Why Slash: It's about Power
Nov. 28th, 2015 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI skimmed past another thing saying that slash just isn't feminist or progressive or whatever.
And okay.
Buuuuuuut
One thing that fascinates me in fiction, esp slash fiction, is dynamics of power.
... yes I mean I read BDSM fic but that's not only or most of what I mean.
One theory that has bounced around since long and long is that slash fic isn't specifically about men, it's about power. Equal power.
Due to thousands of years of wax and wane patriarchy and all the daily bullshit we identified as women get to live through, het ships have baggage.
I have read a lot of fiction in my time, and there is so. Much. Drek. About power. In het relationships.
Because just for starters, power is always an issue, and power is always assumed to be preset to one particular dynamic.
... okay, not always within the text, sometimes I'm reading about anthropomorphised lions.
But always in the back of the minds in people socialised into this society with patriarchy the ongoing battleground it is, if you have two genders, it is on some level about power.
Make everyone matching and it is not about power. Like, not automatically. You can just take power out of the thing and have relationships between actual equals where even the subconscious assumptions say they're starting out on a level playing field.
It's really relaxing.
I mean I read standard het stuff from published fiction and part of me is always, always, wincing, and waiting for when the other shoe drops. Because at some point she's going to sacrifice her dreams for his, or she's going to be fail princess and he'll save her, or all her achievements turn out to be just to make his look stellar. Fiction where that doesn't happen goes on my Good Things shelf despite other factors, or at least has a major bonus to its chances.
That automatic curled up flinch away from the text? There's no need to do it when they're matching.
But wait, why not matching women?
Well, patriarchy. Because part of the dream is a liberation from patriarchy. And sometimes that means reading about princess kicks arse, and sometimes that means reading, well, men. Just identify with the powerful ones and let the whole bias of society take the strain.
Feel kind of tired about it later, maybe, but be escapist for a while.
So that's another reason why usually two white men, because tada, we're starting out with the easiest social difficulty settings, absolutely any judgement made upon them is not about what they are, just what they do.
Holiday.
... well, holiday in world without homophobia. Writing about homosexual relationships doesn't exactly fix homophobia, though it arguably helps what with the visibility and normalising. I guess we're just choosing our oppressions and dealing with them one at a time.
This world makes me so tired some days.
And okay, maybe it's not progressive to read and write ... I typed white, okay, that's the short version... maybe it's not pushing the boundaries of society to just have a nice little paddle pool full of same same where we can slide in and bliss
but can we fight all the days?
Further, it gives you access to techniques of defamiliarisation, making strange. Even those dumb ass conversations about which one is secretly the girl in the relationships, they're big blinking lights of Really??? Like, your bullshit assumptions, what the hell are you doing, gender doesn't work that way. Relations of power are being lifted off their socially dominant normalised and naturalised framework, crammed onto something they obviously don't fit, and drawing attention to themselves.
And then fandom goes out and writes tropes that overrule the gender binary as the dominant social construct. Sentinel and guide, maybe. BDSM AUs, sometimes. A/B/O, with an arguable six gender system that just... how did that get to be popular? That must be tapping something people want to get into. And a lot of these tropes are about power, control, loss of control, being perceived as being less powerful but proving it's bullshit, all stuff that has been gendered but when projected onto these idealised white men is untethered from its current social constructs and made strange. Often made too strange for many people to swallow. Which can be part of the point. Lookit, they think half them is inferior from teh get go, how weird is that?
But some of it is about romanticising, normalising, naturalising, loss of power, loss of control. It's like in a lot of romance novels, the old school stuff not the ones we write on the internet, het romance seems to be about finding the least worst guy and then the happy ending is if you just put up with him long enough he turns out kind of okay. ... okay, I can't even write about it accurately, it gives me the ugh too much. It's about starting with the hard, cold, distant guy who maybe even pushes her around or worse, and then by the end of the book taming him by just being a virtuous woman, which often means doing like he says a lot. It seems to me it's underpinned by the assumption that you're going to get chosen by someone who will have such a lot more power than you that, you know, sometimes you need a dream of making the best of him.
If you've got to have a master you write dreams of a good master.
But a lot of fic, even if it puts the BDSM in and makes explicit the social pressure to have a master, it's more about saying you don't got to have a master, and he bloody better be proving himself to you loooooong before he pulls any master bullshit, and with proper negotiation, and safewords.
... safewords are such a very different relation to power imbalance than that assumed by, for instance, patriarchy, sexism, racism, etc. Power imbalance as a game you can safeword out of? Again, happy times bliss, there's an off switch.
There'll be more reasons for reading and writing stuff than there are readers and writers. So this is just one thread.
But I think a lot of the time it's about power.
And writing stuff where [oppressed group] takes back the power and makes it seem normal and natural, that's just one way to explore power. Writing stuff that lets the reader *be* the powerful, that's another. Just doing a different and more escapist thing.
It would still be cool and helpful if we could stop being racist and sexist long enough to make everybody be in the stories, but that would be doing a different thing.
Sometimes we're just playing with power.
And okay.
Buuuuuuut
One thing that fascinates me in fiction, esp slash fiction, is dynamics of power.
... yes I mean I read BDSM fic but that's not only or most of what I mean.
One theory that has bounced around since long and long is that slash fic isn't specifically about men, it's about power. Equal power.
Due to thousands of years of wax and wane patriarchy and all the daily bullshit we identified as women get to live through, het ships have baggage.
I have read a lot of fiction in my time, and there is so. Much. Drek. About power. In het relationships.
Because just for starters, power is always an issue, and power is always assumed to be preset to one particular dynamic.
... okay, not always within the text, sometimes I'm reading about anthropomorphised lions.
But always in the back of the minds in people socialised into this society with patriarchy the ongoing battleground it is, if you have two genders, it is on some level about power.
Make everyone matching and it is not about power. Like, not automatically. You can just take power out of the thing and have relationships between actual equals where even the subconscious assumptions say they're starting out on a level playing field.
It's really relaxing.
I mean I read standard het stuff from published fiction and part of me is always, always, wincing, and waiting for when the other shoe drops. Because at some point she's going to sacrifice her dreams for his, or she's going to be fail princess and he'll save her, or all her achievements turn out to be just to make his look stellar. Fiction where that doesn't happen goes on my Good Things shelf despite other factors, or at least has a major bonus to its chances.
That automatic curled up flinch away from the text? There's no need to do it when they're matching.
But wait, why not matching women?
Well, patriarchy. Because part of the dream is a liberation from patriarchy. And sometimes that means reading about princess kicks arse, and sometimes that means reading, well, men. Just identify with the powerful ones and let the whole bias of society take the strain.
Feel kind of tired about it later, maybe, but be escapist for a while.
So that's another reason why usually two white men, because tada, we're starting out with the easiest social difficulty settings, absolutely any judgement made upon them is not about what they are, just what they do.
Holiday.
... well, holiday in world without homophobia. Writing about homosexual relationships doesn't exactly fix homophobia, though it arguably helps what with the visibility and normalising. I guess we're just choosing our oppressions and dealing with them one at a time.
This world makes me so tired some days.
And okay, maybe it's not progressive to read and write ... I typed white, okay, that's the short version... maybe it's not pushing the boundaries of society to just have a nice little paddle pool full of same same where we can slide in and bliss
but can we fight all the days?
Further, it gives you access to techniques of defamiliarisation, making strange. Even those dumb ass conversations about which one is secretly the girl in the relationships, they're big blinking lights of Really??? Like, your bullshit assumptions, what the hell are you doing, gender doesn't work that way. Relations of power are being lifted off their socially dominant normalised and naturalised framework, crammed onto something they obviously don't fit, and drawing attention to themselves.
And then fandom goes out and writes tropes that overrule the gender binary as the dominant social construct. Sentinel and guide, maybe. BDSM AUs, sometimes. A/B/O, with an arguable six gender system that just... how did that get to be popular? That must be tapping something people want to get into. And a lot of these tropes are about power, control, loss of control, being perceived as being less powerful but proving it's bullshit, all stuff that has been gendered but when projected onto these idealised white men is untethered from its current social constructs and made strange. Often made too strange for many people to swallow. Which can be part of the point. Lookit, they think half them is inferior from teh get go, how weird is that?
But some of it is about romanticising, normalising, naturalising, loss of power, loss of control. It's like in a lot of romance novels, the old school stuff not the ones we write on the internet, het romance seems to be about finding the least worst guy and then the happy ending is if you just put up with him long enough he turns out kind of okay. ... okay, I can't even write about it accurately, it gives me the ugh too much. It's about starting with the hard, cold, distant guy who maybe even pushes her around or worse, and then by the end of the book taming him by just being a virtuous woman, which often means doing like he says a lot. It seems to me it's underpinned by the assumption that you're going to get chosen by someone who will have such a lot more power than you that, you know, sometimes you need a dream of making the best of him.
If you've got to have a master you write dreams of a good master.
But a lot of fic, even if it puts the BDSM in and makes explicit the social pressure to have a master, it's more about saying you don't got to have a master, and he bloody better be proving himself to you loooooong before he pulls any master bullshit, and with proper negotiation, and safewords.
... safewords are such a very different relation to power imbalance than that assumed by, for instance, patriarchy, sexism, racism, etc. Power imbalance as a game you can safeword out of? Again, happy times bliss, there's an off switch.
There'll be more reasons for reading and writing stuff than there are readers and writers. So this is just one thread.
But I think a lot of the time it's about power.
And writing stuff where [oppressed group] takes back the power and makes it seem normal and natural, that's just one way to explore power. Writing stuff that lets the reader *be* the powerful, that's another. Just doing a different and more escapist thing.
It would still be cool and helpful if we could stop being racist and sexist long enough to make everybody be in the stories, but that would be doing a different thing.
Sometimes we're just playing with power.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-28 07:03 pm (UTC)Also, yes. How weird is it that A/B/O is so huge? I kinda love it myself, in part because it's just so fandom-weird. That's my kind of weird.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-29 12:18 am (UTC)