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

[kaigou]

The first one is making all the comments we already made at Dear Author, basically (and is by someone who popped in on that thread, too). I mean, hell, I was the one who first raised the question of whether the new-and-improved rules would be all that pleased about a bi-woman writing gay characters. The rules are just plain ambiguous, and though I didn't say it there, you know as well as I do that if I, a married woman who says I'm bi but, gee, I'm married to a guy, so in the eyes of 90% of the LGTIQ-not-B community, I might as well stop waffling and admit I'm het, or something... you know if I, or someone like me, won, there would be wank the likes of which we've not seen since, well, the last time FMA blew up. Or the last great GW was-Trowa-raped war. I mean, melodramatic dramaqueen dragqueen finger-snapping wank, baby.

Frankly, I think LLF should just stop waffling and admit it's a misogynist, anti-everyone-but-gay-guys org that only wants Serious Literature, Folks and hates entertainment, and we could all get back to what we were doing. Mostly, ignoring LLF. Though I wouldn't mind (and would be more than happy to help) someone organizing a cross-group diverse pansexual awards where the content gets the bed check, the judges are out and diverse, and there are separate categories for bi, poly, and coming-of-age, and multiracial, and multicultural, and... okay, I need to stop dreaming now and get back to coding. *cough*

[branchandroot]

*wry* Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn't it?

cathexys brought up the genre issue, too, the capital-L Literature thing. Which makes me wonder whether that's one of the reasons the idiots are so het up (besides being idiots); that one of the few loci of Literary (and commercial let us not forget) validation for m/m has told them to take a hike.

[cathexys]

See, but that's where I'm so confounded. Like in a way by excluding that genre (and I love your description...very much like my own, let's own up to what we do :) they've given it literary validity where they could/should have just let it run up against the capital L criteria and fail. The decision thus was kinda counterintuitive...and I think I was trying to argue only understandable in a way where they REFUSE to acknowledge their own limitations (effectively what kaigou was describing).

[branchandroot]

*snorts* Yeah. I'm endlessly entertained by the suggestion that id-fic would do anything but fail smashingly when judged against the usual Literary metrics. Which does suggest the rule change was more for the sake of identity push-back--of making the awards a space for identity consolidation. *pauses to laugh rather hollowly, given the factionalism of the queer 'community'*

[kaigou]

I think what actually gets me the most about the LLF is that they're obviously so up-in-arms about the het-writer-in-gay-fic category, and yet they can't get their own house organized. I mean, there's only one category for all of the B, and one for all of the T, but the L and the G get like twelve categories each. So busy worrying about the G and ignoring parts of their own community they've been excluding all this time!

And actually, the only comment so far that's really sent my blood pressure through the roof was someone on (yet another) "they're just such speshul snowflakes for despairing women writers Can Do It Better" blah blah blah, where someone replied, That is very exclusionary, and will just mean that people will hop into the het closet to get their work publish. Cause it doesn't take much to be bi. [emph mine]

Boy, it's a damn good thing it isn't really physically possible to reach through the computer screen and freaking PUNCH someone. Cause if it were, I would be replying with, "and I bet it doesn't take you much to pick up your teeth with those broken fingers, does it?" But since I can't, I suspect the only way to deal with the insanity of it all is to sit over here and remain invisible to both sides.

Freaking morons.