alias_sqbr

Through all of these discussions, there's a fascinating conflation of things like genre, affect, narrative, and style with gender and/or sexuality. That seems to be how our culture is encoded (I'm not gonna say "hard-wired," because much of that line of thought is BS). Thus, for example, not only is the idea of fanfic constructed very differently from "outside" and "inside" fandom (speaking very broadly), each construction immediately implies particular codes about gender and/or sexuality.

Like you, I'm a gen fan, for the most part. I totally get slash, and value it as a mode of culture, but it just doesn't do anything for me. More or less the same for shipping (to an extent). I find myself wondering if that's because of my gender and sexuality, or if that's because of my taste formation (not high or low, but relative to all sorts of stuff in culture), or something else, and I'm not sure.

So, then, as someone who considers himself a fan, but isn't into slash or shipping, I've had a difficult go of it on LJ. I'm not going to "pass" as someone who is into it, but I am familiarizing myself with more concepts and issues, because I am very interested in the broader endeavor of fandom, or, to be more precise, if less proper, "fannishness."

To flip this on its head, one of my former students (now getting her PhD in Communication Studies) is a het female whose fannish passion is professional male sports. Not in a sexual mode (that's secondary, according to her), but as sports, i.e., as a "guy" would typically do. She's found it incredibly difficult to find a place in this world, as male privilege locks out or shuts down women's perspectives, and dominant discourses of femininity (and feminism) tell her she's either supposed to only be in it for the "hot guys" or reject it altogether. The upside is that she's found it an incredibly fertile ground for exploring issues of gender, passion, expertise, and marketing in contemporary culture!

Anyway, I think I'd like to see more discussion (in general; this particular discussion is very engaging!) about what makes some artifact or practice "male" or "female" or "gay" or "straight," and what about the folks who say "none of the above, thank you"? I'd like to do this without dismissing the problem of the very, very real politics of gender bias and male privilege in the world overall, but still get at the "stuff" that makes stuff gendered in the first place.