queerfic vs slashfic?

[sciatrix]

So this post popped up again in my feeds and I got extremely excited, except that I actually sat down to read the comments and got depressed by the, ah, discourse in them.

Which is a shame, because the distinction between the types of stories I would classify as slashfic versus queerfic are not necessarily about what kind of story is necessarily sufficiently good and didactic or even sufficiently representational. It's not a distinction about whether the story is important or whether it's worthy of existing or whether it's even necessarily realistic. So instead of commenting on a two-month-old post full of really irritating infighting (which seems to be the case for the OP, too!), I want to maybe start a new discussion.

Let me reiterate for my space: this ain't a question about whether slashfic is worthy, or what kind of story is only created by appropriating straight women, or whether this distinction should exist. It's a question about whether this genre distinction applies to the stories within the broader genre of fanfiction.

See, not all the queerfic I can think of is relationship fic. (I miss Dreamwidth's old queerly_gen, because to me, that community was a great place to find queerfic that wasn't necessarily structured around a relationship.) By contrast, pretty much all slashfic is relationship fic by nature--it's a subgenre of shipfics, or perhaps more accurately two subgenres (m/m and f/f, which I'd argue are qualitatively different and tend to have different norms). Slashfic generally tells the story of a romance between two (or sometimes more!) characters who are not one man and one woman (usually two men or two women, but sometimes folks whose gender isn't either one). The story is the interaction between the two characters, and the resolution is usually the resolution of tensions and some sort of acknowledgement of that relationship. (It's not always sex, and it's not always "we're together now!"; sometimes it's another kind of release of tension. But I'd argue that that romantic tension and resolution is the inherent arc of a slashfic.)

Queerfic, on the other hand, is a subset of... well, the larger overarching category is honestly something that is often unkindly called issue fic, which is to say stories that exist in part to have a conversation about something other than the interactions of their characters. A lot of stories do this and do it well; some of them are centered around a main romantic/sexual relationship and use that to dig into their main subject matter, but some of them are centered around another type of relationship (familial, for example) or no specific relationship at all. In the case of queerfic, the dialogue that the stories are taking part in usually boils down to one question:

What does it mean to be queer?

Oh, sometimes they ask questions that are more specific than that. For example, I can think of stories that asked "what does it mean to be asexual," or "what does it mean to be out," or "what does it mean to combine your queer circles and your straight ones," or "what does it mean to make a queer family?" or any of a thousand other questions. Sometimes these stories ask these things in the context of two characters developing a romantic and/or sexual relationship; sometimes they don't. But that's the dialogue that they are part of. It's worth noting also that in this context, the concept queer refers to something broader than simply "being in a relationship or having sex with someone who happens to be of the same gender."

Now, I want to make another point very clear: I do not think that either queerfic or slashfic are inherently better than the other. I think that they serve different niches and needs, which is a very different thing. I also don't think either is necessarily inherently exploitative or free from any possible exploitation; for example, I'd classify blatant attempts to cash in on queer audiences in mainstream media alongside queerfic in fandom as interrogating the same sort of question, and I have similarly seen straight writers whose answer to "what does it mean to be queer?" is "a whole lot of delicious angst for my enjoyment."

By contrast, I also know an awful lot of queer folks--I'm married to one!--who have complicated and difficult experiences with queer communities and dialogues, including the sort of trauma that makes them actively reject media that is in dialogue with those communities. I know people who just want to enjoy a goddamn romance that includes them without having to interrogate what that means for their Experience As A Queer Person. Queerfic is inherently a little heavier, a little grander than plain old slashfic, and sometimes as a queer person I am not up to engaging in that dialogue. Sometimes, though, I am.

Isn't it wonderful that all of this writing exists so that we can engage in things that please us and help us grow as we choose to?

Possibly more later, after I get back from a friend's birthday.

[Posted originally to Pillowfort.]

Comments

[sciatrix]

yep! This one actually has the originating place linked under it, but I will start maybe labeling at the top?

[staranise]

Ooh, that would be a good tweak. I love your discussions, but it makes them richer to get a sense of context.