Bisexuality and Fanfic

Meta
Title:	Bisexuality and Fanfic
Creator:	alixtii
Date(s):	Apr 5, 2009
Medium:	Online
Fandom:
Topic:	Bisexual representation in fanfic
External Links:	LiveJournal Archived version
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Bisexuality and Fanfic is a 2009 meta essay by alixtii on the subject of bisexual representation in fanfiction. It is a response to trobadora's rant Monosexuals, this one's for you and it originated as a comment on that rant. It was posted on alixtii's LiveJournal where it received 18 comments, and it was later linked on Metafandom.

Another meta essay on bisexuality and biphobia in fic, dunmurderin's Bisexuality, Visibility, and Fanfic Labels, or, Being the Blue M&M, was subsequently posted in response to alixtii, trobadora, and a meta post by chasingtides.

Some Topics Discussed

• Bisexual representation in m/m slash and f/f slash
• What does bisexual erasure or bisexual invisibility mean?
• OTP-ism and monofannishness
• The problems with categorizing fic by genre
• Brief detour into the Wave Theory of Slash
• alixtii's distaste for the Kinsey scale

The Essay

trobadora has an interesting post on biphobia in fanfiction that got me thinking:

In fanfic, all too frequently characters who have had heterosexual relationships are presented as gay and closeted. (Not bi and closeted.) In fannish squee, slashy subtext is generally welcomed as "gay". It hardly ever seems to allow for bisexuality.

1) This is so not my experience--but OTOH, I'm filtering it through het male privilege, so it could just be there and I'm not noticing it. I wondered if this could be an issue with m/m slash more than slash in the broadest sense, but trobadora said in response to nymphaea1's suggestion that bi invisibility in m/m fic could be a manifestation of misogyny that she saw femslashers "erasing men" (from canon characters' sexual lives, I'm assuming?), though. (And makes me think that I'm just not noticing what she's noticing, that I don't understand what was meant by "erasing.")

Can anybody on the flist think of femslash pairings where this sort of thing might happen?

2) Or this seems like it could be linked to OTP-ism. Since one of the common tropes of OTP-ism is that all relationships pale in comparison to the OTP, of course Character A's real sexuality can only be that which pairs them with B. Since all relationships with the gender B isn't are by definition lesser, than A can't really be attracted to that gender. It's stupid logic, but that's OTP-ism for you. And since I don't read OTP-y fic, it'd explain why the fic I read/write has bi characters, or at least characters engaged in queer acts while only being seen as het in canon without being explicitly labelled as something other than bi.

I wonder if this could be systematically studied? Read a bunch of OTP fics, then quantitate the bi visibility somehow, and then do the same for a bunch of rarepair fics. The only femslash OTP I read on a significant enough basis is in DWP, though, and I hadn't noticed that those fics erased Nate--just mocked and marginalized him (as well they should).

3) Most m/m or f/f fic I read/write is about queer acts more than queer experience--the love of A for B rather than A coming to terms with her sexuality. In the fic I read, characters don't struggle with their sexual identity--whether it be straight, gay, or bi--and homophobia is largely absent. That's part of the fantasy.

Queer acts between two cisgendered persons have to be either homosexual or heterosexual (am I missing something?); bisexuality only becomes relevant when characters begin putting themselves in boxes. Most (but not all) fic I read/write isn't about that. "My" Dawn is absolutely bi (other characters might have other identities, or it might depend on the fic, although most are bi), but I might not manage (or even try) to make that clear in a particular fic.

In WNG Femslash, I looked at the sexual identities of some of the charcters in my fic. And there are characters who, to me, have constant sexual identities. Whenever I write Dawn, she's bi. Whenever I write Willow, she's gay. Buffy's straight in my head unless I'm writing her in a femslash pairing. But does the fact that Amanda and Vi have sex in Just Skin and its sequel First Time's Not the End of the World mean they're gay or bi or straight or what? Hell if I know.

In military fandoms like SG1/SGA, DADT also makes an emphasis on the queer experience more necessary than it would be in, say, Buffy, I think.

4) Asking why people who are interested in writing about the queer experience might tend not to write characters as bi is certainly an interesting question. Indeed, out of the hundreds of stories I've written, most of them femslash, I consider one of them, My Girlfriend is a Telepath, to be about the queer experience--and yes, sure enough, bisexuality is never mentioned.

But then the word "gay" is only used once in the entire story, by Kitty's brother in the IM conversation which closes the fic:

rdwingzkikass: hey sis
arielsprite129: hey
rdwingzkikass: mom sez ur gay now?!1?
arielsprite129: i dunno. i guess. maybe.
rdwingzkikass: cool. B-]
rdwingzkikass: is she hot?

Similarly, the word "lesbian" is never mentioned either, although there are a couple uses of "dyke" by homophobic, mutant-phobic street hoodlums. So even in my story about the queer experience queerness as an identity is never utilized except from without--and every time it does, it's by objectifying males. It's a story about "repression and coming out," to use trobadora's words, but what is being released is not the knowledge that Kitty is bi or gay, but that she likes girls. Whether or not she likes boys never actually comes up. (Is that a sort of invisibility? I honestly don't know. If the deleted Bobby/Kitty kiss in X3 had been included in canon, would that have changed things? Possibly.)

While I'm sure there are cases of biphobia or mononormativity at work in some "coming out" stories, I'm not quite succeeding in imagining how the systemic process would work--which is probably a failure of imagination on my part. But there does seem to be enough of a pattern to assume that something systemic is going on. So I don't know.

5) It's not just my story; conversationally it's common to say "gay" and mean "queer," which adds to the problem. Fic often needs to be realistic about this or risks going into OOC territory; how would most canon characters refer to "not-straightness"? Which, yes, is a reflection of biphobia in the source text, which is a reflection of--and normalization of--biphobia in the real world. But I think trobadora's post may also be in part to actual uses of "gay" to mean "queer" on the parts of fans? (This problematic usage is probably common enough to not be nonstandard, unfortunately.)

6) How much is this linked to our sucky classificatory schema? I'm still trying to struggle with what was mean by "erasing" a gender. Femslash generally isn't about men; m/m slash isn't about women. Now obviously fics can and do contain both m/m and f/f pairings within the same fic, but the way our genre system leads us to think about a fic being either about a m/m pairing or about an f/f pairing or about a het pairing or about plot (i.e., gen) is extremely problematic, as I and others have argued at length before. Is this leading into bi invisibility in fic?

7) How is this related to who's writing the fic? We can explain bi and lesbian writers erasing women in m/m fic either as biphobia or as misogyny. Do we even need as complicated an explanation for the straight women who may be erasing women in m/m fic? And if I'm erasing men in my m/m, misandry strikes me as a more likely culprit than biphobia (but then I'm the worst person to judge, being me).

8) trobadora is right that WNG is less common than it used to be in the sense that you'll rarely find explicit denials that a m/m or f/f calls into question a character's straightness anymore. But I don't think the successor to WNG is a bunch of stories where the characters are explicitly gay--or if it is, then that's the second-wave successor while we're in the fourth wave or such. I think in a postmodern slash environment where everyone's potentially slashable, where there's probably an entire comm for Dumbledore/Sorting Hat, the old categories are just assumed to not apply anymore. And I think this is why biphobia and OTP-ism might go together, because with an OTP everyone's not potentially slashable; instead, it's something specific about those two characters. It's a more mordernist aesthetic.

Also, again, the existence of DADT exacerbates the problem in military fandoms--it makes the "not caring about sexual identities" thing literally impossible.

9) I find myself getting flummoxed by terminology, because straight != 100% straight, only ever attracted to the opposite gender. I'm not so much as agnostic as to whether 100% straight people exist as I find the very question to be a dangerous reification of the Kinsey scale: it assumes sexuality can be quantified, that we can possibly mean something by the English phrase "one hundred percent straight" when really, we can't. I find myself not wanting to homophobically deny my same-sex attraction but at the same time not acting like the fact I wouldn't turn down phone sex with David Tennant makes me bi--not because I don't want to be bi but because I'm just not, and I don't want to appropriate someone else's identity. (And this is true on the other side of the scale, too: is the assumption that all talk of gayness constitutes bi invisibility itself a medium of bi invisibility? Because obviously gay != 100% gay any more than straight = 100% straight.)

Reactions and Responses

The comments section started off with a bang as peasant_ questioned whether biphobia truly exists:

[peasant_]
The complaints about bi invisibility always strike me as being mostly related to insecurity about sexual identity - which is perfectly understandable, because pretty much everyone with a minority sexuality (and probably quite a lot of normal people as well) is insecure about their sexual identity and hence touchy on the subject of 'invisibility'. How you get from that to an actual 'phobia', or accusations of 'prejudice', I don't know. If people are specifically prejudiced against me for being bi as opposed to merely queer, then all I can say is I've never noticed it. And there seem to be plenty of bi people in the media, at least as many as vanilla homosexuals, so I've personally never felt particularly invisible. So I am rather bemused by the claim.

But of course this is just me - I put a lot of effort into not noticing prejudices of every sort, and not getting upset about the ones I do happen to notice. Of course different strokes for different folks, I know a lot of peeps adopt alternative strategies for whatever reason. We all have different triggers and ignition points. And I admit I did once lose it and ask my flist not to claim Ianto was being badly written for having 'switched' from straight to gay. (What can I say - I'd been having a bad month. Even the best of us give in to the siren call of PC at times ;)

"I find myself getting flummoxed by terminology"
Oh well aren't we all. It takes several paragraphs to describe my sexuality, not any single word, and it certainly comes under the heading of TMI so I am not inclined to do it with any but my closest friends. So for the benefit of strangers I will happily use words like 'gay', queer' or 'bi' simply as useful shorthand to help them grasp the general idea of 'a minority sexuality'. I tend to assume most other 'gay', 'queer' etc. people use the words in a similar way. One thing we do all have in common, I assume, is that we have probably had to think about our sexualities a lot, and thus are rather aware of all the complexities. This makes it extra odd to me that homosexuals might be prejudiced against bi folk. I can maybe see it if I sort of squint sideways and assume a certain amount of the cabin boy kicking the cat, but it still doesn't quite ring true. My inclination is to dismiss the claim as attention seeking. Apart from anything else, unless you spend your life amongst homosexuals who happen to have the prejudice, why would it even matter? As you say, it is hard to spot where the systemic problem might lie.

"it assumes sexuality can be quantified, that we can possibly mean something by the English phrase "one hundred percent straight" when really, we can't"
I think most people will agree one should never say never, but I also think I can happily grasp the idea of sexual phobias and squicks. And it does seem to me that a lot of heterosexual people have the equivalent of a phobia or squick at the thought of sex with someone of their own gender. So on those grounds I think it is fair for them to say they are 100% straight, just as I can say I am 100% not interested in eating live monkey brains. Yes, with appropriate therapy I could doubtless overcome my aversion, but since I have no interest in even considering such therapy the matter is moot.

The phenomenon of homophobia does fascinate me. I can't understand why it even exists in the first place, let alone why it is perpetuated. Cui bono?

[hermionesviolin]
The complaints about bi invisibility always strike me as being mostly related to insecurity about sexual identity

This hasn't been my experience. I see complaints about invisibility as, well, complaints about invisibility. I'm very secure in my identity as a bisexual/queer woman, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see people who are like me in that way represented in the tv and movies that I watch and in the books and comics that I read. That doesn't mean that I don't still get upset when people say that bisexuality isn't a "real" sexual orientation, that bisexual people just haven't made up their mind, that people who say they're bisexual just want to have a lot of sex, that bisexual means polyamorous, etc.

And there seem to be plenty of bi people in the media, at least as many as vanilla homosexuals, so I've personally never felt particularly invisible.

"[A]t least as many as vanilla homosexuals" is not what I would define as "plenty" when it comes to the media. I'm hard pressed to think of any bisexual people in media. I hear there are/have been some on shows I don't watch (Gray's Anatomy, Bones, Torchwood), but I'm hard pressed to think of ones on shows I do/have watch/ed, and I definitely feel like the (still small) number of gay men and lesbians in the media far outpaces the number of bisexuals in the media.

One thing we do all have in common, I assume, is that we have probably had to think about our sexualities a lot, and thus are rather aware of all the complexities. This makes it extra odd to me that homosexuals might be prejudiced against bi folk. I can maybe see it if I sort of squint sideways and assume a certain amount of the cabin boy kicking the cat, but it still doesn't quite ring true. My inclination is to dismiss the claim as attention seeking. Apart from anything else, unless you spend your life amongst homosexuals who happen to have the prejudice, why would it even matter? As you say, it is hard to spot where the systemic problem might lie.

I agree that there's an illogic in members of a sexual minority being prejudiced against members of another minority sexuality solely because of the latter's identity labels, but I don't think the answer to that conundrum is, "Therefore that prejudice doesn't exist." I think there is some logic behind the prejudice actually (resentment that bisexuals are able to access a lot of heterosexual privilege, for one), but also, has logic ever been a prerequisite for prejudice?

I'm really uncomfortable with the framing of this as "attention seeking." I think it is bisexual people saying that their experience isn't getting represented -- is getting ignored or misrepresented -- and that this is a problem. Their experience may be different from your experience, even though you both claim the same umbrella identifier term, but that doesn't make their experience invalid.

I don't even know where to begin with "unless you spend your life amongst homosexuals who happen to have the prejudice, why would it even matter?" Are you conceding that the prejudice DOES exist and we should just try to avoid the people who have it? (Which, one, undermines the sense I get of your general argument in this comment, and two, is a really problematic statement to be making about any experience of prejudice.) Isn't the whole claim of trobadora and chasingtides and others that we/they ARE surrounded by people who have this prejudice?

Others agreed with alixtii that characters in their fandoms were usually implied to be bisexual, and that perhaps bisexual erasure was a feature of an earlier wave of slash:

[st_crispins]
Not my experience either. In Man from UNCLE fandom, one or both of the guys (but especially Solo) is more likely to be cast as bi- than truly gay.

[lunabee34]
I think that in much of the fanfic that I currently read, the characters are represented as bisexual by default and that like you say in your post, the focus is on queer acts, not coming to terms with newfound gayness.

But when I first got into fandom (Buffy), most of what I read was about Xanderf discovering he is gay and going through that existential angst and forging a relationship with Spike. Lots and lots of We're Not Gay in that segment of the Jossverse and it's a trope I've sincerely come to despise. I find stories now and again that fall into that genre that I enjoy but they are very few and far between. Mostly I find the whole concept very insulting.

One of the things I notice in femslash is that I've rarely come across the We're Not Gay trope there. I hesitate to say it doesn't exist, because, dude, internet huge, but I can't think of a single femslash piece I've read that falls into that category. I wonder why. *muses* I'd love to find some femslash like that for comparison's sake.

[alixtii]
Hmm, yes, my post WNG Femslash was all about that--because I, too, noticed the lack of WNG in femslash. (Indeed, that lack is one of the first things I point to when I argue that m/m slash and femslash are radically different beasts, as I do regularly.) We discuss why there's no WNG Femslash at length in the comments, but I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that a lot of femslash is written by queer women, which cuts down on the homophobic versions of WNG. I suppose I could still see the kink-based, non-homophobic (or at least less homophobic) "our love is so great it transcends sexuality" versions of WNG operating in some femslash--I could see it working well in some Buffy/Faith, for example--but as you note, I haven't seen it. (It strikes me that the more OTP-y a pairing is, the more easily I can imagine WNG-ing it. I discuss the relationship between femslash and OTPs here.)

[executrix]
I think it's because for a lot of people, feelings about same-sex romantic attachments and sexual acts are mixed up with feelings about masculinity. A lot of male characters angst over not only having sexual relations(hips) with other males but over loss of masculinity, which is also status. (And a lot of ficwriters find it necessary to make one partner in a male/male relationship figuratively--or literally--barefoot, pregnant, and stuck in the kitchen.) It's a lot harder to lose femininity, because not only is it a default position but most societies are set up so that masculinity is considered an Important Big Deal but femininity gets much less thought.

mizuno_caitlin argued that the problem truly lay with gendered and heteronormative assumptions in slash fandom:

[mizuno_caitlin]
I'm a little surprised this post managed to cover so many possible points and missed a few basic criticisms of slash that are very relevant to this argument. But, it seems the post(s) you link to and your own post centers mostly on fandoms in live action works talking place in the Americas and England. When it's an actor in front of you on the screen you don't consider the possibility of gender identity confusion as readily, I suppose? But, I think that's part of the problem, too.

You assume in the mind of the writer and reader that both partners in a m/m or f/f fic are being characterized as male & male or female & female. I don't think that's the case. More often than not, it seems, one partner in these sorts of stories will take the role of "The Woman" and the other "The Man". What sex organs they possess becomes irrelevant because their love story, in the mind of the reader and writer, starts to slide into a vanilla, married and together forever, heteronormative mold. I theorize that people ignore the issues of actual sexual identity in fic because of this phenomenon. It isn't REALLY a gay story. It's Romeo and Juliet where Juliet has her chest taped down and hair cut short. So, all the regular biases and prejudices still apply. Issues of homophobia in regards to all aspects of GLBT identity still apply.

[...]

Things I've noticed in fandom that make me believe this:

1) The prevalence of secrets on fandom secrets about people who read/write/love slash and yet are anti-gay or anti-same-sex-marriage.
2) The persistent existence of mpreg. The fall in love, get married, and have children, right? That's what couples do? Right?
3) The constant complaints I see by gay men or those informed in the ways of real life same-sex m/m relationships about the lack of verisimilitude in the sex lives of slash fic partners. The over use of anal sex, for instance. Or, the insistence that one partner is always the one who penetrates and the other. One becomes 'the woman' and the other 'the man'. They have to have anal, because that's the heteronormative thing to do. It's the gay missionary position, right? Right? And, they certainly can't change it up, because there's no way a "woman" can enter a "man".
4) The OTP phenomenon. Like you mentioned, there are many who act and write as though only one love or lover is valid in a lifetime. Well, that's the standard that the good straight couple in a fairy tale, or conservative religion, will be held to. You get married young and you stay married forever. Divorce is not an option. You can't sleep around. Strictly forbidden by doctrine.

That all being said, I do tend to see the idea of "love the person not the gender" come up far more often than "We're not gay, just..." The characters tend to live in a happy place where sexuality is defined by each person for themselves rather than broad, over sweeping stereotypes that fit no one. I'm happy with that most of the time.

nora_charles disagreed with several of both alixtii's and mizuno_caitlin's premises, and pushed back against the idea that biphobia doesn't exist in fandom:

[nora_charles]
I can buy Willow faking attraction to Xander and Oz because of being a deeply closeted and in denial lesbian if the author is willing to set that characterization up carefully and convincingly, and is making some sort of point by doing it, but when an author blithely assumes her to be gay that to me is making bisexuality invisible, and I find it annoying and offensive.

As for seeing biphobia where there is only obsessive OTPing, that does not explain the many fics where the main characters go into their same gender sexual history, or an old same gender lover shows up to create drama, but different gender (even canon) love interests are invisible or dismissed.

I've seen a lot of fics that deal with gender queerness be bashed, and I'm sorry mizuno_caitlin, by dismissing all mpreg as hetero-normativity you are doing it too. Sometimes slashers force their nominally same gender characters into traditional hetero-normative femme vs. butch / seme vs. uke roles, and sometimes slashers challenge the idea of binary gender by mixing up sexual and gender attributes, and are in fact being pansexuality and genderqueer friendly.

Regardless of whether you believe biphobia really exists in slash fandom, when someone tells you they feel invisible and dismissed, replying that their emotions are irrelevant because the problem they experience isn't "real" isn't very likely to help them feel not invisible and dismissed. This is not aimed at alixtii, just a general plea to sanity ^_~

Other commenters disagreed as well, and pointed alixtii in the direction of femslash that erases men:

[chasingtides]
If you're looking for femmeslash that erases men, I would direct you to a lot of the femmeslash in the Harry Potter fandom. While I'm bisexual and was, at one point, active in the Harry Potte femmeslash community, they often go to great lengths to erase the men, especially after the epilogue was so heavy handed with het pairings.

In other sexuality related news, it might be the fandoms in which I participate, but I do often see either the characters referring to themselves as gay or the authors/readers refer to the characters as gay. It's most often the latter, I admit. But it does frustrate me to no end when people call Ianto Jones "gay" or refer to an RPS character as "gay" when the fic does recognise that he was with women. Or that the character decides that because he's falling for a man, his ex-girlfriend must have meant nothing - the automatic assumption that feelings for one sex erase the other. (In this case I am thinking of the Supernatural RPS fandom where this seems to be common trope.)

I have heard the argument that, basically, "gay" = anyone attracted to anyone who isn't their own gender. And the thing is - that's biphobia in our language. It doesn't work like that. Gay does have a fairly specific meaning. For example, I, a pansexual woman, don't feel included in the "gay" category. If I said I were gay, it would be a lie and appropriating an identity that isn't my own. I don't see why fiction (or discussions about fiction) should be any different.

[blackjackrocket]
Can anybody on the flist think of femslash pairings where this sort of thing might happen?

Revolutionary Girl Utena, but that series has the most elaborate relationship charts I've ever considered.

Since one of the common tropes of OTP-ism is that all relationships pale in comparison to the OTP, of course Character A's real sexuality can only be that which pairs them with B. Since all relationships with the gender B isn't are by definition lesser, than A can't really be attracted to that gender. It's stupid logic, but that's OTP-ism for you.

But in that fervent of OTPism there's also the matter that any relationships the characters have outside the OTP don't matter, no matter the orientation.

On her own post, trobadora ultimately declined to respond to alixtii because of things that were posted in his comments section:

[trobadora]
I was going to answer your comment, but frankly, I have neither the patience nor the inclination after seeing your own post and the kinds of things you have allowed to go uncontested in the comments there. That's ... really not okay. At all..