susanreads | Year of Fail continues (Reply)

It's just like the Everready bunny, isn't it? Now we come back to cultural appropriation, from a different direction.

I've got a rotten cold and don't feel up to a detailed argument, so have an outline:

1: Oh, for crying out loud.

2: Original slash is, to a first approximation, written by and for women. Many - the majority, I believe - of the authors are het cis women. The stories are romance, erotica, or both.

Slash has the potential to be subversive, but my mostly-secondhand impression is that it usually isn't.

3: Gay fiction, as it was called in my day (LGBT is what the Lambda Literary Foundation are calling it; other acronyms are available), can be any genre. Its defining characteristic is featuring characters of minority sexuality and/or minority gender, from the viewpoint of someone who knows what they're talking about, unlike the stereotypes we're usually confronted with in the mainstream media.

LGBT fiction might just be written as a romance, detective story, western, SF story etc. with a protagonist the author can relate to, but promoting it as LGBT fiction is inherently political.

4: 2 and 3 are not the same thing.

If slash writers want to win awards, they should roll their own.

In the first post I read about this, Willow disproved a well-meaning but unfounded argument.

likespring calls out some of the nasty things being said (includes quotations of racism and general cluelessness; I'm using it as a guide to what not to read in the linkspam)

linkspam masterpost