Category Archives: think pieces

dyke: the threads

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by in my historian hat, think pieces

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Last week I saw a Twitter thread shared on my timeline several times that I didn’t understand, and when I clicked into the thread in an attempt to learn more I became even more confused. A bunch of queer women appeared to be arguing about whether bisexual women were “allowed” to use the word “dyke” — a slang term that’s been around since the early twentieth century , typically referring to queer women who are “mannish” in appearance. Think about the Dyke Marches at Pride and Dykes on Bikes, or the long-running cartoon serial by Alison Bechdel Dykes to Watch Out For which is how I, a teenager in the 1990s, first learned and grew fond of its warm, rebellious edges. Since going down the rabbit hole, I’ve been lurking and reading — on Twitter and elsewhere (Tumblr, reddit) — where these policing conversations are taking place and I’ve written a number of Twitter threads about the themes that I’ve seen. Below are those threads in blog post format. I may update as the dyke police watch continues.

Thursday, August 20th, 2020.

I think what I want all the babyqueers trying earnestly to police the use of “dyke” by people who identify as (among other things) as dykes is this: The language of gender, sex, sexuality, desire is not fixed. We are always becoming, and doing so in relationship with the world. The idea that our gender/sex/sexuality is super specific, innate, and fixed is a very recent and historically specific truth. That doesn’t make it less valid for those who find meaning in that paradigm. But it is not universal. It is not everyone’s truth. Yes, we want to be careful with our words. We want to use the language others choose for themselves and know the power and meanings of the words we use for ourselves. Those meanings may be multiple and contextual.

Words I have used to speak about my queerness that are all true: fluid, bi, gay, pan, demi, lesbian, sapphic, dyke, queer, not straight.

It’s particularly important to me — as a woman with bi/demi/pan desire, who for a full decade plus gaslit myself convinced I was not queer “enough” — to gently yet firmly remind folks that telling bi people they can’t identify as [insert queer term here] has a bad history. We do very real harm by telling bisexual people “you do not deserve these words” which is another way of saying to bisexual people “you do not deserve to be a part of our community.” So if you are being told somewhere by folks that “dyke” is only appropriately used by specific women (setting aside who polices on a case by case basis each person’s qualifications…) please stop and consider whom you are being asked to harm. And if you’re okay with that. And remember that it is OKAY to change and learn and grow and let go. The words you use, even for yourself, today may be different from the words you choose tomorrow.

All of the words can be true. Kiss mark

Saturday, August 22nd, 2020.

I honestly had no idea until two days ago this was a thing and now I can’t stop thinking about how fascinating and wild it is that there are people who’ve decided that bisexuals and lesbians are two circles on the Venn diagram that do not, and never have, overlapped. Just as one single example of how ahistorical that notion is, as recently as the 1970s historians have seen the use of lesbian/ism and lesbian desire to refer to (typically cis) women desiring women … the exclusivity of that desire wasn’t necessarily assumed. So many women who identified as lesbians / with the lesbian or gay community experienced bisexual desires during their lives. In some cases they also identified as bisexual, or shifted to using bisexual as their primary language of identity. But not uniformly so. So it’s fascinating to me, from a historian’s perspective, to see that there’s a cohort of people who’ve suddenly decided this group of jumbled-up queer women constituted two entirely separate groups with separate genealogies requiring a boundary that needs linguistic police.

I’m skimming through primary sources here on social media and so struck by the fact that a recurring definition used for “lesbian” by the people saying bisexuals can’t use “dyke” is “lack of attraction to men”. As a reader and writer of romance, I will say that a story about desire that is defined by what is not desirable rather than what is desired is always a huge red flag to me. Like … you can’t describe your attraction to women as attraction to women? You still have to define it in relation to men? That’s fucked up.

Another slippage that I’m seeing as a scroll through the primary sources here on social media is that there’s no distinction being drawn between hurling “dyke!” at someone as an act of aggression and someone using that word as a cozy self-descriptor. For me, in reference to myself, it’s like pulling on a fuzzy oversized sweater. But, like, dudebro hurls it out of his pickup truck at me and my wife on our walk to the grocery store — not fuzzy at all.

“Gay” is a totally mainstreamed word that bigots also weaponize. Context matters!

Wednesday, August 26th, 2020.

Continuing my adventures in reading the “bisexuals aren’t allowed to say dyke” corner of the Internet, here’s another slight-of-hand I’m seeing that is extremely red-flaggy from both an activist and historical perspective. The historical sources this crowd cite as origin documents all come from a period when “lesbian” was a term used both for behaviors (one engaged in lesbian acts rather than being a lesbian) and included women who might now identify as bi.

They acknowledge and/or are confronted with this historical context — that their argument (lesbians are the only people who can use the word dyke because it’s a derogatory term only used toward lesbians) is undermined by the documented usage of the term over time — but shimmy around the problem by arguing that now lesbians (the group against whom the word dyke was originally hurled) include a much narrower group of people, and that narrower group of people are the people who have the right to police usage.

This also conveniently ignores that dyke is a word that not only has associations with same-sex desire but has a strong historical association with gender presentation — so a case could be made it’s not primarily about whom you have sex with but that you present as a “mannish” woman.* So the self-deputized dyke police also put forward a fascinating (to this historian of sexuality) theory about community ownership of histories: that it is (a very specific) present-day definition of a community that determines who has the right to the community’s history. If we take as a given (which I don’t) that at some point around 1969 “lesbians” and “bisexuals” found enlightenment and became two wholly separate communities, when before they had maintained only one, who, then, has the “right” to the pre-history that included both? The folks currently defining “dyke” as the sole property of “lesbians” maintain the only people who identify as their particular, current-in-the-moment definition of lesbian have a legitimate claim to the pre-history of queer women. That claim situates this particular group as the most lesbian, because it places them in the position of continuity with lesbian forebears, while all other queer women must apply (to them) for the right to even speak the words of that shared past.

At this point, I’m not going to directly engage with these folks because 1) a lot of them seem to be quite young and I’m not parachuting into their timelines as a grumpy older stranger because that’s a shitty power move, and 2) they clearly don’t want to discuss this. But I do want to put out there, for any peers or younger folks they are currently bullying, from me and all of the other queer folks who feared for years we weren’t queer enough to speak the words: YOU ARE ENOUGH. You are queer enough. This is your history. Speak the words that help you make sense of who you are in the world & connect with people in the past & present who help you feel less alone. The people with delusions of grandeur telling you what you’re “allowed” to say are wrong.

*Remembering that all of this historical-contextual usage developed during a time when our understandings about gender and sex, and the relationship of gender and sex to desire, were very different than our understandings today.

Friday, August 28th, 2020.

So two items of note from yesterday’s dyke police watch. They decided to lose their shit over a man on a con panel who gave a shout out to a lesbian colleague’s podcast: “Desperate Housedykes.” There were, I understand, other content problems with the panel. It’s not my fandom and not my lane to speak to those. This thread is only about the dynamics around a man saying “dyke” as part of saying the title of a queer woman’s podcast.

The angry dyke police keep making, in this situation and others, comparisons between the word dyke and the n word which I think is a really noteworthy tactic. By claiming that anyone other than (their narrowly defined category of) lesbians uttering the word dyke under any circumstance is analogous to non-Black people speaking the n word they are elevating “dyke” to a potency level of universal hate that it never had, and certainly doesn’t universally retain today.

I would argue this move, and the rhetorical strategy of replacing dyke with “the d slur”, enlists the power of structural racism and anti-racist activism in a completely inappropriate way against a word that has had a much less violent, much more mixed-bag history.

Why? That’s my current question. Why take a word that the queer community has used creatively in a wide variety of activist and social ways since the 1970s and attempt to re-stigmatize it? Yesterday’s argument, that the word should be unspeakable, would make the creative work of many queer women difficult to promote, to recommend, to squee about, to share joyfully, to discuss in a class, or review comprehensibly. When we use “dyke” we use it for a reason. While obviously people who are uncomfortable with the word can choose not to say it, I am deeply troubled by the way they are trying to make our chosen words unspeakable by others.

own your smut: on sexually explicit media and language

07 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in fandom, think pieces

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A few days ago this Tweet, from a romance author, was retweeted into my timeline:

I was struck by the intensity of this writer’s response (burn with fire … fucking insulting) to having her sexually explicit stories characterized as porn. As of this writing  her Tweet has been retweeted 135 times and liked 909 times. So Davidson is clearly not alone in this sentiment.

I’ve been writing and publishing sexually explicit fanfic for eight years and reading sexually explicit stories for over two decades. For at least a dozen years, I have consciously chosen to characterize what I read and write as “porn” and “smut” as a deliberate intervention targeting what I see as the harmful distinction between “erotica” (highbrow, legitimate, artful) and “porn” (crass, illegitimate, gratuitous). Obscene and pornographic works — broadly described as works created with a primary goal of sexually arousing one’s audience — have historically been dismissed and derided because of their capacity to engage our bodies in a pleasureable way. Suspect on its own, this capacity to arouse has typically required an external justification — literary merit or educational purpose — to earn widespread (though far from universal!) approval or simply the right to exist and circulate in carefully circumscribed spaces. 

Pornography is so universally understood as creative endeavor of unseemly excess that we use it as an adjective to describe objectional leveraging of emotional response in contexts that have nothing to do with sex: trauma porn, ruin porn, disaster porn. We might be moved by these things, the phrases imply, with their juxtaposed language of depicted pleasure and real-world pain … but we will likely come away feeling gross and guilty for having enjoyed the experience. I believe this is an impoverished view of human sexual pleasure and an impoverished understanding of the way sexually explicit fictions (a.k.a. porn!) can bring us joy. 

So I responded to Davidson pushing back against her framing:

Davidson never responded to my question but other writers did. “Porn is about sex. That’s the foundation. There can be a larger story but it’s not necessary,” one writer argued, distinguishing this type of storytelling from her own erotic romantic narratives where sex is “an integral part” of a happily-ever-after plot. “It really hurts,” Davidson wrote in response to another commenter, when fellow romance writers “start flinging the term around. You expect erotic romance = porn from ignorant media or fundamentalists or whatever. But other romance authors?” “Erotic Romance stimulates the mind and ones imagination where as Porn doesnt,” chimed in another author. “Smut [and porn] has no literary quality to it. It’s gratuitous,” wrote another. “And also burn the idea that F/F romance is also ‘porn’ – have had this said to me more times than I care to eye roll,” wrote another.

It became clear, as I watched this Twitter thread unfold, that many people in romancelandia have very strong and negative feelings about their work being characterized as pornography. Part of this, I gather from the thread, is coming in reaction to romance writers who write less-sexually-explicit, fade-to-black, “chaste” romance trash-talking writers who choose to tell stories with more — and more detailed — sex scenes. I get it. I get the frustration over being slut-shamed. There is misogynistic policing going on here, with good-girl romance writers distancing themselves from the jezebels who are brazen enough to write sex scenes (“Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac!“)

The problem is, responding to the charge that you’re writing porn by splitting hairs, hiding behind ideas about genre conventions or format (image versus text), and arguing that porn is “about sex” not a “larger story” (so … sex can’t be a larger story?) accepts the framing you’ve been given by your accusers. 

“Oh, but we don’t write sex like THOSE people over THERE …” is not a good look.

If we lived in a world where pornography and erotica and romance were located in roughly the same place on the respectibility continuum — where “erotica” didn’t have a history of being wielded as the highbrow alternative to lowbrow “porn”; where “romance” wasn’t struggling against the misogynistic forces that dismiss the entire genre as trivial and trashy because women — maybe … maybe … in that world we could have a valuable discussion about whether differences of genre and convention exist between romantic, erotic, and pornographic styles of sexual storytelling. But in the world we live in, staking your claim to the erotic while taking umbridge at the suggestion your work is pornographic supports a hierarchy of sexually explicit stories. It supports a hierarchy where stories labeled “porn” are dismissed and devalued in order to give you artistic high ground to stand on.

And I am not comfortable with throwing porn under the bus for the sake of respectibility. Because I think that throwing pornography under the bus means we accept the premise that stories grounded in — sometimes consisting entirely of! — human sexual expression are not really stories at all. It means we accept that writing and reading stories to turn people the fuck on — engage their embodied, sexual response as well as their hearts and minds — is categorically different (and more suspect) than engaging them as readers of fiction that elicits other types of physical and emotional reactions.

If it makes us uncomfortable to have our sexually explicit works described as “porn” or “smut” I really think the onus is on us to sit with that discomfort — maybe even to lean into that headwind — and get comfortable with that characterization even if it doesn’t feel 100% accurate in a fine-tuning subgenre sense. Because the alternative only fuels the politically powerful machinary of anti-sex sentiment entrenched in American culture, and that machinary demonizes and marginalizes — directly and materially harms — many of our most vulnerable.

If the price of defusing the charge behind the “insult” of labeling someone a pornographer is getting a little over-generous with our definitional boundaries, I say that’s an entirely acceptable price to pay.

burnout: the thread

11 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in life writing, think pieces

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Below is a lightly modified long-ass Twitter thread that I wrote earlier this week about burnout. It got a high amount of traffic (for me) and I thought some might benefit from having it in blog post form, with some added citational links to other work on these subjects. The thread began as a riff on this Tweet from Anne Helen Peterson:

This response also suggests burnout only “counts” if you’re parenting. And normalizes burnout for parents. If you’re interested in the normalization of burnout for those doing reproductive and other types of care work, Laura Briggs’ How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump for more on this trap. And care work doesn’t begin and end with parenting either. As a thirty-seven year-old millennial not parenting, I still have non-waged kinkeeping that is chronically time-starved. Off the top of my head, kinkeeping activities beyond parenting:

  • Remembering/celebrating family & friends’ birthdays, holidays, etc.
  • Caring for an ill spouse
  • Caring for an ill parent or sibling
  • Caring for companion animals
  • Feeding, exercising, caring for your own body
  • Writing letters, emails, to long-distance friends and family
  • Meeting friends and family for coffee dates
  • Participating in community life (church, neighborhood, volunteer orgs.)
  • Participating in political life
  • Creative pursuits that make the world a more beautiful place

Feminist activists have been pointing out at least since the mid-20th century that when people who previously did unpaid kinkeeping labor (women, teenage daughters, spinsters, elders) are pushed into wagework the need for that labor doesn’t disappear. You either have to pay someone to do this work, or you do it yourself as “second shift” work (leading to burnout), or — because of burnout and a literal lack of time — it doesn’t get done.

(A bit later…) I read Anne’s newsletter on writing the burnout piece, which is all I could face today (So much irony in feeling too burned out to read about burnout…). Some lateral thoughts that bubbled up:

In the newsletter she quotes someone citing Chomsky on “efficiency” for business = extra labor for customers. I haven’t read the Chomsky analysis but I recall a great example of this presented in terms of retirement and pensions vs. 401(k) model. (I tried to find the example online while compiling this post and the Internet defeated me.) Pensions make the work of investing the responsibility of the company rather than the employee. You work, you retire, you get a set amount from your employer. You don’t need to make many complex high stakes choices to ensure the money is there for you. In the 401(k) model, the employee is responsible for ongoing, complex financial management. Most of us do not have expertise in this area, or money to pay independent experts, but WE are responsible and shoulder the risk even when we struggle to be “good” savers.

This shouldering of responsibility and risk — packaged for us as freedom of choice across many areas of life — means in practice that human rights become contingent on our ability to become experts in navigating countless complex systems.* If we don’t have money to outsource the labor of making informed, meaningful choices we are in practice held responsible for “choices” that are not, in fact, in our ability to actively make.**

*My reflections here are shaped by a reproductive justice framework, especially about the human rights problems created by “choice” rhetoric. So a shout out to those scholars. You can read an introduction to reproductive justice here and I also recommend this excellent book on the history and activism of the movement.

**Inserts obvious all caps footnote that along every vector the existing inequalities of race, class, gender, health, education, immigration status, disability, etc both create and amplify this responsibility trap.

On a less meta level than the risk/responsibility trap and its violation of fundamental human rights (YOU HEARD ME) My wife Hanna and and I experience decision fatigue so frequently we have a short-hand for it: “ferret shock”. (The internet informs me another term for this would be overchoice.) If we’re out running errands or standing in the grocery aisle and one of us asks the other to make a decision, that person often says “I”m ferret shocking” and the asker knows exactly what they’re talking about and we go home.

Another thing the burnout discussion is reminding me of Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (2007), my own reaction to it at the time of its publication, and the limits of countercultural lifeways. For those who haven’t read it, the nutshell argument was/is that for (white, middle-class, aspirational) women of my age cohort (b. 1981) had learned we could/should strive for perfection and it was killing us. When I read it in 2007, I didn’t see myself in this narrative. I knew the narrative, sure, but I had also been insulated from it in a variety of ways leading from my parents’ own countercultural decision to let me opt out of formal schooling until college, and do college extremely part-time as a commuter. Because I never socialized intensely with my cohort or with people drilling aspirational messaging into my cohort, I had some measure of distance from that narrative. I didn’t feel like a failure for opting out of many things my peers felt were obligatory.

(There’s a complicated side narrative here connected to queer identity, chronic illness, and religious subcultures but that’s for another thread.)

But the thing about structurally-created burnout is that you CANNOT opt out as a single person or even, in many cases, as a subculture or community of crunchy-granola-hippie types (I’m speaking of myself here, with a mixture of mild self-parody and entirely sincere commitment to crunchy granola). The same year Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters came out I moved to Boston for grad school and was structurally forced into a number of systems — graduate school, student loan debt, resume building, the cost of living where I attended school and worked etc. — that create burnout. For a lot of that first year in Boston and back in the formal school environment, I felt like an extreme failure for having been unable to find a countercultural alternative to the cross country move –> graduate school –> librarianship path to adulting. I knew that aspects of the systems I was becoming embedded within were actively toxic to me.

In the past (through social privilege and positive family support for those alternative choices) I had been able to create loopholes for myself. But loopholes don’t create long-term structural change; they don’t fix the problem that created the need for the loophole. And even for the people (like me) who had the resources to create them, they are typically temporary. What I’m groping toward here is that burnout gets spun as an individual mental-health, self-help problem, when burnout is a collective and structural problem. It’s been baked into a system that capitalizes (literally!) our burnout. That doesn’t mean subcultural attempts to address and assuage burnout are pointless — I would argue based on my own experience and my historical research that such subcultural attempts are vital in demonstrating that burnout is historically created and change is possible.

Jo Freeman’s work on the tyranny of structurelessness is also informative and applicable to the condition of burnout we are coping with, as a society as well as individually, in this historical moment. The essay’s basic point is all groups have a structure. Either the structure is explicit, rulebound, with pathways of power and accountability or the structure is denied, shadowy, with no accountability for those who gain power. (Sound familiar?) The language of libertarian freedom of choice so beloved by the GOP and many on left too becomes the tyranny of structurelessness. Sure, we technically all have “choices” … but we don’t all have the power to take meaningful advantage of those choices. And the illusion of everyone having equal agency, in reality, allows people uninterested in sharing power to seize control because they are loud and pushy and don’t care. There is no structural way to stop them.

(When I think about the tyranny of structurelessness, I often remember Angus Johnston’s piece on the value of using Robert’s Rules of Order as a collective decision-making process: “Remember that Robert’s Rules are there to protect your rights, and those of the other members of the group.” If you’re interested in how structure can facilitate inclusivity, I highly recommend reading it.)

So finally, let’s talk about the idea of a “millennial” cohort and whether cohort generalizations are at all useful in this conversation about burnout. Some framing statements: generational language, like decade language (“the Sixties”) is primarily a marketing concept not very useful for historical analysis. Nevertheless, the term is in widespread use. When I use it, I use the Pew Research Center definition: Those born between 1981-1996. A fifteen year spread. I will turn thirty-eight this year, the oldest “millennial” as I was born in 1981. Those born in 1996 will turn twenty-three. So by raw age, the millennials so defined are in middle adulthood. They have jobs, bills, kinkeeping responsibilities. Most are no longer their parents’ dependents. Many have dependents of their own. If I had become a parent at age eighteen, my child would be twenty, possibly in college, possibly a parent themselves. That’s the cohort we’re talking about.

So is the idea of a “millennial” cohort at all useful or are we just stuck with it? I think it can be useful as a concept with some important caveats. I would argue that “millennial is a narrative not an identity. It is a story we tell about the people who arrived in adulthood between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s. It is a normative force that helps organize the conditions of our adulthood. Like most normative forces it is less representative than it is pre/proscriptive. It tells us who we are expected to be. Which is why the archetype “millennial” is white, rich, able-bodied, etc. The archetype is tied to age, yes, but in a looser way than birth year. It is a story that lays out how our lives should be organized and also itemizes the ways in which we fail those benchmarks. As a “discourse” (theorists might say) the story about millennials activates when and where our lives intersect with that story. Regardless of our technical age.

Some aspects of the millennial narrative have to do with the big-picture national and world events that shaped our childhoods and early adulthoods: Reagan and Thatcher, globalization, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the gutting of the social safety net, Bush v. Gore (my first presidential election), and our endless wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan (I was twenty on 9/11). Those things shaped the lives of everyone who lived through them or is now dealing with the consequences, but the idea of “millennial” argues that these things shape us uniquely depending upon our age and/or “stage of life”. But not everyone follows the middle class, orderly story we are sold (another narrative!) about what order we (are supposed to, ideally) live our lives. So the intersection of a world event with a stage of life gets messy super quickly.

Let’s take the 2008 economic crisis. In 2008, I was beginning my graduate program for library science. My wife, technically a Gen Xer was two years ahead of me in the same program. She graduated into a much more precarious job market than I did. But so did much younger and older graduate students! I was in the same program with people age twenty-one and people in their forties. As a group, our graduate school experience was shaped by the conditions of the millennial narrative with no regard to age. So, in sum, it can be useful to think about how the millennial narrative is both shaped by and shapes the stories that we tell about our lives, the order in which we do (and are supposed to do) things, and how it is used to penalize human beings who fail the narrative.

whither the f/f romance?

17 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in fandom, think pieces

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StarCrossedTest1It’s Femslash February and I’ve been writing Jean/Hilda and Sam/Susan all month which has returned me to the perennial question of why there is not more romances (fanfic or profic) in the world featuring a central relationship between two female-identified persons. There are a lot of women writing professionally published romance and romance-centered fanfiction, and there are a lot of queer women writing it. Published romance featuring m/m relationships is a booming category (I read and enjoy a lot of it!) and “slash” is so synonymous in the fandom hivemind with male/male pairings that “femslash” carries the mark of difference: this isn’t regular slash (featuring men sexing) but femslash (featuring ladysex).

(Image: Cover of Star Crossed by Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner. The cover art features an black woman and a white woman kissing superimposed on a night sky.)

Women — especially queer women — writing romance know full well that women can fall in love with, and have smoking hot sex with other women. Many of us have done so! But “the market isn’t there” for f/f stories the way it is for m/m or f/m (or even f/m/m). Last night I read an interview with romance writer Cat Sebastian where she and the interviewer, Kelly Faircloth, have the following exchange about why we aren’t drowing in historical femslash a la the classic Sarah Waters’ novels Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith:

There’s such a large audience of women for romance featuring two men. What do you think it is that readers see in that?

I don’t know, and I think about this all the time! First of all, I don’t know that there is an answer that we can access. This is just me guessing. I do wonder if it’s something about seeing a man through the male gaze. Maybe we are used to seeing women through the male gaze. Maybe the experience of seeing men as beings who are desired by other men is freeing, or novel, or attractive in some other way as readers. I feel like that could be it, and that might explain why F/F doesn’t seem to have taken root, which is a huge source of frustration for me. I don’t understand—where are all my lesbian historical novels? Give them to me! There aren’t nearly enough of them out there, and everybody who’s written one assured me that the reason is because there’s just not a huge audience, and they like to eat food and make money, which is totally respectable. Maybe it’s because in a novel with two women as protagonists, maybe as readers, we don’t know how to look at them without the male gaze. I have no idea, and it’s been so long since I have been in a women’s studies class, but I do feel like that’s got to be part if it.

I don’t know! I would like for somebody to write a dissertation on that.

I also don’t understand. Like, Fingersmith is one of the best books ever.

Exactly. One of the best books ever. I feel like romance needs to jealousy claim Sarah Waters as one of our own, because Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet are models we could use.

Also, if you look at how people could hide queer relationships around existing structures—two women could live together really easily in the 19th century.

Yes! And forever. It’s never been hard to hide a lesbian relationship. And I don’t know if that’s because we expect women to live together, or we expect single women to team up, or if it’s just because no one’s thinking there’s anything sexual behind it, so they can do whatever they want. Even if they’re married to other people, they can do whatever they want, and no one looks twice.

As Cat observes, there’s a widespread agreement that “there’s just not a huge audience,” and yet there are also perennial discussions by the (mostly female/nonbinary and many queer) people who read/write romance and read/write romantic fanfic about how we all wish there were more. I actually began writing fanfic and publishing it on Ao3 in 2011 specifically because I was frustrated by the lack of f/f representation in erotic fanworks. Writing m/m came later, although these days I have about an equal number of m/m, f/f, m/f and more complex (e.g. m/m/f or f/f + m/f + m/m) relationships represented in my overall body of work. I have felt the pull first-hand, as both a (queer cis woman) writer and a reader, toward m/m story arcs and pondered how to square the desire to read, write, and imagine those relationships with my real-life f/f marriage and my feminist values which call upon me to center marginalized voices in narrative storytelling.

So here’s my attempt to share my working theory for why f/f romance isn’t an exploding subgenre, and why Femslash February is a thing because the rest of the year femslash is such a rare flower in the ecosphere of fandom. This is in no way meant to be a definitive articulation of why f/f is so difficult to locate in our bodies of literature, and if anyone who reads this has additional insight I welcome your thoughts below or on Twitter (@feministlib).

Reason 1: Men are protagonists.

It’s widely recognized across genres that in the stories available to us in Western literature, (white) male characters are understood to be capable of carrying a “universal” narrative while female protagonists are not. Women and girls, queer or not, learn from a very young age to identify and empathize with male characters in stories across multiple formats (television, film, literature). Men and boys are presumed to need characters like themselves to remain interested in the media before them. I don’t believe this is innately true about men and boys — because I believe that women, men, and nonbinary persons share a common humanity that allows us to empathize and be interested in the humanity of one another across categories of gender, race, sexual orientation, and other differences. However, I do believe that it is a groomed preference: That women (and people from other marginalized identities) are expected, and therefore learn, to identify with characters across identity categories while men are not, and therefore do not — unless they are purposeful about cultivating that ability. It’s not a muscle they are challenged to use — while women are challenged to use it continually.

Therefore, it makes sense that even in a genre dominated by female creators, we drift toward narrative scripts that privilege male subjectivity. That means stories that include male protagonists, either in m/f or m/m relationships, feel more natural to create and consume because we are used to male agency.

This default of the male protagonist can be amplified in fanworks particularly because fanworks play with existing media that is — because patriarchy — skewed heavily toward (white) male protagonists.  While fanworks creators have done incredible work queering those canonical protagonists — including, at times, imagining them as genderfluid or trans, or genderswapping one or both characters in what would canonically be an m/m relationship — it remains a factor that canonical main characters are overwhelmingly presented as cis, straight, and male.

Reason 2: Sex Needs Dicks.

Our cultural scripts for sex are overwhelmingly heteronormative and require the presence of a penis for “sex” to have taken place. I would argue that m/m narratives, rightly or wrongly, are easier to translate in the context of these narratives because putting a penis into an orifice counts as sex in our brains in a way that sex only with clitorises does not. We also expect men to be sexually-desiring beings, and physically sexual, in a way we do not expect of women. (Again, even queer women are vulnerable to these sexual scripts because we grow up in heteronormative culture too.) In the context of the romance genre, there is typically a romantic and sexual script that intensifies over the course of the novel and culiminates — for f/m couples — with penis-in-vagina intercourse as an expression of consumated love and/or marriage. This script can be hijacked for use with m/m protagonists because you can build the sexual intimacy from handjobs to blowjobs to anal sex with kissing thrown in somewhere along the intimacy ladder depending on whether you assume that kissing is the entry point for sexual contact or a feminine-coded expression of love (meaning it falls probably somewhere after blowjobs).

What do you do with two women? We don’t have a widespread, culturally legible or adaptive script for that. Which leads to jokes like this:

Heres+a+helpful+graph+_a8fb5dfbfc60275175878a56cdeaa830

(Image: Imagined graph of Hetero Sex vs. Lesbian Sex. The hetero sex graph is a four-minute timeline featuring a male orgasm, an optional female orgasm, then sleep. The lesbian sex graph is a five-hour timeline featuring a rainbow tangle of sexual activity and multiple orgasms. I don’t have an image credit for this, so if you know who to credit please let me know!)

Despite the fact that f/f couples report higher rates of orgasm and higher levels of sexual satisfaction than women who have sex with men, we don’t know how to turn our queer sexual pleasure into a linear narrative (possibly because of that “time travel” squiggle around hour three…). In a genre that relies to some extent on a predictable, comfortable formula that promises readers the emotional satisfaction of increasing emotional and sexual intimacy that culminates in the formation of a committed, found-family relationship, those squiggles don’t provide clear guidence for how to move your two female protagonists from first blush to final orgasm and/or family formation.

Reason 3: Challenging Toxic Masculinity

In a world where toxic masculinity runs rampant, f/m and m/m romance (fanfic or professionally published) is a space where feminist-minded women and nonbinary folks can explore what the world might be like if men, too, were allowed to be vulnerable and desired. In romance literature and fanfic romance, male partners feel a full range of emotions related to forming human relationships: desire, pleasure, anxiety, hurt, anger, fear, pride, caring … the list could go on and on. In order for a romance plot to work, the male protagonist(s) must be a character the reader can identify with as a human being whose humanity could be made more whole in relationship with his partner — and often in relationship with extended and found family too. Romance novels assert that men can be desiring and desired, and that their sexuality is not irrevocably shaped by expectations of dominance or violence. I think this reason is part of what Cat Sebastian was getting at in the interview excerpt above, where she observed that “seeing men as beings who are desired by other men is freeing.”

As Emma Lindsay observed a year ago, dating men can make women feel like shit in part because “society labels men creepy when they are open about their sexual feelings.” Yet in order for f/m or m/m romance narratives to work, male characters must be open about their sexual feelings. A three hundred page novel centered around a man and a woman, or a man and another man, falling in love and becoming sexually intimate requires interiority and emotional labor from both protagonists in order to give the readers stake in the happily-ever-after outcome. We need to care that they care. We need to be shown that they care. Or the emotional payoff of reading the novel simply isn’t there. And because of this genre requirement, we get three-dimensional human characters who wrestle with their humanity, wrestle with their desires, and wrestle with the cultural scripts they have been handed and emerge better human beings.

This is cathartic and hopeful reading, and writing, for people who yearn for a less toxic, less patriarchal world. And it’s an act of revisioning that f/f romances don’t tackle in such a direct way (although they also must reckon with toxic masculinity, as I point out below).

Reason 4: The Shadow of Male Violence

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(Image: Still from the film Carol in which Carol and Therese are interrupted at breakfast by a private investigator posing as a salesman.)

For a number of reasons this year I’ve been thinking a lot about the spectre of male violence that haunts romance between women. I’m not sure if this is so much a reason that f/f stories are not created as it is an illustration of how deeply our patriarchal  narratives of romance and sex require a male presence — so much so that when we try to write them out of the narrative they become violent. In the 2015 film Carol — an adaptation of the classic lesbian pulp The Price of Salt — the two women whose romance is the central narrative, Carol and Therese, escape Carol’s estranged husband and Therese’s (nominal) boyfriend by embarking upon a roadtrip from New York to Chicago. Carol’s husband, furious at his wife’s request for a divorce — and eager to collect evidence of her perversity as leverage in the custody dispute over their young daughter — sends a private investigator to tail them. In a striking violation of the couple’s private intimacies, he ultimately ends up making an audio recording of the couple’s first sexual encounter together.

There is something heady (for me, as a cis, bisexual woman) in the realization that you can opt out of the social expectation that you give a damn what men think of you: your body, your words, your desires, your life choices, your past, or your future. Men are powerful in our patriarchal society — granted, it is power that comes with caveats regarding race, class, sexual orientation, and all the rest — and girls grow up into women understanding that they will be scrutinized by men and that this scrutiny will matter. If you are a woman who desires men (and I have been that woman, in the past) the reality of navigating patriarchal power within the intimacies of your most intense and enduring adult relationship(s) can feel like an exhausting prospect. For women who also or instead desire women, it can be liberatory to realize that the male gaze no longer matters to you. It might constrain your choices in the wider world, but it is unable to touch you in the bedroom.

As I say, I experienced this as liberatory. Yet it is also dangerous. Since I have been paying attention to this spectre of male violence in the context of f/f romance I have seen it everywhere: In Cat Sebastian’s The Soldier’s Scoundrel the sister of one of the male protagonists, Charlotte, is trapped in an abusive marriage and escapes only when her lover, Anne, murders her husband. In Jordan Hawk’s Undertow a spurned male suitor not only attempts to murder Maggie’s ketoi lover Persephone but attempts genocide against Persephone’s entire species. Women are vulnerable under patriarchy whether or not they choose to have sex with men, and men who feel entitled to female attention can turn violent when they realize they have been written out of the plot. That’s an exhausting truth we live with daily, and it can be hard to read and write it in our escapist literature as well.

Reason 5: Follow the Money

Of course, at the end of the day, women — queer women, especially — do write and read f/f romance, and yearn for more. But as with any other lack of diversity in publishing, authors need editors and publishers convinced of a book’s marketability before they will give meaningful support to a project. This is why, I would argue, that we see f/f relationships written in to more and more m/m and f/m romance series as novellas or as secondary couples. Queer women — including myself — who write m/m relationships as the primary story arc will populate their world with secondary queer characters that feel authentic to our experiences. The m/m or f/m romance carries the narrative for all of the reasons outlined above, while the women-loving-women do so on the sidelines — often with the full support of their gay male or otherwise socially subversive protagonists.

Hopefully, in the not-to-distant future, we’ll see those relationships rotated with increasing regularity from the sidelines to center court. More and more frequently we are seeing f/f novels integrated into romance series with m/f and m/m pairings: Her Ebony by Maggie Chase (2017); Star Crossed by Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner (2017); and the forthcoming Last Couple in Hell by K. J. Charles (March 2018!) which I am dying to get my hands on.

Earlier this month I set up a Good Reads shelf on which I am collecting all of the f/f historical romances I come across. If you have a favorite f/f historical — or come across one in your reading life — please share! I dearly hope that one day there will be too many f/f romance novels published for me to keep up with the flood.

the universal is specific and the specific is diverse

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

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(This is an expanded version of a Twitter rant I went on this morning.)

This morning on Facebook a friend shared, critically, this story at the Guardian about a crank objecting to the pleasure others’ find in diverse literature:

Campbell had said that “there are so few books for queer black boys, but there are just too few books for all our marginalised young people”. Rosoff, author of How I Live Now and other bestselling titles, responded that “there are not too few books for marginalised young people. There are hundreds of them, thousands of them”, and that “you don’t have to read about a queer black boy to read a book about a marginalised child”.

“The children’s book world is getting far too literal about what ‘needs’ to be represented,” wrote Rosoff. “You don’t read Crime and Punishment to find out about Russian criminals. Or Alice in Wonderland to know about rabbits. Good literature expands your mind. It doesn’t have the ‘job’ of being a mirror.”

On the commute to work I couldn’t stop thinking about this notion that advocates of diversity are being “too literal,” and that what we expect is “a mirror” in literature that maps one-to-one against our own personal life experiences. I kept thinking about how, elsewhere in the Guardian piece, the Ms. Rosoff is quoted as saying (in response to social media pushback:

I really hate this idea that we need agendas in books. A great book has a philosophical, spiritual, intellectual agenda that speaks to many many people – not just gay black boys. I’m sorry, but write a pamphlet about it. That’s not what books are for.

This framing of increasingly-diverse participation in the world of literature and public speech as agenda-driven and somehow antithetical to “Good literature [that] expands your mind” is a tired, reactionary position. And it tells us far more about the speaker than it does about the individuals who are busily creating an ever-more-diverse literature that fully represents our human experience is all of its’ myriad universal-yet-specific particulars. Continue reading →

in which I write letters: “female patients ONLY”?? #wtf

25 Thursday Jun 2015

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Dear Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center,

I had an appointment at your radiology department this afternoon to follow up on a potential irregularity in my left breast (thankfully all is well!). Overall I had an exceptional experience: your reception staff, mammography and ultrasound technicians, and doctor were all courteous and professional. The decor was a little overwhelmingly floral, and was it really necessary to have that much pink in the color scheme — right down to the pink floral sticker they affixed to the relevant spot on my boob? But I can roll my eyes at those design decisions and get on with my day.

What I am uninterested in rolling my eyes at and moving on from is this:

IMG_20150625_145204Several years ago, when my wife had an appointment in your radiology department we happened to notice this sign in passing and found it troubling. I had hoped, upon my return today, to find that your policies and signage had changed — but had my phone ready to hand for snapping this picture if they had not. And here we are.

My problem with this sign and policy is quite simple: Male people (assigned and/or identified) can get breast cancer or experience other physical issues needing breast imaging services. Whether or not you provide those services to male individuals elsewhere, or make exceptions to the stated policy on a case-by-case basis, the sign is alienating. It is unwelcoming not just to men but to women (like me and my wife) who find spaces that are women-only by policy to be unwelcoming, uncomfortable spaces. To put it another way, I am more comfortable accessing healthcare in a place welcome to people of all combinations of sex, gender, and sexuality than I am seeking care in a place that explicitly states that it only welcomes certain types of bodies and/or identities to pass through its doors.

Given that our family’s health center, Fenway Health — a leading provider of respectful, holistic care to trans and genderqueer individuals — refers patients regularly to your institution for necessary clinical care, I would have expected better from you. I am disappointed that in 2015 you continue to use signage (and presumably enforce policies) that are so exclusionary.

I hope the next time I have reason to visit your radiology department I won’t have cause to pull my camera out of my messenger bag.

Sincerely,
Anna

thoughts on obergefell v. hodges

28 Tuesday Apr 2015

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28ae4-2012-08-2713-38-44Since Windsor, and the death of DOMA, the marriage equality struggle here in the U.S. hasn’t had a lot of direct bearing on our family life. Hanna and I are married in the eyes of the state of Massachusetts and our federal government. It is only when traveling to non-equality states (such as my home state of Michigan) — or when we consider distant possibilities of future relocation — that it really hits home for us that our marriage is still legally more fragile than the marriages of our hetero married friends.

So I admit I’ve been watching the journey of same-sex marriage cases through the state and federal circuit courts attentively but not too closely. I’ve been interested, but with little feeling of personal urgency at this juncture, to see how it all plays out.

But today watching the live-blog of oral arguments and later reading the transcript of the same, it was undeniably energizing to see decades of agitation and strategy (yes, on both sides) demonstrably playing out in the wandering, back-and-forth debate that is an oral argument before the Supreme Court.

There’s already been a bajillion and one pieces of commentary published already, and I’m not going to try and be originally wise on any aspect of this case. Yet reading through the transcript, I was struck by two things I wanted to share. Continue reading →

does being welcoming mean constantly being “on”?

02 Monday Feb 2015

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Image: Illustration from The Little Book of Love (16th c.). A man stands on a tree extending out over a body of water, chopping the tree off at the root.

This week I’ve been haunting the comment threads over at Student Activism, one of my favorite personal blogs, where we’ve been discussing in wide-ranging form the fallout from Jonathan Chait’s piece (of click-bait) on “political correctness” (which doesn’t exist) and community norms. See this post, this post, this post, and this post if you want the specifics.

I don’t want to rehash complex debates from the comment threads here; what I want to riff on is the question of the responsibility of any group to outsiders who are considering becoming insiders. Chait, and those who agree with his perspective, argue that certain ways of enforcing group norms in a given community (in this case the political left-liberal coalition) end up alienating newcomers who are embarrassed, shamed, or vilified for transgressing a community ground-rule. This, they assert, is bad politics: The community will not grow into an effective force for political change if people are made to feel bad and leave never to return.

At is most basic, this is a question to take seriously: how welcoming is the left? Or, more generally, how welcoming is [insert group of choice herein]? Back when I attended church on a regular basis, this was a perennial question, the question of the welcoming church. How did we greet newcomers? How did we invite them to stay? Were we too hands-on, not hands-on enough? How would we ever grow the congregation if adherents never became members … and so forth and so on.

It seems like a goal — being welcoming — that few people could or should disagree with. But I’ve been mulling over a couple of facets of this question in the past few days and I want to share my questions and concerns with y’all here.

Continue reading →

self-care in december

11 Thursday Dec 2014

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Fenway Victory Gardens in Snow, December 2007 (photograph by the author).

I’m home this afternoon with an anxiety-ridden wife, trying to help keep the white noise of depression at bay. We’re watching Emma and Grandpa while Hanna dozes on my lap and I catch up on emails and a few work-related tasks.

I’m so thankful for a flexible-ish work schedule and understanding colleagues; it means so much to me that I’m not in a position of having to choose between my job and my family.

I’ve been thinking a lot this month about the stress of the holiday season — in part because Hanna and I are doing what we can to avoid it this year. After our extended visit to my parents’ last December-January (thank you polar vortex!) and a lot of additional, stressful, travel in 2014 we decided to stay put in our new home this Christmas. We sorely need the ten days of holiday leave to just be as a family, without the scramble of schedules and press of adult responsibilities. We’re using our advent calendars to count down to the solace of this time together (twelve days to go!) and looking forward to being quiet and in place.

Another aspect of slowing down for the season has been the decision to not rush holiday gift-giving. The members of my writing group, #firstthedraft, have been talking this week about gift-giving, gift-receiving, and the December holidays. We hold an informal weekly chat, to keep our virtual community connected, and this week the conversation evolved into a discussion about the stress and expense of gift-giving for many of our little families. While I completely understand why families with children feel both pleasure and pressure to engage in gift exchanges in December, it struck me that one of the freedoms of adulthood is the ability to step back from the seasonal rush and choose to select and give gifts outside of a strict timetable.

Hanna and I do still send treats to our close friends and relatives during midwinter. But this year it won’t be happening before Christmas — I couldn’t face the coordination of selection, purchase, wrapping, and the trek to the post office. So our families and friends will be getting a surprise in the mail in early-to-mid January instead.

The end of the year, and the winter season (at least for those in the northern hemisphere) is a really difficult one for many people … it’s kind of odd that as a culture we’ve chosen it as a time in which to pressure people into increased sociality, travel, expense, and enforced cheer.

Perhaps the holiday festivities help some among us get through the darkest days of the year. But those traditions don’t help everyone. What do all of you do to combat the December blues (if you get them)?

counting, calories, and self-worth

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

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I don’t know how many calories were in this breakfast.
For me, that is a sign of better health than when I did.
As always, your mileage may vary.

I woke up this morning to a story on NPR about new FDA rules that will require restaurants with more than twenty locations to provide “calorie information” on their menus. Unsurprisingly, the story was factual-to-positive about the change; National Public Radio has a history of uncritically reproducing narratives about fatness, health, and the supposed “obesity epidemic” around which much moral panic has been generated in recent years. Public health workers gushed about the “terrific” new labeling and we were treated to clips of (young, female) customers giggling self-deprecatingly about their food choices and how calorie counts might encourage them to change their orders — always to something with fewer calories.

Given NPR’s glowing coverage, I feel the need to intervene in this self-congratulatory narrative and share a few thoughts on what effect providing calorie counts on menus has on me, as a consumer, and why I believe the practice is neutral at best and actively harmful at worst.

Why are we, as a society, obsessed with calories? A dietary calorie is a way of measuring energy, equal to the amount of energy required to raise the heat of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Humans require fuel (measured in calories) to function; we consume energy in order to expend energy through physical movement, cognitive thought, to keep ourselves warm, to keep ourselves alive.

Fuel comes in many delicious forms, some more efficient than others; we can consume relatively “empty” fuel that is a poor source of energy, or energy-rich foods that supply us with nutrients we need to grow, repair, and function.

Therefore, to learn that the sandwich I ate for lunch on Monday contained 500 calories worth of fuel provides strikingly little information with which to guide my dietary selections. That sandwich could contain just what I need to help me function for the rest of the day; it could be superfluous energy that nevertheless served a social or emotional function; it could be fuel that actively worked against me in terms of an allergy or other physical reaction. The calorie count provides none of that information. Displayed by itself, alongside a series of menu options, the calorie units of each option is a set of supremely useless data.

But I would go further than that. I would argue that displaying calorie counts alongside menu options is actively harmful when considered in the context of our social dysfunction around food and our culture of fatphobia. Because in the public mind calories aren’t just a neutral way of measuring energy; calories are bad. Calories are shameful. And I’m betting that the 30% of consumers who, NPR reports, will actually read those calorie counts on the Starbucks menu are individuals who are already hyper-aware of their energy intake, who are already struggling with a disordered relationship with their bodies.

I’m betting this because, as I’ve described before, I used to be one of those people. One of those women. Between the ages of roughly sixteen and twenty-four I tracked my energy intake by counting calories. I still own cookbooks in which I once penciled in the calories for things like three cloves of garlic (24) and a tablespoon of lemon juice (10).

Yes, I learned a lot of nutritional information during this period, learned how to seek out a wide variety of foods to fuel my body, learned to pay attention to my body’s energy ups and downs.

But mostly, my sense of self of self worth rose and fell with the end-of-the-day tally of calories. (And to a lesser extent quantified exercise.) It didn’t matter what else I’d accomplished that day: acts of kindness toward others, ideas articulated in writing, conversations, explorations, creations.

It all came down to the numbers:

1540 (victory).

1860 (shame).

2300 (guaranteed to send me to bed weeping).

To this day, seeing calorie counts listed beside my fuel options prompts stress reactions, visceral reminders of a time when what counted about my personhood was how much fuel I did (or didn’t) consume.

A time when less fuel equaled more worth.

So forgive me, NPR, if I don’t view these new FDA regulations as an unalloyed good. As an act of self care, I’ll likely be avoiding — as much as possible — those restaurants affected by the new rules. Because rather than a tool for making informed fueling decisions, I see calorie counts as mostly promoting a simplistic less-is-better, fatphobic and deeply disordered, alienated relationship to our bodies and the way we care for them.