best - humans are too complicated to be reduced to "lifestyles" on the basis of something as highly personal as memebrs of which sex(es) you're capable of fancying/falling head over heels in love with.
I haven't read much Blakes' 7 f/f, but that I have read, I was more interested in the specifics of how, say, Jenna and Cally would react to each other in that siuation, than any idea of them representing "typical" queer women.
As for slash dealing with gay issues - well, B7 isn't the only fandom out there. Shishi/palletshipping (Ash/Gary, the most common Pokemon slash pairing) is obsessed with coming out stories and overcoming homophobia etc etc. Lovely Zelda's rather cutting satire "Ash's Little Secret" was written after I complained bitterly to her about a surfeit of toffee...
That wasn't what I meant-- I meant the relative lack of f/f slash out there.
There's a quite a lot of femmeslash/yuri on the net, actually. It's probably the dominant fanfic genre in the Xenaverse and Bad Girls fandom, for a start. In other fandoms, it's still there, although it's probably received with even more hostility than m/m, and is not as widespread. If you scroll down to my signature, you'll find a link to my own multifandom mailing list, which is devoted exclusively to creating a nurturing community for f/f fanfic.
We've only had two Blakes' 7 stories so far - Jenna/Cally and Servalan/Dayna - but as we have very few members who even know what B7 is, this is not all that surprising... Personally, I'd welcome anyone who wants to add to the B7 quota of the list, because obviously it's more fun to read fanfic from fandoms I follow myself. And maybe I'd get a Soolin story or too... <wistful smile>
I don't know if yuri reflects my lifestyle as a queer woman - partly because, Arthur Dent-like, I don't know if I even have a lifestyle as such. I just... potter along somehow, in my INFP way...
Oh, and though my femmeslash list seems to be slightly dominated by bisexual and lesbian women, we do have several male listmembers, and my assistant list mummy is a heterosexual sheila. Draw what conclusions you like <smile>.
XXX Kanna-Ophelia (who reads and writes f/f, m/m AND m/f, although mostly set in the Pokemon Islands.) Femmeslash: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/femmeslash The Pokeslash Playground: www.tvheaven.pokemon.com Diversion Tactics: www.geocities.com/diversiontactics
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