Boys and girls are all het up
Jul. 6th, 2012 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cest_whatI've been thinking a lot about hetfic lately. When I started out in fandom it was 2006, femslash barely existed on my radar, and het was that less-cool, way-more-mainstream thing that some other people did in other parts of fandom and mostly I didn't get why you would bother.
Then fandom rediscovered feminism (again? I guess?) and I personally discovered that having called yourself a feminist from the time you could read did not actually mean that all of your thoughts and opinions were feminist by default and you got to not question yourself and your assumptions. And that maybe this thing where we as a community didn't really want to read fic with girls as main characters was less awesome and progressively subversive than previously thought.
Which meant that het, along with femslash, became itself cool and subversive. And, especially in fandoms with no or very few important canon relationships between female characters, where femslash was as a result going to be a particular hardsell, focusing on important female–male relationships as a reader and a writer became an act of feminist fannishness.
Which is a pretty common fandom arc to have followed, I think? But it isn't everybody's. So I would find these new fandoms that had a lot of het, and I would read that as feminism, and cheer. Only sometimes it isn't. Homestuck in particular is excellent for hetfic: of my 165 HS saves at pinboard, 61 are het, with only 30-something each for slash and femslash. And it was only after a few months in the fandom that I began to realise that some of those het writers and readers are actually, you know, crazy revelation, coming from a place of unacknowledged homophobia. The "I just happen not to like slash it's personal taste" folks and the "I have no interest in two guys together because I'm a straight dude" folks. (Because ... personal sexuality is totally a bar to appreciating romances that don't cater to it, that's why no queer people through history have ever been into hetero romantic literature, and also why Homestuck is exclusively populated by people who are turned on by underage grey-skinned aliens with horns. In their personal lives.)
Which led to me feeling weird about het again. Because I don't want to be part of a movement to make fanfiction less subversive of mainstream constructions of sexuality and gender and the dynamics of romance. I don't want to de-claw it in a way that makes it palatable to anti-queer prejudices. That would be the opposite of cool.*
Except, OK, last night I was reading this Jade/Dave ficlet, and I had one of those revelations-that-shouldn't-have-been-a-revelation-because-it's-completely-obvious. You go to fanfiction for what you can't already get everywhere else, and that applies to het just as much as it does to every other kind of fic, doesn't it? The Jade/Dave ficlet above has the kind of deeply personal gender dynamics and shivery exploration of male physical and emotional passivity and vulnerability, without being explicitly about power - just about these two characters and the ways they respond to each other - that I couldn't find in one in a hundred YA romances. It's really fucking hot, and really appealing, and it's human and individual and it's what I read hetfic for. Even though I didn't realise it.
Anyway that was way too many words to say not very much, except that mainstream romance is hopelessly limited and limiting and fandom is awesome and hetfic is important, and also I read a story I really liked last night. YAY \o/
______________
*Which is not to say that people shouldn’t read and write exactly what they want to read and write, or that wanting, say, Elizabeth/Darcy stories with mainstream nineteenth century gender politics and notions of satisfying romance is a less valid fannish desire than wanting Thor/Loki alien incest slash, etc. etc. you know this line and it's really not the point here.
Then fandom rediscovered feminism (again? I guess?) and I personally discovered that having called yourself a feminist from the time you could read did not actually mean that all of your thoughts and opinions were feminist by default and you got to not question yourself and your assumptions. And that maybe this thing where we as a community didn't really want to read fic with girls as main characters was less awesome and progressively subversive than previously thought.
Which meant that het, along with femslash, became itself cool and subversive. And, especially in fandoms with no or very few important canon relationships between female characters, where femslash was as a result going to be a particular hardsell, focusing on important female–male relationships as a reader and a writer became an act of feminist fannishness.
Which is a pretty common fandom arc to have followed, I think? But it isn't everybody's. So I would find these new fandoms that had a lot of het, and I would read that as feminism, and cheer. Only sometimes it isn't. Homestuck in particular is excellent for hetfic: of my 165 HS saves at pinboard, 61 are het, with only 30-something each for slash and femslash. And it was only after a few months in the fandom that I began to realise that some of those het writers and readers are actually, you know, crazy revelation, coming from a place of unacknowledged homophobia. The "I just happen not to like slash it's personal taste" folks and the "I have no interest in two guys together because I'm a straight dude" folks. (Because ... personal sexuality is totally a bar to appreciating romances that don't cater to it, that's why no queer people through history have ever been into hetero romantic literature, and also why Homestuck is exclusively populated by people who are turned on by underage grey-skinned aliens with horns. In their personal lives.)
Which led to me feeling weird about het again. Because I don't want to be part of a movement to make fanfiction less subversive of mainstream constructions of sexuality and gender and the dynamics of romance. I don't want to de-claw it in a way that makes it palatable to anti-queer prejudices. That would be the opposite of cool.*
Except, OK, last night I was reading this Jade/Dave ficlet, and I had one of those revelations-that-shouldn't-have-been-a-revelation-because-it's-completely-obvious. You go to fanfiction for what you can't already get everywhere else, and that applies to het just as much as it does to every other kind of fic, doesn't it? The Jade/Dave ficlet above has the kind of deeply personal gender dynamics and shivery exploration of male physical and emotional passivity and vulnerability, without being explicitly about power - just about these two characters and the ways they respond to each other - that I couldn't find in one in a hundred YA romances. It's really fucking hot, and really appealing, and it's human and individual and it's what I read hetfic for. Even though I didn't realise it.
Anyway that was way too many words to say not very much, except that mainstream romance is hopelessly limited and limiting and fandom is awesome and hetfic is important, and also I read a story I really liked last night. YAY \o/
______________
*Which is not to say that people shouldn’t read and write exactly what they want to read and write, or that wanting, say, Elizabeth/Darcy stories with mainstream nineteenth century gender politics and notions of satisfying romance is a less valid fannish desire than wanting Thor/Loki alien incest slash, etc. etc. you know this line and it's really not the point here.
