De-butchify
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| Title: | De-butchify |
| Creator: | Laura Jacquez Valentine |
| Date(s): | April 2001 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Wayback, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
De-butchify is an essay by Laura Jacquez Valentine.
Summary: "On the feminization of male characters in slash."
Originally posted to Prospect-L, in response to theorizing that Blair's gender-ambiguous name leads to feminization of the character in fanfiction. Several posts combined and edited for clarity. It is at listen to me! listen to me! essays.
Excerpts
[The gender-ambiguous name is] probably one reason, but then what about people feminizing Ray Kowalski or Jim Kirk or Tom Paris? (It also happens to Spock, Methos and Obi-Wan Kenobi, but they have non-normal names.)I think Blair has a lot of aspects that make him easier to feminize: he's got long curly hair and he's short and he's got a gender-ambiguous name and he wears jewelry and he's, like, *sensitive*, man.
But I also think there's a general trend in slash to feminize one of the characters in a pairing. Why this is, I don't know. I've got theories about Beloved Slash Objects and authorial identification and the reconstruction of social roles and internalized ideas about homosexual culture and behavior, but I don't really *like* any of my theories. So the young guy, the blond guy, the skinny guy, the shorter guy, the pretty guy, the [insert vaguely possibly just barely non-butch characteristic here] guy turns into the girly guy.
One of the reasons I like Deb's "Sweetcheeks" is that the first story uses that as humor to make the taller, older, butcher guy into the girly guy. And it's funny as hell.
And so we end up with Fembot!Blair and Demented!Immie!Hausfrau!Methos and Whiny!Little!Neurotic!Bitch!RayK (sorry, this week's pet peeve) because people can't really conceive of how two guys relate romantically/sexually without imposing some kind of gender role on them. And, frankly, I can sympathize. The temptation to just give in and make the person I identify with more like me is huge, and then there's the whole fact that there *are* feminine men out there, and there's simply nothing wrong with that--so why object to it in slash?