[LMB] Re: Slash (was OT) now Bujold Romance/Slash Meta

[Lois McMaster Bujold]

Marna Nightingale marna at marna.ca
Wed Jan 3 07:30:19 GMT 2007

   
Lois McMaster Bujold wrote:

 > Remember, a key sign of a status emergency is a heated or violent
 > response disproportionate to the apparent cause.  It's not a concept to
 > be blithely applied to every human interaction to come down the pike.  
 > Just to certain bewilderingly whacko ones.  ***

Riffing off that bit:

One thing worth remembering is that there really _is_ a there there.
Slashers are not the only people who pick up on this sort of subtext
between male characters, only the people who find it narratively or
erotically intriguing enough to actually produce or go looking for
fiction that deals with.

So if "status emergency" plays a part in slash, I rather suspect that
it's not in the slashers' arena, but rather in the various ways in which
writers and actors manage whatever anxiety about meal-male relations


*** Pardon me while I walk around it and admire this typo.  It just 
wants to jump on a horse and gallop off in all directions, it does.  (To 
quote Stephen Leacock.)  ***

 (of
all sorts, not necessarily rumpy-pumpy) presents itself in the attempt
to write or perform male friendship (or antagonism).

Marna.


*** I will add in passing, I have no problem, personally, with persons 
who express a discomfort about slash as a sub-set of their discomfort 
about erotica/porn generally.   That is entirely their privilege, and I 
have no interest in making people read/experience art outside their own 
comfort zones.  Life's too short.  Ditto folks who are simply 
indifferent to it, "this just doesn't float my boat, not interested, 
thanks all the same."  There are any number of things *I* don't want to 
read, after all.  Horror is high on that list, which is likely rather 
long. 

     The problem only comes with hypocritical reactions: persons who 
want to control other people's behavior but not their own; or, more 
interestingly -- is there a word for this? -- people who want to control 
other people's behavior as a *part* of controlling their own.  The 
latter is not hypocrisy, it's something else.  Is there a word for it?  
"Prudery" doesn't quite cover it.  This is the one part where the 
concept of "status emergency" might actually impinge.

Ta, L.