Hey slash theorists

[petronia]

If you didn't see my 1AM post - go read this and tell me what you think. XD;;

It's only funny for the first five minutes, and then you start thinking. I am basically gacking z107m's class(?) reading but her more coherent and knowledgeable gloss is locked - usual reservations (shall we say) re Freud aside what I like about this is the fact that the m/m content is not given the spotlight so to speak but the power inequality is, which I've always thought was where "slashfen pop psych" goes wrong. (It's the nature of how the issue is framed - if you're going to analyse m/m fantasies you of course assume you're analysing m/m fantasies.) I said to Lisa that I thought accepted fandom wisdom was that youthful platonic male friendship fantasy was a sublimation of the err yaoi impulse and she pointed out more accurately that it's more inexperience than sublimation. XD And also doesn't address the question of "why", but then you hit the pathology vs. normalcy thing that makes it not-funny after the first five minutes.

Here's an introduction to a collection of discussions that gives an interesting thumbnail overview of current critical perspectives re Papa Freud's original essay, I think (a number of the papers suggest - I paraphrase flippantly - that psychoanalysing your own daughter is perhaps not the greatest way of "fixing" Oedipal issues, which, well).

Here is something I found through the same Google search. Has anyone seen this movie? o_O; I've never heard of it. (And now I'm spoilered for it thoroughly.) But yes, obviously applying "A Child Is Being Beaten" to homoerotic fantasy Nazis is the logical next step.

Comments

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

Has anyone seen this movie? o_O; I've never heard of it.

Remember seeing the preview, for all it's worth, and being mildly interested. But the ratio of movies I'm mildly interested in to those I'll actually get off my ass and see (...or, uh, get off my ass and remember to plug into my Netflix queue) is...oh, 9-to-1, maybe. What'll *really* boggle your mind is that this movie is based on a Steven King novella x_X

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I know, looking at the quotes from the novella in that paper was like x_x.

"Brad Renfro? Ian McKellan? Stephen King? Since when? Brian Singer adding gay subtext... oh wait, that's par for the course."

[troisroyaumes]

I saw the movie and found it rather disturbing. I was fifteen when I watched it and hadn't (yet) discovered slash, although my friends had. Actually, this explains why they wanted to see it in the first place. -_-;;

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Hmm, Freudian terminology always gives me a headache. The conclusion does seem similar to some of the claims made in fandom, though.

[marici.livejournal.com]

Dear god, she was his real daughter? I assumed it was a pseudonym.

Like everyone else, I recognize the slash themes here, and it's interesting to hear them analyzed without foregrounding the m/m content. Freud points out to me that women's desires are more alien to mainstream culture than men's desires are. I was disappointed in an analysis of sex and consent in The Tale of the Genji because there wasn't a single reference to rape fantasy, then did the same damned thing in my term paper. I suppose I was convinced that justifying rape fantasy would take the whole paper, leaving no room for my point. I'd tell the world that it's not the m/m, it's the power dynamic, but why do I read so much more m/m, then? Just what's available? Just that much easier to displace weird thoughts if the characters are both male? It's not like most slash fans have any way to deny their personal sadistic-sexual connections, but so long as you don't directly participate, it's ok? Why not go nuts for Phantom of the Opera, violent yet forgiving dark sexual hero and weak, enticing female heroine? If only the Phantom hadn't killed, he'd be the natural hero, and I wonder if there were ever a creative stage where that happened. Certainly Christine's eventual fiance is extremely forgettable.

Read any Stargate: Atlantis fic? The fandom roars right now because there isn't enough canon to disprove the lethal military man / weak, whining genius slash yet. So what's it mean that the genius tops in at least two-thirds of the explicit stuff I've read? The frame seems the same, but is it really a different basic fantasy? I suppose it could be American fondness for perverting the obvious relationship, putting people at emotional risk by wanting sexual roles that don't match their social roles. It might be controlling personal fantasy to better communicate with the audience, but that really begs the question of why the audience wants something different in their reading than in their fantasies, and why fanfiction blurs the line (Dysfunctional Series, anyone?). Maybe it boils down to little girls fantasizing about fucking their fathers? Maybe the thought is that sexually receptive is the stronger position?

...The frustrating thing is, if someone used this to analyze us they'd almost certainly conclude by pathologizing as well. Sex turns the wheels on practically everything, but female sex expression never looks healthy when you see it on the news. /rambling, pointless comments.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

According to Freud's original paper, the third-person fantasy manifests as m/m in both males and females, which is an interesting observation. (Memory's muddled as to what his conclusion was - the boys in question are transposing a fantasy of being beaten by their mothers, possibly. XD;;)

Lisa mentions Deleuze's refutation of Freud, which is touched on in Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadism) And that's food for thought too. I mean, I'm just tossing ideas about with no real idea of what I'm saying...

Actually (as Charmian seems to point out?) the part that hits closest to home fandom-wise is the bit at the end of the paper regarding how the fantasy changes when it's written down, because the motivation for the act of writing comes from a different place than the motivation for the fantasy. "Demands of narrative pacing" is an ego concern. XD

FTR I do know some yaoi fans who are quite enthusiastic about the Phantom of the Opera. And many others who like het if it possesses certain "slash-like" qualities, variously defined (at the moment C.S. Friedman's In Conquest Born pops to mind XD).

Whoops

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Freud said that the boys in question also wanted to be beaten by their fathers, at least in the summary article you had linked. [Though Freud would have said that on an unconscious level the figure of the father lurked behind that of the mother, Shengold believes that there is a greater layering of meanings involving both parents. ] But who knows if any of this Freud stuff is for even valid scientifically? (Possibly not--more philosophy than science) Then where does f/f fit into this?

The problem is that on some level most explanation is in a sense pathologicalization. (Why does person X do that? They do that because it fulfills need Y which they don't even know they have, but I, the explainer do.) The language of the disease and the symptom comes into play. Didn't you say something in one of your posts once about getting to a deep enough level of human motivation makes everything look ugly? So all displacement/sublimation makes it seem like avoidance and denial, which are loaded words. Still, unless you can prove any sort of real dysfunction (in that it affects the person's quality of life) it by definition can't be pathological, IIRC.

On the other hand, fandom would sure be a different place if one of the dominant genres was intergenerational sadomasochistic incest. :P

[z107m.livejournal.com]

Erm, well, Deleuze is a whole other can of worms that I brought up in order to ask whether m/m fandom, as engaged by women/girls, was inherently a masochistic expression or sadistic. Do women/girls seek out slash in order to express their victimization through the torturer (masochism) or through the torturer's hypocrisy (sadism). On the one hand I do mean victimization in the sense that women are oppressed/repressed in this society, but on the other hand I'm not using this term as if society is owing the female race. Rather, it's as much a fact as men are victimized by the hegemonic ideas of masculinity imposed on them. And yeah, there's definitely different sub-genres of slash for everyone, so it's not like we can even begin to generalize the motivational factors of all of fandom.

While Papa Freud forever returns to the body and sexual gratification as the ultimate motivator, Delueze believed the fundamental aim of sadism and masochism and the repetition of their fantasies was to achieve an idea of pure reason or mythic imagination respectively. Freud looks to the sexual childhood and the body and Deleuze looks beyond the body and to the idealized, unattainable future. No strong theories from me regarding how slash fits in, only that both may be applicable at certain stages of a fangirl's involvement, which is why Anna makes a very appealing paradigm that cycles through different phases, so to speak. She also leaves out the body almost entirely-

Dang it, I'm rambling again.

Anyhow, Apt Pupil's a good watch, when you're in that right kind of a mood for a gritty movie that was too un-Hollywood to be very popular. Even with the copious spoilers from that fascinating essay (thanks for sharing!), it's still interesting to see the motions and actions of the actors unfold on screen.

[pere-chan.livejournal.com]

Agh, am trying to compose my thoughts about this and it does NOT help that I've just been reading Kusatta Kyoushi no Houteishiki and before that a really good but really unfinished Snape/Harry fic.

Why the gender switch? In situations like this there is obviously a highly dominant "master" and a passive-unto-masochism "victim". But why does the victim become male? Why is the idea of an older male erotically threatening a younger male so appealing to me us the female fantasiser?

Not to say anything of the need to channel the fantasy into something more productive, thereby (inadvertently or purposefully) planting the seeds in other young female minds. Yaoi as self-perpetuating phenomenon.

Another thesis idea looms.