On the personal as normal; on the normal as political
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| Title: | On the personal as normal; on the normal as political |
| Creator: | havingbeenbreathedout |
| Date(s): | February 3, 2017 |
| Medium: | online, tumblr |
| Fandom: | panfandom |
| Topic: | Femslash, Meta |
| External Links: | tumblrarchive |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
On the personal as normal; on the normal as political is a meta essay written as part of Femslash Revolution's I Am Femslash series. The essay focuses on the conflicts writers experience when trying to tangle apart the personal and political when writing femslash.
Excerpts
"But the truth is that these days, twenty years on, my selective hair removal—I shave my legs and my pits, but not my bush—feels, to me, neither politically motivated nor even particularly intentional. Instead it feels normal. It’s one of the myriad little habits that makes feel at home in my body, in that deeply comfortable and worn-in sense of "at home” that comes from being able to walk around one’s apartment barefoot, in the dark, while thinking about the last scene in one’s novel rather than where one is placing one’s feet. It’s a level of at-home-ness; of ownership and normalcy, that means conscious thought is superfluous... What does all this have to do with femslash? Glad you asked."
"And even though my lack of fandom context led to me doing and saying some things in those early days that were, in retrospect, kind of embarrassingly naïve and lacking in nuance, I’m glad that I was ignorant of the larger fandom dynamics around lady/lady sex writing (or hey, around lady/lady writing at all [or hey, around writing about women, full stop]). Because my ignorance meant that when I discovered an entire new-to-me, female-dominated community writing complicated, explicit sex scenes, full of longing and messy exploration and bodily fluids, I could blunder right into writing about women conflictedly fucking other women; conflictedly fighting with other women; conflictedly forgiving other women and reconnecting with other women and betraying other women and taking care of other women and bittersweetly remembering other women. Because why wouldn’t I write about that? That was, to my fandom-naïve eye, the normal thing to do in this subculture into which I’d wandered."
"But I think one thing that stands out, from a majority of my interactions on this issue through the years, is the perception that the act of writing relationships among women is inherently political, in a way that the act of writing about relationships among men is not."
"By contrast, when we are reading and writing about women (especially queer women and women of color), our default assumptions tend to range from “individualized character depictions can influence the political status quo” to “individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable.” It is burdensome to write about queer women because we feel that every individualized queer woman character we write, in her body and her actions, must both bear the brunt of, and actively resist, all that baggage listed above. She must subvert (on a meta level) and/or stand against (on an in-story level) the tide of mainstream objectification, of lesbian hypersexualization, of sexist and homophobic tropes, of poor treatment and shoddy development at the hands of media creators, and on and on. Everything that happens to her or doesn’t happen to her, every physical trait and every mental tic, is massively overdetermined, because we feel that to write about queer women is to body forth our own personal politics into the world—and, more than that, to transform the landscape of queer female representation entire. OBVIOUSLY, as a writer and reader this is neither fun nor possible! No character can do this."
"Taking a larger view, I think that we need to close the gap between our reading and writing of men, especially straight white men (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated”) and our reading and writing of women, especially queer women and women of color (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable”). Both sides need to shift. Neither extreme is true, and we are doing a disservice to all our characters, and our works, if we disregard the nuance that lives between them."
Responses
"A good piece.The things that we do nominally for the sake of others can’t rest solely on that as foundation. There needs to be a way that they generate value for ourselves. There are so many virtuous actions that can be worthwhile purely for what they do for us as actors.
When I was young, I made little birds out of snow and hid them in the forests of my hometown. It was play and that play had value even if not a single other person noticed them.
I don’t expect my actions to change the world. But they can change me and they can change the lives of those close to me and that is enough."
[2]
References
- ^ Response by plastic-lions on tumblr Link to archive.
- ^ Response by transientpetersen on tumblr Link to archive.