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

[breathedout]

Aha, maybe my previous comment was too judgmental for your formulation! If so, apologies. My specific fandom-related bugbears skew me toward suspicion of slash-that’s-not-queer-fic, but this post clarifies how the niche could be an important one.

[sciatrix]

LOL! I actually can't recall--I commented well back in September when I wrote this piece originally, but I think that the irritation I was building up to with it was more at folks who were growling "are you saying that my slash fic is totally invaluable????" And, well, I'm always more prone to banging my cane and being visibly grumpy when posting elsewhere than I am when I comment in an existing discussion, as I think many folks are.

Mostly, I think I was disheartened by what I initially read as an interesting question of putative genre differences getting turned into a discussion from a number of folks about whether or not wellthisisnice was telling them that their own personal preferred way of engaging in fandom was devoid of value or not. It's a dynamic that is pretty familiar to me from ace communities--different people with different kinds of marginalization that each appear to the other to be a face of hegemony, each reacting at the other because the other group has blundered into sore spots. So that's the lens I was bringing to the discussion when I was writing this piece.

I think both genres are important for different needs, and I think that bringing the distinction over to f/f is also a particularly interesting one because the ratios for f/f in queerfic vs slashfic seem... different than m/m's? Like, hrm, how do I put this--I associate f/f with either having a lot of what I would style queerfic-like approaches, or else having absolutely none at all.

A lot of that is probably sheer numbers--many of the folks I think of as writing excellent queerfic are people who are interested in that "what does it mean to be XYZ" question, and fandom being female-and-nb skewed, I think those folks are more likely to pick up f/f relationships to illustrate those questions with than people who are more interested in the specific dynamics of a relationship. This is especially true given that on-screen f/f relationships are often not given the rich interiority of on-screen m/m relationships, so putative slashfic-focused writers who really want to dig into and explore the particular relationships between characters are, I think, maybe less likely to pick them up? IDK, I'm thinking out loud about why I have certain associations, but I certainly haven't put together any kind of grand theory.

(I need to put that damn f/f recs list together. I have a lot of tabs open, and a lot of stories to quickly reread so I can explain what I'm trying to articulate about the things that make those stories sing to me.)

[unicornduke]

I really think it is an important and interesting distinction! I've read both slash fic and queer fic and which one I read depends on how I'm feeling. In general, I like to read queer fic when I'm happy and in a good place because I can work through things with the characters and it's good to think about things. And it's good to reflect about myself then. But when things aren't so great, it can be hard to read things that are heavier and so then I gravitate towards slash fics, with a focus on happy fics that are all about a happy healthy relationship build.

[jadislefeu]

If I'm parsing this right, I think what I tend to want to read is kind of axiomatically opposed to queer fic? Because I don't want to read about homophobia, I prefer to read settings where Being Gay Is Normal And Not A Big Deal because I want escapism from the bigotry of the real world, so queer community is kind of... neither extant nor necessary and possibly not even possible in those kinds of work, because there isn't really a differentiation of queerness. (I just find it really exhausting to read about people being miserably oppressed in the same ways I am miserably oppressed. There's a really long good f!Harry/Hermione fic that a friend recced me and I enjoyed but will probably never read again because the plot revolves around building queer life in the face of really heavy societal homophobia and it's just too much for me.)

It's an interesting distinction!

[staranise]

Would it be possible for these crossposts to have some sort of label saying when they originated?

A lot of what I take away from this conversation is not Slash Needs to Be More Queer, but honestly, Mass Media Queerfic Needs To Be More Slashy. We have SO many mournful dirges about that gay old life, and so little that says, "Being gay can be cute and funny and amazing and fulfill all your dreams!", y'know?

[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.

[wellthisisnice]

We absolutely need more of everything.

Mass media queer fiction is 99% of the time aimed at the Straights™ with the objective of making them care about us either by showing how terrible it is to be queer (i liked Golden Boy, is a great intersex YA-ish book, but ugh) or by showing us as normal, nice middle class people that are just like them! Mass Media has not yet, not really, catched up on the fact that they can also Make Stories For Us.

On the other hand, independent queer original fiction and fanfiction have an issue with practically only creating cute, Happy Ever After stories that focus on (same-gender) romance. There are very few happy queer stories out there about, say, self-discovery or found families or adventure or work life that isn't slashy. And that's also unfortunate.