Bingo!

[branchandroot]

*just kind of stares*

Okay, let's get something straight (Ha. Ha.). There is a small (quite small) portion of slash fiction that manages to overlap with queer fiction. But the vast majority of slash? Is not queer fiction.

No. No, it's not. No, shut up and quit making asses of yourselves while you demonstrate at length that yours is very probably not.

Queer fiction deals with queer people, emphasis on people. It does not deal with the paper-doll id-fic that constitutes the vast majority of slash, and against which I have nothing. Id-fic is a lovely thing; I write it myself. But it's not queer fiction. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the experience of queer people, of whom I suppose I should say I am one.

Given all this idiotic howling, I find the initial issue, which is the Lambda awards committee specifying that award candidate fiction must be written by people who identify themselves as queer, makes perfect sense. It becomes abundantly evident that there are plenty of clueless straight women (mostly) who are so willfully blind to the appropriation they perform that they will stampede right over a queer-affirming community space if measures are not taken to defend it.

As has been demonstrated.

Comments

[laughingrat]

Hm! This is all over my Network page right now. I'd only skimmed the posts until I reached yours, since I read slash. :) I'm really shocked! Why would straight people think they should be part of the Lambda awards? They're not gay. How hard is that? I'm genuinely puzzled and disappointed that anyone is actually upset that Lambda's restricted to, you know, queer authors.

Privilege is a hell of a drug!

[kaigou]

So there is wank about it. I'd heard rumors, but the only place I've really come across it was on the post over on Dear Author -- which (with the exception of a single troll) was a rather civilized conversation. (Ironically, the ones bitching the most about the ambiguous language being potentially exclusionary for women-writing-men was, well, we bisexuals, but then, we already had reason enough to be pissed at LLF for only giving us a single freaking category, among many other things... so it was mostly the straight women saying, "well, it is their award..." and a few random bis going, "great! one more thing we can become invisible for! yay us!" and so on.

Where else does the wank exist? Bored and needing-distraction minds want to know. I have a craving for trainwreck this evening, please.

[elizacake]

I made the mistake of trying to point out that the changes to the LLF submission guidelines are a good sign. It is confirmation that there are now enough books being written by queer identifying writers to justify the awards without having to rely on the contributions of non-queer writers to pad out the nominations.

I got stomped on.

I'm stunned and bruised, and am very glad to see I'm not the only one going WTF over this reaction.

[kaigou]

Hey, since you deal with literature/composition stuff as academic: isn't it generally accepted that for a work to be included in, say, "women's literature" that the author must be female? Or that for a work to be considered part of the body of "native american literature" that the author must be "native american"? I mean, when it comes to drawing the line for inclusion in, say, a women's literature class, or similar.

[ldybastet]

I read some of those posts/comments and... urgh. :( It really goes too far for my taste when the comparisons to completely other and unrelated things (racism, for instance) start to show up.