janecarnall's Journal

Yes, I do exist
Dissenter wrote an anti-slash post on her blog a couple of weeks ago. It actually merits a thoughtful response, though of course on a different blog as she will not approve any "pro-slash" comments on her own, but one thing I did want to tell her:

I’m a lesbian-feminist who has been writing slash for nearly 25 years, and I do get tired of the persistent claims that neither I nor all of the other lesbian and bisexual slash fans I know really exist.

Oh well. That’s the patriarchy for you. Lesbian invisibility and bisexual invisibility are a problem everywhere, and at least other slash fans have no difficulty accepting that we exist, even if outsiders looking in somehow never manage to see us.

I think the particular problem of lesbian/bisexual invisibility in slash fandom (especially lesbian invisibility: I think the bisexual invisibility is at least partly caused by the general invisibility of bisexuals everywhere) is the belief that liking slash is somehow an inability to choose between two appropriate lust objects, so you put them both together.

And for straight/bi women, finding one or both of the men sexually attractive may be a factor.

But I think that the common strand - the reason we get into slash - is that we have a sexual orientation, orthogonal to the accepted orientations of lesbian/bi/straight, such that we find two-men-together attractive. I know I always have, and while it caused me some confusion trying to find a way of verbalising how I felt and what I thought about it, it never caused me internal confusion: I might not have known how to find the words, but I knew even when I was a child how I felt.

This is actually almost irrelevant to Dissenter's arguments that writing fanfic/writing slash is a non-feminist/anti-feminist thing to do. I disagree with those arguments, but they're not too far removed from the usual "Why are you wasting your time doing this when you could be doing something more important!" arguments. It's just that, you know: when someone says they can't see any lesbians here, I want to stand up and wave and go "Over here!"

So this is me, standing up, waving.

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