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Carola Katharina Bauer

Naughty Girls and Male Romance/Porn

Slash Fiction, Boys’ Love , and Other Works by Female “Cross-Voyeurs” in the U.S. Academic Discourses

Anchor Academic Publishing

Bauer, Carola Katharina: Naughty Girls and Gay Male Romance/Porn: , Boys’ Love Manga, and Other Works by Female “Cross-Voyeurs” in the U.S. Academic Discourses. Hamburg, Diplomica Verlag GmbH 2012

ISBN: 978-3-95489-001-9 Print: Anchor Academic Publishing, an Imprint of Diplomica® Verlag GmbH, Hamburg, 2012

Bibliographical Information of the German National Library: The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography. Detailed bibliographic data can be found at: http://dnb.d-nb.de

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: John Donne and “American Girl-on-Girl Action” vs. the Strange Case of Female “Cross-Voyeurs” ...... 1

2. Theoretical Framework: Meets Feminism Meets Foucauldian Discourse Analysis ...... 5

2.1 A “Deliberately Disruptive” Challenge to : Queer Theory and Its Key Concepts ...... 5

2.2 Troubling Gender & Sexuality: Judith Butler “in the Interstices” of Feminist and Queer Theory ...... 9

2.3 Technologies of Power/Knowledge: Using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis ...... 13

3. “Cross-Writing” Female Novelists under Scrutiny: & Others in the U.S. Academic Discourses (1969 – Today) ...... 16

3.1 Gay Male Fiction by Women – An Inventory ...... 16

3.2 From Victims of “Misfortune” to “Fag Hags” and the “New Couple”: Speaking about (Heterosexual) Women and since 1969 ...... 19

3.3 About the Three Ways to Conceptualize Your “Faghagging” Novelist: Interpretations of “Cross- Writing” Women and Their Works in U.S. Academia ...... 25

3.3.1 The (Heterosexual) Woman as Empathic Outsider and Mediator – Mary Renault and Patricia Nell Warren in Traditional Literary Criticism around 1970 ...... 27 3.3.2 About “Fag Hags” on “Power Trips” and Their “Ersatz Works” – Bradley & Others in the Works of Gay Male Intellectuals and Academics since the 1970s ...... 31 3.3.3 The Feminist and the “Factor”: Interpreting Mary Renault & Marguerite Yourcenar from a Third Point of View in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s ...... 34

3.4 Heresies, Girlfags, and “Faghagging” Novelists – A Conclusion Regarding the “Do’s and Don’ts” of the Academic Discourse(s) about Renault & Other Cross-Writers ...... 39

4. Female “Cross-Readers”: Talking about “Textual Poachers” and Slash Fiction in American Studies since the 1980s ...... 44

4.1 Snape and Harry Sitting in a Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G: Defining the Genre of Slash Fiction ...... 44

4.2 A Fateful Encounter: Feminist Theory and Media Studies Meet Slash Fiction – The Beginnings of an Academic Debate (1985-1992) ...... 48

4.2.1 “ by Women for Women, with Love”: The Pornography Wars, Joanna Russ, Patricia Frazer Lamb, Diana Veith, and K/S Fiction in the 1980s ...... 49

4.2.2 The “Guerilla Tactics” of “Textual Poachers”: Slash Fiction Meets Media Studies – Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley, and Camille Bacon-Smith (1988-1992) ...... 55

4.3 “Let’s Talk about Slash, Baby.” Characteristics of an Academic Debate (1985-Today) ...... 59

4.3.1 Shrieking Teens, Divorced Housewives, and Their Mediocre Fiction: Slash Writers/Readers as the “Other” Fans in Scholarly Accounts ...... 61 4.3.2 Women’s “All-too-often Purple (Gay) Prose” – Genre and Gender Essentialism in the Academic Discourse about Slash Fiction ...... 65 4.3.3 Subversive/Queer Pleasures? Explaining “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking” ...... 71

4.4 A Tale of Two Academic Discourses: Slash Fiction Fans vs. “Cross-Writing” Novelists ...... 77

5. Boys’ Love for Women, Made in Japan: and Shounen-ai Manga in the U.S. Academic Discourse (1983-2011) ...... 80

5.1 Beautiful Men and “Rotten Girls”: Boys’ Love Manga in Japan and the USA ...... 80

5.2 Female “Cross-voyeurism,” an Intrinsically Japanese Phenomenon? Yaoi and Shounen-ai in U.S. Scholarly Accounts since 1983 ...... 86

5.2.1 Robots, Samurai, and Pokémon: North America, Japan, and (Techno-) Orientalism ...... 86 5.2.2 The Threat of “Tentacle ” and Those Poor, Oppressed Geishas: The Portrayal of BL as a Medium of Empowerment for Japanese Women ...... 87 5.2.3 Queer Japan: Conceptualizing a “Strange” Sexual Culture, or the Benefits of Exoticism ...... 911

5.3 An Exciting “Import” and Its American Counterpart – Discussing Boys’ Love and Slash Fiction in the U.S. Academic Discourses ...... 97

6. Conclusion: Theorizing Female “Cross-Voyeurism” in U.S. Academia – A “Vicious Circle” ...... 99

7. Works Cited ...... 106

1. Introduction: John Donne and “American Girl-on-Girl Action” vs. the Strange Case of Female “Cross-Voyeurs”

“Chandler: I was just watching regular porn. Monica: [Relieved] Really? Chandler: Yes, just some old fashioned, American, girl-on-girl action. Monica: You have no idea how happy that makes me!”1

In the Friends episode “The One with the Sharks,” aired in October 2002, one of the sitcom’s main characters, Monica Geller, catches her husband, Chandler, masturbating – apparently, while watching a shark documentary. Convinced that her partner is secretly into “shark porn,” Monica tries to accept and even re-enact his “perverse” desires – only to discover with quite some relief that Chandler just changed the channel when she came into the room and that he originally was getting off on “some regular […] old fashioned, American, girl-on-girl action.” The feminist theorist Rebecca Whisnant has criticized this scene as being one of the “pop cultural references” teaching women “that men’s pornography use is inevitable and completely legitimate, and that the way to be a cool, modern, liberated woman is to not only tolerate it, but to join in” (Whisnant 16) – a harsh judgment which can be partly explained by the radical feminist, anti- pornography stance Whisnant takes in her paper “Confronting Pornography.” Whereas it is certainly true that women’s sexual needs and desires are not given much thought in this episode of Friends, it is not for this, but for another topic connect- ed with sexuality and gender that this moment of U.S. broadcasting has been selected to serve as the introduction for my study: What I find particularly interesting in this scene is the naturalization of straight men watching “lesbian” porn. By contrasting the viewing of “girl-on-girl action” with the ridiculously obscene erotic fascination with murderous fishes, the U.S. sitcom advertises this particular pornographic subgenre not only as normal and “regular.” Chandler, in his function as the “sarcastic joker” of the series (Charney 599), even declares “lesbian” pornography to be at the heart of an “old fashioned” American culture of male erotica. And without question, this kind of male “cross-voyeurism”2 – a term which will be defined in this publication as referring to men or women consuming/producing “homosexual” media texts about the opposite sex

1 “The One with the Sharks.” Writ. Andrew Reich and Ted Cohen. Dir. Ben Weiss. Friends: The Complete Ninth Season. Warner Brothers, 2005. DVD. 2 Jacobs coined this term in her paper “Academic Cult Erotica.” She applies it to Internet porn users “who peruse selections beyond the boundaries of their niche sites and communities,” but also mentions female yaoi and shounen-ai readers as an example (Jacobs 128). For an explanation of those terms, see chap. 5.1.

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– has actually become one of the unquestioned clichés within U.S. popular and academ- ic culture. The platitude of “two playful ” being part of every “straight guy-” is thus not only prevalent in mainstream Hollywood teen movies such as American Pie 2 (2001) (Pener 57), but also reappears in various scholarly accounts. Even though lesbian feminists like Adrienne Rich and Barbara Smith have criticized male-oriented “girl-on- girl” erotica in the 1980s, by pointing out that the majority of so-called “lesbian porn” was produced “for the male voyeuristic eye,” to the detriment of “real” homosexual women (Rich 234; Easton 83), the tendency to portray this potentially queer phenome- non as a part of a “regular” male heterosexuality has seldom been questioned. Only Linda Williams mentions the “strangeness” of this “widely accepted form” of “male heterosexual titillation” (Williams 206), but more often, the straight-male, erotic fascination for “lesbianism” in the 20th century is universalized and naturalized in an academic context. Regarding John Donne’s famous poem Sapho to Philaenis (1633), literary scholar Ronald Corthell even tries to project this specific kind of male “hetero- sexual” desire on the Renaissance writer. By suggesting in his overview of Donne’s oeuvre – Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry (1997) – that Sappho’s allusion to her masturbatory fantasy about Philaenis serves to arouse the male reader/writer like a “pin-up” (Corthell 72), Corthell equates the 17th century poem with “[l]ovemaking between women […] in [contemporary] pornography” (71) in a problematic and completely ahistorical fashion. One could expect things to be similar regarding female “cross-voyeurs” – i.e. women interested in media about gay men. Yet, as in most cases, gender proves to be of crucial importance: Despite the fact that there actually exists a large number of pornographic and romantic texts about male consumed and produced by American women since the 1970s, the “abnormality” of these female “cross-voyeurs” is constantly underlined in U.S. popular and academic culture. As the astonished, public reactions in the face of a largely female (heterosexual) audience of Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Queer as Folk (2000-2005) have shown, a woman’s erotic/romantic interest in male homosexuality is definitely not as accepted as its male counterpart (Nobble 158-9; Nayar 235). Even if it is occasionally made a topic in mainstream television series like , the exceptionality of this phenomenon is emphasized. In the 2002 episode, “All That Glitters,” Samantha, Miranda, Carrie and Charlotte are shown watching . Yet, the fact that this incident is definitely not an everyday occurrence for the women is underlined, as they act surprised and start to laugh hysteri-

2 cally at the “show,” thus denying the possibility of (female) sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction though male homosexual erotica.3 In the academic publications on female “cross-voyeurs,” the application of “double standards” with regard to male/female “cross-voyeurism” is even more obvious. As Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse note in their “Introduction” to Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Internet (2006), slash fiction – fan fiction about male homosexual relationships mainly produced and consumed by women – has stood in the center of fan fiction studies so far, despite being merely a subgenre of it. The reason for this seems to be an urge to explain “the underlying motivations” for the fascination of women with m/m romance4 or pornography within the academic discourse (Busse and Hellekson 17) – a trend which differs completely from the extremely under-theorized complex of men interested in “lesbians.” Similar to those tendencies, a genre of Japanese manga called Boys’ Love – also concerned with gay men and directed at females – has equally received a disproportionately large attention in U.S. research papers in reaction to its growing popularity in North America since the late 1990s in the context of the “Japani- fication” of U.S. culture (Levi, “North American” 147; McLelland and Yoo 3). By concentrating on possible reasons for Japanese and American women to read and write these manga, the Japanese and American papers (Kamm 45-66) once again emphasize the oddness of those female “cross-voyeurs” – suggesting a “Never-ending Story” of over-theorizing and over-analyzing them. It is this obvious influence of conventional gender stereotypes on the perception of these phenomena that provokes me to examine the way in which the works of female “cross-voyeurism” and their consumers/producers are conceptualized in the U.S. scholarly accounts. In many ways, my study will explore “unknown territories” and respectively try to take a closer look at academic problems that have not been adequate- ly conceptualized and addressed yet. Although parallels have been drawn between slash fiction, Boys’ Love manga and about gay relationships by female writers such as Mary Renault’s Persian Boy (1972) and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Catch Trap (1979) (Woledge 101-2; Suzuki 261), no scholar has hitherto provided a – thoroughly re- searched – chronological account outlining the history of American women as consum-

3 “All That Glitters.” Writ. Darren Star and Cindy Chupack. Dir. Charles MacDougall. Sex and The City: The Complete Fourth Season. Home Box Office, 2003.DVD. 4 Terms containing the abbreviation m/m (male/male) like m/m romance, m/m fiction, and m/m novels are used in this study as neutral terms for literary works about gay male relationships. I am aware that m/m fiction has been frequently defined as referring to gay written by heterosexual women (Shram- ko). Yet, as this publication argues for a definition of “gay fiction” that is not based on the gender or the sexual orientation of the writers, this seems at least problematic and is definitely not implied by the use of this term here.

3 ers and producers of gay romance/porn since the 1970s. Moreover, whereas several American researchers, like Busse and Hellekson or Wim Lunsing, have already pointed out at least some of the problematic tendencies of the academic discussions on slash fiction or Boys’ Love manga (Busse and Hellekson 17; Lunsing, “Intersections”), my study will be the first one to analyze the representations of these “faghagging […] women” (Decarnin, “Faghagging” 10), Boys’ Love “fan girls” and “textual poachers” (Jenkins, Poachers 27) and their works in the U.S. academic discourses on a larger scale.5 As an attempt at a comprehensive historical analysis of these scholarly accounts on female “cross-voyeurism,” this publication will be divided in three major parts: After a closer look on how “cross-writing” female novelists, like Patricia Nell Warren, Mary Renault or Marguerite Yourcenar, are portrayed in the intellectual and academic debates since the 1970s, the discourses about slash fiction – starting with Joanna Russ’ famous essay “Pornography by Women for Women, with Love” (1985) – are going to be analyzed by focusing on the continuities and discontinuities regarding the stereotypes surrounding the female “cross-voyeurs” in those primary sources. Last but not least, the third section of my study deals with the depiction of Japanese Boys’ Love manga in Western research since the late 1980s: This debate differs decisively from the discus- sions about slash fiction, even though both genres are quite similar – a disparity which can be, at least partly, explained by the Orientalist stereotypes about Japanese culture pervading this academic discourse. With academic publications as primary texts, it is necessary for my study to possess a sound theoretical perspective from which the scholarly accounts can be evaluated. As “cross-voyeurism” per se is a phenomenon transgressing the boundaries of conventional hetero- and homosexuality, queer theory will be one of the theoretical approaches important for this analysis. Regarding the importance of gender conceptions for this topic mentioned in the introduction, postmodern branches of feminism, which are useful when thinking about conceptions of “femininity” and “women” – especially Judith Butler’s insightful approach developed in Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) – should be included as well. With the Foucauldian discourse analysis as methodology – essential for an examination of a large amount of primary sources – a solid theoretical “fundament” is ensured, whose components are going to be explained in detail in the subsequent chapter. Other minor theoretical influences, such as Post-

5 This study will focus on scholarly accounts originally published in North America. If, occasionally, academic contributions from other Anglophone countries such as Australia or England prove to be important for the academic discourses described in this paper, they will be included and analyzed as well.

4 colonial Studies – a school of thought, which plays an important role in the analysis of the academic discourse about Boys’ Love manga – will be discussed later, as they are only relevant with regard to certain parts of this publication.

2. Theoretical Framework: Queer Theory Meets Feminism Meets Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

2.1 A “Deliberately Disruptive” Challenge to Heterosexism: Queer Theory and Its Key Concepts

“Queer theory originally came into being as a joke. Teresa de Lauretis coined the phrase ‘queer theory’ to serve as the title of a conference that she held in February of 1990 at the University of California, Santa Cruz […]. She had the courage, and the conviction, to pair that scurrilous term with the academic holy word ‘theory.’ Her usage was scandalously offensive.” (Halperin, “Normalization” 340)

Thus David M. Halperin, an important figure in the field of queer theory, describes the “birth” of the term referring to a field of studies that became popular in the 1990s and initiated a “powerful refiguring” of gay and lesbian studies (Jagose 2-5). But just like in a traditional Christian “infant baptism” – where the “official” naming actually occurs some days after the delivery – the “child” called queer theory came into existence long before 1990: The founding mothers and fathers of this particular school of thought that was established in reaction to Teresa de Lauretis “deliberately disruptive” exclamation – Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler – had already written The History of Sexuality (1976-1984), Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Gender Trouble (1990) “well before anyone had ever heard” of queer theory (Halperin, “Normalization” 341). As the “referential slipperiness of queer” (Morland and Wilcox 4) and the refusal towards definitions in this field of studies in general (Walters 6-8) are actually part of queer theory’s allure, it seems wise to concentrate on these important theoretical influences first. For now, the preliminary definition by Nikki Sullivan, describing queer theory as an attempt to “make strange, to frustrate, to counteract, to delegitimize, to camp up […] heteronormative knowledge and institutions, and the subjectivities and socialities that are (in)formed by them and that (in)form them” (Sullivan iv) has to suffice – the implications and exact meaning of these words will become clearer as we get to the theoretical segments important for understanding the basic key concepts of queer theory.

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The earliest one of these foundational texts is Michel Foucault’s three-volume series The History of Sexuality: Its first volume The Will to Knowledge (1976) has especially contributed to a process of denaturalizing and historicizing sexual identity, thus chang- ing the field of gay and lesbian studies significantly (Jagose 77-79). Before Foucault, theorists influenced by the gay liberationist movement, starting with the in 1969, saw marginal sexual identities such as homosexuals as simply being oppressed by a heterosexist society (Seidman 119-120). Propagating a logic of “coming out” and “gay pride,” liberationist intellectuals like Dennis Altman formulated the need to voice supposedly “silenced” gay and lesbian identities in order to transform American culture (Bredbeck 379-383). However, in contrast to those older, essentialist models – believing in the existence of an ahistorical, universal, and natural difference between homosexuality and hetero- sexuality (Seidman 116) – Foucault’s Will to Knowledge introduced a constructionist conception of to the debate. By criticizing the “repressive hypothesis” of the (hetero)sexual revolutionists of the 1960s, Foucault shows in this work that sexuality is something that is discursively produced and thus historically changeable (Foucault, Will 1-14). Whereas the “repressive hypothesis” of the 1960s claimed that the 17th century constituted “the beginning of an age of repression emblematic of what we call bourgeois societies,” The Will to Knowledge questions this hypothesis according to which sexuality has been censored, blocked and prohibited by powerful, prude “Victorians” since then and is therefore in need to be liberated (3-4, 15). By looking at various historical documents, Foucault notices that – instead of a “si- lencing” – there has been a “steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex – […] a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward” (18). He discovers that this multiplication of educational, political and legal discourses about sexuality since 1700 originally was caused by a wish to control and regulate sexuality, but nevertheless resulted in producing the behavior it tried to prohibit. Thus, The Will to Knowledge introduces a notion of power completely different from the traditional Western “jurisco-discursive”6 one – a power that is not only repressing and negative but also productive in a way (82-94). The advice manuals and regulating practices in order to prevent children from masturbating in the 19th century, for exam- ple, are revealed to contribute to the sexualization of the body of the infant – thus

6 According to Foucault, the “jurisco-discursive” representation of power is the predominant model in the West. Power is regarded as something that a “legislative power” exercises over “an obedient subject on the other side.” Within this logic, power is conceptualized as something that has only negative effects on “sex” since the 18th century, as it is prohibited per law by methods like (Foucault, Will 83).

6 contradicting their original intent of eliminating this kind of perverse behavior in the domain of the family (Mills, Foucault 36-7). But the passage in The Will to Knowledge about the “new specification of individu- als” connected with the “persecution of […] peripheral sexualities” in the 19th century (Foucault, Will 42) refers to a more important effect of this power/knowledge system with regard to lesbian and gay studies – ultimately leading to the glorification of “Saint Foucault” within queer politics (Halperin, Saint 14). Based on the non-existence of a special category describing same-sex acts before, Foucault argues that the article “Die konträre Sexualempfindung (1870)” by the German psychiatrist Carl Westphal actually brought the new “species” of the modern homosexual into being (43). From 1870 onwards, the practicing of same-sex acts was no longer understood as some kind of “sodomy” which might be tempting for everyone (Jagose 11). Instead, people involved in with someone belonging to their own gender were beginning to be portrayed as “sick” and theorized as essentially different, equipped with some “kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul” (Foucault, Will 43). By showing that the “gay pride” movement actually was only made possible by the categorization of people into heterosexuals and homosexuals in the 19th century in those pejorative medical discourses, Foucault exemplifies his claim that the mechanisms of power are complex and inscrutable (Jagose 81-2). While the exact time of “birth” of the “modern homosexual” has been disputed since the appearance of The Will to Knowledge in 1976 – with Alan Bray arguing for the first emergence of this sexual identity at the end of the 17th century in Renaissance England, for example (Bray) – Foucault’s re-conceptualization of same-sex and heterosexual desire as historically changeable and discursively produced has proved to be of tremen- dous influence on theoretical texts within gay and lesbian studies – such as Eve Sedg- wick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), another one of the foundational texts of queer theory. In an attempt to further denaturalize the existing categories of modern hetero- and homosexuality, Sedgwick underlines the narrow-mindedness of Western modern societies, visible in their insistence on defining sexual identities based on the “gender of [one’s] object-choice” (Sedgwick, Closet 35; Sullivan 38). By naming alternative classifications available – e.g., “human/animal, adult/child, autoerotic/alloerotic […] [or] in private/in public” – Epistemology of the Closet questions the obsession with the “heterosexual/homosexual binary,” underlining the diverse, complex and shifting nature of human sexuality (Sedgwick, Closet 35).

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To return to the problem of defining queer theory: In the face of its – very poststructur- alist – rejection of a conception of the subject in the spirit of humanism, as some kind of exceptional, unified being with an essential core, it is no wonder that there is a “delight in inconsistency” (Walters 9) within queer theory, mirroring its rejection of fixed and stable identities (Sullivan 39-41). This rejection of exact definitions also can be ob- served in the manifold meanings of the term “queer” itself. Mainly used as pejorative term for gays and lesbians in the 20th century, to emphasize their supposed “oddness” and “abnormality” (Halperin, “Normalization” 1), the negative connotation of this designation was successfully replaced around 1990 when activist groups such as Queer Nation started their campaigns against homophobia and the discrimination against other sexual “deviants.” As it transcended the homosexual/heterosexual binary, the more inclusive term “queer” – also applicable to transgendered persons and bisexuals – in this context showed an awareness and acceptance of the diversity of non-normative sexual identities (Walters 7). Yet, radical groups like Queercore or QUASH (Queers United Against Straight Acting Homosexuals), which use “queer” for the means of an anarchist agenda, rejecting any assimilation into heteronormative society and even criticizing self-identified homosexuals for their fixation on categories of identity, underline the various meanings the term still possesses (Sullivan 45-6) – an ambiguity also noticeable in the academic discourses. With “queer’s” multiple possible meanings in research papers – ranging from the noun used as an “umbrella term” for marginalized sexual identities of any kind (Doty, Flaming 6) to the understanding of “queer” as a verb, describing actions that decon- struct (Jakobsen) – my study makes use of the latter of those two very different connotations: To define “queering” as some kind of “doing” preserves the notion of identity as something provisionary, fragmented and constructed that permeates queer theory (Sullivan 50) and proves to be quite valuable for understanding and analyzing texts about female “cross-voyeurism.” Not only is the erotic or romantic involvement of gay men and women in any form something that transcends our conven- tional understandings of sexual identity and thus “queering” – as Annamarie Jagose implies, when she provocatively asks in her excellent introduction what category describes a woman currently in a sexual relationship with a gay man (Jagose 7). Queer theory can also be useful when analyzing scholarly accounts about these phenomena. By keeping an open mind about and accepting the complexity of human sexuality, thinking outside the restricting and restricted “boxes” of hetero- and homosexuality will equally enable me to consider the various “queer” aspects of the concept of “cross-

8 voyeurism.” But – as queer theory has been accused of neglecting gender issues, while concentrating on gay men (Walters 11-13) – it seems appropriate in a study concerned with representations of female sexuality to dedicate an extra chapter to a theorist like Judith Butler who describes herself as working “in the interstices of the relation between queer theory and feminism” (Butler, “Objects” 1).

2.2 Troubling Gender & Sexuality: Judith Butler “in the Interstices” of Feminist and Queer Theory

“The story, alluded to above, goes something like this: once upon a time, there was this group of really boring, ugly women who never had sex, walked a lot in the woods, read bad poetry about goddesses, wore flannel shirts, and hated men (even their gay brother). They called themselves lesbians. Then thankfully, along came these guys named Foucault, Derrida and Lacan dressed in girls’ clothes, riding some very large white horses. They told these silly women that they were politically correct, rigid, frigid, sex-hating prudes who just did not GET IT – it was all a game anyway, all about words and images, all about mimicry and imitation, a cacophony of signs leading back to nowhere. To have politics around gender was silly, they were told, because gender was just a performance anyway, a costume one put on and, in performance, wore backward. And everyone knew boys were better at dressing up.” (Walters 13)

In her polemic, witty and acerbic account about the way in which feminism is portrayed as an outdated theoretical model that has been overcome in academic retellings of the advent of queer theory, Suzanna Walters criticizes the neglect of queer theory’s roots in feminist theory common in most descriptions about its history (Walters 11-15), which would often render feminism “strangely unrecognizable” (Weed viii). And indeed: lesbian feminists such as Adrienne Rich – who rejected the “assumption ‘that most women are innately heterosexual’” in her landmark essay from 1980, thus making obvious the constructed nature of the patriarchal institution of heterosexuality (Rich 238) – are quite often forgotten as intellectual foremothers of queer theory.7 However, whereas Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” might be disregarded, another feminist contribution certainly is not: Gender Trouble (1990) by Judith Butler is never missing in introductions to queer theory, ranking among its most seminal texts (e.g. Jagose 81-92). Part of the reason why those two theories nevertheless are mostly regarded as an “awkward pair” – as Elizabeth Weed describes it in her excellent introduction to Feminism Meets Queer Theory (1997) (Weed viii) – is the common misconception that Butler is somehow too poststructuralist

7 Sullivan mentions Rich, for example, only as an after-thought, when talking about “Queering Straight Sex” at the end of his introduction to queer theory (Sullivan 119-120).

9 to be part of feminist theory – a problematic perspective fueled by critics such as Nancy Hartsock and Linda Alcoff (Sawicki, “Critical” 348-357).8 Contrary to this point of view, the following, brief recapitulation of Gender Trou- ble’s theoretical innovations will show that Butler – who did not plan for her to become “one of the founding texts of queer theory” – is essentially anchored in feminist theory and first of all conceptualized as “a ‘provocative’ intervention” in this field of studies (Butler, “Preface” vii). As I agree with Jana Sawicki who characterized Butler as the first scholar who successfully “develop[ed] a powerful argument against the idea that feminist theorists’ need to develop a unified account of feminine identity as a common ground for feminist politics” (Sawicki, “Critical” 364; Sawicki, “Identity” 296-301), Gender Trouble’s notions about gender and sexuality – equally influenced by both poststructuralist/Foucauldian and feminist theory – will be important for my analysis of the discourses about female “cross-voyeurism” in academia. Published in 1990, Gender Trouble is in particular a critique of the identity catego- ries prevalent in contemporary political and theoretical discussions about gender, sex and sexuality (Kirby 19). Starting with a skeptical analysis of feminist theory, Butler questions especially its essentialist and heterosexist tendencies: By portraying them- selves in the tradition of identity politics, as representing “women,” she argues, feminist theory and feminism inevitably assume some kind of essence shared by all its represent- ed female subjects – thus discursively producing a normative, gendered, natural unit of “womanhood,” similar to the one they originally tried to abolish (Butler, Trouble 2-4). In order to completely denaturalize conceptions of sex and gender, Gender Trouble is designed as a “feminist genealogy of the category of woman” (8). Influenced by Foucault’s “genealogy” as described in his later works – a methodology not looking for a pre-discursive “truth” but analyzing the rules inherent in discourses (Mills, Discourse 24-5) – Butler tries to reveal and thus deconstruct discursive mechanisms responsible for “the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between feminine and masculine” (Butler, Trouble 24). Whereas feminist theorists like Gayle Rubin differen- tiated between the sex – the “natural” differences between men and women – and gender as “a socially imposed division of the sexes” before, Gender Trouble’s claims in 1990 are far more radical than Rubin’s model of the “sex/gender system” in 1975 (Rubin, “Traffic” 28, 40): According to Butler, it “would make no sense […] to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex,” as “sex itself is a gendered category”

8 An excellent introduction into this debate is the anthology Feminist Contentions, where Butler and Hartsock engage in an interesting dialogue (Benhabib).

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(Butler, Trouble 10). She argues that even the seemingly natural distinction between male and female bodies i.e. the interpretation of anatomical differences is already part of a socio-historical “signifying order,” influenced by the expectations and meanings existing within each culture (Leitch 2465). Of great relevance to queer theory is Gender Trouble insofar as it uses these revela- tions to “uproot […] pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuali- ty” as well (Butler, “Preface” xix). Inspired, amongst others, by Monique Wittig’s essays – which often deal with the complicity of gender in the maintenance of hetero- sexism (Jagose 54-55; Salih 1) – Butler relates conceptions of “men” and “women” as “polar opposites” to a “compulsory heterosexuality” prevalent in our society (Butler, Trouble 24). In the “heterosexual matrix” influencing modern discourses and practices, sexual intercourse or desire is only regarded as “natural” if it occurs between “male” and “female” bodies, thus relying heavily on notions about sex/gender (6). By radically denaturalizing these categories – and by reading Freud’s psychoanalytic texts The Ego and the Id (1923) and Mourning and Melancholia (1917) in a way that suggests that stable heterosexual identities are always “melancholic” i.e. connected with a loss as they are based on a disavowal/prohibition of same-sex desire (Butler, Trouble 78-97; Salih 52-56) – Butler does her share in destabilizing supposedly fixed sexual identities. With her theories on “performativity” and “performance,” Butler even points out another way in which a “subversion” of sex/gender might be possible (Lloyd 205-7) – beyond her own deconstructionist academic musings. Rejecting terms connected with “construction” as too rigid and deterministic, Gender Trouble introduces the model of “performativity” to describe the workings of gender norms in everyday life (Butler, Trouble 11-12, 34). Instead of imagining gender identity as something that is “con- structed” and thus stable and fixed, Butler starts out from Beauvoir’s famous assump- tion that “On ne naît pas : on le devient”9 in Le deuxième sex (Beauvoir 285-6) and describes gender as something that is a “doing” rather than a natural “being,” with no essence “that preexists the deed” (Butler, Trouble 34). In order to completely annihilate notions of an ontological status of gender/sex, Gender Trouble defines gender as “performative” i.e. as something that only comes into existence through “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance” (45). The doctor defining a baby as either “boy” or “girl,” the 10-year-old “wannabe-princess” dressing up in pink,

9 Trans. “One is not born, but becomes a woman.”

11 the young male beer-drinking insensitive “brute” – by citing existing norms how to be “feminine” or “masculine,” we participate in creating seemingly fixed gender identities. In reaction to this concept, critics such as Elspeth Probyn accused Gender Trouble of participating in a “feel-good gender discourse,” by suggesting that “we can have any kind of gender we want” (Probyn 79). But Butler’s performative practices and discours- es by which we constantly are producing “men” and “women” are not really voluntaris- tic i.e. a matter of choice: As she elaborates in 1993, in the context of Bodies That Matter, “performativity” is “neither free play nor theatrical self-presentation; nor can it be simply equated with performance” (Butler, Bodies 94). Rather, “doing” gender has to be regarded as a “forcible citation” – as Salih describes it in her excellent introduction to Butler’s work (Salih 90). Nevertheless, subversive actions questioning the natural- ness of gender are possible according to Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter: In this context, Butler especially mentions “drag performances” as instances where the exaggerated re-citation of conventions regarding “how to be a woman” may reveal the imitative i.e. parodist nature of gender in general (Butler, Trouble 187-189; Lloyd 198- 207; Bublitz 70). To draw a short conclusion on the usefulness of Judith Butler’s theories about sex/gender and performativity for my study: Butler’s text is one decisively influenced by feminist theory, alluding to its most important thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir. Whereas other “queer theorists” like Foucault and Sedgwick already questioned the stability of sexual identities, Gender Trouble challenges existing notions about sexuality further: The model of a “natural” heterosexuality is revealed as dependent on the supposed naturalness of two opposites “men” and “women” – categories whose onto- logical, pre-discursive existence is completely rejected by Butler. Regarding female “cross-voyeurs,” the radical stance of Gender Trouble – defining gender as some kind of “regulatory fiction” producing the sexed body (Butler, Trouble 33) – will be the role model for my analysis of the debates about women writing/reading about gay men. By denying the existence of a “true nature” of female sexuality, the awareness of the performatively constituted of sex/gender will allow me to regard any kind of generalizing statement about “women” and “men” with caution. Equally important is Butler’s conception of the “heterosexual matrix” for my study, mainly because it emphasizes the interdependence of the categories of sex/gender with the “compulsory heterosexuality” existent in modern societies. As the desire of female “cross-voyeurs” is one that does not conform with the norm, notions about their “femininity” or “womanhood” are likely to be affected – something

12 that will be discussed in detail in the main part of this book. But while the theoretical framework of my study is set with this combination of queer theory with feminist theory, the methodology still needs to be discussed: Having collected a large body of primary sources discussing the phenomenon of “cross-voyeurism” in the U.S. academic context, a short subchapter on Foucauldian discourse analysis is needed in order to adequately apply this approach – especially since its interpretation varies widely within cultural studies and is in need of clarification (Mills, Discourse 7, 9).

2.3 Technologies of Power/Knowledge: Using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

“[A]ccording to Foucault’s analysis, civil society, scientific research, intellectual activity and personal life are not in fact free zones from which power has progressively retreated since the Enlightenment but colonized spaces into which it has steadily expanded, proliferated, and diffused itself.” (Halperin, Saint 19)

Thus, David Halperin summarizes Foucault’s notion that “power is everywhere” (Foucault, Will 93) – a concept which has been already mentioned in the discussion of The History of Sexuality. Instead of adapting older models of power – supposing a dichotomy between a “powerful” oppressor and the “powerless” oppressed – Foucault conceptualizes power not simply as something that can be possessed, but as something that is “employed and exercised through a netlike organization” (Foucault, Pow- er/Knowledge 98). Power according to the French philosopher and historian therefore is rather a “verb” than a “noun” (Mills, Foucault 35-6); informing relations and describing mechanisms that are “multiple,” can “have different forms” and “can be at play in family relations, or within an institution, or an administration” (Foucault, “Critical Theory” 38). Intent on deciphering and unraveling those complex “power relations,” Foucault uses a special methodology. In his historiographical approach, which he himself calls “archaeology” and later “genealogy” (Mills, Discourse 24-5), “discourse analysis” is applied in order to analyze the large quantity of primary sources – a methodology which will be explained in this subchapter. As early as 1969, in his Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault defines “discourse” or a “discursive formation” as “a group of statements,” made in a historically specific period of time and characterized by “certain rules” (Foucault, Archaeology 131, 155). In contrast to traditional historiography – which usually works with one text at length, considering its genesis as well as its author’s biography and intention – a Foucauldian discourse analysis thus concentrates on a large quantity of primary sources (Winko

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467). Regularly connected by a common topic or discipline, those primary texts out of a specific historical context are compared to one another in order to discover similarities and differences in the way they formulate and conceptualize knowledge (Olssen 12-3). As Foucault rejects the exaggerated status of “the author” in Western thought – theo- rized as someone whose life is inevitably linked to his work and vice versa – he focuses on the primary sources themselves instead of recounting their writer’s biography (Schößler 40; Foucault, “Author” 115). Especially in his inaugural lecture “The Order of Discourse” at the Collège de France in 1970, Foucault specifies what is important when dealing with “discourse,” now defined more precisely as a system of rules informing its statements and practices (Schößler 38). Out of the awareness that people of a certain time actually interpret the world in very similar ways, constantly repeating themselves even though they theoretically have “an infinite variety of sentences” at hand (Mills, Foucault 56-7), “The Order of Discourse” logically deduces the existence of certain “procedures” controlling these statements (Foucault, “Order” 52). Foucault differentiates between “systems of exclusion” – operating from the exterior – and “internal procedures” – working within the discourses themselves (56). As “internal procedures,” which regulate and categorize statements from the inside, Foucault names the “author,” the “academic discipline” and the “commentary,” which contributes to the circulation of an academic text (56-61). As “systems of exclusion” influencing discourses, the French philosopher mentions the “forbidden speech” i.e. taboos, the difference between “reason and madness,” and the “opposition between true and false” (52-55). While the “internal procedures” and the first two “systems of exclusion” might be pretty much self-explanatory, the third exclusionary mechanism, the “opposition between true and false” – also called “will to truth” (55) – is of greater importance for this study. By emphasizing that “truth” is historically changing and, more importantly, dependent on institutions such as universities, publishing houses and governmental education politics, Foucault underlines the relativity of knowledge and its dependency on and contribution to power structures – a topic especially important within his later writing. In his collection of essays called Power/Knowledge, published in 1980, the French theorist explores the complex relationship between power and knowledge and emphasizes that the processes, which lead to the establishment of certain facts as the “truth,” are part of a “struggle over power” (Mills, Foucault 58). His deeper insight in the fact that even academic and intellectual texts are (in)formed by power mechanisms as well – discrediting “Enlightenment-era values such as […]

14 truth and rationality” (Halperin, Saint 19) – is definitely useful for a work such as mine, concentrated on the U.S. academic discourses. In the spirit of Foucauldian discourse analysis, I will thus analyze the three different academic discourses about “cross- writing” novelists, Boys’ Love manga “fan girls”/writers and slash fiction writ- ers/readers with the awareness that there is no such thing as one definite “truth” – especially with regard to the much-debated question as to why female “cross-voyeurs” consume and produce gay fiction in the first place. Rather, I want to expose the rules and controlling “systems” at work within these academic and intellectual statements – mechanisms of power that change over time and differ from discourse to discourse. As intertextuality is a decisive feature of academic writing in general, the third of the “internal procedures” mentioned by Foucault in “The Order of Discourse” – the “commentary” – is especially useful as well. By focusing on the way in which some of the academic texts about “cross-voyeurs” are “recounted, repeated and varied”, whereas others “vanish as soon they have been pronounced” (Foucault, “Order” 56), the internal mechanisms of the specific academic discourses about women reading/writing about gay men will become obvious. And as the various works discussed in this paper belong to several different disciplines – from literary criticism to media studies – giving consideration to their particular “set of methods” and “theoretical horizon” is necessary as well (59-60). However, despite these subtleties, the thematic focus of this publication is on the portrayal of female (and, to some extent, male) sexuality, especially with regard to matters of heterosexism and phallocentrism. Regarding the compatibility of discourse analysis with queer theory and feminist theory, there is no cause for concern. Whereas Halperin underlines the fruitfulness of “Saint Foucault” for queer politics and studies in his Gay Hagiography (Halperin, Saint 3, 14), discourse analysis has equally proved to be quite applicable to feminist theory, although there were/are some objections. Especially critics of a postmodern feminism are generally more skeptical towards Foucault’s theories and methods – e.g. Lois McNay in Foucault and Feminism (McNay 6-8). Yet, as my point of reference is the poststructuralist branch of feminist theory anyway, an alliance between feminism and discourse analysis does not seem too problematic: After all, Judith Butler herself “recommends Foucauldian-style critical genealogies of the domination relations involved in the mechanisms of identity production as a way of bringing […] liminal identities into play” (Sawicki, “Identity” 301) – an instruction which will be followed in the main part of my study, starting with the analysis of scholarly accounts dealing with novels about gay men by “cross-writing” women.

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3. “Cross-Writing” Female Novelists under Scrutiny: Mary Renault & Others in the U.S. Academic Discourses (1969 – Today)

3.1 Gay Male Fiction by Women – An Inventory

“Much of the literature that has been discussed in connection with homosexuality has not been written by writers who would identify themselves as gay.” (Stephens 2)

Thus, Hugh Stephens discusses the definition of “gay male literature” in the introduc- tion to The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing (2011), and simultane- ously reveals one basic characteristic usually associated with this genre: the autobio- graphical component (Bergman 309). As Sneja Gunew mentions in Framing Marginality (1994) “minority writing” in general is often “characterized by offering the authority and authenticity of the marginal experience” (Gunew 53): Whereas Gunew makes this statement with feminist literature and ethnic minority writing in mind, the same can be said about gay and – something that becomes even more obvious when looking more closely at Stephens’ “Homosexuality and Literature: An Introduction.” One might deduce from the quotation cited above that Stephens wants to base his definition of “” on the same-sex content alone in order to circum- vent the “autobiographical prerequisite.” But this impression is deceptive: Stephens just refers to the Foucauldian realization that the identification with “homosexuality” is a modern phenomenon – meaning that writers of “homoerotic” literature such as Shake- speare or could definitely not be gay-identified – while still upholding the condi- tion that an author of “gay male literature” has to have personal experience with male same-sex desire. (Stephens 3-5) That such an restriction of the “gay canon” is problematic, becomes particularly evident when noticing the – not to be underestimated – number of women involved in the writing of male homosexual fiction. In French literature, it is especially Marguerite Yourcenar that springs to mind: With her novella Alexis – a story about a man leaving his wife in order to live out his homosexual tendencies – she celebrated her first literary success in 1929. And this is not her only work about same-sex desire between men: In Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), which is written in the form of testamentary letters from the Roman emperor to his successor Marcus Aurelius, the love relationship between Hadrian and a Bithynian youth called Antinuous forms an important part of the (Griffin 221-222; Kiebuzinski 160-1). But Yourcenar is by no means an exception. In Anglophone literature, there are plenty of female novelists in the 20th century writing

16 about gay men as well: Mary Renault constitutes an example of a British female author whose homoerotic novels were “enormously popular with the general public” in England and the U.S. of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, even “though they contained explicit and positive representations of same-sex love” (Bergman 311). Partly, this success might be attributed to something the gay liberationist scholar Roger Austen calls the “historical remove” in his groundbreaking study about the American homosexual novel, Playing the Game (Austen 91). Set in the antique world, literary works such as The Last of the Wine (1956), describing Athenian , and The Persian Boy (1972) – a novel about the love between and his Persian eunuch called Bagoas – may have been problematic for “middle-class novel readers” because of their historical and geographical distance to “real” homosexuality in the U.S., which was still considered to be an illness by the American Psychiatric Association in the 1950s (Ritter and Terndrup 29; Austen 91-2). Whereas the number of historical novels about same-sex love by female novelists might be attributed to the importance of female writers as writers of in the 20th century (Wallace 3-4), there are also many novels about “modern” male homosexuality by Anglophone women: Renault chooses a more contemporary setting in (1953), published in the U.S. in 1959, in which the injured soldier Laurie Odell comes to terms with his own homosexuality in a hospital in Britain during World War II (, Hellenism 30-1). The American fantasy author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, mostly remembered for her Darkover series (which also contains LGBT themes), equally wrote a novel about gay men in the middle of the 20th century (Smith 99-100): In The Catch Trap (1979), set in the circus milieu of the 1940s and 1950s, the trapeze artists of an aerial troupe, Mario Santelli and Tommy Zane, manage to build a healthy, stable love relationship, despite the difficulties stemming from living in a homophobic society (Tait 111). Above all, the popularity of some of these novels within gay American subculture is an especially valid argument for the inclusion of female writers into the “gay canon,” i.e. a re-definition of gay male literature emphasizing also the content, not only the sexual orientation of the author. Robert Drake’s definition of a “gay book […] as a book that addresses issues of same-sex love or a book written by an author who enjoys the same gender for sexual fulfillment and/or relief” therefore seems quite adequate (Haggerty, “Canon” 286-7). Renault’s in particular managed to gain a large following within the gay community, as her biographer David Sweetman emphasizes when he writes that “The Last of the Wine was a rite of passage, The Persian Boy a gift

17 for young male lovers. Gay bookshops in had prominent ‘Renault’ sections” (Sweetman 273). Equally famous among gay men was U.S. writer Patricia Nell Warren – scholar Eric Anderson, for example, names her as one of the influences that inspired him to write his own autobiography in his study In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity (2005) (E. Anderson xi). Her now mostly forgotten bestselling10 novel of the 1970s, The Front Runner (1974), has been influenced by the gay liberationist movement (Levin 265-6) and deals with discrimination against homosexuals in male-dominated sports by telling the story of a gay track coach falling in love with the young athlete Billy Sive. While there is also a sequel called Harlan’s Race (1994), Warren’s books do not only circle around sports, but gay male love always remains an important issue: Fancy Dancer (1976), for example, tells the story of the young priest Tom Meeker who comes to terms with his own homosexuality, thus problematizing the negative attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards same-sex desire (Ridinger 388-9). Other, more recent female novelists writing stories with homoerotic content might easily be named. ’s Chronicles (1976-2003) as well as Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain (1997) are examples that instantly spring to mind (Haggerty, “Rice” 5-18; Miller 50-56). But – for reasons of practicability – the following analysis will concentrate on Marguerite Yourcenar, Patricia Nell Warren, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mary Renault, i.e. on their portrayal in the U.S. academic papers and intellectual writing.11 With regard to the “autobiographical prerequisite” of gay male fiction – in gay stud- ies and beyond – it is not surprising that the sex and sexual orientation of those “cross- writing” women constitute an important subtext, which influences the interpretations of those gay-themed novels considerably. Using the method of Foucauldian discourse analysis, the scholarly accounts about this topic are going to be analyzed in this chapter. On the basis of Judith Butler’s theory about the performative nature of sex/gender, the academic explanations for the women’s affinity to male homosexuality will be evaluat- ed with special regard to the gender roles/conceptions of “women” re-cited in them. However, as the academic discourses about female “cross-writers” are partly influenced

10 In the journal American libraries, the Front Runner is listed as one of the “Best Sellers” in 1974. (“Best Sellers” 549) 11 As the role of the homosexual academic in the 1970s was closely connected to the gay liberationist movement, some contributions were published outside the academia, while still maintaining the academic standards (Seidman 120). The same can be said for feminist theorists and the corresponding movement. This is why this and the second part of this publication will also consider papers and books published outside of the academic context.

18 by the new perceptions of homosexuals – and the women associated with them – since the beginning of the gay liberationist movement in 1969, there will be a brief discussion of the new views on the pair “gay men and (heterosexual) women” emerging in the second half of the 20th century first – another development, which is in need of further research, as it has not been addressed sufficiently in academia, yet.

3.2 From Victims of “Misfortune” to “Fag Hags” and the “New Couple”: Speaking about (Heterosexual) Women and Gay Men since 1969

“A homosexual man […] has no right to marry. The wrong committed by a homosexual marrying is a double one: It is wrong to the mate, wrong to the children.” (Robinson 828)

In this way, the article “Who May and Who May Not Marry,” published in The Ameri- can Journal of Clinical Medicine in 1916, characterizes the relationship between heterosexual women and homosexual men – a depiction typical for the heteronormative discourses about this unusual “pair” before the 1960s and 1970s. Due to the low status of the male homosexual – who had been pathologized since works such as Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) by Richard von Krafft-Ebing (Hall 105) – heterosexual women married to them were preferably seen as passive victims of the attempt to build a “smokescreen” in order to appear heterosexual/“normal.” The best-case scenario for such a marriage was, according to this logic, to have it “happily dissolved” – as H. Senator describes it in Marriage and Diseases (1909) (Senator 393). If anything was considered, it is the negative attitude of homosexual men towards heterosexual women – e.g. in theoretical writings such as Sigmund Freud’s Infantile Genital Organization (1924), who parallels misogyny and homosexuality by claiming that they both would originate in castration anxiety/horror of the female genitalia (Jonte- Pace 53; Speirs 601-2). Karl Heinrich Ulrich, a German attorney, suggested another interpretation in the 19th century, declaring homosexuals to be “Urnings” – that means inverts, females trapped in a male body – a perspective that was equally influential in later studies (Hall 105), which claimed that there were similarities between women and gay men. A possible sexual attraction to (or even the platonic interest of “normal” females in) male homosexuals per se was unthinkable to most – particularly because of the imagi- nation of “healthy” female sexuality as passive and vaginal (Gerhard 32, 41). The homophile sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld is the exception to the rule with his text Die

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Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914),12 when he speaks about a certain “type” of heterosexual women who always tended to fall in love with homosexual (or very effeminate heterosexual) men (Hirschfeld 229-230). Yet, by contrasting this kind of behavior with “normalsexuelle[m] [Verhalten]” and by describing it as a “Mißges- chick” that only happens to “berühmten Schauspielerinnen und Künstlerinnen,” Hirsch- feld underlines the extraordinariness of this phenomenon, thus making it seem to be unimportant and rare (Hirschfeld 230). But with the beginning of the gay liberationist movement, new ways of seeing gay men and thus the women associated with them began to emerge. The Stonewall riots in 1969 – when one of the police raids of a gay bar in New York was protested and fought against – proved to be a turning point in this process (Bredbeck 380). Whereas the homophile movement, in the U.S. represented by the Mattachine Society since 1951, strove to achieve social acceptance of homosexuals through assimilation – by showing that gay citizens where “just the same as everyone else” – the dissatisfaction of many with this strategy manifested in this “rebellion” around the Stonewall Inn (Corber 446). In the aftermath of the event and inspired by the protest culture of the New Left in the late 1960s, the gay liberation movement formed, whose primary goal was a more radical one: Associations such as the Gay Liberation Front emerged in order to change the conservatism and heterosexism of society, instead of simply submitting to it (Jagose 30- 40). By propagating slogans like “Gay is Good” (Shelley 31) and by postulating general consciousness-raising with mottos such as “Out of the Closets, into the Streets” (Young 6), new perceptions of male (and female) homosexuality developed. Naturally, the “gay pride” movement also had consequences on how heterosexual women associated with homosexual men were portrayed. While some former medical articles and handbooks depicted the married, homosexual man as an intruder and impostor in the “sacred alliance,” now it was the women’s turn to be scrutinized and defamed as “straight infiltrators” of gay culture: Around 1970, a new “species” called the “fag hag” was “born” – a term developed in the male homosexual community that ambiguously oscillated between “Insult and Inclusion” since its first appearance (Moon 487, 493). Usually referring to heterosexual women sexually attracted to or simply interested in gay men or gay culture, the term was often used in a pejorative way, possessing two different negative connotations.

12 This text was translated into English in 1920.

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1) The “fag hag” as femme fatale In a critical reconsideration of a certain heterosexist view that circulated throughout the 19th and 20th century – namely that homosexual men should be “cured” by marrying a “normal” woman (Hodann 57) – “fag hag” was a term used against females who acted towards gay men in a sexually aggressive way. In his publication The Gay Mystique (1972) – a book dealing with the and Reality of Male Homosexuality, for which he received the Stonewall Award in 1972 – Peter Fisher thus describes a “fag hag” as a “woman [who] often operates under the assumption that the homosexual is gay only because he has not found the right woman” yet. This “fag hag” plans to “initiate [the gay man] into the glories of heterosexual sex” with “missionary zeal,” according to Fisher (Fisher 66) – an accusation obviously quite common at the beginning of the 1970s. A similar association of the “fag hag” with the negative stereotype of the femme fa- tale, can thus be found in Parker Tyler’s groundbreaking study about homosexu- ality in the movies, Screening the Sexes (1972), when the American scholar talks about Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). In this motion picture after a play by Ten- nessee Williams, Catherine, the female protagonist helps her gay brother seduce unwilling men by acting as a decoy: The “charade” ends in an act of cannibalism in which her brother dies, with the consequence of her becoming mad as a “vic- tim” of homosexuality. Tyler, however, criticizes this homophobic tendency of the movie by claiming that Catherine actively tried to associate with gay men as a “fag hag,” thus being responsible for her “fate” according to this logic (Tyler 316) – an argumentation that once again connects the “fag hag” to the archetype of the “evil seductress.”

2) The “fag hag” as sexually confused Another negative meaning of this term links it to a “confused” sexual orienta- tion; emphasizing the notion that being too interested in gay men as a woman is a “displacement activity” through which a confrontation with repressed, uncon- scious desires is avoided. In George Birimisa’s episodic play Georgie Porgie (1971), for example – a piece about a gay man’s self-hatred due to society’s homophobia – the main character accuses his wife, Grace, to be a “fag hag,” be- cause she is married to him and attracted to another “potential” homosexual, Tom Seymour. By associating this term with her alleged difficulty of being “with a real man” and by revealing her to be a “woman who really wants another woman,” while being “too frightened to admit” it, Georgie Porgie defines a “fag

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hag” as someone who is a closeted lesbian (Birimisa 87), i.e. as someone replac- ing her “real” desires. Other negative connotations of the term “fag hag” echo in Georgie’s reproach that Grace is too anxious to be with “real” i.e. heterosexual men: As Carol Warren’s sociological paper “Observing the Gay Community” (1972) elaborates, “[u]sual interpretations” were not only that the “fag hag” is a “latent homosexual,” but possible explanations for her behavior also included her depiction as an “asexual” person or as a female, who “is frightened of sexual relations with men” – all “explanations,” which implicitly suggest that a “fag hag” somehow has problems with her sexuality (C. Warren 152).

Nevertheless, the term “fag hag” did not only have a derogatory connotation, but also – at times – inclusionary character since its first appearance in the 1970s (Moon 494). It is thus no coincidence, that Carol Warren proposes the “fag hag disguise” as the perfect way for the female, heterosexual sociological researcher to actually infiltrate and observe gay male culture in a “Covert Research” operation (151-2). As an article in Magazine in 1973 shows, the term “fag hag” also slowly spread into mainstream American culture in the early 1970s: In order to criticize the actress Hermione Gingold for being too “campy” in Sondheim’s operetta A Little Night Music, John Simon thus snidely remarks in “Grimaces of a Winter’s Night” that Gingold continued to be “our leading fag hag, senior division” (Simon 80). While it is obvious that discourses about women associating with gay men multiplied in the 1970s, the discussion of strictly platonic friendships between these two parties did not necessarily have the same pejorative ring to it as the “fag hag” designation, but were theorized as positive and benefiting relationships instead. Fisher, for instance, talks about a “special rapport between homosexuals and women” in The Gay Mystique (Fisher 66). Even though he rejects the old “Urning”-stereotype according to which “[h]omosexuals are […] imitation women, expected to behave like women, share interests and emotions with them, and respond to men the way they do” (63), he names several reasons as to why gay men and heterosexuals of the opposite sex should get along just fine: As gay men, he argues, “have no real sexual interests” in women, they “probably do have a greater potential for understanding and sympathizing with them” (64). Meanwhile, the male heterosexual partners of these women would feel “no threat to their masculinity” and thus be able to allow contact without fear of being betrayed (64). Whereas Fisher’s argumentation is blatantly sexist – in neglecting the women’s point of view and in his inability to imagine a traditional friendship between a single

22 woman and a gay man without insinuating “fag hag tendencies” – new perspectives regarding such relationships developed during the next decade. The period around 1980 in particular constituted an important time span in this dis- course: In 1979, Rebecca Nahas published The New Couple; in 1980 John Malone’s Straight Women/Gay Men appeared. Both publications are sociological studies for which the material has been collected by interviewing gay men and women engaged in an emotional or sexual relationship with each other. Clearly influenced by the second wave feminist movement, both texts present a more nuanced perspective on the hetero- sexual women involved. This is particularly the case with Rebecca Nahas, who rejects the misogynist stereotype of the “fag hag”, as it portrays a woman interested in gay men as “a social renegade who cannot fit into the conventional scene” (Nahas 3). By introducing the possibility that a man who identifies as a homosexual, nevertheless might be able to have sexual intercourse with a woman – something also suggested by the Kinsey Report (5-6) – Nahas recognizes the existence of more complex emotional and sexual relationships between a “self-proclaimed gay […] and a woman who understands and accepts the man’s homosexuality” (11). Like the novelist in his documentary The Sexual Outlaw (1977), she sees the predicament for this “New Couple” in “the women’s conscious movement” out of which “a new figure, neither fag hag nor surrogate mother nor hostile competitor” emerged (Rechy 188). For such new feminists “seeking personal and professional equality with men,” Nahas argues, “a relationship with a gay man, not based on traditional male/female role divisions, may be an attractive option” (Nahas 212-3). John Malone’s Straight Women/Gay Men, in contrast, harkens back to notions of the early gay liberationist movement, when some circles wanted to include feminist ideas in the program, arguing that gay men were equally oppressed by patriarchy and constrained by gender roles, because of which they would not be seen as “real men” (Jagose 39). In a similar paralleling of the feminist and the gay liberationist movement, John Malone claims that “emancipated” women and male homosexuals constitute natural allies, as both are regarded as “twin threats to the family structure upon which American morality and the American economic system have long been predicated” (Malone 6). Like Nahas, John Malone notices that “sexual relationships between straight women and gay men […] are far more common than has generally been perceived” (7); but unlike her appraisal of the “New Couple,” he considers them to be “more problematic” (15). In academic and popular culture, it is John Malone’s perspective that has evidently survived throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Various television series and movies cele-

23 brate the gay man as a woman’s best friend in the 1990s, while implying an emotional instead of some sort of sexual connection. Will and Grace (1998-2006) – “the first successful network prime-time series to feature gay characters in a gay milieu” (Cooper 513) – thus tells the story of a close emotional yet completely asexual relationship between a heterosexual woman and a gay man (Castiglia and Reed 171, 179),13 and My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) as well as Sex and the City (1998-2004) are similar in this respect (Quimby 131).14 Some academic texts around 2000 still concentrate on this image of gay men as being perfect, sexually non-threatening, witty companions for the modern, stylish women as well: While scholar Scott Speirs considers this depiction of male homosexuals as a “stereotype” in Haggerty’s excellent encyclopedia Gay Histories and Cultures (2000) (Speirs 601), some studies in the field of neuroendocrinology try to “prove” this essentialist assumption by claiming a similarity between heterosexual women’s and gay men’s brain structures with dubious methods (Brookey 89-90). Thus, whereas the term “fag hag” has been rejected by academia for being “homophobic and misogynist” (Sedgwick, “Trust” 749; Van Leer 595) – and deservedly so! – its special connotation, i.e. women sexually desiring gay men, seems to have vanished as well. That “fag hags” – for the lack of a better term they will continue to be called this way – are mostly a “disruptive” and rarely considered existence in academic and popular texts becomes obvious when looking at the lack of research about this phenomenon. Carol ’s provocative essay “Beyond the Valley of the Fag Hags” in PoMoSexuals (1997) – a collection with the explicit goal of Challenging Assumption about Gender and Sexuality – is one of the few texts looking at this kind of sexual orientation (Queen 76-84). Against the background of these developments in the perceptions of heterosexual women interested in gay men in American culture since the 1970s, the academic discourse about female novelists writing about male homosexual relationships will be evaluated in the subsequent subchapters – with special consideration of the similarities and differences between those two discourses. Just as important as the theorization of the “new couple,” will be the way the relationship between self-identified lesbians and male homosexuals is perceived – a pairing that has traditionally been conceptualized in a very different way.

13 One exception to the rule – in which the friendship between gay men and heterosexual women in the series becomes definitely erotic – is the scene, in which the Karen, Grace’s friend gets aroused by the gay erotica written by her homosexual friend, Jack. But this is definitely the only moment in the series in which a queer (sexual) desire of the woman towards the gay man is represented (Quimby 129). 14 The comic “How to Be a Fabulous Fag Hag!” (2003) by Ellen Forney this now strictly platonic understanding of the relationship between “fag” and “hag” (Forney).

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Before 1969, a “connection” between lesbians and gay men was mainly considered with regard to a common “pathology” or “natural aberration” in medical and juridical texts – Karl Heinrich Ulrich and Carl Friedrich Westphal thus parallelized the male and female invert, “Urning” and “Uringin” as early as in the 1860s and 1870s (Sullivan 4-6, 10). Especially since Stonewall and the beginning of the gay liberationist movement – in which some lesbian women were equally important participants – both sexual minorities became “political allies” in their fight against heterosexism, even though women were clearly marginalized in the gay liberationist agenda (Jagose 44). Yet, different to the relationship between heterosexual women and gay men, the bonds between those two groups were clearly not interesting enough to be discussed in separate publications. Thus, the more complex characteristics of some gay-lesbian friendships or partnerships – the possibility of sexual interaction especially – have been completely disregarded. The provocative essay “Stroking My Inner Fag” by Jill Nagle – again published in PoMoSexuals (1997) – as well as Pat Califia’s “Gay Men, Lesbians and Sex: Doing It Together” (1983) are exceptions in so far, as they deal with S/M practices between lesbians and gay men, without conceptualizing them as “heterosexual” (Nagle 122-126; Califia 22-27). If and how the academic texts recognize the complexity of this “other couple,” when talking about “cross-writing” women who self-identify as lesbians, will be another important “focus point” of the ensuing analysis.

3.3 About the Three Ways to Conceptualize Your “Faghagging” Novelist: Interpreta- tions of “Cross-Writing” Women and Their Works in U.S. Academia

“The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs: The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire, the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.” (Barthes 221)

In his famous essay “The Death of the Author” (1967), Roland Barthes criticizes traditional literary criticism for its exaggerated consideration of the supposed intentions of the author and his/her biographical context, when interpreting a text – Foucault utters a similar opinion one year later in his article “What Is an Author” (1968) (Pease 113). Yet, as it has already been mentioned before, these poststructuralist proclamations had

25 relatively little impact on the academic discourses about women writing about gay men. As it will be shown in this chapter, the “author function” in gay male fiction has not only been an influential factor within intellectual writing and academic studies in the 1970s and 1980s influenced by the gay liberationist movement. Blatantly homophobic texts as well as papers more connected to ideas of the older homophile movements equally underline the fact that the novelist writing about gay men is female – an interpretational “move” that, for instance, provides a way to downplay or minimize the male homosexual content. Whereas these examples underline that it was politically necessary for seminal texts of gay and lesbian literature in the 1970s and 1980s to emphasize “personal experience” and “authenticity” in order to be taken seriously, the continuation of this tradition at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century is seen in a more critical light in this study. The occasional “bashing” of heterosexual academics, having made important contri- butions to the field of queer theory and gay and lesbian studies, is quite dubious. Eve Sedgwick, for instance – who was married to Hal Sedgwick, but continued to publish academic writings about gay male fiction such as Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) – has been criticized for “cashing in on the trendiness of postmodernism” and queer theory, while not “knowing” about the “oppression” and “limits” that homosexuals face in everyday life (Walters 9-11). Notorious in particular became David van Leer’s review of Between Men entitled “The Beast of the Closet: Homosociality and the Pathology of Manhood” (1989), in which he accused Sedgwick of homophobia – an incrimination based primarily on Sedgwick’s “position as an outsider” (Van Leer 587; Edwards 138). Similarly disturbing are the “misinterpreta- tions” of and “discriminations” against women’s novels about gay men in some aca- demic and intellectual interpretations influenced by the gay liberationist movement, which are going to be analyzed in the second subchapter. And whereas the importance of the fact that – in the chosen examples – the novelist is not a gay man for the academ- ic interpretations of the texts since 1969 will be discussed in the first two points, another perspective in research addresses the female sex of the writers in more detail. Just like Nahas and Malone, feminist interpretations of the novels since the 1970s problematize heterosexual and homosexual women’s interest in gay men – which makes altogether “Three Ways to Conceptualize Your ‘Faghagging’ novelist” in the U.S. academia, which are going to be discussed in the following subchapters.

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3.3.1 The (Heterosexual) Woman as Empathic Outsider and Mediator – Mary Renault and Patricia Nell Warren in Traditional Literary Criticism around 1970

“He put his arm with his cloak about my shoulders. ‘Was it for this,’ he said, ‘that we made our offering to the god?’ I said, ‘Yes, Lysis.’ We stood by the stream, for it was too cold and wet to sit, and I told him. The first birds woke, and the face of the opposite mountain showed grey through the haze; the dark thorn- three wept with dew. At last the sun shone red on the peak, and we heard the others waking; so we went back to rub down our horses and make ready for the day.” (Renault, Wine 150-1)

As this passage indicates, The Last of the Wine (1956) – a novel by Mary Renault about the relationship between the runner Alexias and the pankratiast (a Greek martial artist) Lysis, set in – presents intimacy and sexual contact between the two young male lovers with such subtlety and delicacy that one barely notices that it’s there at all. It was probably not only because of this merely “implied” homosexuality, but also because of the marketing campaigns of Renault’s U.S. publishers – who underlined the “serious historical and literary qualities” of her works (Sweetman 184-5) – that Mary Renault became the object of several “traditional” academic studies around 1970. Peter Wolfe’s Mary Renault in 1969 constitutes the “first critical study,” giving a general overview about the oeuvre of the writer so far. Further analyses concentrate on particular aspects of her work, such as Mary Roby, who focuses on The Significance of Sport (1971), or Bernard Dick, who writes about The Hellenism of Mary Renault (1974) (Wolfe; Dick, Hellenism xviii; Roby). Most noteworthy about these studies is the way they deal with the topic of male homosexuality in Renault’s novels: Interestingly, Roby’s analysis – which is of ques- tionable quality anyway, as it involves the dubious attempt to uncover the Significance of Sport in Ancient Greece through the interpretation of Renault’s historical novels – simply ignores it. While examining “the ‘inside’ accounts of [Athenian] athletic contests” in The Last of the Wine, for instance, Roby disregards the sexual and emotion- al closeness between the two “lover[s]” (Renault, Wine 122), Alexias and Lysis, by reducing them to mere “friends.” The only cryptic concession to the existence of same- sex desire in the novel is made, when she acknowledges a special “depth of their friendship” (Roby 3, 55-56). Whereas the heterosexist tendencies in Roby’s case are quite obvious, Wolfe’s and Dick’s treatment of the topic of “men-loving men” in Renault’s novels is more complex, but no less homophobic. While Roby’s The Signifi- cance of Sport in Ancient Greece mentions the fact that Renault is a woman quite casually – by quoting Orville Prescott’s sexist appraisal of her writing to be “astonish- ingly masculine” (and thus of high quality) in the New York Times – Wolfe and Dick

27 emphasize the novelist’s status as a “male impersonator” on purpose (Roby 3; Hugh 15). By underlining Renault’s supposed position as an (heterosexual) outsider – that the writer, who was staying in South Africa since 1948, was in a long-term homosexual relationship with Julie Muillard was obviously not a well-known piece of information (Sweetman 151) – both Mary Renault and The Hellenism of Renault make light of the central topic of same-sex desire in her work.15 Published in the year of the “Stonewall Rebellion,” but obviously completely unaffected by it, Peter Wolfe’s Mary Renault thus only speaks reluctantly about Renault’s favorite “subject of homosexuality” in the chapter “Beyond Pamphleteering,” as overlooking it would be “evasive” (Wolfe 30). “Fortunately” he finds that he can deal with this “awkward” issue quickly, as the explanation of the existence of gay men in Renault’s novels could “be easily com- pressed into a survey of the sexual context of the 1930s” (30). By explaining the existence of male (and sometimes also female) homosexual characters in her work with the atmosphere of “social permissiveness” and “sexual freedom” in the England of the 1930s – in which Renault grew up – Wolfe reduces the pervasive topic of same-sex desire to a mere chance element that is only there because of a particular historical context – whose codes and morals he discredits as “desperate” and contributing to “the decline in childbirth and suicide increase” (30-31). Thus, while accusing other scholars of homophobia – claiming that Renault has been neglected in literary studies because of a “prevailing critical animus against homosexual fiction and historical fiction” – Wolfe himself handles the homosexual16 elements of her novels in a problematic way, despite his “lip services” against discrimination (Wolfe 188). Similarly, Bernard Dick makes quite an effort to reveal the “ridiculousness” of the reluctance of the American publishers to print Renault’s novel The Charioteer before 1957, because of its too explicit depictions of male homosexuality in a contemporary setting. By referring to Leslie Fiedler’s famous, provocative essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’n, Huck Honey!” (1949) – in which the literary critic claims that the fear of “overt homosexuality” in American culture can be explained by its childish wish to preserve the myth of chaste male camaraderie and love – Dick criticizes such examples

15 The “misreading” of Renault’s novels by Peter Wolfe – because of his ignorance/lack of knowledge about Mary Renault’s lesbian tendencies – has been noticed before, for example in Zilboorg’s interesting biography (Zilboorg 138). 16 As Wolfe and other scholars use the term “homosexuality” with reference to the topic of male same-sex desire in Renault’s works about antiquity, I will use it as well, for the sake of convenience. With regard to the insights of Foucault, it should nevertheless be evident that the modern concept of “homosexuality” did not exist before the nineteenth century – something which Renault equally tries to consider in her novels.

28 of U.S. homophobia (Dick, Hellenism 30-31; Fiedler, “Huck” 27). Yet, like Wolfe, the author would be well-advised to “remove the beam from his own eye,” as Dick equally portrays Renault as a heterosexual outsider in order to discriminate against homosexu- als. On the one hand, Dick refers to lesbians and gay men with the problematic, anach- ronistic, medical term “invert” – used in the 19th century by sexologists to describe same-sex desiring patients (Dick, Hellenism 1; Hall 105). On the other hand, he seeks to explain Renault’s interest in male and female homosexuality – the latter can be found especially in her early novels such as The Promise of Love (1939) – by mobilizing the Western female stereotype of the sympathetic, caring and affectionate woman (Ashcraft and Belgrave 6). Accordingly, he claims that Renault’s “compassion for victims of parochial oppression” is the main reason for her wish to write about this topic (Dick, Hellenism 2). Regarding the novels playing in antiquity, The Hellenism of Mary Renault furthermore “justifies” the existence of male same-sex desire in these works by adding that it would be “historically incomplete” and a sign of “Victorian prudery” if she had omitted “ancient Greece’s sexual ethic” (120). Just like Peter Wolfe – who declares that the implicit goal of The Charioteer is to awaken “our moral responsibility to an urgent social problem,” i.e. to homosexuality (Wolfe 121) – Dick thus creates an artificial dichotomy between a heterosexual “us” (Renault and the scholar) and a homosexual “them” (the “poor souls” described in the novels). Even the “regular” and “understanding” reader is conceptualized as “straight;” it is the gay male recipient that is prone to fatal misinterpretations. Regarding the ambiguous ending of The Charioteer, for instance, The Hellenism of Mary Renault criticizes the Homosexual Handbook’s interpretation of it as “happy” with the homo- phobic remark that “only a homosexual dreaming of a permanent liaison with his lover” would get to the same conclusion as this “worthless” publication (Dick, Hellenism 36). In a similar problematic fashion, Bernard Dick generalizes “homosexual fiction” actually written by gay men as “maudlin.” Citing works such as John Rechy’s City of Night (1963), he criticizes those autobiographically motivated novels for their realism and presents the female writer as a positive counter-image (118-119). Partially, the fact that Renault becomes some kind of “role model” for these slightly homophobic examples of American literary criticism around 1970 can be explained by the perspectives on homosexuality that are present in her novels. Whereas Renault herself rejected to label herself as a “lesbian” in her personal life and distrusted the gay liberationist movement of the 1970s (Sweetman 273; Zilboorg xiii), the element of “social protest” against homophobia in her novels is equally “muted”. Especially The

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Charioteer – a “coming out narrative” about a gay man trying to cope with his sexual orientation in the war-time England of the 1940s – portrays gay subculture, with its “queens” and “campy” behavior, as “deeply pathological,” while celebrating the “balanced type” of homosexual men, who integrate easily into “normal” society (Summers 156, 162-164). The ideal gay males in The Charioteer accept heterosexist society, act like “civilized people” without making “public exhibitions” of themselves and without starting “to expect a medal” for it – as Ralph, the protagonist Laurie’s beau formulates it quite eloquently (Renault, Charioteer 200). And it is this particular attitude – resembling writings of the homophile movement – that is assumed in the works of literary criticism around 1970 too, when Bernard Dick, as has already been mentioned, rejects some of the “wilder” prose of homosexual writers for its sexual explicitness and shocking reality (Dick, Hellenism 118-119). Yet, the problematic tendency to regard female novelists writing about gay men as better-suited to “present the gay experience to individuals who might otherwise have little direct knowledge of homosexuality” (Steuernagel 125) can also be observed in academic texts about other novels more influenced by the notion of “gay pride”: Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner (1974) is – in contrast to Renault’s works – a novel clearly written out of the ideas of the gay liberationist movement and as such a “self- conscious defense of homosexuality and homosexual love” (Bergman 312; Levin 265- 266). Celebrating the public “coming out” and “gay pride” of Billy Sive, the young athlete (P. Warren 157), and giving a provocative, detailed picture about gay bars, “Baths” and “hustler[s]” as well (57), Warren’s novel is more anchored in the American gay culture of the 1970s than Renault’s works. But the mainstream success of The Front Runner once again leads literary critics like Trudy Steuernagel in 1986 to celebrate the female novelist’s particular suitability to mediate between gay and heterosexual culture, thus making homosexuality “more accessible and familiar to her audience” (Steuernagel 132): By equally comparing Warren’s novel – that would finally reveal that gay men were “not some form of incomprehensible species” but “ordinary people” (132) – to John Rechy’s impossibly “strange” “exotica,” Steuernagel downplays the benefits of actual autobiographically motivated fiction in a dubious way (129). Similarly, the advertising campaigns around the publication of The Front Runner praised Patricia Nell Warren as giving a “compas- sionate insight of a viciously persecuted minority” (P. Warren I), thus conceptualizing the “gulf” between heterosexuality and homosexuality as a gap that can only be over- come by an outsider in the form of an heterosexual woman, too.

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Fortunately, this widespread discrimination against autobiographically motivated gay male fiction has come to an end with the success of lesbian and gay studies in the U.S. academia – something that occurred especially during the late 1980s (Minton 1). Nevertheless, the portrayal of the “cross-writing” woman in academia still occasionally depends on a gender stereotype visible in some of the texts discussed in this chapter. The cliché of the asexual female, who is only interested in male gayness because of her sympathetic and compassionate nature, can be found, for instance, in Rob Latham’s analysis of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles: In Consuming Youth (2002), Latham recognizes the sexual quality of the relationship between Rice’s male “Yuppie vam- pire[s] such as Lestat and Louis, and – quite accurately – emphasizes that these novels often take on the character of “boldly libidinous dreams” and “homoerotic of sexual and artificial paradises” (Latham 96, 98). Yet, he insists in his biographical interpretation that Anne Rice’s interest in male homosexuality is purely platonic and developed out of a “strong feeling of kinship” with gay men in her school days, who exhibited “courage in the face of prejudice” (98). But, while problematic generalizations about the suitability of heterosexual female novelists as ideal “mediators” of male homosexuality have luckily vanished, another way of exploiting the “outsider” status of them has not. In the following chapter, those interpretations questioning the “authentici- ty” of novels by “cross-writing” women – common especially in the early days of gay academic and intellectual writing – will be discussed in more detail.

3.3.2 About “Fag Hags” on “Power Trips” and Their Fake “Ersatz Works” – Bradley & Others in the Works of Gay Male Intellectuals and Academics since the 1970s

“Although monogamous ‘till death do us part’ novels do exist, they are a minority. The romance of Jack Hardigan and Fred Trusteau in Wingmen (Case) and Mario Santelli and Tommy Zane in The Catch Trap (Bradley) provides an interesting alternative and some counterbalance to the one night stand dilemma. Historical fiction and gothic novels, such as The Persian Boy (Renault), Gaywick (Virga), and My Brother’s Image (Hamilton) are more apt to pursue ‘happily ever after’ themes than fiction which has a more contemporary setting.”(Dombrowski 59)

With these words, Mark Dombrowski praises the idealized gay romance/historical novel in his paper about “Stereotyping in Gay Fiction” (1986) as an important contribution to the genre of “homosexual fiction” – a statement that is exceptional for two reasons. On the one hand, Dombrowski’s critique that a “subculture characterized by its joie de vivre” should have alternatives to a “literature [that] emphasizes mortality” (Dom-

31 browski 61) turns against many gay intellectuals of that time who – like Roger Austen in Playing the Game (1977) – argue that “real” gay fiction has to deal with the grim reality of the discrimination against homosexuals and their status as “outcasts” (Austen 217). On the other hand, Dombrowski’s system of categorization is quite extraordinary, too. When he describes both Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner and ’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as examples for the “majority of gay fiction” – because both novels describe relationships ended by a tragic death – it becomes evident that he cares about neither gender nor sexual orientation of the writer (Dombrowski 60). By revealing in “Stereotyping in Gay Fiction” that slightly kitschy, idealized “happily- ever-after” novels about gay men were written not only by Mary Renault and Marion Zimmer Bradley, but also by gay male writers such as Ensan Case, Vincent Virga or Mark Hamilton (59), Dombrowski thus implicitly also contests a view common in gay intellectual and academic texts of the 1970s and 1980s: that women – in their status as “outsiders” – somehow would write completely different literary texts about male homosexuality than gay men, i.e. “ersatz works.” In Playing the Game (1977) Roger Austen, for instance, emphasizes the inadequacy of the “secondhand” experience and the impossibility to reach “authenticity” when portraying a homosexual relationship as a female author. The romantic elements in The Front Runner – with the novel “turning into an idealized love story when [Warren] […] sends coach and miler out in the greenwood” – are as such depicted as a logical conse- quence of Warren’s gender, because of which she could only depict her subject realisti- cally “as long as [it] […] is track” (Austen 66, 216). Similarly, declares in his introduction to his famous anthology A True Likeness: Lesbian and Gay Writing Today (1980) that books by heterosexual women are generally less “insightful and […] conceptually challenging” than homosexual novels by gay men (Picano xiv). And in his linguistic analysis of language in gay subculture, “Lesbians, gay men and their lan- guages” (1981), Joseph Hayes cites Patricia Nell Warren’s Front Runner as the homo- sexual novel that has no ethnographical value at all: The similarity to actual “gay language”17 would be barely noticeable – a contrast comparable to the difference between the “Holinshed’s Chronicles” and “Shakespeare’s history plays” (Hayes 36). But whereas this kind of gender-conscious criticism is somehow an understandable reaction to the – already mentioned – phenomenon that most literary scholars in the 1970s and 1980s practice the other extreme by only reviewing gay novels by female

17 Joseph Hayes, like many other scholars since the 1980s, assumes that there is a specific language that is used in gay subculture – called “Gayspeak” – including, for instance, secret codes in order to be able talk about gay sex/relationships in public (Kulick 259).

32 writers positively (See also: Austen 222), its continuing existence in academia today is problematic. James Levin’s description of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Catch Trap (1979) in his analysis of The Gay Novel in America (1991) as a “melodrama” or a series of “staged events” is one of the many examples that recall this stereotype of the artificiali- ty/“missing” authenticity of the female-written male homosexual novel (Levin 296), suggesting a female “intent to glamorize” (Bentley 131). Yet, in order to return to the originally analyzed time span, gay intellectual and aca- demic criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s did not limit itself to criticize the content of the mentioned works. In an interesting parallel to the “fag hag” discourses, the “cross-writing” women were scrutinized on a more personal level as well. The Ameri- can critic and playwright Eric Bentley describes Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy (1972) and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) in an interview in 1979 thus as negative examples for women being on “a power trip,” who “[m]adly” want to identify “themselves with male power” (Bentley 131). And Dennis Altman praises Warren, Bradley and Renault as examples for a “positive” gay writing in his ground- breaking work about The Homosexualization of America (1982), but simultaneously claims that by “writing positively about homosexual men,” those writers would show that they had problems with lesbianism (Altman, Homosexualization 13, 159) – an accusation that strangely resembles the argument that the “fag hag” really only is a “closeted” lesbian. That prejudices against the (heterosexual) female novelist of homosexual fiction – based on the impression that they somehow “do not belong” in this genre – are still common in contemporary cultural studies is indicated in the paper “About the Univer- sality of Brokeback Mountain” (2007) written by the American scholar D.A. Miller. When talking about the short story Brokeback Mountain (1997) by Annie Proulx and the writer’s voyeuristic view, Miller claims it to be a female writer’s duty to stage the “woman’s complex desiring relation to male homosexuality” in her work, thus again applying different, gender-specific standards (Miller 52-3, 56). Even more obviously, James Keller argues in his study about Anne Rice and Sexual Politics (2000) that the “authenticity” of the depictions of male homosexuality in Anne Rice’s novels is not only undermined by the narrative conclusions, but especially by “the conventionality of her [personal] life” (J. Keller 1). But even though he is right in pointing out the exist- ence of a “destructive […] stereotype about the gay community” in the Vampire Chronicles, it is problematic to simply lead back these tendencies to Anne Rice being married and “family oriented” (2, 8, 11-29).

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Summing up, it remains to say that the treatment of the female writers of gay fiction in the intellectual and academic writing connected to gay studies somehow shows interest- ing parallels to the ambiguity of the concept of the “fag hag.” Whereas the references to Bradley and Warren in overviews such as Levin’s The Gay Novel in America (1991) (Levin 265-278, 296-298), and entries concerning Mary Renault or Marguerite Yourcenar in encyclopedias like Haggerty’s Gay Histories and Cultures (2000) symbolize a certain degree of “inclusion” of female writers in the history of “gay fiction” (Abraham, “Renault” 742; Black 964), talking about those women has never- theless often been accompanied by a pejorative tone – especially in the seminal works of gay intellectuals and academics in the 1970s and the early 1980s. Interestingly, most of the early analyses based their hypothesis about the “falseness” of female-written gay fiction on the sexual orientation of those women, which they implicitly assumed to be “heterosexual.” But luckily, this heterosexist assumption was annihilated when lesbian studies began to take an interest in Marguerite Yourcenar and Mary Renault in the 1990s. Which additional way to conceptualize a “faghagging” novelist emerged with this development will be discussed in the following subchapter.

3.3.3 The Feminist and the Lesbian “Factor”: Interpreting Mary Renault & Margue- rite Yourcenar from a Third Point of View in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s

„An extremely successful and popular woman novelist whose career perfectly demonstrates the woman writer’s deep need to affirm the patriarchal structure is Mary Renault. Like other women writers, but more openly and to a wider audience, she reveals to be an author fascinated with male wholeness, unable to conceive of power as passing from males in fiction as it has not passed in life.” (Heilbrun 231)

Thus, the American scholar Carolyn Heilbrun insinuates that Mary Renault’s intensive focus on male homosexuality is antifeminist in a paper published in 1976, called “Axiothea’s Grief” – a reference to one of Plato’s first female disciples, also depicted in Renault’s novel The Mask of (1966). Using the example of Renault’s version of Axiothea, who experiences womanhood as a disadvantage and wants to be reborn as a man in the next life, Heilbrun accuses the British writer of misogyny by concentrating on an “all-male world of armies, where women are raped and murdered” in works about antiquity such as Fire from Heaven (1969) and The Persian Boy (1972) (Heilbrun 234). While praising the writer’s earliest novels depicting lesbianism such as Promise of Love (1939), and The Middle Mist (1943) as “frank and courageous[ly],” Renault’s works about men-loving men such as The Charioteer are dismissed as inferior in “Axiothea’s

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Grief” because of their refusal to deal with feminist issues and their alleged tendencies to reduce women to minor, “annoying” “Nazi”-like characters (231-2). And Heilbrun is not the only one arguing from such a perspective when dealing with female “cross- writers”. Pierre Horns reports in his study about Marguerite Yourcenar (1985) that her concentration on male homosexuality has led many critics to impute “contempt for women” to Yourcenar, “citing the conspicuous absence of heroines [in her work] as proof to their conclusions” (Horn 96). Similarly, Linda Leith’s article in the academic journal Studies (1980) describes it as a “curious fact” and thus poten- tially suspicious that Marion Zimmer Bradley seems to be “far happier to deal with a man’s homo- or than a woman’s” in her Darkover series (since 1958) (Leith 30). As these examples show, many scholars in the 1970s and 1980s belonging to second- wave feminist movement evidently are reluctant to accept women wanting to write about gay men, insinuating misogynist tendencies. Obviously influenced by “gynocen- tric” feminism – a school of thought developing since the early 1970s that regards positive self-identification as a female and an acknowledgement of patriarchy as the basis for women to free themselves from male oppression (Nicholson 147-151) – those critics cannot stomach the possibility of female writers identifying with gay men without simultaneously being antifeminist. One is reminded of Hélène Cixous’ famous essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), undoubtedly of great influence in this context, in which the French feminist demands that “woman must write woman. And man, man” (Cixous 877). However, the apparent difficulty in academia to understand that such a preference for male characters is not necessarily misogynic unfortunately lingered on, even after the 1980s. In the article concerning “Patricia Nell Warren” in Sharon Malinowski’s lexicon of Gay and Lesbian Literature (1994), Robert Ridinger desperately tries to combine Warren’s “own feminism” with her concentration on male homosexuality in novels such as The Front Runner (1974) (Ridinger 388). His “solu- tion” is not really convincing, or at least questionable. By exaggerating the status of the “militant lesbian” athlete Betsy – in the novel a minor character only important because she becomes a surrogate mother pregnant with Billy Sive’s child (P. Warren 135, 294) – Ridinger claims that this “strong and capable character” is one determining the entire storyline of the novel. This interpretation of Betty as an “outgrowth of [Warren’s] […] questions regarding her identity as a woman and her awareness of people’s sexual needs” (Ridinger 388) is clearly based on a refusal to accept a female writer identifying with the male protagonists.

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It was even more “difficult” to explain Renault and Yourcenar’s interest in gay men, when critics began to connect their sexual identities as same-sex desiring women with their favorite subject in the 1990s. Lesbians – as implied in the last chapter – had not been frequently seen in any emotional or sexual connection to heterosexual or homo- sexual men. Similar to theories about male homosexuality, a lack of sexual interest in the other sex was often associated with hatred and disgust in medical publications since the 19th century: The Swiss scientist Auguste Forel thus explains that merely the “idea of sexual intercourse with men is repugnant” to the “pure female invert” in his study The Sexual Question (1908) (Forel 254). Additionally, the partially close connection of the lesbian struggle against heterosexism to the feminist movement since 1970 (Jagose 47) reinforced the stereotype of the men-hating homosexual female. John Malone argues thus in his Straight Women/Gay Men (1980) that it would be impossible for lesbian and straight men to have a similar connection as the “New Couple,” because of those women being “[d]oubly radicalized by both the women’s movement and the gay rights movement” and often “twice as angry” (Malone 4). Whereas this comment also refers to the participation of lesbian women in the gay liberationist movement, the new “lesbian feminism” – starting with the intervention by the group called “Lavender Menace”/“Radicalesbians” on a feminist congress in 1970 – consciously put itself more explicitly in opposition to gay and heterosexual men by arguing for the “primacy of women relating to women” (Radicalesbians 157; Jagose 44-58). With this gynocentric concentration on “essential” feminine qualities in lesbian feminism, lesbianism was even occasionally celebrated as the “ideal” realization of feminist goals, i.e. independ- ence from male supremacy (Sullivan 33-34). Because of this association of female same-sex desire with an oppositional stance towards the other gender, it is not surprising that the interpretations of Renault and Yourcenar’s works in the 1990s in lesbian studies often rely on a feminist perspective, from which the choice of gay men as protagonists is viewed in a very particular fashion. Due to the difficulty to even think of lesbians interested in gay male relationships – whether emotional or sexual – the analysis of male homosexuality in those novels is accompanied by a curious search for explanations. Julie Abraham’s study Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (1996) has been particularly influential in this context: “Unwilling to abandon biography,” Abraham does not concentrate on novels dealing with female same-sex desire, but on “modern lesbian writing,” i.e. literature written by homosexual women (Abraham, Necessary xiii, xvii). Noticing that lesbians in the 20th century before Stonewall did not necessarily write

36 about female couples, nor any fixed subject or form, she tries to explain the reluctance of some female homosexuals to write “lesbian novels” by arguing that those usually were “formula fictions based on the heterosexual ” at that time (xiii, xix). Concern- ing Mary Renault, Abraham reads The Middle Mist (1943), a lesbian novel about the relationship between Leo and Helen, a writer and a nurse, as an “explanation” for Renault’s abandonment of female characters. By identifying Renault with the butch novelist of Western Cowboy stories, Leo, Are Girls Necessary? implies that the ending of Middle Mist – with Leo leaving the “femme”-like Helen for the man Joe – is a symbol for the British novelist’s refusal to further write “lesbian literature”: Whereas the “feminine-masculine,” lesbian pair is abandoned, the “masculine-masculine” couple is preferred. And while neither of them is regarded as “heterosexual” by Abraham, Middle Mist’s use of “heterosexual plots” such as the disruption of the lesbian union by a man is indicated as a reason for Renault’s “own escape from contemporary literary realism to a masculine world” (61-64). Are Girls Necessary? argues that The Charioteer would show Renault’s dislike for the gay subculture and her aversion against a modern understanding of homosexuality in the 20th century as a “group identity” (64-66), which is why antiquity as a setting in her various historical novels about Greek culture is interpreted as a logical conclusion, as this time had offered the author a “social form for homosexual relationships.” This avoidance of issues of homophobia and “otherness” associated with same-sex desire in the 20th century, according to Abraham, unfortunately had to result in an abandonment of lesbian relationships for Renault, as the “only significant relationships within this history could be male” (68). As “to be female is an indispensable disqualification” in antiquity, “Mary Renault could not inhabit her own fictional universe,” Julie Abraham laments – an interpretation that, like Heilbrun, implicitly argues from a feminist perspective. Despite her initial goal of wanting to accept other forms of lesbian writing, Are Girls Necessary? thus resembles the “soft” reproaches made by critics such as Anne F. Garréta – who mourns the invisibility of the female homosexual in French literature written by lesbian women, citing Marguerite Yourcenar as one of those writers “mask- ing” desire in “hermeneutic puzzles” (Garréta 208). Influenced by Julie Abraham’s perspective on lesbian novelists, Gay Wachman de- velops an additional, slightly more positive way of interpreting the “switch to the other sex/gender” from a feminist perspective in Lesbian Empire (2001). Out of a “con- sciousness of deviance from the sexual roles […] prescribed for women,” female “cross-writing,” for which Renault’s and Yourcenar’s historical novels are cited as “the

37 most obvious examples,” would also constitute an attempt to escape the “sex/gender system” by using male characters (Wachman 1-2, 37, 39) – an argumentation that reminds of Kevin Kopelson’s interpretation of Renault’s and Yourcenar’s works in Love’s Litany (1994). By claiming that both writers were “utopian egalitarians” that wanted to “liberate sexual love […] from erotic domination,” Kopelson describes the male “Achilles/Patroclus”-like heroic companionships in Renault’s and Yourcenar’s historical novels as the only way for those women to imagine equal relationships – a dream of egalitarian love, which at least in Yourcenar’s case, would be “part of an extensive antipatriarchal project” (Kopelson 104-5, 116). Whereas Abraham’s and Wachman’s interpretations perceive the “obsession” of the lesbian novelists with men as something done out of “necessity,” other analyses question the “masculinity” of the fictional characters in order to be able to reconcile the gender and sexual orientation of Renault and Yourcenar with their “subjects.” Roger Austen suspects in Playing the Game that Renault “has quite probably used the Double Albert Strategy (i.e. transforming two lesbians into two male characters) in some of her novels,” and thus claims that characters like Lysis and Alexias were “originally” women in the writers’ mind (Austen 92). In a more elaborate fashion, Ruth Hoberman argues in her paper “Masking the Phallus” (1996/1997) that – while concentrating on male characters – Renault and Yourcenar would “queer” sex and gender in their novels in a way that characters and “bodies resist easy categorization as female or male” (Hober- man, “Phallus” 277-278, 292; Hoberman, Classicism 73, 74, 88).18 Bagoas, the eunuch in Persian Boy (1972), who is castrated at the age of ten and since then keeps “the shape of a boy” his entire life (Renault, Persian 11), is cited as a prime example, in which the physical and psychical “genital ambiguity” of Renault’s dramatis personae would reach its “height” (Hoberman, Classicism 86). Likewise, Caroline Zilboorg argues that Renault shows an unusual “awareness of gender and its performative dimension” in her oeuvre, with Bagoas’ sexuality being “impossible to determine” and Laurie from The Charioteer having an “ambiguously gendered name” (Zilboorg xii, 106, 224). And whereas such stylizations of lesbian “cross-writers” to foremothers of Judith Butler and queer theory indicate that those studies about Renault, Yourcenar and the others are up-to-date with the most recent theoretical trends, there is still a problematic adherence to the concept of a “fixed” sexual and gendered identity that becomes evident within these texts: The reluctance to even consider the fact in the 1990s that those

18 Hoberman’s article was first published in the Twentieth Century Literary Journal in 1996, and then integrated into her book Gendering Classicism (1997).

38 homosexual women are indeed writing stories about gay men and interested in them per se is a symbol for this neglect of the “queerer possibilities” of “cross-writing” female novelists in academic studies – a tendency that will be discussed in the following conclusion to this first part of my study.

3.4 Heresies, Girlfags, and “Faghagging” Novelists – A Conclusion Regarding the “Do’s and Don’ts” of the Academic Discourse(s) about Renault & Other Cross- Writers

“Faghagging is a complex subject with potential for a lot of research as well as a potential for overgen- eralization and misunderstandings. Faghagging is not new and has appeared in some women’s writing. Maureen Duffy, in The Microcosm, described a women first becoming aware of her lesbianism by feeling strong fascination for two men who were, it was explained to her, homosexuals. In the well-known novels of Mary Renault and more recently in those of Patricia Nell Warren, the faghagging element is excep- tionally clear. The empathy for gay men that Elizabeth A. Lynn expresses in her science fiction novel A Different Light is well matched by her awareness of women’s issues; this is not the case with all women who write sympathetically about gay men […].” (Decarnin, “Faghagging”10)

In the introduction to her “Interviews with Five Faghagging Women” published 1981 in the feminist magazine Heresies, Camilla Decarnin links the term “faghagging” to some of the female writers writing about gay men, who were discussed in the first part of this work – and she does this in a way that can be regarded as quite exemplary for the discourse about those “cross-writing” women in U.S. academia. By naming “empathy for gay men,” an “awareness of women’s issues” and male homosexuality as a “meta- phor” for lesbianism as possible reasons for the existence of “faghagging” novelists, Decarnin practically sums up the three, positively connoted basic “explanations” common in U.S. academia for this occurrence (10). However, whereas Decarnin’s concise words are proof of her profound insight in this matter, her journalistic piece is equally a prime example for the “taboos” and “exclusionary mechanisms” inherent in every statement of the academic discourse about female “cross-writing” novelists. By using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I have shown in this chapter that there are indeed certain “patterns” of interpretation that are constantly repeated, when talking about those women in U.S. scholarly accounts – tendencies, which occur in “Interviews with Five Faghagging Women” as well. One of the most persistent preconceptions in academia certainly is the belief that the female works about male homosexuality “differ” in some way from gay fiction by gay men. By exaggerating the importance of the “author” – one of the “principles of classifications” in discourses named by Foucault (Foucault, “Order” 56-58) – scholars have based their interpretation on the writer’s

39 gender and sexual orientation when writing about “faghagging” women since 1969. Influenced by the 19th century-based conviction that “homosexual” and “heterosexual” people are of a different “species,” an “in-authenticity” of Renault and other cross- writers’ works has been assumed by many gay intellectuals, resulting in negative critiques, whereas homophobic literary scholars often viewed this “distance” from “actual” gay men as a positive feature. However, as especially the academic interpreta- tions of lesbian women writing about gay men show, the gender difference has been another equally important factor in this case. Writing about two male characters as a woman has often been interpreted as misogynist, anti-feminist or “glorifying/falsifying” – if it is occasionally viewed positively, another female “ersatz” identification figure for the writer is named, or the “femaleness” of the gay men is underlined. Whereas such analyzes are somehow “explainable” in the 1970s or 1980s – when an essentialist view on gender differences as well as on the heterosexual/homosexual binary prevailed – their continuation nowadays is definitely problematic. By completely neglecting the insights of queer theory in general and Judith Butler in particular, the persistence of certain “prejudices” against Renault & other cross-writers in this regard actually contributes to a proliferation of stereotypes about “men” and “women” as well as a consolidation of the dominant sexual norms. If Judith Butler defines “performativi- ty” as a “sustained set of acts” that creates the impression of “an internal essence of gender” and sexual identity (Butler, “Preface” xv) the scholarly accounts about “faghagging” novelists definitely fall in that category. In their citation of the norms conceptualizing male/female and heterosexual/homosexual as polar opposites, they are constantly reproducing the status of the “cross-writing” woman as a genuine “outsider” – a portrayal that can easily lead to a return of the negative and potentially misogynist “fag hag” stereotypes. While the importance of the “author function” in existent analyses of Renault’s, Yourcenar’s, Bradley’s and Warren’s novels is a sign for the fact that female “cross- writers” somehow are perceived as a “disturbance,” which has to be discussed in academia; the omission of some “other” possible interpretations of this phenomenon provides further insight in the “heterosexual matrix” and the gender stereotypes inform- ing these discourse. The stark contrast between the statements of the five interviewees and Decarnin’s analysis in Heresies is a vivid illustration of the reluctance of intellectu- al and academic texts to consider more “deviant” perspectives. In their answers to Decarnin’s questions, the “test subjects” thus willingly tell the interviewer about their reasons as to why they consider themselves as “faghagging women” and how they

40 define their relationship to gay men. Whereas already mentioned “explanations” such as the stereotype that gay men were more understanding towards women because they would not view them “as an actual or potential sex object” and were more sensitive to “machismo” occur (Decarnin, “Faghagging” 10), there are also some testimonies of the “fag hags,” which offer new perspectives. Lacey, a lesbian thus reports of her participa- tion in gay sex acts such as “fisting;” while Lee, a self-proclaimed “butch ,” and Solo, a heterosexual woman, report about their desire to actually “be” or “look like” a gay man (13-4). Yet, Decarnin interprets those statements in a way that “unqueers” Lacey’s and Lee’s confessions, in her answer “to the question of why some women are primarily attracted to gay men.” By claiming that the “basis for the erotization of gay men by women” is American “sexist culture,” which would deny women “men’s valued position,” she reduces the “fag hag”-phenomenon to a side-effect of patriarchy. Thus, Decarnin denies the complexity of Lacey’s and Lee’s longing to “become” a gay man, as she equals it with the feminist goal to “to be valued as men are valued, while retain- ing a wish to be erotic with men” (10). As I have shown in the analysis of the academic texts, the tendency to perceive the interest in gay men as a woman as some sort of “replacement activity” is not singular to “Interviews with Five Faghagging Women.” Quite often, the “cross-writing” women’s possible attraction to and identification with “gay masculinity” as such is not considered as a valid interpretation per se: The “heterosexual woman” in gay academic and intellectual writing, who allegedly “mystifies” gay relationships, or the “homosexual feminist” in lesbian studies, who uses two male versions of herself to defy patriarchy, are perfect examples for the predominant neglect of the “queer” female desire for/identification with homosexual males. Thus, whereas the novels by Renault, Yourcenar, Bradley and Warren are quite often “included” in the canon of gay litera- ture, the gender and sexual orientation of their characters become “necessities” or “symbols” for conscious or unconscious heterosexual or homosexual, i.e. “normal” desires, as soon as the novelist as a “cross-writing” woman is considered. So far, the academic discourse has definitely been “ruled” by an inability to imagine a sexuality that is not only determined by the “gender of [one’s] object-choice” – a dilemma that is part of our problematic, general tendency to “think” about sex and gender in terms of binary oppositions, which has been criticized by Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick, Closet 35). Homosexual/heterosexual women who like gay male sex per se/identify with gay men as such are seldom conceptualized as valid “explanations” for the desire to read/write about male homosexuality.

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But there are also exceptions in the more recent theorizing about the overall phenome- non of female “cross-voyeurs” that offer new perspectives on “cross-writing” novelists. In his paper about Boys’ Love manga, “Hidden in Straight Sight” (2010), the German scholar Uli Meyer introduces the concept of the “girlfag” not only to the discourse about Japanese comics, but also to the one about Renault and her fellow cross-writers (Meyer 251). A “girlfag” is, according to Meyer, a person strongly identifying “with and even as a gay man, while still maintaining a female identity.” The difference between a “female-to-gay-male ” and a “girlfag” thus can be defined in the “degree” of the identification with male homosexuals (245). By introducing this new “explanation” of “cross-writing” women into the academic discourse, Meyer actually takes the “gay masculinity” in those texts seriously, when talking about the relationship of the female writers to it. That this more complex and “queering” perspective appeared only recently is quite telling in a way and says a lot about the status of “female masculinity” in contemporary American/Western culture. After lesbian feminists criticized and ridiculed “butch- femme culture” in the 1970s, conceptions of “male-identified women” such as “butch dykes” have been re-established in intellectual and academic discourses as a legitimate, sexual identity after the beginning of the “sex wars” in 1980 (Breyette 133). However, the celebration of such “female masculinity” and female-to-male as forms of gender subversion in publications by Judith Halberstam and others (Halberstam, Masculinity 1) in the 1990s apparently did not immediately change their status as “stigmatized” or “exotic” (xi) – something that can also be perceived in the reluctance of critics to regard “cross-writing” novelists as male-identified. Wishing to be/becoming another gender is a concept that is difficult to accept in general in a “gender-specific world,” as Stephen Whittle has argued in his article “Gender Fucking or Fucking Gender,” in which he looks at transvestism and transsexuality (Whittle 117-119). Similarly to these phenomena, female “cross-voyeurism” has theoretically the potential to question the identity categories queer theory tries to deconstruct, as some of its subjects do not only envision themselves as another gender, but as another sexual identity as well – a “queer”/“queering” concept that has not been sufficiently theorized, yet. Luckily, as Meyer notes, this aversion to think about those more “deviant” identities and desires with regard to “cross-writing” novelists is slowly changing (Meyer 249): “Unusual” successful novelists such as Poppy Z. Brite – famous for “emphatically queer” and very sexually explicit gay male horror stories such as Lost Souls (1992) or

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Drawing Blood (1993) (Holmes 181) – recently have come “out of their closet,” speaking publicly about those “tabooed” dimensions of female “cross-voyeurism.” In the essay “Enough Rope,” first published in the anthology Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity (1998), the female-born, “cisgendered” writer Poppy Z. Brite speaks in length about his identity as a gay man with a woman’s body (Brite).19 And while it might be equally problematic to reject those “other” explanations for “cross- writing” novelists or to declare every female writer of gay male novels to be a “girlfag” or a female-to-gay-male transsexual, a new dimension of female “cross-voyeurism” has become more accessible with Meyer’s essay. If and how it affects the interpretations of gay male fiction by women in U.S. academia has yet to be determined. Another characteristic of the debates around Renault & her fellow cross-writers is equally interesting: Whereas the “author” is quite important in the discourses about “faghagging novelists” and their works, the reader is seldom considered at all. – the writer of the famous, gay-themed and groundbreaking (1948) – is one of the few critics who asks how books such as The Persian Boy could find favor with “those ladies who buy hardcover novels” (Dick, “Novelist” 869): Regarding slash fiction, however, it is mainly the female “cross-reader” academia focuses upon – an interesting difference, which will be discussed in the subsequent part of study.

19 Since 2010, Poppy Z. Brite participates in a gender reassignment program.

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4. Female “Cross-Readers”: Talking about “Textual Poachers” and Slash Fiction in American Fan Fiction Studies since the 1980s

4.1 Snape and Harry Sitting in a Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G: Defining the Genre of Slash Fiction

“Snape didn't open his eyes, but a delicate shudder ran through his body. His lips moved slowly against the pad of Harry's finger. ‘I...’ ‘Just a kiss,’ Harry whispered, his voice going hoarse as he named his desire. ‘We've done that much already, haven't we?’ He leaned in and brushed his lips lightly over Snape's forehead, and they both shuddered this time. ‘It – it can't hurt anything...’ A soft kiss on the cheek. ‘Just one. And then... if you like... I'll go. I'll –.’” (Telanu)

Thus begins the forbidden and juicy love affair between the 16-year-old wizard Harry Potter, student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and his strict and mysterious Potion teacher – a relationship, which has to kept a secret not only from the old headmaster Albus Dumbledore, but from Harry’s close friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley as well. However, if you are afraid to have missed something in Joanne K. Rowling’s , you can rest assured: The passage quoted above is merely part of a fan fiction novel named “A Wizard Song,” which was written by Telanu. Published on the Internet in 2003 and part of the Tea Series – seven intercon- nected novellas about Harry and Snape – “A Wizard Song” takes Rowling’s Harry Potter books until The Goblet of Fire (2000) as a basis and spins its own tale about two “enemies” falling in love with each other. Rated NC-17 for its explicit depiction of gay sex (Telanu), the novel is not only very popular on the Web – with the Tea Series being the reason for many fans to support the Harry/Snape pairing (Snarry_reader) – it is also a typical example of the fan fiction genre called “slash fiction,” which is going to be introduced in this subchapter. While “fan fiction” regularly is defined as referring to “fan-written stories based on fictional worlds and characters borrowed from popular culture” in academic literature (Steenhuyse 1), its “beginnings” are disputed. If writings are categorized as fan fiction solely on the basis of their intertextual references to another text, one might as well argue that the genre emerged “several millennia ago,” including recent examples of “high literature” such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) – an absurdist play in which Tom Stoppard tells the story of the two courtiers from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who are killed in the original work (Derecho 62). It is more common in academia nowadays, however, to associate fan fiction with the emergence of “fan

44 culture” in the 20th century. Thus, whereas some – like Sarah Hale – regard the “fan- nish” societies in the 1920s around Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Jane Austen, and the “literature” inspired by them as the earliest instances of fan fiction; most scholars determine Star Trek “fan culture” of the late 1960s as the beginning of “media fandom” – i.e. “fan culture” closely connected to modern technologies and media (Sindhuber 18). First aired in 1966, the original science fiction TV series Star Trek managed to gain an avid, comparatively large “fan base” very fast, among which it reached cult status – despite its limited popularity among a wider audience. The letter campaign of 1967, by which fans managed to prevent the show’s cancellation planned by NBC after its second season, is a vivid proof of this community’s dedication (Geraghty 3-4). Since 1972, Star Trek conventions offered possibilities to meet up with other fans. Additionally, Star Trek fan , i.e. amateur fan magazines, became popular within the circle of devotees – a development that is hardly surprising, as zines were an established practice within in general since the 1930s (Verba 1; Warner 175-180). While the first Star Trek zines– starting with Spockanalia (1967- 1970) in – contained stories and poems, which the fan community today would describe as “genfic” or “mild het,” i.e. fan fiction in the Star Trek universe with either an emphasis on the “science fiction”/“adventure” aspect or a (hetero-)sexual, romantic plot (Verba 1- 19), the situation changed in the early 1970s. Intrigued by the close friendship between the bold and handsome Captain James T. Kirk and his first officer, the human/Vulcan hybrid Spock, some (mostly female) fans began to fantasize about a closer, homoerotic connection between those two main characters of the TV series. And while the first Star Trek stories depicting Kirk and Spock in a homosexual relationship – such as Diane Marchant’s “A Fragment Out of Time” (1974), published in Grup III – appeared in “regular” zines (Verba 19), separate fan magazines for this new “subgenre” of Star Trek fan fiction emerged with its growing popularity around 1976/77 (Lamb and Veith 237). Called “K/S” zines – to mark their difference from “K&S” zines, which emphasized the friendship between Kirk and Spock (Verba 23) – publications like Companion (1978) or Thrust (1978) featured poems, artwork, and short stories about the “new couple” (Sinclair). Soon, other television series characters such as Starsky and Hutch (1975-1979), Bodie and Doyle from the British TV show The Professionals (1977-1983) and Simon & Simon (1981- 1989) became involved in homosexual relationships in stories of mostly American, but also British provenience, too (Jenkins, Poachers 188, 201): The popularity of slash

45 fiction20 began to spread within fan culture – a “success story” which continues to this day. Whereas this subgenre of fan fiction – with narrative conventions such as the “first time stories” – certainly is influenced by the “romance novel” with its focus on emo- tions and often informed by pornographic elements (Driscoll 79), it is difficult to define slash fiction more precisely, because of its “complexity” and “variety” (Penley, “Brownian” 137). Especially since the rise of the Internet starting in the early 1990s, slash fiction – like fan fiction in general – has developed and grown decisively as a result of the huge improvement regarding its access and distribution (Sandvoss 23). Instead of selling printed fan zines at conventions and by mail order, writers can now publish their stories on huge Internet archives such as fanfiction.net or adultfanfic- tion.net (Jones, “Cult” 80). Other aspects of slash fiction, such as pictures of the two male characters in compromising poses – formerly part of zine culture as illustrations to particular stories or sold as artworks at conventions (Jenkins, Poachers 47; Russ, “Love” 81) – find their forums in the World Wide Web as well, for instance on sites like yaoi.y-gallery.net.21 In general, “face-to-face” communication in fan culture has been replaced by more anonymous discussions in the blogosphere, on social media platforms like livejournal.com (Busse and Hellekson 13-15). This may have resulted in a loss of “personal touch,” but has proved to be stimulating and inspiring in other ways: Role Playing Games (RPG) with male characters engaged in a homosexual relationship are new forms of “slashy” entertainment, in which several writers gather to create a slash story together (Lackner, Lucas, and Reid 197, 200-201). Another form of slash fiction that has prospered with the rise of the Internet is Real Person Slash, i.e. fiction that uses celebrities such as The Beatles band members John Lennon and Paul McCart- ney as “fodder” for gay fantasies (Scodari 54) – although this kind of “fanfic” is not allowed on some websites because of its violation of human rights/its invasion of privacy. Similar to the gay novels written by “cross-writing” women such as Mary Renault discussed in the last chapters, slash fiction has been authored by a majority of female

20 The “slash” in “slash fiction” refers to the virgule (/) connecting the K and S in “K/S”. It has become common practice to use the forward slash for fan fiction stories in order to indicate male same-sex content such as in “Harry/Snape” or “Frodo/Sam” fan fiction. 21 Penley also describes a pre-Internet slash fiction practice called “making song tapes” in her study, which consisted of producing self-made fan videos (at home, with two video recorders and an audio cassette deck). These “tapes” naturally put the homoerotic moments between the “slashed” characters in the original TV series together and were shown in video contests at slash conventions (Penley, “Browni- an”145). An equivalent to this practice nowadays can be found in YouTube videos such as Ari- el333Lindt’s “Harry Potter: The End of War – Harry/Snape SLASH DH Tribute,” which work in a similar way (Ariel333Lindt, “War”).

46 fans since its beginnings (Jones, “Cult” 80) – which is why it can equally be regarded as an example of female “cross-voyeurism.” In contrast to Warren, Yourcenar and other cross-writing novelists, however, slash fiction – like fan fiction in general – is written on a non-profit basis and usually amateur work that has not “passed” the editorial office of a regular publishing company. The fan zines of the past, and even more the web archives of the present have contributed with their relatively “low barrier of entry” to huge quality differences within slash fiction (Jenkins, Poachers 158). Especially because of their dubious legal status as copyright infringements, more elaborate slash stories based on popular TV series such as the X-Files (1993-2002) – whose characters are owned by their respective creators – were/are seldom published “professionally” and benefit from cyberspace’s challenge to traditional notions of property (Consalvo 76). An exception might be the only recently established subgenre of “original slash fic- tion,” i.e. m/m romance short stories and novels not based on existing fictional charac- ters and universes. Claiming an adherence to the “fannish” conventions of slash fiction and mostly published on Internet forums such as fictionpress.com or livejournal.com first, slash fiction writers occasionally even manage to get publishing companies interested in their works – like Megan Derr, who writes with Less Than Three Press nowadays. By being basically female novelists writing “gay fiction,” those writers blur the boundaries between the “cross-writing” women discussed in the last chapter and the m/m fan fiction writers. These partial intersections between gay (romance) novels and slash fiction, however, have not been noticed within academia so far. How women associated with slash fiction are perceived in fan studies and what differences and similarities exist between their portrayal in academia since 1985 and the depiction of “cross-writing” novelists such as Mary Renault will be discussed in the subsequent analysis.

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4.2 A Fateful Encounter: Feminist Theory and Media Studies Meet Slash Fiction – The Beginnings of an Academic Debate (1985-1992)

“The history of fan fiction studies, for the most part, is a history of attempting to understand the underlying motivations of why (mostly) women write fan fiction and, in particular, slash.” (Busse and Hellekson 17)

In their short, concise introduction to their excellent anthology Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), American scholars Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson define “fan fiction studies” as an academic field strongly emphasizing the “strangeness” of female “cross-voyeurism” by constantly searching for explanations for women’s interest in gay men. And it is indeed striking how important slash fiction usually is within overall analyses of fan culture such as Henry Jenkins’ seminal Textual Poachers (1992) or Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women (1992) – given that it is merely one of many subgenres of fan fiction (Bacon-Smith 228-281; Jenkins, Poachers 190-227). Rarely have there been academic works dedicated to “other,” neglected genres like the “” stories, i.e. narratives that introduce a “perfect,” female idealized alter ego of the writer into the respective fictional environment (Kustritz, “Romance” 380). Similarly, Sara Gwenllian Jones’ “Histories, Fictions, and : Warrior Princess” (2000) is one of the few papers dealing with “,” i.e. slash fiction with lesbian relationships instead of gay male ones, which especially became popular within Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Xena (1995-2001) fandom in the new millennium (Jones, “Xena” 415; Sindhuber 14). In contrast to the rather sporadic and isolated comments about “cross-writing” novel- ists within literary criticism, the discussions about female “cross-voyeurism” in slash fiction thus dominate a whole field of studies. Consequently, the academic debates about women reading and writing homoerotic fan fiction about male fictional characters are a lot more complex than the ones about Renault, Yourcenar, and Warren. In order to adequately understand their dynamic, characteristics and development, it is therefore necessary to analyze the academic discourse about slash fiction carefully: As Joanna Russ, Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith on the one hand and Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith on the other hand already established the main paradigms still influential in fan fiction studies today (Busse and Hellekson 17-18), a closer look at the beginnings in the 1980s and early 1990s seems to be especially beneficial – before coming to a more profound comparison between “cross-writing” novelists and slash writers/readers as depicted in academia in the subsequent subchapters.

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4.2.1 “Pornography by Women for Women, with Love”: The Pornography Wars, Joanna Russ, Patricia Frazer Lamb, Diana Veith, and K/S Fiction in the 1980s

“Yes, there is pornography written 100% by women for a 100% female readership.” (Russ, “Love” 79)

Thus, the American feminist academic and science fiction writer Joanna Russ celebrates K/S fiction in her essay with the – quite telling – title “Pornography by Women for Women, with Love,” published 1985 in her collection of feminist essays Magic Mom- mas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts – one of the first scholarly accounts about m/m fan fiction ever. Her blatant delight regarding slash fiction is only understandable when taking the historical context of her essay into account, i.e. the “anti- pornography/anti-anti-pornography fight,” which Joanna Russ herself also briefly mentions in this text (Russ, “Love” 79). As Busse and Hellekson remark in their short and sketchy overview of the history of fan fiction studies (Busse and Hellekson 17), the beginnings of research about slash fiction in general – including Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith’s paper “Romantic Myth, Transcendence and Star Trek Zines” (1986) – were highly influenced by this inner-feminist debate, also called the “Pornography Wars,” which is why it will be considered in detail in this subchapter. While seeming to “erupt out of nowhere in the early 1980s,” the “Pornography Wars” actually can be linked to important “milestones” of feminist politics of the 1970s, as Nan Hunter points out in her attempt at “Contextualizing the Sexuality Debates” (Hunter 15). In the 1970s, the fight against sexual violence against women became an important point within the agenda of U.S. feminism: In 1971, various anti-rape organi- zations, rape crisis centers and hotlines were installed with the goal to disarm the “myth” of “no means yes” (18). The first “Take Back the Night” protest was organized in Pittsburgh in 1977 to create an awareness of crimes against women and to proclaim the wish for “safe” nights, free from sexual assault and abuse (20). And in 1976, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) was formed in Los Angeles – an organiza- tion out of which the group Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media (WAVPM) arose on a conference in San Francisco in the same year. As the emergence of WAVPM indicates, the “relationship between [sexual] fantasy and behavior,” and pornography and sexual crimes became important topics for femi- nists since the late 1970s (Vance xxiv): WAVPM organized events such as the confer- ence “Feminist Perspectives on Pornography” with a march of five thousand women in favor of the abolition of pornography, and a new group called Women Against Pornog- raphy (WAP) formed 1978 in New York with similar, anti-pornography goals (Hunter

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21). Not only male erotica, but also sex practices such as S/M were increasingly criticized within this logic as an “acting out” of “the roles of dominance and submission the [patriarchic] system forces on us [i.e. women]” (Leidholdt 130). Butch/femme- culture as well as lesbian S/M stood especially in the center of these debates. As Lynda Hart explains, the scorching criticism of lesbian sexual/social practices in particular can be attributed to the conceptualization of lesbianism as the ultimate realization of feminism. Naturally, some defenders of lesbian sex as a stronghold of feminism’s “ethical high ground” were especially “disappointed” in the face of the existence of sadistic/masochistic “dykes” (Hart and Dale 348), which were seen as an embodiment of patriarchal oppression. Unsurprisingly, the anti-pornography stance of feminist groups such as WAP soon met with resistance within feminism: The lesbian S/M group Samois defended consen- sual sadomasochism with publications such as What Color Is Your Handkerchief (1979) or Coming to Power (1981) (Hunter 21-22). Similarly, the Barnard Conference in 1982 focused on issues of “Pleasure and Danger” with regard to sexuality and tried to provide another, anti-anti-pornography stance, by excluding radical anti-pornography feminists from this event – a policy that resulted in bitter protests from WAP (Vance xxi; Hunter 22). The contributions made on the Barnard Conference – collected in the anthology Pleasure and Danger by Carole Vance – propagated another, more differentiated view on pornography and controversial practices like S/M by defending “women’s sexual self-determination” as a value (Gerhard 193). On the peak of the “Pornography Wars” in 1984, anti-pornography feminists – also occasionally called “cultural feminists” – tried to enforce an anti-pornography legislation under the leadership of Andrea Dworkin and Catherina MacKinnon in Minneapolis and Indianapolis (Hunter 16; Strossen 1103- 1113). Although they were supported by the Political Right, the Supreme Court ruled the envisioned law to be unconstitutional in 1986 – eventually also influenced by the anti-censorship protests, which were led by anti-anti-pornography feminists, who organized in groups such as FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce) (Hunter 22- 24; Duggan 6). Joanna Russ’ collection of Feminist essays, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts (1985) – all six of them originally published before in small- circulation magazines such as 13th Moon or Sinister Wisdom – offers a variety of contradictory and complex commentaries on these debates. As Jeanne Cortiel explains in her comprehensive introduction Demand My Writing (1999), Joanna Russ’ feminist position as a science fiction writer and theorist is constantly changing within her oeuvre

50 and not easy to “categorize.” With reference to Julia Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time” (1981), Cortiel emphasizes this point by assigning the three phases of (second wave) feminism, which Kristeva distinguishes, to different periods of Joanna Russ’ fictional work (Cortiel 7-8): While Russ’ early writings – propagating women’s agency in narratives such as “Bluestocking” (1967) – echo the materialistic feminist theory according to Demand My Writing (7, 17-23); her texts of the 1970s, like the novel The Two of Them (1978), are strongly influenced by essentialist feminist thinkers (8, 99- 121); later works of the 1980s “anticipate the poststructuralisms of the late ’80s and ’90s” (9, 210-229). Bearing Cortiel’s insight in mind that Joanna Russ’ fictional work occasionally is difficult to position with regard to the various “branches” feminist theory, it comes as no surprise that Magic Mommas, Trembling, Sisters, Puritans & Perverts reflects this inner ambiguity on a theoretical/political basis. It is thus no coincidence that Marilyn Frye describes Russ’ collection as being “anti-pornography” in her article in the Women’s Review of Books (1985) (Frye 5), while Gubar assigns it “to the other side,” i.e. in this case, to “libertarian-feminist” publications such as Varda Burstyn’s Women Against Censorship (Gubar 728). Russ herself sharply criticizes activists of the anti- pornography movement in an essay included in Magic Mommas, “Being Against Pornography,” for unjustly condemning lesbian S/M, while she questions the claim that showing women as “sexual objects” in pornography is necessarily a bad thing (Russ, “Pornography” 60-63). Nevertheless, in her – obviously much later written – introduc- tion to this collection of feminist essays, she suddenly maintains that “[t]here is no such thing in a male-dominant culture as ‘acceptable pornography,’ no matter what rules it follows, and forgetting that can only lead us into endless snarls – as in my own essays that follow!” (Russ, Introduction 13). By expanding her skeptical gaze to “mass literature, television, and movies” which equally would be encouraging violence against women, Joanna Russ even radicalizes the criticism of the anti-pornography movement (12). What remains spared by her “value judgment […] about […] commercial sexual fantasy sold largely to heterosexual men” (11), however, is something Russ calls “sexual fantasy,” or “Pornography for Women, by Women, with Love” (Russ, “Love” 79) – a category to which slash fiction clearly belongs, which becomes quite clear in her essay about homoerotic Star Trek fan texts: In an interesting parallel to other radical anti-pornography activists (Halberstam, “Sex” 332-336), the science fiction writer and feminist essayist differentiates between a feminist, morally superior, anti-hierarchical

51 and tender/romantic erotica and a phallic, sexist, male, hierarchical and potentially violent pornography. Within the logic of Russ’ particular essay about slash fiction, male pornography and sexuality is “violent” and “sexist” and thus naturally represented by S/M such as Punished (1980) and The Sadistic Sisters of Saxony (1978) (Russ, “Love” 91-2), whereas K/S fiction is described as “female” through and through. In an essentialist argumentation – that neglects the possibility of male readers/writers of Star Trek slash – Joanna Russ celebrates K/S as the novel, ultimate “female sexual fantasy […] full of tenderness and empathy and commitment and nurturance,” in which women have “sexualized [their] […] female situation and training, and made out of the restrictions of the patriarchy [their] […] own sexual cues” (85-6). Similar to Camilla Decarnin’s interview about “Faghagging Women” in Heresies (1981), which she also quotes – one of the few intersections between the discourses about “cross-writing” novelists and slash fiction – Russ perceives the choice of two “men” as erotic objects as a peculiarity caused by male dominance/women’s oppression. Decarnin’s argument that a “fag hag” “recognizes in the a socio-erotic position she herself would like to hold, as the recognized peer and the lover of a male, a position impossible for women in sexist culture to secure” (Decarnin; “Faghagging” 10) is adopted by Russ in a very specific way: Her conviction that the female creators of fan fiction about Star Trek write about a homosexual instead of a heterosexual relationship, because the friendship between Kirk and Spock – full of “real love and real respect” in the TV series – is “more noble” than any of “Kirk’s absolutely pro forma affairs with various women,” echoes Decarnin’s hypothesis of a “fag hag’s” yearning for gender equality (Russ, “Love” 84). Like the discourse(s) about lesbian/feminist “cross-writers,” Joanna Russ equally erases the “fag” out of the “fag hag,” by referring to the – now unfortunately irretrievable – lecture by Diana Veith and Patricia Frazer Lamb on the 1982 Conference on Fantasy, “The Romantic Myth and Transcendence: A Feminist Interpretation of the Kirk/Spock Bond” (99). By declaring that Kirk and Spock are not “really” gay men in K/S fiction, but “only nominally male” – a metaphor for “love and sex as women want them, whether with a man or with another woman” – the female slash fan’s/writer’s attraction to “male homosexuality” is neglected/declared to be a “substitution mechanism” once again (83). In their paper in Donald Palumbo’s anthology Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature (1986), “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith amplify this point of view. Based on the insight of feminist science fiction studies that the “alien” as the “other” symbolizes the “woman,”

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Veith and Frazer argue that Spock is no “real man,” but essentially “androgynous” in the zine stories. While he certainly would have “masculine qualities” such as his Vulcanian rationality, there would simultaneously be many “feminine” characteristics of Spock like his strict monogamy and – above all – his “cyclical” “reproductive biology” connected to the Vulcanian phenomenon of pon farr22 (Lamb and Veith 242-3; Russ, “Love” 83). Likewise, Kirk would not only be blessed with “macho-characteristics” such as being an “undisputed leader,” “initiator of action” and “sexually ready at all times,” but would equally show “other” qualities at times by being “physically weaker,” “emotional” and “femininely ‘beautiful’” (Lamb and Veith 243). By presenting the ideal relationship between Kirk and Spock in slash fiction – the rejection of gender roles, the notion of them “completing each other” as well as their status as “soul mates” (242) – as the answer to Freud’s question as to “what women want,” Lamb and Veith go down the path of feminist essentialism as well (236). With reference to Carol Gilligan’s gynocentric publication In a Different Voice (1982) – in which the feminist psychologist makes “generalizing” statements about a supposedly common “female” psychological development – Lamb and Veith portray K/S fiction as proof of Gilligan’s hypothesis that women “see a world […] that coheres through human connection rather than through systems of rules” (Gilligan 29; Lamb and Veith 244). Similar to this, Joanna Russ equally depicts the notion of “romantic love” and “intimacy” in K/S Fiction as essentially “female” – even if she tries to fight the conclu- sion that slash fiction could serve as evidence for the “sexist litany” that women “don’t like sex except in committed relationships, […] think about ‘love’ all the time” and are “sentimental” and “altruistic” (Russ, “Love” 96). However, especially by refusing to notice the more subtle aspects of slash fiction, Russ gets unknowingly caught in a trap she herself has spotted before: In her attempt to describe the “hurt/comfort” (h/c) stories – an important subgenre of K/S fiction, in which one of the partners is hurt in the course of an adventure, which propels the other to touch/nurse him, ending with both of them discovering their love for each other (Lamb and Veith 246-7) – Russ thus completely rejects the possibility that the reader could be aroused by the (often sexual) “violence” done to one of the characters. Sado- masochism has no part in Russ’ conception of “Pornography, for Women, by Women,

22 Pon farr, mentioned in the original Star Trek series, refers to the Vulcanian mating period occurring every seven years, during which all Vulcanian males and females “go into heat” and have to have sexual intercourse – without it, they would die. Naturally, pon farr formed a regular element of K/S fiction since its beginnings: In Ray Newton’s “The Prize” (1981), for example, Kirk has sex with Spock for the first time in order to save him from perishing (Newton).

53 with Love,” when she underlines that the “rape” and “the power games” are not the “point” of slash fiction, but the “nurture” aspect (Russ, “Love” 88). K/S stories such as Ray Newton’s “The Prize” (1981), however, suggest otherwise: In the “alternative universe” fan fiction, the human Kirk is kept as a slave by the Vulcans, with Spock becoming his new master – a relationship clearly echoing narrative conventions of BDSM erotica. And whereas the sexual intercourse between Kirk and Spock happens quite willingly, the “hurt” part of the narrative seems to adhere to S/M aesthetics as well. In meticulously described detail, the reader is able to witness Kirk being raped several times by his previous “owner” Savak and his companions: Descrip- tions of Savak’s “long heavy […] green penis,” “thrusting deep” tongues and Kirk’s “climax” or “his spine arching against the penetration” are clearly devised to arouse, not to repulse (Newton) – characteristics that clearly are neglected by Russ in order to be able to uphold her claims that slash fiction is, first of all, about the “erotic tendresse” between the two main characters, indulging in their mutual love (Russ, “Love” 86). To sum up: The beginning of the academic discourse about slash fiction is strongly influenced by the feminist “Pornography Wars” of the 1980s. The differentiation between female, morally superior “erotica” and male, sexist and potentially aggressive pornography permeating these debates is clearly visible in Russ’, Lamb and Veith’s contributions about K/S fiction. However, whereas this “hierarchical valuation of sex acts” – which anti-anti-pornography activist Gayle Rubin criticized as one of the tendencies of the discussions about sexuality in the 1980s in her brilliant lecture on the Barnard Conference, “Thinking Sex” (1982), (Rubin, “Thinking” 279) – is problematic per se, it is the “gender essentialism” within these first academic/intellectual writings about slash fiction which has the most tremendous consequences for the following development of (m/m) fan fiction studies. The conceptualization of “male and female sexuality as though they were polar opposites” in the “Sex Wars” and those early contributions – criticized by Alice Echols in the “Taming of the Id” (1982) on the Barnard Conference (Echols 59) – therefore results in the restriction of slash fiction readers/writers to heterosexual/bisexual and homosexual women. In a stark contrast to the academic discourse about “cross-writing” novelists, the scholarly accounts of slash fiction, in consequence, define it as a strictly and typically “female space.” Feminist or woman-oriented “explanations” of this genre – albeit with different results and emphases – thus dominate its interpretation within academia until today. Radically new perspectives emerged more in terms of methodology and theoreti- cal framework: Since 1988, Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith

54 began to analyze slash fans/fan culture in general with the help of media studies’ theories and ethnological methods – important innovations for slash fiction studies, which will be discussed in detail in the next subchapter.

4.2.2 The “Guerilla Tactics” of “Textual Poachers”: Slash Fiction Fandom Meets Media Studies – Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley, and Camille Bacon-Smith (1988-1992)

“Early 1970s feminist media criticism tended to focus on what was felt to be media texts’ unrealistic and dangerous depiction of women. What sustained these accounts were the twin assumptions that media images carry transparent, straightforward meanings, and that women as viewers passively absorbed these messages and would act accordingly.” (Hermes 144)

In the passage quoted above, the Dutch scholar Joke Hermes summarizes the early stance within feminist media criticism towards popular culture – a negative perspective on mainstream entertainment not extraordinary for this time: Especially Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) – in which the German philosophers criticize the modern “mass culture” industry as serving the “totalitarian impulses of modern capitalist society,” thus posing as a threat to individual- ity and independence (Leitch 1221-2) – shaped perspectives convinced of popular culture’s damaging influence (Longhurst 178-180). A significant paradigm shift, however, occurred in the 1980s, with Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980/4),23 and John Fiske’s works such as Television Culture (1987) and Under- standing Popular Culture (1989) (180). By conceptualizing the “consumption” of popular culture as another kind of “pro- duction,” which is characterized “through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order,” the French scholar Michel de Certeau rejected the Frankfurt School’s model of a passive reception of the mass media by moldable, sheep-like masses in 1980 (Certeau xii-xiii). Instead, The Practice of Everyday Life emphasizes the activity of the reader/viewer, especially in its chapter “Reading as Poaching” (165-176): In the image of the “poacher” – a marginalized profession that entails illegal hunt- ing/gathering in restricted places for personal benefit – Certeau captures the individual’s process of meaning-making through reading/watching (174). The very influential American media theorist John Fiske radicalized Certeau’s model of the consumer further in his writings, by theorizing the possibility of a creative

23 Michel de Certeau’s first volume of L’invention du quotidien was published in 1980 in French, but translated into English not until 1984, by Steven Rendall.

55 engagement with the messages inherent in popular culture in terms of “power” (Sandvoss 11-13). In Understanding Popular Culture (1989) and earlier works, Fiske thus equally rejects previous assumptions about a “mass culture [that] produces a quiescent, passive mass of people, [….] totally disempowered and helpless” (Fiske 20). Instead, he develops the ideas of Certeau further, by declaring “popular culture” to be a “site of struggle” and “semiotic guerilla warfare,” in which the “forces of dominance” are partially “resisted” or “evaded” through the productive strategies of consumption (19-20). As Cornel Sandvoss has shown in his work on fan studies, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (2005), this “paradigm of power and resistance” in the works of Michel de Certeau and John Fiske has strongly influenced further analyses of fandom since the late 1980s, studies about fan fiction in particular (Sandvoss 11-14, 24-27). Slash fiction became the metaphor par excellence for the “resistance paradigm” within academia – a trend started by the works of Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith, which will be discussed in detail in this subchapter. One of the first and still the most influential scholars to connect the “resistance para- digm” of popular culture studies with fan fiction was Henry Jenkins: Starting with his paper “Star Trek Rerun” (1988), the American scholar underlined the “subversive” characteristics of media fandom by drawing from the ideas of Certeau (Jenkins, “Rerun” 85-87; Busse and Hellekson 18). Textual Poachers (1992) – the title already indicates a strong influence of The Practice of Everyday Life on Jenkins’ work –emphasizes the productivity of media consumption by analyzing media fandom, its cultural practices and the “material” remnants of its engagement with popular culture (Jenkins, Poachers 1-3). While Jenkins is intrigued by Certeau’s stance concerning media reception processes – informed by a reluctance to differentiate between “misreadings” and “correct” readings (33-34) – he nevertheless criticizes his failure to recognize the existence of consumption practices that do not happen “silently, and almost invisibly,” by actually manifesting “itself through its own products” (Certeau xii-xiii). Naturally, fan fiction serves as a prime example for this hypothesis of the reader as a “writer”/“producer” in media fandom, which he defines as a “participatory culture.” Other fan practices – like artwork, song tapes and performances – are considered as well (Jenkins, Poachers 45-6). By visiting conventions, collecting data about media fandom and attempting to “capture” its characteristics, Jenkins makes use of ethnographic methods to comprehend the particular processes of its specific consumption techniques (1). In a self-reflective manner, which is quite typical for ethnographical approaches since the 1980s, he considers his own status as a researcher who simultaneously belongs

56 to media fandom himself. By arguing that an “objective” view is impossible – even for the “typical” participant-observer as conceptualized by ethnogra- phy/anthropology/sociology, who observes a particular culture by temporarily taking part in it – Jenkins defends a study of fan culture “as a fan academic” as an opportunity to consider both: academic theories as well as “insider knowledge” of the particular community (4-5). Despite his status as a male, white “media fan,” however, the American scholar yields to a temptation common in fan studies, namely to construct fandom as a gender- specific field that is either predominantly “male” or “female” (Sandvoss 16). Due to his approximations – according to which media fandom consists of a community that is “largely female, largely white, [and] largely middle class” – Jenkins downplays the existence of male members such as himself. Albeit admitting that men are “certainly not remarkable within this culture,” i.e. actually pretty common, he refuses to give up the definition of media fandom as a “female space” by claiming that “we [i.e. the male fans] have learned to play according to the interpretive conventions of that community, even if these subcultural traditions did not originate in response to our particular interest or background” (Jenkins, Poachers 6-7). And it is partly through this “maneuver” that Textual Poacher is able to interpret the emergence of “media fandom” with Star Trek in the 1960s as “progressive,” as it is depicted as a break from traditional (science fiction) fandom, which has often been defined as primarily restricted to men (48). This feminist perspective on media fandom in general and fan fiction in particular in Jenkins’ groundbreaking study becomes more evident with regard to slash fiction, which functions as a major “proof” of Certeau’s hypothesis of the “productivity” of consumption: By drawing, amongst others, on Russ’ and Lamb and Veith’s theories, Jenkins reads slash fiction as an “even more exclusively feminine genre” than fan fiction in general (191) and maintains that it would question traditional notions of gender and constitute a female “reaction against the construction of male sexuality on television and in pornography” (189). However, this is not the only way in which slash fiction functions as evidence for the “productivity” of media fandom, according to Textual Poachers. Jenkins differentiates between “primary text,” i.e. the TV se- ries/movies, and “secondary text,” i.e. the slash fiction stories, and presents the latter as an interpretative strategy that transforms “homosocial” into homosexual relationships. Due to this “change” of the original, Textual Poachers (1992), and even more explicitly “Star Trek Rerun” (1988) present K/S fiction as the most radical form of “rewriting” in fan fiction in general (Jenkins, “Rerun” 102; Jenkins, Poachers 202).

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Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992), however, is not the only academic publication that presents slash fiction as the ultimate illustration for Certeau’s and Fiske’s theoreti- cal contributions to media studies. Another academic referring to The Practice of Everyday Life in her evaluation of K/S fiction is media scholar Constance Penley. In her early paper “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics and Technology” (1991), Penley uses Certeau’s description of the “tactics” of the relatively “powerless” as “Brownian movement[s]” in order to emphasize the subversive potential of slash (Certeau xx; Penley, “Brownian” 139). By insinuating an unconscious feminist politics underlining K/S fiction with its “guerilla erotics” (136, 138), Penley agrees with Jenkins on the potentially progressive nature of fandom, while both scholars follow Fiske in his radicalization of Certeau’s theorems. Otherwise, she takes a very different approach to fan culture than Jenkins, mostly by using psychoanalysis in her analysis, as will be explained in one of the next subchapters (Hills 95). Published in the same year as Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women (1992) equally follows a logic derived from media studies – but with completely different results. Influenced by John Fiske’s writings such as Television Culture (1987) (Bacon-Smith 327), Bacon-Smith also speaks at length about the productive aspect of media fandom, and depicts it – similar to Jenkins – as a female counter-space, “a new kind of community, that fulfills women’s needs to reach out and be heard” (39). Compared to Textual Poachers and Penley’s paper, however, Enterpris- ing Women has a completely different understanding of the supposed “guerilla tactics” employed by slash/media fandom, perceiving them rather as “hiding” or “camouflage” than veritable “resistance” (Sandvoss 26). By using the concept of a “creative play” that can in no way be taken seriously to describe female media fandom, Bacon-Smith simultaneously proclaims its culture as a form of problematic escapism from patriarchy (Bacon-Smith 290). Slash fiction, presented as the “inner core” of the Star Trek fan community is consequently declared to be a psychological manifest of women’s oppression (228). Portrayed especially as informed by the “hurt/comfort” genre, K/S fiction’s frequent depiction of rape, for instance, is explained by the female writ- ers’/readers’ “sharing” of the “pain” of sexual victimization “through language” (278- 9). Additionally, despite the fact that Bacon-Smith’s use of ethnographic methodology resembles Jenkins’ approach, Enterprising Women literally appears to be the polar opposite of Textual Poachers with regard to its chosen perspective: Whereas the latter gives a positive, sympathetic portrayal of media fandom, the former provides a colder, more analytical and slightly contemptuous account – a disparity, which can also be

58 explained by Bacon-Smith’s use of the more traditional stance of the “participant- observer” in her ethnological methodology (81). In conclusion, however, all three fan fiction scholars influenced by media studies – Jenkins, Penley and Bacon-Smith – equally show decisive similarities in their ap- proaches, which became very influential for further analyses of slash fiction. On the one hand, their dependence on Michel de Certeau’s and John Fiske’s publications results in problematic categorizations: By adopting the distinction between “high culture” and “popular culture,” and by defining fan fiction as part of the latter, i.e. a medium of the “disempowered” masses (Sandvoss 12-13), the status of “fan literature” as inferior to “real” literature is only cemented further. On the other hand, Enterprising Women, Textual Poachers and “Brownian Motion” further contribute to the definition of slash fiction as a female “sanctuary,” while promoting feminist interpretations of the genre à la Russ and Lamb/Veith: While media fandom is presented as harboring a large majority of women, m/m romance fiction is defined as its “heart,” where the “true nature” of women’s productive engagement with mainstream culture is revealed. Overall, the influence of media studies on fan fiction studies in general naturally has contributed to a theorization of the special dynamics of the production-reception process of slash fiction, which is now of particular importance to nearly every analysis of the genre: The ambiguous status of the female slash fiction fan as a consumer/“cross-reader”/“cross-writer” and the difference between “original” and “fan text” continue to structure the academic discourse about slash fiction and contribute to its decisive differences from the discourse about the female novelists discussed in the previous chapters.

4.3 “Let’s Talk about Slash, Baby.” Characteristics of an Academic Debate (1985- Today)

“In short, we may suspect that there is in all societies, with great consistency, a kind of gradation among discourses: those which are said in the ordinary course of days and exchanges, and which vanish as soon as they have been pronounced; and those which give rise to a certain number of new speech-acts which take them up, transform them or speak of them, in short, those discourses which, over and above their formulation, are said indefinitely, remain said, and are to be said again.” (Foucault, “Order” 56-7)

With these words, Foucault describes the “commentary” in his seminal inaugural lecture “The Order of Discourse” (1970) as one of the internal procedures of discourse, which contributes to a “natural selection,” differentiating between “unimportant” contributions

59 and “important” ones. When looking at the frequent re-citation and re-actualization of Russ’, Jenkins’, Bacon-Smith’s and Penley’s papers within the academic discourse about slash fiction, there is no doubt that those publications definitely belong to the latter category. As Busse and Hellekson note in their introduction to Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), those early contributions already “set the stage for more than a decade of fan fiction studies” (Busse and Hellekson 19). Due to these developments, however, the methodology and the theoretical approach laid out by Jenkins & Co did not change until the late 2000s: Even if the World Wide Web transformed the genre tremendously since the early 1990s, fan fiction scholars were late to catch up with recent developments. Constance Penley speaks in her NASA/TREK about a slash fandom “cautious” and “intimated by [the] […] technological complexity” of the Internet (Penley, NASA 116) – an observation that seems slightly out-of-date, considering that it was made in 1997. The theorization of the female “cross- reader”/“cross-writer” as part of a larger fan culture, the conceptualization of the genre of slash fiction as typically “female,” and the negation of its “queer”/”queering” aspects remain important tendencies in the academic discourse as a whole. At least the problematic obsession of early fan fiction studies with K/S zines, also criticized by Jenkins in Textual Poachers (Jenkins, Poachers 157), vanishes slowly in the course of the 1990s. Anna Smol’s paper “Oh … Oh … Frodo! Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of the Rings” (2004), for instance, discusses “Frodo/Sam” slash fiction stories (Smol 970-974) – only one of the many papers that indicate an end to the general “intellectual stagnation” in scholarly accounts of the 1990s. To what extent the depiction of female “cross-voyeurs” and their works in the debates about slash fiction differs from the portrayal of the female cross-writing novelists will be one of the leading questions in the following subchapters, in which the further developments within (slash) fan fiction studies are going to be discussed in more detail – from 1985 until today (2011).

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4.3.1 Shrieking Teens, Divorced Housewives, and Their Mediocre Fiction: Slash Writers/Readers as the “Other” Fans in Scholarly Accounts

“Fluent speakers of Elvish, collectors of Klingon pottery--the near-obsessive super-nerds of pop culture's wild frontier are Jeanine Renne's chosen people.” (Dundas)

Thus, reporter Zach Dundas of the Willamette week – a weekly newspaper published in Portland, Oregon – begins his sensationalist account about two local female Lord of the Rings fans: Fittingly entitled “Hobbits Gone Wrong” (2004), the article depicts slash fiction as something that only “freaks” would find interesting (Dundas). The academic discourse about fan fiction and its writers/readers since the 1980s is – at least occasion- ally – less discriminative and more nuanced: Especially Henry Jenkins, who – as already mentioned in the previous chapter – describes himself as a “fan academic,” speaks at length against the pejorative portrayal of “fandom” in American mainstream television and academia in his Textual Poachers (1992). By citing popular insulting depictions of “fans” such as the ridiculing of Star Trek devotees in William Shatner’s Saturday Night sketch “Get a Life!” or movies like The Fan (1981) – featuring a psychopathic stalker – Jenkins criticizes the tendency to imagine fans as “fanatics,” who try to compensate their social inaptitude with an absurd obsession (Jenkins, Poachers 9- 24). Yet, despite such reflexive insights, the mostly negative “fan” stereotypes remain a decisive factor in the academic discourse about fan fiction until today, as I will show in this subchapter: Associated with “popular culture,” the slash writer/consumer as a “fan” remains inferior to a regular “author” of “normal literature” such as Renault, Warren or Yourcenar. Joli Jensen has convincingly argued in her essay “Fandom as Pathology” – collected in the “most centrally important collection of fan studies itself,” The adoring audience (1992) (Busse and Hellekson 19) – that academic accounts of fandom in general serve an elitist ideology, cementing the old distinction between a bourgeois “high culture” and the entertainment of the masses (Jensen 10). As the concept of the “pathological fan” is never used on “serious,” “professional” critics and scholars – enraptured, for instance, by Proust or Kierkegaard – but only on fans of popular culture, it contains a pejorative view on everyday-practices outside the realm of the “classical” “high culture” (9-10). According to Jensen, depictions of the “fan” as an “obsessed loner” or a “frenzied crowd member” derive from a critique of modern mass culture in America since the beginning of the 20th century: Based on the belief that fans are a “deranged version of ‘us,’” those stereotypes express a more general concern with

61 regard to the growing influence of the mass media and the decline of the community – thus rendering the term problematic in itself (11, 14-5). In consideration of the “othering” usually connected with the “fandom”-concept, it is not surprising that Jenkins’ “textual poachers” are equally not presented as “normal,” despite his caution vis-à-vis a supposed “strangeness” of and the like. As Kristina Busse and Jonathan Gray remark, Jenkins’ attempt to study fandom instead of caricaturizing it rather results in another “extreme” (Busse and Gray 429-40). In the endeavor to depict a positively connoted media fandom with the help of Certeau, Textual Poachers presents the “fannish” subcultures’ engagement with their favorite TV shows/movies as overly “intricate and thoughtful” (429). Slash fiction consumers and producers in particular are described as “progressive” with regard to their rejection of traditional notions of gender and sexuality – even if Jenkins admits that the genre is by no means a “politically stable or consistently coherent response to these concerns” (Jenkins, Poachers 189-90). In accordance with slash fiction’s exceptional status in Textual Poachers, it is equally not surprising that Jenkins’ efforts to assume a non- pejorative perspective, speaking from the inside of the fan community as a “fan academ- ic,” fail sometimes when speaking about m/m fan fiction. By mentioning that K/S fiction is considered to be a form of “character rape” by many in the Star Trek commu- nity, the American media scholar lets the definition of slash as a “weird” or “freakish” thing proliferate in a way (187) – especially in his first paper “Star Trek Rerun” (1988), in which he does not even make the effort to disagree with this statement (Jenkins, “Rerun” 101-2). Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women (1992), however, is more explicitly informed by the concept of the (female) “pathological fan.” From her perspective as an “outside observer,” the American scholar describes the fan community as a bunch of sexually and emotionally frustrated suburban housewives, teachers and secretaries, who use their “obsession” with Star Trek as a compensation for and escape from their everyday life struggles (Sandvoss 26-27; Bacon-Smith 3). Instead of portraying the “women’s writing community” as a group of adults, confident with their sexuality and their hobby, Bacon- Smith emphasizes their dependency on men – “husbands and bosses” – on the one hand, while suggesting an emotional and intellectual immaturity on the other, by underlining the meetings’ “pajama party atmosphere” full of “grins and giggles” (3-4). Unsurpris- ingly, slash fiction fans as the “inner core” of the group are the most pitiful in Enterpris- ing Women: The “small but significant number of the women in media fandom” suffering from “extreme, health-threatening obesity” naturally “tends to cluster in the

62 homoerotic genres”, according to Bacon-Smith. Every other K/S fiction consum- er/producer is described as being either “celibate,” “divorced, […] post-relationship” or without any prior “loving, sexual relationship with a man” (lesbians are obviously per se suspect within this logic) (247). With regard to Bacon-Smith’s evident discrimination against slash fiction fans, it is hardly surprising that Henry Jenkins criticizes this publication – with its focus on pain, vulnerability and loss – harshly for its tendency to associate fandom with social and emotional “weakness” in his Science fiction audienc- es, published in 1995 (Jenkins, “Gender” 203). The fact that Bacon-Smith regards women’s consumption/production of explicit male homosexual erotica – of all things – as the epitome of pathological “fannish obsession” can be traced back to a specific practice of interpreting the “female fan,” which plays a certain role in the academic discourse about slash fiction in general, too. Whereas the “dangers” of male fandom traditionally have been reduced to its alleged destructive, violent tendencies, the female fan’s “sickness” usually is said to manifest itself in “deviant” sexual behavior. Jenkins thus notices in Textual Poachers that the most popular images associated with women as “fanatic” fans are the ones showing them as sexually aggressive –“screaming teenage girls who try to tear the clothes of the Beatles or who faint at the touch of one of Elvis’s sweat-drenched scarfs” – whereas their male counterpart is depicted as “psychotic” and “asexual or impotent” (Jenkins, Poachers 15). As Richard Butsch remarks in The Citizen Audience (2008), this gendered perspec- tive emerged as early as in the “silent film era,” when “fans were depicted as young women infatuated with a romantic lead,” thus “building on the image of the matinee girl at the stage door in the late nineteenth century, but with a reference to hysterical and obsessive behavior” (Butsch 132). To return to the academic/intellectual discourse about slash fiction, even Joanna Russ, albeit feeling quite positive towards m/m fan fiction, describes the reaction of grown women towards it in terms which remind uncomfortably of the stereotype of the hysterically screaming crowd of teenage girls. She writes that her friends “shrieked with delight and turned bright red with embarrassment upon hearing only the premise of K/S zines” (Russ, “Love” 81). Similarly, Bacon-Smith’s especially pejorative description of female fans reading m/m erotica can be partly explained by the particular traditions of equating “pathological” female fans with sexually “deviant” women. Bacon-Smith’s indications that slash fans have – in some ways or other – problems with heterosexual men, however, also echoes the “fag hag” debate analyzed in the previous chapters. Having an active, sexual or emotional interest in gay men as a

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(heterosexual) woman is again associated with the negatively connoted inability to lead “normal” relationships – a train of thought that is based on the old sexist belief that a healthy woman needs a “real” man to be complete (Gerhard 22). Adding to the notion of slash fiction fans as “ugly” or – as Joanna Russ puts it – emotionally and sexually starved/inexperienced (Russ, “Love” 96), is its character as “pornography” and possible “masturbation” material. Despite the efforts of second wave feminism to establish female (clitoral) onanism as an accepted sexual practice – propagated, for instance, in Betty Dodgson’s Liberating Masturbation (1974) (Hunter 19) – Gayle Rubin’s percep- tion in 1982 that female masturbation counts as an “inferior” replacement activity in the “hierarchical valuation of sex acts” (compared to the “ideal” of reproductive sex, marriage and love), is obviously still valid in the 1990s (Rubin, “Thinking” 288, 278). Bacon-Smith’s reduction of slash fans to unattractive, divorced or virginal “ladies” – who have “no choice” but to satisfy their desires in this way – is a vivid illustration of the survival of this “ranking.” The continuing influence of the association of “fandom” with an “inferior” popular mass culture in academic accounts also has definitely influenced notions about slash fiction’s literary “quality.” Frustrated, Mafalda Stasi thus complains about the lack of “serious” literary analyses of slash texts in “The Toy Soldiers from Leeds” (2006) –and deservedly so! A “judgmental approach” (Stasi 116) to fan fiction can be observed in many of the scholarly publications of the last 25 years: As the seminal scholarly accounts – such as Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers – concentrate on the fannish subculture with an obvious ethnographical or sociological interest, preconceptions about slash fiction stories as “trashy romance novels” are difficult to eliminate (Stasi 116). The description of m/m fan fiction as cheap, “wish-fulfilling fantasies” in Catherine Salmon’s and Don Symons’ “Human Mating Psychology” (2004), as well as Smol’s obvious surprise in reaction to an unexpected complexity/intertextuality of Lord of the Rings slash, are only two of the most recent manifestations, illustrating the survival of these stereotypes (Salmon and Symons 96; Stasi 117). A possible solution to this obvious dilemma is proposed by Abigail Derecho: By suggesting to regard fan fic- tion/slash fiction as part of a larger literary genre she calls “archontic literature,” i.e. texts that consciously and “overtly” “tie themselves to preexisting texts” and “mark themselves as revisions, continuations and insertions” (Derecho 66), Derecho tries to inspire a comparison with professionally published texts – but regrettably, a successful application of her theoretical proposition has not been achieved yet.

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Overall, the disregard of the existence of fan texts of higher literary quality is indicative of a continuing tendency of slash fiction studies to misrepresent this particular genre as a “static,” formulaic one by neglecting its variety and development – something that has also been criticized by Cynthia and Henry Jenkins and Shoshanna Green in “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking” (1998) (Green, Jenkins, and Jenkins 11). The trend towards an oversimplifying generalization is even more evident with regard to the conceptualization of the readers/writers of slash fiction. As mentioned before, the problematic tradition to categorize a fandom as predominantly “male”/“female” – as done, for example, in the case of “spectator sports,” usually seen as a domain of “traditional” masculinity (Sandvoss 16) – proves to be constitutive for the theorization of slash fiction’s producers/consumers. Whereas many other statements about slash fandom have been criticized,24 the “womanhood” of its members remains strangely unquestioned in the academic discourse. Recent papers such as “Cunning Linguists” (2006) find fault with a perceived “homogenization” of slash fiction subculture, but refer only to the omission of its bisexual and lesbian female readership/writers (Lack- ner, Lucas, and Reid, 189-191). Early male consumers/producers of slash fiction, like the members of the Boston Area Gaylaxians – a group that has tried to achieve the inclusion of gay male characters in Star Trek since 1987 (Jenkins, “Queers” 237, 264) – however, have seldom been considered in academia. This ongoing adherence to the belief in a strictly “female” slash fiction fandom can also be traced back to the frequent conceptualization of slash fiction as “women’s fiction” in academia – a rather persistent stereotype, which will be discussed in detail in the next subchapter.

4.3.2 Women’s “All-too-often Purple (Gay) Prose”25 – Genre and Gender Essential- ism in the Academic Discourse about Slash Fiction

“A series of profound cleavages run through the history of writing. The fault lines opened by the social division of labour, most particularly by the sexual division of labour, have cut deeply into the whole process of writing. Most overtly through the historical exclusion of women from the whole process of writing. Most subtly through the psychological severing of human personality according to gender, such

24 Cornelius Sandvoss, for instance, has shown that Jenkins’ and Bacon-Smith’s surveys and statistics are not really representative: Textual Poachers and other writings by Jenkins mainly take students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as test subjects, whereas Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women analyzes a group of Pennsylvania-based women – something that also explains their different “results” with regard to the “explanations” as to why women read slash fiction (Sandvoss 27-28). 25 Thus, Jenkins refers to slash fiction’s roots in “other popular writing targeted at a female readership” (Jenkins, Poachers 219).

65 that the rational, the theoretical, the political have been identified as masculine and the emotional, the experiential and the personal as feminine.” (Sheenan)

In her paper “Gender & Genre,” published in 1992, the philosophy scholar Helena Sheenan criticizes the problematic tendency in Western culture to associate certain “genres” with men or women in a sexist way. Slash fiction studies, as mentioned before, has been especially informed with such notions since its beginnings – a characteristic, which can be traced back to its roots in the “Sex Wars” and feminist essentialism. With Judith Butler’s utopian dream of a radical “breakdown of gender binaries” as an agenda (Butler, “Preface” viii), this subchapter will question the implicit assumption in those academic publications that slash fiction is “women’s fiction,” and point out “other ways” to theorize m/m fan fiction. Because, even if Russ’, Jenkins and Bacon-Smith’s definition of K/S fiction as “100% by women, for a 100% female readership” is apparently based on actual statisti- cal research,26 the gender demographic of slash fiction fandom changed – at the latest – with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. The fact that fan fiction became a “main- stream” activity (Busse and Hellekson 23) as well as the blurring of sexual and gender identities on the World Wide Web in general – for example by the use of “neutral” pennames – makes the implicit assumption that slash fiction remains “exclusively feminine” at least questionable (Jenkins, Poachers 191). Nevertheless, the “topos” of slash fiction as a “women’s genre” has remained in scholarly accounts – partially because m/m fan fiction has always been linked to another literary tradition generally associated with the female sex: the romance novel. As recent overviews such as Pamela Regis’ A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) illustrate, “romance fiction” is still – above all – conceptualized in terms of gender, i.e. as a genre whose “writers and readers are women,” because the content could not possibly “appeal” to something other than a “female audience” (Regis xii). That the history of the romance novel actually started with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) (Ramsdell 5), or that recent, popular writers of romantic fiction are often male – the American writer Nicholas Sparks is one of the more prominent examples – is completely disregarded. Some feminist analyses in the 1980s – such as Carol Thurston’s Romance Revolution (1987) – merely criticized

26 Russ’ claim that there is a “pornography written 100% by women for a 100% female readership” is based on statistics given by K/S zine editors. Nevertheless, Russ admits that – occasionally – there are also men writing m/m fan fiction (Russ, “Love” 79, 99). Bacon-Smith and Jenkins also mention that it is an “exclusively feminine genre” (e.g. Jenkins, Poachers 191), but without giving the exact ratio of females to males in the analyzed group.

66 scholarly accounts about romance fiction for the inherent assumption that only “bored housewives” would read them (Thurston 117).27 The genre per se, however, was mostly perceived as part of “women’s writing”– which explains the vehemence with which some feminists condemned it as a patriarchal tool for “brainwashing women into subservience” since the 1970s (Hollows 72). Joanna Russ’, Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith’s evaluation of slash fiction as a genre decisively formed by romance fiction thus naturally underlines its categorization as a “female” branch of fan fiction: In the academic discourse, it is not only male pornography, but also the “romance novel” to which slash fiction is compared in order to define its characteristics. But whereas the former serves as a negative contrast, the latter is perceived as the “basis” of this genre: “Pornography for Women, by Women, with Love” depicts K/S fiction as strongly influenced by the narrative conventions of “female romance books” and cites especially the “manufactured misunderstandings” that delay the sexual and emotional fulfillment as evidence for her hypothesis (Russ, “Love” 82). In a contradictory way, Russ praises “nurturance” “monogamy” and “intimacy” in K/S fiction on the one hand as positive characteristics of “female” erotica – compared to male pornography. On the other hand, however, she simultaneously downplays those “romantic” aspects, inherent in both these fan fiction stories and romance novels, as mere consequences of gender stereotypes existing in patriarchic society (85-87). She claims that women writing/reading slash fiction had “sexualized” the sexist “myth of romantic love” and their “female situation and training,” thus making “out of the restrictions of the patriarchy” their “own sexual cues” (86). By positively underlining the sexual explicitness of K/S fiction in contrast to “stand- ard romances” – which only contained “one-kiss-in-the-moonlight” – Russ establishes an interpretative tradition that views slash fiction as superior to its “predecessor” (87- 88). Similarly, Lamb and Veith compare K/S slash to the “popular commercial romance novel” (Lamb and Veith 238). According to them, both genres express “women’s” alleged prime desire “to find their mates” (244), but m/m fan fiction improves the romance tradition significantly, because of its implicit, feminist message “that true love and authentic intimacy can only exist between equals” (238). The tendency to portray slash fiction as genuine “women’s fiction” – and thus pre- serving essentialist gender stereotypes – is equally present in Constance Penley’s “Brownian Motion.” By reducing the complex and diverse genre of K/S fiction to

27 For an overview of the history of literary criticism’s engagement with romance fiction: see Ramsdell, 305-326.

67 femininely connoted “soft science fiction” – meaning SF not concentrating on depicting the “scientific” aspects of the story – Penley repeats a problematic polarization in science fiction studies that is prone to proliferate the “myth” of a difference between female and male writing (Penley, “Brownian” 148; Larbalestier 148).28 However, it is especially the continuation of the romance novel/slash fiction debate started by Russ and Lamb/Veith in the late 1990s which further cements slash fiction’s reputation as a “female genre.” Mirna Cicioni’s paper “Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Slash Writing” (1998), as well as Anne Kustritz’s “Slashing the Romance Narrative” (2003) refresh the interpretation of m/m fan fiction as a “subversive” rewriting of the “traditional romance.” Ciconi thus agrees with her predecessors that slash fiction’s focus on commitment and a “happy end” reflects a “typical female fantasy pattern,” also visible in the heterosexual romance novel (Cicioni 171). However, whereas Russ and Lamb/Veith presented the “standard romance novel” in a problematic way, neglecting its positive changes since the 1970s – such as the emergence of strong heroines and more sexually explicit heterosexual romances (Thurston 8-9) – Cicioni assumes a much more nuanced perspective. Neither romance nor slash fiction could be “really” rebellious, as both would satisfy women’s needs, thus robbing them of their feminist “zeal” – an argument reminiscent of Bacon-Smith’s opinion in Enterprising Women. Nevertheless, “Male Pair Bonds and Female Desire” also claims that there is some sort of subversive quality of m/m fan fiction despite these reservations: Especially as part of a “queer cultural criticism,” slash fiction would underline the “fact” that same-sex relationships were much more “equal” and thus more benefiting, giving “women” the opportunity to voice their desires “outside the dominant notions of acceptable love” (174-175) – an equally problematic, generalizing and heterophobic perspective. More in the lines of Jenkins’ conviction that fan fiction is “textual poaching,”, a resistance to mainstream culture, Anne Kustritz underlines the contrast between “Cinderella, Harlequin romances, fashion magazines and helpful aunts” and slash fiction in “Slashing the Romance Narrative” – something that is also emphasized by the paper’s title itself (Kustritz, “Romance” 378). Whereas “only beauty” could make a

28 The sexist accusation of a ‘softening’ influence of female writers on the science fiction genre emerged with the rise of feminist science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, as Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Doris Lessing and Marion Zimmer Bradley began to write feminist utopias and dystopias in order to express feminist values (Aisenberg 159-186). According to the critic Charles Platt, the emphasis on human values and a neglecting of the technological background in feminist science fiction since the 1970s, had led to a Rape of Science Fiction (1989),– only one statement that shows how negative this female intrusion in a traditionally male genre was viewed by many (Larbalestier 169).

68 woman deserving of a man’s love in the traditional heterosexual romance, m/m fan fiction portrayed a “primarily intellectual or spiritual bond, based upon a long friend- ship” between male characters such as Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan from Star Wars (378) – a “rewrite of […] traditional romance narratives,” mainly “attractive to women who feel oppressed by patriarchy” (380). As the short summary of the more recent contributions to slash fiction studies indi- cates, the connection between “gender and genre” remains an important, recurring topic in academia. This is equally true for the conceptualization of (male) porn and (female) erotica as polar opposites in the scholarly discourse about slash fiction – despite the fact that the female viewership of allegedly “male,” mainstream pornography has increased significantly with the rise of the Internet, thus questioning any categorization on the basis of a gender/sex difference (Bancroft 227). In an obvious parallel to the academic publications in the context of the “Sex Wars,” Kustritz claims that slash stories would “invert the common structures of pornography”: Whereas pornographic texts for men denied the “emotional consequences of sex” in a “disturbing” fashion, slash fiction would luckily put an end to “sex for the sake of sex” narratives by providing some sort of “emotional context” (Kustritz, “Romance” 377-8). Even more pejorative towards erotica aimed at a male audience is Cicioni’s paper, in which she even rejects the mere use of the term “pornography” for m/m fan fiction, arguing that this designation could only refer to “degrading or abusive” representations of female sexuality (Cicioni 168). The publications by the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Don Symons crown this gender essentialist trend in the academic discourse about slash fiction so far: In Warrior Lovers (2001) and “Slash Fiction and Human Mating Psy- chology” (2004), slash fiction is cited as proof for “how different male and female erotic fantasies actually are” – a biological and psychological “fact” that had developed because of “different selection pressures males and females faced over human evolu- tionary history” (Salmon and Symons 94). There are few, more insightful and differen- tiated new approaches in fan fiction studies, however. In her article “One True Pairing: The Romance of Pornography and the Pornography of Romance” (2006), Catherine Driscoll criticizes the academic tradition of juxtaposing romance novels and pornogra- phy in the discourse about slash fiction, arguing that both equally influenced the genre and thus have much more in common, than formerly suspected – such as an “ecstatic relationship to exposure” (Driscoll 79, 94-5). In conclusion, the evaluation of female “cross-voyeurism’s” products in the academ- ic discourse about slash fiction seems to differ decisively from the one about the

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“faghagging” novelists at first glance: Whereas The Persian Boy and The Front Runner are at least discussed in works about the “gay canon” or “gay literature,” m/m fan fiction does not even seem to “deserve” an entry in encyclopedias about male homosex- uality like Haggerty’s Gay Histories and Cultures (2000) – exactly because it is perceived as a “women’s genre.” However, considering the fact that gay fiction by female novelists was often perceived as informed by an “intent to glamorize” male homosexual love (Bentley 131), or as “clichéd,” “silly ” (Adams 27; Levin 278), the problematic equation of the “female desire” with a yearning towards romantic love can be found in scholarly accounts about “cross-writing” novelists, too. One of the few papers drawing analogies between Renault & her fellow cross-writers and slash fiction writers/readers, Elizabeth Woledge’s “Intimatopia: Genre Intersections between Slash and the Mainstream” (2006), summarizes and amplifies the gender stereotypes inherent in both academic discourses. By subsuming virtually every text about m/m relationships written by women under the category of “intimatopic literature” – defined as texts that propagate love relationships in which “intimacy” replaces mere sex – Woledge loses herself in essentialist assumptions, claiming that all “women” share “an ideology where intimacy is of central importance” (Woledge 99, 112). Such a generali- zation seems at least problematic, as certainly not only gay novels by women – like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Catch Trap – contain “cheesy” passages about two lovers being connected in a fashion that results in them “having [only] one heartbeat” (Bradley 552). Gay fiction by gay men, such as Vincent Virga’s gothic romance novel Gaywick (1980), equally occasionally pursue a “happily-ever-after” (Dombrowski 59) – one reason more to “trouble” the particular association of certain literary traditions with gender in academia. On another note, there is actually a whole subgenre of slash fiction that emphasizes sex over romance: PWP stories – an acronym that can stand for both “Plot? What Plot?” and “Porn without Plot” – concentrate entirely on the pornographic description of the sexual encounter between two male characters, without any attempts of “disguising” its purpose as a medium of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction (Driscoll 85). The entire Fantasy into Reality series by Minx, for instance, revolves around BDSM scenarios between Harry Potter and Severus Snape, who try to re-enact their sexual fantasies: Often, the short stories include Harry being “punished” in detention (Minx). Besides slash fiction’s categorization as “women’s writing,” however, there is one additional reason for slash fiction’s exemption from gay fiction altogether: The denial that the male characters in m/m fan fiction actually are gay men is curiously omnipresent in the

70 academic discourse – despite or perhaps because of slash fiction’s concentration on male homosexual sexually explicit scenarios.

4.3.3 Subversive/Queer Pleasures? Explaining “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking”

“Ben had expected it to hurt and it did, a little—but he hadn't expected the gut-wrenching pleasure of it. The way his body had burned as it opened. Ray hard and slick and deep inside of him, Ray's hands gripping his hips hard enough to leave bruises. The way Ray's cock kept rubbing that sweet spot inside him, convulsing him again and again – Christ, he hadn't known, hadn't even suspected that his body could produce such multiplicities of pleasure. He collapsed under it, went blind with it, and later, when he was shivering with his own cooling sweat, Ray laughed and roughly stroked his hair and face and head the way you might stroke a dog, the way Ray sometimes petted and soothed Diefenbaker.” (Speran- za)

By quoting this passage out of Speranza’s short story Passion, a fan fiction about the Canadian TV police series Due South (1994-1999), Anne Kustritz exemplifies in her dissertation that slash fiction indulges in “forbidden ecstasies” – a characteristic which is symbolized “most powerfully […] by the “pleasures of the prostate,” according to Kustritz (Kustritz, Space 189). In a way, such an emphasis on the “subversive” and “scandalous” qualities of slash fiction is quite common in scholarly accounts. On the one hand, it is the explicitness of the sex scenes in slash fiction that is under- lined in an attempt to affirm its “shocking” characteristics: Despite the fact that there actually exist many stories that are not X-rated since slash fiction’s beginnings, a concentration on the NC-17 texts is evident in academia (Driscoll 82). Most often, even the captions of the publications – like “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking” (Green/Jenkins/Jenkins) or One Index Finger on the Mouse Scroll Bar and the Other on My Clit (Boyd) – consciously play with the “scandalous,” erotically stimulating quali- ties of m/m fan fiction. Additionally contributing to slash’s reputation as “offensive” material is its legal status as copyright infringement, which is equally accentuated by many scholars. Fitting neatly into the logic of fandom as resistance to the mainstream (i.e. “textual poaching”), the mentioning of the rage and shock of “producers of Star Trek, [and] fans involved in official Star Trek fandom” is an important motif in slash fiction studies, which underlines the status of its devotees as “rebels” or “guerilla” fighters (Penley, “Brownian” 136; Bacon-Smith 3). Henry Jenkins even describes m/m fan fiction’s subversive qualities as an internalized feature of its subculture by declaring the “forbidden” aspects as an important part of its allure (Jenkins, Poachers 201).

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As one of slash fiction’s most “revolutionary” modifications of the primary text seems to be the transformation of two heterosexual characters into “homosexual” men, it is not surprising that this “queering” of TV shows, books and movies has been discussed at length in fan fiction studies. Especially Leslie Fiedler’s famous study Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) – in which he claims that “classical” American novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe and Huckleberry Finn were full of “innocent” homoerotic relationships in their glorification of male friendship (Fiedler, Love 181-2, 406-7) – influenced early scholarly accounts about K/S fiction in the 1980s considera- bly. Fiedler’s theory about an unconscious homoerotic desire for men of color haunting the (white) American psyche – visible, for instance, in the relationship between the white boy Huck and the black slave Jim (406) – has been applied to the Star Trek TV series and K/S slash by many scholars. Both Alice Selley’s paper “I Have Been, and Ever Shall Be, Your Friend” (1989) and Lamb and Veith’s “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines” (1986) thus read Kirk and Spock’s relationship in the TV series as a paradigm for Fiedler’s model of the “quintessential American romance” (Selley 102), which even contains a concealed “racial tension” provided by the alien-human difference (Lamb and Veith 138). Espe- cially Lamb and Veith argue that K/S fiction has been inspired by the importance of male bonding already existent in the Star Trek TV series: The close friendship between the Vulcanian and the human is read as a basic prerequisite for the “slashing,” i.e. a transformation into a “romantic, sexual relationship, approximating marriage” (137). With the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), however, Fiedler’s influence on slash fiction studies is replaced by a theory, which – in retrospect – has certainly proved to be more suitable for this particular academic field. Whereas Fiedler portrays unconscious homoerotic relationships between men in American fictional texts as the result of a “failure […] to deal with adult heterosexual love” because of a masculine fear of “sex, marriage and responsibility” (Fiedler, Love 12, 26), Sedgwick is more concerned with the peculiar conceptualization of male “homosociali- ty” in Western culture. In Between Men, she claims that the “diacritical opposition between the “homosocial” and the “homosexual” is “much less thorough and dichoto- mous for women”: While “women loving women” and “women promoting the interest of women” are often described as “congruent” in our society, male bonding is almost always informed by an intense homophobia (Sedgwick, Men 2-3). Thus, Sedgwick’s theory describes the sex/gender system and patriarchal heterosexuality as decisive for

72 the conceptualization of male friendship – one of the reasons as to why this model proves to be particularly fruitful for slash fiction studies. Especially Henry Jenkins presents Sedgwick’s seminal text, as the “theory” to the “practice” of slash fiction. Based on the assumption that the findings of Between Men – originally a study about the British fiction of the 18th and 19th century – can be attribut- ed to contemporary popular culture, he argues that Sedgwick’s theory about male homosocial/homosexual desire works with regard to TV series such as Star Trek, Starsky & Hutch and the Professionals as well. While today’s mainstream culture thus propagates male bonding, according to Jenkins, but simultaneously rejects any “explic- itly recognizable form of [male] [homo]sexuality,” the slash fiction texts bring the “subtext of male homosocial desire” into the open (Jenkins, Poachers 202-3). Textual Poachers thus presents the slash writers as women breaking out of the patriarchal, heterosexist logic: By creating a convergence/continuum between the male “homoso- cial” and the “homosexual” – otherwise rejected in Western culture – slash fiction propagates new conceptualizations of masculinity (218). Agreeing with the American radical feminist activist John Stoltenberg’s insights in Refusing to Be a Man (1989) – namely that “male supremacy” is supported by problematic assumptions about “male sexual identity” (Stoltenberg 4) – Jenkins depicts m/m fan fiction as a medium, where utopian ways of defining gender/sex are envisioned (Jenkins, Poachers 189). In a genre, in which “men’s bodies [are] represented as smooth and womanly, [and] male kisses described as the meetings of two vaginas” in one scene, whereas in another scene they can reverse to being “burly […] rigid, and […] athletic,” a departure from traditional notions about masculinity accompanies the abandonment of a heterosexist ideology, says Jenkins (194). But Textual Poachers is not the only text that prefers Sedgwick over Fiedler: Simi- larly, Constance Penley also makes use of Between Men in NASA/Trek (1997): By proclaiming that the “invisible homosocial underpinnings of Trekdom, the Federation and U.S. culture” are made explicit with slash’s overt , Jenkins’ appro- priation of Sedgwick’s theory is repeated (Penley, NASA 141). By criticizing Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, for its association of a concentration on male friendship with a “nightmare of misogyny,” Penley equally underlines the importance of Sedgwick’s insight that the mere “exclusion” of female characters is by no means a sign for a hatred of women in general (141) – an argumentation that is useful with regard to gay novels by “cross-writing” women as well.

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In the light of this detailed theorization about turning male “homosociality” into “homosexuality” in slash fiction, however, it is quite interesting that the “gayness” of m/m fan fiction vanishes as soon as the female “cross-voyeur” is brought into the equation. Whereas slash writers and readers are portrayed as “rebels” in every other way, the discourse about possible “explanations” for a woman writing or reading about same-sex desiring men is – once again – informed by a refusal to “think” outside the heterosexual/homosexual binary. In fact, the discursive practices intent on “normaliz- ing” the “queer” desires of the “cross-voyeurs” are much more numerous and forceful than the ones that could be observed in the scholarly accounts about “cross-writing” novelists – possibly a result of slash fiction’s sexually explicit, homoerotic character. Whereas the academic discourse about Renault & her fellow cross-writers thus mainly concentrated on a theorization of the – in the logic of Western culture – much more “inexplicable” desire of lesbian cross-writers for “gay men” in detail, the debates about slash fiction devotees already have difficulties to explain the reason as to why hetero- sexual women prefer “gay” erotica about Kirk and Spock or Harry and Snape. Most often, the “answer” to the question as to why there are two male bodies having sex, instead of the “regular” heterosexual couples, is – as already mentioned – one influenced by feminist theory. Slash fiction’s gay couple is mainly theorized as a representation of the ideal heterosexual relationship in which all women want to participate. In a blatant neglect of slash fiction’s sexual appeal and arousing function, the subgenre of fan fiction is often reduced to its alleged political message of gender equality in academic accounts – much to the dissatisfaction of its writers and readers (Green, Jenkins, and Jenkins, 31). Within this logic, the same-sex couples are seen as a metaphor that has as much to do with homosexuality as “Civil War history did with Gone with the Wind” (22-27). Joanna Russ’ argument that K/S fiction is not about “a homosexual love affair between two men, but love and sex as women want them, whether with a man or with another woman” (Russ, “Love” 83) has influenced fan fiction studies tremendously, even if later texts concentrate on slash fiction’s appeal for heterosexual women instead of lesbians. Mirna Cicioni, for example, is one of the contemporary scholars, who refuses to regard m/m fan fiction – in this case, slash fiction about The Professionals – as anything else than “fantasies that articulate women’s desires” in a heterosexual relationship with a man (Cicioni 154). Since “Pornography for Women, by Women, with Love,” the homosexual anal intercourse in slash fiction is often regarded as some kind of vaginal penetration “in disguise,” partly because of an alleged lack of realism in the depiction of

74 gay sex (83)29 – even if particularities of gay sex, such as the necessary “lubrication,” the “prostate” and mutual “blow jobs” have by now become important standards in slash fiction. Additionally, it is the missing self-identification of some characters as “gay men,” which has always been regarded as an important “evidence” for the “hetero- sexuality” of the genre (Russ, “Love” 99) – an unnecessary simplification that disre- gards other slash fiction stories, more conscious of gay subculture and politics. Whereas gay-for-you30 fiction actually is quite frequent in the slash genre, there have equally always been stories, which dealt with issues of homophobia and “coming-out” – Shoshanna’s Professionals-novel Never Let Me Down (1992) is only one of many examples (Shoshanna). In the light of this radical “denial” of a possible “male homosexual” content of wom- en’s fan fiction, it is not very surprising that the sexually stimulating quality of slash has been mostly theorized in a “conventional” fashion as well – if it is uttered at all. The erotic appeal for the female viewers is assumed to consist in an unapologetic gaze on the male (heterosexual) body, as slash fiction’s narrative traditions make a closer look on “male beauty,” i.e. the “passive, acted-upon glories of the male flesh” possible. Russ thus speaks fascinated about the K/S story Shades of Judy, in which Kirk praises Spock’s genitalia as a “beautiful flower, an orchid” (Russ, “Love” 90). Penley similarly emphasizes in “Brownian Motion” that slash fiction would turn men into “sexual objects,” whose “yielding phallic power” functions as a significant turn-on for its female readers (Penley, “Brownian” 155-6). Additionally, the maleness of the charac- ters is regarded as a reaction to the “greater standards of physical beauty” with regard to women, because of which writing about a heterosexual couple would be problematic (155). Yet, like Russ, Penley – and other scholars – remain convinced of an unintended heterosexualization of the sex acts, in which Kirk and Spock participate in K/S fiction (Penley, “Brownian” 156). Thus, a queer desire of female “cross-voyeurs” for gay men per se is seldom theo- rized in the discourse about m/m fan fiction. Even if “Brownian motion” and Textual Poachers consider an “aggressive identification with the men” as a possibility, the cross-gender identification aspect is not properly considered as a departure from a

29 This argument is at least problematic. As Driscoll remarks in her paper, the “realism” in pornography is always “under strain” anyway (Driscoll 87), which is why this approach is perhaps not the best way to deal with this topic. 30 “Gay-for-you” is a term that has developed recently, referring to a new genre of romance novels in gay fiction. In gay-for-you stories, at least one of characters is straight and develops his homosexual feelings/tendencies only in reaction to “the one” – a term that seems quite fitting for many slash fiction stories, in which both characters are conceptualized in this way.

75 heteronormative conceptualization of sexuality as well (Jenkins, Poachers 198; Penley, “Brownian” 155). That the complex erotic and pornographic aspects of m/m fan stories have been painfully reduced by the logic of “one (heterosexual) hot guy is good, two (heterosexual) hot guys are better” in scholarly accounts (Lothian, Busse, and Reid 106), becomes evident when looking at another interpretation suggested by m/m fan fiction itself: The character of the “fan girl” as described for instance in GioGio’s London Calling31 – content on experiencing gay sex/romance as a voyeur, without simultaneously wanting to have a sexual or emotional relationship with one of the protagonists – is a perfect example for the more intricate “fag hag” aspects of slash fiction (GioGio). In the academic discourse, however, any links between this subgenre and actual relations of women with gay men are mostly ignored. If associations to “real” male homosexual subculture are theorized occasionally, it is only in political/feminist terms: Penley thus speculates that slash fans might share “feelings of solidarity” with gay men, as they also both “inhabit bodies that are still a legal, moral and religious battleground,” but underlines that a slash fan’s feelings towards “actual” male homosexuals are nothing but “sympathetic” (Penley, “Brownian” 157). Bruce Bagemihl is the only one that dares to draw parallels between “female-to-gay-male” transsexuals and the erotic appeal of slash fiction for women in his “Surrogate Phonology and Transsexual Faggot- ry” (1997) (Bagemihl 386-7). However, it is quite telling that his paper has not been very influential in slash fiction studies yet – another indication for its stubborn adherence to traditional concepts of sexual identity. Luckily, however, some publications of the recent years hint at a paradigm shift in academia, which focuses on the “queerer” aspects of m/m fan fiction. “Cunning Linguists” (2006) thus criticizes the frequent conceptualizations of slash fans as heterosexual women that leave out the possibility of lesbian, transgendered or transsexual consumers/producers (Lackner, Lucas, and Reid 193-195). With the upcoming model of the Internet as a “queer space,” where sexual identities can be assumed at will, the fact that the reading/writing of slash fiction is “queering” in itself is

31 “Fan girl” is a more recent term used to describe women/girls in the media fandom. In slash fiction circles, it is also used to refer to a fan of m/m (fan) fiction in general. Mairi, a female character in London Calling can be described as a prime example of a “fan girl” attracted to “gayness.” Being the girlfriend of Rob’s flat mate Nicky, she constantly tries to convince Rob and Quinn, the gay main couple of London Calling to have sex in front of her and cheers them on – a typical characteristic of a slash “fan girl” and a point, where “fag hag” and “fan girl” are overlapping. In YouTube videos such as “2 Guys for Hermi- one,” the fan girl perspective is equally built inside the story, as Hermione watches Queer as Folk, discovers the “hotness” of gay sex, and makes Harry and Ron fall in love with each other (Ariel333Lindt, “Hermione”).

76 recognized as well (Lothian, Busse, and Reid 103). Slash Role Playing Games featuring cross-gender identifying Kirks and Spocks or Harrys and Snapes, however, offer new possibilities that have not been researched in detail yet – at least they have been noticed in “Cunning Linguists,” which offers hope for the future (Lackner, Lucas, and Reid 197-201). Another interesting new approach influenced by queer theory in recent publications of slash fiction studies relies on Alexander Doty’s groundbreaking study Making Things Perfectly Queer (1993): Based on Doty’s remark that the “queerness” of a text is not “less real,” if it is only discovered through a special mode of “reception” (Doty, Things xi), Jones claims that many heterosexual cult television series, like the X- Files (1993-2002), actually encourage a queer reading. Within this logic, slash fiction could be seen as an “actualization of latent textual elements” instead of a “resistant” interpretational practice (Jones, “Cult” 82) – an interpretation that radicalizes the notion of a “homoerotic” or “homosocial” quality of the original.

4.4 A Tale of Two Academic Discourses: Slash Fiction Fans vs. “Cross-Writing” Novelists

„The erotic speculations of contemporary slash fiction authors extend in many directions. The sexual encounters described in slash stories may be tender, fiercely passionate, casual, masturbatory, voyeuris- tic, orgiastic, sadomasochistic or non-consensual. Almost every imaginable seduction scenario, narrative context, emotional import and sexual practice is somewhere described in slash fiction. Stories may be plotless pornographic tableaux, sexually explicit romances, comedies, tragedies or action adventures.” (Jones, “Cult” 79-80)

Thus, Sara Jones rightfully emphasizes the openness and variety of slash fiction as a genre in her paper “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters” (2002). And indeed: Theoretically, the only “convention” characterizing this kind of fan fiction is the “erotic encounter” of two television, movie or literary “characters of the same sex” (Jones, “Cult” 80) – a fact that is obviously disregarded in most scholarly accounts. On the basis of an initial, majorly female, heterosexual K/S fandom, the academic discourse mostly assumes (in an ahistorical fashion) that there is a “uniform” circle of slash devotees and one “unchanging” kind of m/m fan fiction (Busse and Hellekson 22; Lackner, Lucas, and Reid 189). In contrast to the intellectual and academic debates about female, “cross-writing” novelists, explanations for female “cross-voyeurs” of slash fiction determine a whole branch of fan studies. The much more intense and numerous attempts at “normalizing” and “incorporating” this kind of “sexual deviance” in the logic of a heterosexu-

77 al/homosexual binary can be explained by the greater visibility of slash fans as “faghag- ging,” “scandalous” women and m/m fan fiction’s obvious concentration on the erotic allure of “gay” male sex. In order to integrate slash fiction “fan girls” in the heterosexist logic, the m/m fan fiction writers and readers are most often conceptualized as resistant feminists – an argumentation relying on the theories of Certeau and Fiske. However, whereas the “feminist” interpretation of “fag hags” also plays a minor role in the academic discourse about Renault, Youcenar, and Warren, the debates about slash fiction in academia universalize and radicalize it. In readings that often depict fans as anti-patriarchic/feminist – even if they clearly say they are not (Hills 102) – slash fiction is presented as a feminist variation of the traditional romance novel, which is in no way associated with gay fiction at all. In the light of the fact that original slash fiction and gay texts are terms occasionally used synonymously on the Internet, the conceptualiza- tion of those two genres as polar opposites is at least problematic: In Web communities of slash fiction fans, cross-references to the “Nifty Erotic Story Archive,” nifty.com – a platform with a section that is dedicated exclusively to pornographic/romantic stories by gay men (Kruger 918-9) – are no rarity and suggest a larger similarity between those two genres than previously assumed. With the help of the theoretical framework established at the beginning of this study, these tendencies can be described more accurately: Judith Butler’s insight that the “category of women” gains “stability and coherence” especially in the context of the “heterosexual matrix” (Butler, Trouble 8) sheds light on this connection between sex and gender in academic accounts about slash fiction. By over-emphasizing the “femi- nine” characteristics of slash fiction as a genre that is rather romantic than pornographic, the absolute difference between “men” and “women” is performatively re-instated in the scholarly discourse. This repeated “establishing” of the gender binary, however, is accompanied and reinforced by a “heterosexualization” of a phenomenon that theoreti- cally challenges traditional notions about sexual identities. By claiming that the gay men in slash fiction are actually a substitute for, or an expression of heterosexual desires, the dominant heterosexist norms are again and again “confirmed” in the academic accounts. The fact that it is even possible to “naturalize” a phenomenon like “straight women reading/writing gay male erotica” definitely is connected to the particular status of heterosexuality as a “silent term,” as theorized by Kitzinger and Wilkinson in 1993 (Sullivan 119). As “heterosexuality” as such has remained largely

78 unquestioned, it does not seem very surprising that the “deviant” desire of female “cross-voyeurism” can be integrated into this “regulative fiction” (Lloyd 198).32 On another note, Foucault’s conception of power as a mechanism or a form of “do- ing” rather than something that one group possesses, has proved to be a rather fruitful basis for this analysis – showing that groups trying to resist “oppression” can be equally “complicit with those identificatory regimes they seek to counter” (Sullivan 40-2; Jagose 82-3). Whereas many “academic fans” like Henry Jenkins actually try to defend the women reading/writing m/m fan fiction by suggesting feminist motives, they nevertheless contribute to a portrayal of those slash fiction devotees as “genuinely feminine” by omitting other motives/male fans. Thus, the scholarly accounts discussed in this chapter actually show interesting parallels to the feminist movement Butler criticized in her seminal work Gender Trouble in 1990. Both try to promote the fight against the discrimination against “women,” but simultaneously set up new “exclusion- ary gender norms” that they originally wanted to abolish completely (Butler, “Preface” vii). Overall, the characterization of female “cross-voyeurs” in the academic discourse about slash fiction is informed by a strange mix of negative and positive “othering.” Mostly, however, the m/m fan fiction – in its resistance to mainstream culture – has been theorized and normalized as a common dream of gender equality, representing what (heterosexual) women “really” want. Such an essentialist approach, in which the female “cross-voyeur” becomes the universal symbol of her own gender’s feminist yearning, however, is “unthinkable” in the academic discourse about another genre connected to female “cross-voyeurism.” Yaoi or shounen-ai, a form of Japanese manga that emerged in the 1970s, is conceptualized in a completely different fashion than slash fiction in American scholarly accounts. Given the similarities of these two genres, this is quite astonishing – which is why the academic discourse about Boys’ Love manga will be discussed in the last chapter of the main part.

32 Uli Meyer equally refers to this complex, when he mentions that the “queer” desires of readers of homoerotic manga are “Hidden in Straight Sight” (Meyer 232).

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5. Boys’ Love for Women, Made in Japan: Yaoi and Shounen-ai Manga in the U.S. Academic Discourse (1983-2011)

5.1 Beautiful Men and “Rotten Girls”: Boys’ Love Manga in Japan and the USA

“Misaki is suddenly having some unexpected and odd problems. What started as a need for some college entrance exam tutoring has somehow led him to being romanced by a suave older man who also happens to be his big brother’s best friend. Confused by all of his brand new emotions, Misaki struggles to deal with his suddenly very odd life. And if that wasn’t enough, his suitor, Usami, has plenty of issues of his own. A man-child who decorates his room in giant teddy bears and toys, Usami is a famous novelist who also writes steamy boys’ love novels on the side. When Misaki cracks open one of these books and reads sentences like ‘Misaki licks every inch of Usami’s hot body’… well, let’s just say that all hell breaks loose.” ( News Network)

With these words, the Internet database Anime News Network summarizes Shungiku Nakamura’s Junjou Romantica (lit. Pure-Hearted Romance) – a Japanese 14-volume manga series, published since 2002, which has been so popular that it even got its own anime33 in 2008. As the synopsis suggests, the comic about the 18-year-old Misaki and his older lover Usami is both a prime example and a parody of the very successful Boys’ Love in Japan – a female-oriented media subgenre featuring homoerotic relation- ships, which developed out of shoujo manga (lit. girls’ comics) in the 1970s.34 Fed up with the stereotypical romance portrayed in Japanese girls’ comics since the 1950s – the traditional heroines were usually “adolescent Cinderellas, reinforcing images of passive femininity” and a dependency on men (Matsui 178) – a group of female artists, the so-called 24-nen gumi (lit. year 24 group),35 radically transformed the manga world by changing basic elements of the shoujo plot. Happy-ends and clichéd, “fluffy” romances were replaced by serious, more complex stories with strong female leads and “social and gender critiques.” ’s (1972- 3), a historical manga playing in 18th century France before and during the revolution is one of the most famous examples of this “new” shoujo genre. In this comic, a cross- dressing girl named Oscar François de Jarjayes is raised as a man by her father to

33 Manga is the Japanese term for printed comics in general, and is used in the West (and in this study) as a term for Japanese comics. Anime describes animated cartoons of Japanese origin in this context. 34 As far as the Romanization of the Japanese Language in this publication, i.e. the transcription into the Latin alphabet, is concerned, I will use the traditional Hepburn system. In this system, long vowels are indicated by the use of additional letters: 少女 becomes shoujo etc. 35 The term 24-nen gumi refers to the fact that everyone belonging to this group of female artists was born in 1949, the 24th year of the reign of Emperor Shouwa (shouwa tenno) (Kamm 20).

80 succeed him as captain of the Royal Guard – a questioning of gender roles ensues that is typical for the 24-nen gumi (Shamoon 9-10). Yet, whereas The Rose of Versailles features same-sex desire between women – as many ladies are attracted to Oscar, despite knowing that she is female – the 24-nen gumi are better known for their addition of male homoerotic relationships to girls’ comics. Starting with the one-shot In the Sunroom (1970), the artists and began to include young, beautiful boys emotionally and sexually attracted to each other in their works (Aoyama, “Homosexuality” 188). Influenced by the Western bildungsroman, those manga – called shounen-ai (lit. boy-love) or bishounen (beautiful youth) – often played at a European boarding school and dealt with serious psychologi- cal issues such as sexual abuse and childhood traumata, staging a “psychodrama of the adolescent ego” (Matsui 178; Kamm 22). Keiko Takemiya’s popular series (lit. The Poem of the Wind and the Trees), published from 1976 to 1982, for instance, features the student Gilbert Cocteau as one of the main characters – a 14-year old boy, abandoned by his parents and traumatized by his uncle’s sexual molestation, who is so emotionally and psychologically scarred that he can only connect with others by having sex with them. But, while Kaze To Ki No Uta contains very graphic depictions of the male homo- sexual “act,” it was more the exception to the rule in this regard (Thorn 185). Other shounen-ai manga of the 1970s and 1980s – such as Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas (1974) – concentrated more on the “pure” and “spiritual” aspect of the relationship, depicting it through “highly formalized” artistic codes – influenced by the Art Nouveau style, the Pre-Raphaelites and Romanticism – as a “perfect aesthetic sphere” (Aoyama, “Homosexuality” 190, 202-3; Kamm 24).36 With the growing success of the genre, a special magazine for Boys‘ Love stories, June, was published around 1980, adhering to exactly this tanbi (lit. the worship and pursuit of beauty) aesthetics influenced by the 24-nen gumi (Wilson and Toku). Artists eager to deviate from the narrative conventions laid out by the early shounen- ai manga, however, easily found another “playground” to experiment to their heart’s content: In the 1980s, many Japanese – i.e. not professionally published manga sold on comic markets37 – started to cover m/m topics, often by taking popular

36 This style is omnipresent in the works of the 24-nen gumi and can be found, for instance, in Hagio Moto’s (1974) – a melancholy adolescent drama playing at a German boarding school. 37 As Kamm notes, professional manga artists in Japan often continue to write doujinshi, even if they already found a publisher, as the amateur market provides a “platform” for experimentation (Kamm 13- 14).

81 characters from male-oriented anime shows like Captain Tsubasa (1981-1988) and imagining them to be in a homoerotic relationship (Mizoguchi, “Romance” 49-50). A new style of manga dealing with male same-sex desire emerged in this context, which was called yaoi. Being an acronym of “yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi” (lit. “no build-up, no foreclosure, no meaning”), this term refers to the much simpler plot of those amateur comics (Kinsella 301; Suzuki 252). In contrast to their shounen-ai predecessors, those doujinshi most often were pornographic – which is why fans of yaoi jokingly claimed that the abbreviation yaoi really referred to the cry “Yamete! Oshiri ga itai!” (“Stop, My Butt Hurts!”) (Valenti). If Takemiya’s and Hagio’s protagonists were only prepubescent, small and androgynous boys, the outward appearance of the male characters began to change, too. Protagonists with more masculine physical attributes such as wide shoulders, large palms and muscles began to emerge, who were either complemented by a feminized partner – reproducing the power dynamics of a “hetero- sexual couple” with a slightly different edge – or provided with another, masculine mate, thus upholding the notion of an “equal” relationship (Suzuki 253). In the 1990s, when the “third stage” in the development of those homoerotic manga took place (254), it was especially the butch-femme version of the “gay” couple that became a vital part of the genre. When the economic situation deteriorated after the burst of the Japanese asset prize bubble (1886-1991), the growing popularity of shounen-ai as well as the huge amount of talented amateur manga artists writing yaoi made a capital investment in this phenomenon seem very profitable (Kamm 29). Just in 1990 alone, seven Japanese publishing companies decided to include girls’ comics about gay men in their product line – a step that started the commercialization of the genre. Boys’ Love (Bouizu Rabu) manga – as those publications now were called – differed decisively from the bishounen comics made by the 24-nen gumi and were more influenced by the doujinshi market: Besides actually often having a happy ending, manga like Yuki Shimizu’s series Love Mode, which began to be published in the monthly BL (abbreviation for Boys’ Love) magazine Be x Boy in 1995, included adult male couples in a Japanese setting (30). From yaoi, the Boys’ Love genre also adopted a hierarchical relationship with fixed gender roles: Perhaps comparable to the top-bottom vocabulary in the gay S/M scene, the seme (lit. attacker) and the uke (receiver) appeared and became established character stereotypes (Mizoguchi, “Rape”). In popular hit manga such as the aforementioned Junjou Romantica, the uke – who is “penetrated” in the often portrayed anal sexual intercourse – is usually associated with a submissive, feminine appearance: The always

82 blushing, round-eyed, kawaii (cute), small, and sexually inexperienced student Misaki Takahashi is a prime example for this. His tutor and lover Akihiko Usami, meanwhile, fulfills the role of the typical seme down to the last detail: Older, taller and more “macho,” the novelist is the sexually aggressive partner, who practically Misaki during their “first time” – a common trope that is considered to be an “expression of love” within the logic of the genre (Kamm 30).38 Due to its success in the 1990s, Boys’ Love also became important in other Japanese media besides manga: “Light novels” (targeting a young adult audience) such as Saki Aida’s police thriller Esu (2005) or erotic PC dating-games like Zettai Fukujuu Meirei: Absolute Obedience (2005), in which the player is encouraged to form male homosexual couples (Wood, “Games” 354-357), as well as anime series based on popular manga such as Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi (2011) (The World’s First Greatest Love) and Koi Suru Boukun (2010) (The Tyrant Falls In Love) are evidence of the variety and popularity of the Boys’ Love genre in contemporary Japan (Berndt x).39 As the female counterpart to the (an obsessed manga/anime fan), the fujoshi (lit. rotten girl) – a Boys’ Love fanatic (Meyer 234-5) – is so notorious in Japanese culture that she has been parodied in many manga series such as Fujoshi Kanojo (2007) (My Girlfriend, the Fujoshi) and Mousou Shoujo Otakukei (2004) (Otaku Girls). Due to the growing popularity of Japanese manga and anime in the West since the 1990s – Mark West even talks about a “Japanification of children’s popular culture” (West xii-viii) – the Boys’ Love genre became one of the various commercially success- ful Japanese imports in the U.S. and Europe, too. Mostly an “Internet-fueled, under- ground fan phenomenon” in the 1990s (Strickland), it was especially from 2003 onwards that several U.S. publishers such as Tokyopop began to translate Japanese Boys’ Love manga (Wood, “Global” 395). Simultaneously, the popularity of yaoi and shounen-ai – terms used differently in the West, in order to distinguish between a sexually explicit (yaoi) and a more innocent content (shounen-ai) (395) – spurred English-speaking devotees to create their own doujinshi. Webcomics hosted on servers such as smackjeeves.com – like Shea Britton’s Paradox (started in 2007) or Emirain’s Teahouse (started in 2010) – began to use the narrative conventions of Japanese BL

38 The group Dangerous Pleasure has put together a (humorous) list of the clichés associated with the uke/seme roles: The Uke Survival Guide 101 (2007) and The Seme’s Handbook (2008), which can be downloaded on their website. In the latter, “Rape = love. The more you love your uke, the more right you have to rape him” is depicted as one of the basic “rules” of being a seme (Dangerous Pleasure). 39 Berndt also mentions BL drama CDs, which re-enact part of the manga or novels as an audio drama (Berndt x). Interestingly, Satosumi Takaguchi’s Sakende Yaruze! (lit. Shout Out Loud!) (1996-2000) involves a seiyuu (voice actor) participating in a Boys’ Love drama CD, who falls for his co-actor – only one of the many inter-medial references within the BL genre.

83 manga, influenced by both the Japanese and the American style of drawing and story- telling.40 American artists like Tina Anderson even managed to get their original stories published and coined Global BL (GloBL) as a new term for Western homoerotic “manga” (Dong, Brienza, and Pocock). Unsurprisingly, the English-speaking academic world has noticed this example of female “cross-voyeurism,” too. As early as 1983, in his Manga! Manga! The world of Japanese comics, Frederik Schodt reports bewildered that the “sweet, naïve Japanese girls” were apparently interested in “a seemingly decadent subject,” namely “stories about male homosexual love” (Schodt 137). And with the growing popularity of Japanese manga in the 1990s, the academic accounts of BL multiplied as well: Scholars like Sandra Buckley, Sharon Kinsella, Mark McLelland and Matthew Thorn have analyzed homoerotic girls’ comics and their increasing reception in the West in detail (Buckley; Kinsella; McLelland, Homosexuality; Thorn). Curiously, however, the obvious parallels between Boys’ Love and American slash fiction have been somehow suppressed and downplayed in the academic discourse. Whereas slash researchers such as Busse and Hellekson are reluctant to deal with yaoi and shounen-ai because of a fear of misrepresenting them due to their lack of knowledge about Asian culture (Busse and Hellekson 32), Boys’ Love scholars have tended to emphasize the exotic and “typically Japanese” features of the genre, thus shying away from a more detailed comparison as well. In this last part of my study, however, I will argue that slash fiction and Japanese Boys’ Love manga are much more similar than formerly suspected. As Dru Pagliassotti has recently shown in her paper “Better than Romance? Japanese BL Manga and Male/Male Romantic Fiction” (2010), slash and BL manga both mix “pornographic” and romantic/emotional narrative conventions and have both been “characterized as creating a female-centered space that resists patriarchal pressures or demands” in academia (Pagliassotti, “Romance” 76-77). Even if critics such as Katherine Keller claim that homoerotic manga in general differ decisively from slash fiction because of their “seme (physically larger rampantly masculine manly-man ‘top’) and uke (y- chromosomed damsel in distress ‘bottom’) dynamic” (K. Keller), the genre is a lot more complex than it seems at first glance. As Mizoguchi has argued in her account of BL’s history, older subgenres like shounen-ai and yaoi doujinshi did not simply vanish with the appearance of commercialized manga that propagated the uke/seme dichotomy (Mizoguchi, “Romance” 59-62). Besides, a lot of manga in the “new style” like Youka

40 Famous examples of Western style Boys’ Love are the webcomics Teahouse and Paradox.

84

Nitta’s Haru wo Daiteita (lit. ) (1999-2009) – about two former pornography actors starting a relationship with each other – contain reversible partners (riba), who break away from the stereotypical role play associated with the genre and switch between “top” and “bottom,” too (Wood, “Global” 402). Thus, a large variety of manga – including merely platonic m/m relationships as well as “more experimental stories” in the tradition of June (62) – can be found on the Japanese market, making the genre of BL as multifaceted as slash fiction. And, whereas Andrea Levi and McLelland have a point when stating that homoerotic manga in Japan are “commercially produced and sold openly in bookstores,” whereas slash fiction has been more of an underground, subcultural, non-profit phenomenon (Levi, “North American” 149; McLelland, “Bonking”), they both merge in today’s English-language Internet culture in a way that emphasizes the similarities between those two genres. As Boys’ Love manga are still mainly distributed by international scanlation groups41 – fans scanning and translating Japanese manga into English (Lee 1011-22) – who make them accessible on servers like mangafox.com or animea.net, the BL subculture in the West takes place majorly on the World Wide Web – just like slash fiction. Actually, there are many incidents where a distinction between those two genres is nearly impossible: Japanese fans writing doujinshi about Western texts such as Harry Potter, as well as Western fans “slashing” their favorite anime characters are both quite popular (Wood, “Global” 407; Strickland). Camilla Decarnin’s claim that those two genres became only “peripherally aware of each other by the turn of the millennium” (Decarnin, “Slash” 1234) is a typical understatement that neglects the large audience on the Internet – which occasionally even results in shared events such as panel-discussions about yaoi on science-fiction conventions like Hamacon (2007) (Kamm 7). In the last part of this study, the neglect of the similarities between those two examples of female “cross-voyeurism” in the U.S. academic discourse about Japanese Boys’ Love manga will be analyzed with the help of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). As the depiction and explanations of “women reading/drawing/writing gay men” in the American debates about BL manga differ decisively from the slash fiction discourse, it can be assumed that this is partly due to Western prejudices against the Japanese, which inform the scholarly accounts – a hypothesis that is going to be corroborated in the next subchapters. As it is common in Western academia, I will use the term Boys’ Love as an “umbrella term” for m/m Japanese erotic comics targeted at a female audience, whereas

41 The terms “scanlation” and “to scanlate” are the results of joining together the words “to scan/scan” and “to translate/translation”. They refer to the Internet phenomenon of fans scanning, translating, and editing manga in order to share them with others.

85 yaoi will refer to sexually explicit material and shounen-ai to manga emphasizing the spiritual/romantic aspect of the relationship, without showing any sexual acts.

5.2 Female “Cross-voyeurism,” an Intrinsically Japanese Phenomenon? Yaoi and Shounen-ai in U.S. Scholarly Accounts since 1983

5.2.1 Robots, Samurai, and Pokémon: North America, Japan, and (Techno-) Orientalism

“I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. […] Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.” (Said 25)

Thus, Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978), the seminal text in Postcolonial Theory, re-examines Orientalist discourses – while relying heavily on Foucault’s idea of an interdependence between power and knowledge (Loomba 43-45) – and reaches the conclusion that Western representations of the “other” often consist of fantasies and constructs rather than veritable facts. As images of the East have always been heavily influenced by the assumption of a Western superiority (45), Said argues that they “as such [have] […] less to do with the Orient than […] with ‘our’ world” (Said 27). Orientalism claims that the “invented” binary opposition between West and East reveals interesting aspects of Western self-conceptions, by either reducing the East to a “reposi- tory or projection of those aspects of themselves that Westerners do not choose to acknowledge” or by transforming the Orient “into a fascinating realm of the exotic, the mystical and the seductive,” reminiscent of a “Garden Eden” fulfilling forbidden wishes (Leitch 193) – insights, which are of use with regard to the academic discourse about Japanese Boys’ Love as well. Whereas Said especially had Middle-Eastern cultures in mind, the theoretical concept of Orientalism has been successfully applied to Western representations of East Asia, emphasizing especially the role of “Japan as Other” in the North American context (Rosen). Similar to other “oriental” cultures, Japan – even though it was never colo- nized – has been admired for its “exotic” aesthetic traditions (geisha, gardens, tea ceremonies) on the one hand, while being feared as a “inhuman” culture for its martial traditions by Europe and North America on the other hand (ninja, bushido, kamikaze) (Sanders 29). And, as the historian Sadao Asada has shown in his essays about Japa-

86 nese-American Relations (2007), U.S. representations of Japan have continued to take this form of a “set of contrasting images” throughout the whole 20th century. Even nowadays, the American perception of the Japanese is “characterized by radical paradoxes, traditionalism and modernity” (Asada 151-2). Whereas Hollywood movies such as The Last Samurai (2003) express a yearning for the exotic, ancient Japan before its adaption of Western culture since the middle of the 19th century; modern Japan’s “superior” high technology and its increasing global influence – “manifested in ubiqui- tous consumer electronics, fashion, […] cuisine” etc. – is often depicted as a threatening “invasion” in a newly-born form of “techno-orientalism” (Asada 152; Morley and Robins 147-173). As LaMarre notes in The Anime Machine (2009), in particular have been conceptualized as the epitome of “Japaneseness” in a problematic fashion in Western academia (LaMarre 89) – a way of adopting the “legacy of Oriental- ism” by depicting the “strangeness” of Pokémon & Co that can equally be observed in scholarly accounts about Boys’ Love manga.

5.2.2 The Threat of “Tentacle Rape” and Those Poor, Oppressed Geishas: The Portrayal of BL as a Medium of Empowerment for Japanese Women

“They can be seen on Japanese television morning, noon, or night, as well as on the movie screen and in video stores. Their viewers are male and female, grade schooler and graduate student, housewife and businessman. The content can include raucous humor or theological speculation or horrifying pornogra- phy – or all three at once. […] They are Japanese cartoons […] and for most gaijin (non-Japanese), an introductory volume like this is an absolute necessity. This is because anime absolutely no resem- blance to their Western cousins like Road Runner or Rocky and Bullwinkle” (Drazen xii)

Thus, Patrick Drazen emphasizes the “outlandish nature” of Japanese cartoons for American viewers in his foreword to Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation (2007) – a way of portraying manga and anime culture that is neither singular nor new. Beginning with the first comprehensive English-language work about Japanese popular culture, Frederik Schodt’s Manga! Manga! (1983), the “incredible” aspects of anime and manga have been underlined, while stating their incomprehensibility to a Western audience due to the “exotic” “attitudes and customs” expressed in them (Schodt 10). By partially neglecting the difference between “socially accepted” and “adults only” animation, Japanese comics have traditionally been misrepresented as being “full of sex and violence” or “tits and tentacles” (Gravett 8) – a tendency that equally started as early as in Manga! Manga!. In a chapter with the telling

87 title “Is There Nothing Sacred?,” Schodt introduces the fact that manga and anime for children and young adults actually have a larger amount of violence and “taboo topics” such as nudity and eroticism in them than American comics, but ends up with an exaggerated portrait that underlines the general “perversity” and “strangeness” of Japanese culture (Schodt 120-126). As anime and manga thus are largely perceived in terms of an Asian “otherness” in the U.S. academic context, it is not very surprising that the scholarly accounts about Boys’ Love manga are influenced by Orientalist stereotypes as well. Starting with the first detailed account of yaoi and shounen-ai in the English- speaking academic world – Tomoko Aoyama’s contribution to the anthology The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond (1988) – those “intrinsically Japanese” homoerotic manga are especially understood as an implicit sign for the archaic and regressive nature of Japanese culture: Gavan McCormack’s and Yoshio Sugimoto’s “Introduction” thus emphasizes the difference between a “modernization as industriali- zation” and a “modernization as democratization,” while associating Japan first and foremost with the former definition. Boys’ Love manga clearly serve as evidence for this hypothesis within the logic of this anthology. By describing BL as a form of resistance against the “dominant” patriarchal “male and heterosexual” Japanese culture, a suppos- edly problematic “inferior” status of the Japanese female population is implied (McCormack and Sugimoto 1, 6-9) – a criticism suggesting an Asian “lack of moderni- ty” in terms of gender equality that is stated more explicitly in later academic accounts. Sandra Buckley thus portrays the culture of post-war Japan as a Western feminist’s nightmare in her paper “Penguin in Bondage: A Graphic Tale of Japanese Comic Books” (1991), which also deals with the tradition of yaoi and shounen-ai. By depicting Japanese popular culture as the ultimate manifestation of sexism and phallocentric, misogynist pornography – “do-it-yourself sexual violence games […] including sadomasochism, bestiality, rape and pedophilia” are quoted as exemplary products (Buckley 163) – Buckley underlines a “special” quality and history of the oppression of women in Japan that differs decisively from the situation in the West/North America (166-168). Within this logic, the emergence of bishounen comics, i.e. male homosexual fantasies in shoujo manga, is perceived as a “rare respite from the dominant cultural production of […] a phallocentric […], normative heterosexuality” that allows young women to “explore relationships of equality that are free of domination and exploita- tion” for a change (176-177). In the rigid anti-feminist Japan of the 1990s Buckley envisions – where the “education system, the family, the media, the entire fabric of

88 society” strive to turn teenage schoolgirls into docile, obedient mothers and good wives, “despite a national rhetoric of equal opportunity” – Boys’ Love is portrayed as one of the few outcries against an Asian patriarchy that needs to be preserved in its subversive quality (178-179). This line of thought is continued by Mark McLelland, one of the most famous Amer- ican researchers of “queer Japan” (Kamm 66). In his seminal work Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan (2000), McLelland reads Boys’ Love manga – with their “androgy- nous” characters, combining “‘feminine’ sensibilities and the freedom to live and act as men” – as the only way for young Japanese women to imagine “love beyond the constraining roles imposed by the marriage and family system” in Japan (McLelland, Homosexuality 78-79). By diminishing the options of Asian adult women to “playing a subservient role in life” (80), he thus equally paints a dark picture of a Japanese culture literally stuck in the Middle Ages with regard to gender equality – a recurrent trope in the academic discourse about Boys’ Love manga that is hard to eliminate.42 A popular argument in this context is the reduction of the protagonists to “sexless angels,” who let the Japanese girls forget in some sort of “therapy” that they belong to the “childbearing sex” (Suzuki 249-250; Wilson and Toku) – a reasoning that completely neglects the popularity of stories about , such as Tarako Kotobuki’s series Sex/Love Pistols (since 2004) and the satirical nature of the genre in general (Bauwens-Sugimoto 1). By deliberately forgetting or downplaying the fact that there is a m/m genre in North America/Europe as well, which has equally been interpreted as a medium of female resistance to Western patriarchy and heterosexism, scholarly accounts re-cite and reinforce the Orientalist stereotype of Japanese women as “she-who-must-be-saved” (Yamamoto 24). Neglecting the actual status of the female population in Japan – especially the huge improvements since the 1970s and 1980s, in the course of which a feminist movement formed, women’s job opportunities improved and the birthrate declined (Ellington 196-7) – the academic discourse about Boys’ Love manga shows that a “displacement of the […] geisha stereotype” (i.e. the image of the devote, oppressed Japanese girl in the Western debates) has not been achieved yet (Yamamoto 24).

42 McLelland also makes use of the theory of the much more oppressed Japanese women when speaking about the Japanese media, by claiming that gender roles in a heterosexual relationship are “heavily scripted in terms other than romance,” because of the “reproductive demands of the Japanese family system” – an argument that neglects the fact that homosexual romance has obviously also been attractive to Western viewers, who, in the academic discourse about slash, have been equally seen as reacting to the lack of convincing and strong female characters in Western media (McLelland, Homosexuality 17).

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The rarely mentioned, complex feminist discourse in Japan with regard to yaoi and shounen-ai equally contributes to this ideological construction of an Asian “backward- ness.” So far, the discussion of BL by Japanese feminists like Azusa Nakajima, Chizuko Ueno, and Tazuko Yamada in the 1990s, in which the genre was especially criticized for its misogynic character (Kamm 51-54), has never been analyzed in detail in the U.S. academia. But luckily, new developments in recent years give hope for a change in perspective. Mark McLelland has thus digressed from his former point of view in his article “Why Are Japanese Girls’ Comics Full of Boys Bonking?” (2006/7), by criticiz- ing “Western academic analyses of the genre which tend to pathologize both the women fans and Japanese society” (McLelland, “Bonking”). And in 2009, Tomoko Aoyama has at least started to introduce the Japanese debates into the Western discourse, by depicting the discussions of BL in the Japanese literary magazine Eureka in 2007 (Aoyama, “Eureka”) – a promising beginning in a task that is further complicated by the need for a detailed knowledge of the language. Yet – judging from what the German Japanese Studies scholar Björn-Ole Kamm has reported about the Japanese feminist discussion in the 1990s so far – a detailed account of these early discussions seems particularly interesting and valuable for U.S. academia. For whereas most Western scholarly publications portray anime and manga as a widely accepted and celebrated element of Japanese society, the harsh judgment against Boys’ Love manga by Nakajima, Yamada, and Ueno implicates a much more complicated status of comic culture in Japan. In portraying the obsession of fujoshi with yaoi and shounen-ai as indicative of a pathological narcissism or self-hatred, or as representative of the girls’ fear of becoming a sexual adult woman (Kamm 50-60), the feminists’ critique is part of a “nationwide controversy and social discourse” about manga and anime in the first half of the 1990s that illustrates the limits of this simplified view on Japan as the “mecca” of comics in general and Boys’ Love in particular (Kinsella 289). While Schodt is right in stating that the comic industry in Japan actually has “exploded into a phenomenon of extraordinary proportions” that can hardly be compared to the situation in North America and Europe (Schodt 10), the positive character of this development has been increasingly questioned after 1989. As Tsutomu Miyazaki – an infamous Japanese serial killer in the Saitama Prefecture, who cruelly murdered four little girls, mutilated them and sexually abused their corpses (1988-9) – had been an anime fan, his deeds resulted in a public discussion about the value of cartoons in Japan. In the ensuing “moral panic,” many critics like Keigo Okonogi suggested that otaku (i.e. obsessed manga/anime fans) like Miyazaki were

90 prone to become social outcasts and deviant criminals, as the cartoons’ fantasy worlds encouraged escapism and provided questionable role models (Kinsella 308-9, 314). It is in this context that the Japanese feminist critique of yaoi and shounen-ai belongs, when, for instance, Chizuko Ueno asks if “yaoi girls […] really have a future?” (314). This ambivalent status of being a fujoshi in Japan is also underlined by Ingulsrud and Allen in Reading Japan Cool (2009): By citing Junko Kaneda’s sociological study about BL fans as “stigmatized,” the scholars reveal the marginality of yaoi and shounen-ai, who – similar to American slash fiction fans – have the reputation of being “socially inept and incapable of securing a partner” (Ingulsrud and Allen 58). And it is this not necessarily “intrinsically Japanese” and sometimes also socially controversial position of Boys’ Love manga that has to be considered in the Western academic discourse, which too often forgets that m/m romance targeted at women is “intrinsically American,” too – a lapse that equally plays a big role when discussing shounen-ai and yaoi with regard to “queer Japan.”

5.2.3 Queer Japan: Conceptualizing a “Strange” Sexual Culture, or the Benefits of Exoticism

“The gay worlds of Bangkok, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Manila, or Seoul are obviously different from those in Budapest, Johannesburg, Hobart, Minneapolis, and Sao Paolo. Yet in all these cities – covering all continents and both the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries – there are similarities which seem important and which I would hypothesize have more to do with common urban and ideological pressures than they do with cultural backgrounds of, say, Thai, Hungarians, and Brazilians. There is a great temptation to ‘explain’ differences in homosexuality in different countries with reference to cultural tradition.” (Altman, “Gaze” 424)

In his groundbreaking paper “Global Gays/Global Gaze” (1997), the Australian scholar Dennis Altman – one of the internationally influential voices in gay studies since his publication Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation in 1971 (Hurley 48-9) – has been “one of the first to point out” that even though there are certain differences in Asian conceptions of sexuality compared to European and Northern American models, there is no reason to “explain away everything ‘Asian’ in terms of traditional and innate ‘Asian differences’” (Shimizu 357). An inconsiderate imposing of Western ideas of sexuality onto other cultures in a cultural imperialist fashion – neglecting their own histories and contexts – clearly is problematic (358). However, the fact that a conceptualization of non-Western sexual cultures as an “exoticized/eroticized [….] other” by over- exaggerating their dissimilarities – describing them as prone to “sexual ‘excess,’

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‘promiscuity,’ largely ritualized or visible homosexuality, and transgenderism” (Kong 21) – is dangerous as well, becomes especially evident in the academic discourses about Boys’ Love manga. Neglecting the slash fiction tradition in the U.S. and Europe, the appearance of gay men in shoujo manga is explained by a supposedly completely different Japanese sexual history and culture – another facet of the Orientalist view on female “cross-voyeurism,” which is going to be discussed in this subchapter. As already suggested in the previous chapter, the existence of Japanese Boys’ Love manga in scholarly accounts is often explained by representing Western “Puritan” morals and Japan’s “liberal” pornographic culture as polar opposites – something that is usually done by dealing with national history in a peculiar way. In a problematic fashion, many scholars differentiate between an “original Japan” before its opening to the outside world in the 1850s, which was “suppressed” since the adoption of a Western cultural identity for the most part during the second half of the 19th and the 20th century – a historical construction that neglects the possibility of cultural “hybridity” as theo- rized most prominently by Homi Bhabha (Loomba 176). In the Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha looks upon the formation of “new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 118) and questions the concept of “cultural purity” in general – an insight that would be quite valuable in the academic discourses about Boys’ Love as well, as it clearly sticks to the idea of a “fixed” and unchangeable opposition between East and West. In “Penguin in Bondage,” Buckley thus depicts a Japan with a long tradition of por- nographic comics, by claiming that shunga – pornographic woodblock prints of the Edo period (1603-1868) – were the predecessors of the (mostly heterosexual comics and cartoons portraying sexual perversions) and Boys’ Love manga of the present (Buckley 165-168). Naturally, a disruption of this tradition is connected with the “prudish” Europeans/Americans: Buckley claims that in the 1860s, a Japanese “desire to meet with the perceived moral standards of the West” led to the “first major crack- down” of pornography (168) – a historical reconstruction that emphasizes the contrast between the “perverse” Asians and the “Puritans” and fails to mention that it is more likely the appearance of erotic photography that caused the decline of this art form. But there is yet another “leitmotif” in U.S. academia connected with Japanese histo- ry, which is used more frequently to defend the claim that the open depiction of male homosexuality in Boys’ Love manga is definitely non-Western. By citing older Japanese representations of same-sex desire like the Chigo monogatari – a literary homoerotic genre about Buddhist monks and their young male chigo (i.e. pupils/lovers) mostly

92 written in the Muromachi period (1336-1573) (Childs 1-26) – or by mentioning tradi- tional Japanese homoerotic woodblock prints, many U.S. scholars like Mark McHarry and Antonia Levi try to uphold the claim that the “representation of male adult/adolescent eroticism [nanshoku] has been prevalent in Japanese cultural products since about 800-850 CE” (McHarry 1446; Aoyama, “Homosexuality” 186; Levi, “North American” 150). Once again, the “invasion” of Western ideas in the era (1868- 1912) and beyond is portrayed as responsible for the “breaking down” of this “original” Japanese tradition, establishing both cultures as polar opposites again. Whereas McHar- ry thus perceives the “adoption of Western psychosexual theories in the late 19th and early 20th century” as the reason for the receding of Japan’s homoerotic literature and art (McHarry 1446), Antonia Levi states that the “arrival of West and Victorian morality in the mid-nineteenth century” caused a “Western-style homophobia” in Japan (Levi, “North American” 150). Overall, this polarization results in a far-fetched, exoticizing romanticization of Japan’s past that is equally problematic, as it neglects the fact that there is a homoerotic Western tradition as well, which goes back to ’ love affairs in Greek mythology (Kamm 20). Another way of depicting yaoi and shounen-ai as a typical manifestation of Japanese culture is to connect it with contemporary representations of male same-sex desire in Japan’s media (as opposed to the depiction of homosexual identities in the West). In his study Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan (2000), Mark McLelland suggests that Boys’ Love manga are part of an Asian trend to portray the homosexual man as “gender- deviant” in the mainstream media: By connecting the okama stereotype on Japanese television – the portrayal of gay men as effeminate and flamboyant transvestites (McLelland, “Homosexuality” 34-55) – with the often androgynous characters of Boys’ Love manga, the American scholar indicates that this genre is not only typically Japa- nese, but also part of a “heterosexist” logic of the Asian mainstream representation (60- 61). By claiming that gay men are idealized in Japanese television and literature as “Women’s Best Friends and Ideal Marriage Partners,” McLelland portrays Boys’ Love manga as representative for a problematic tendency within Japanese society as a whole (89-109). In a return to the “fag hag” stereotype – a cliché also existent in Japanese culture (called okoge) – Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan argues that the enthusi- asm of Japanese women for male homosexuality – which might easily turn into a pathological delusion – is responsible for gay men’s romanticized representation in the Japanese media (122).

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Wim Lunsing – another Western scholar studying the “gay boom” in Japan since the 1990s (Lunsing, “Gay Boom”) – repeats this generalizing “othering” of Japanese Boys’ Love fans as an “exotic” and “strange” part of Japanese culture: By describing how a Japanese (heterosexual) Boys’ Love fan girl rubbed “her crotch” against his “buttocks in a club in Kyoto, like gay men may do when dancing” – an action he interprets as “mimicking the active male part in the sexual role division” of yaoi – Lunsing continues this portrayal of Japanese BL manga readers as visible “fag hags,” who can be a real “nuisance” to gay men “in their desire to become one’s friends, up to the point of stalking” (Lunsing, “Intersections”). But, whereas this connection between female “cross-voyeurs” and gay subculture in the academic discourse about Japanese Boys’ Love manga reminds strongly of the scholarly accounts about Renault & her fellow cross-writing novelists, a point of view, which constructs BL as a “women’s genre” – as in the debates about slash fiction – can be found as well. Just like K/S fiction, yaoi and shounen-ai are often seen as a homoerotic “ideal imag- inative fantasy” for Japanese women in American publications, which is “on the level of unicorns and elves,” i.e. has little to do with “real” male homosexuality (Nagaike 98; Pagliassotti, “Reading”; Wilson and Toku). But again, the Western tradition of slash fiction is neglected and the “fantasy” element is often associated with a special quality of Japanese literature – a repetition of the process of exoticizing female “cross- voyeurism.” By claiming that manga in general are more bold with regard to their violent and sexual content, because of their obvious status as unrealistic narratives in Japan, many Western scholars – including Frederik Schodt – have explained the homoerotic content of girls’ comics with this particular philosophy of “anything goes” in Japanese comics (Pagliassotti, “Reading”; Camper 25). Overall, there has been a general neglect of the Japanese intellectual discussions about Boys’ Love manga in American academia with regard to the issue of male homosexuality as well. In 2006, Wim Lunsing noticed bewildered that the yaoi ronsou (lit. yaoi discourse), a famous Japanese “discussion concentrating on the politics of depictions of men having sex with men in shoujo manga,” had never been mentioned in English-language scholarship so far (Lunsing, “Intersections”). And whereas this debate – in which the gay Japanese activist Satou Masaki criticized yaoi in the feminist magazine Choisir in 1992 as homophobic, which led to a defense of Boys’ Love by fans of the genre – has been reconsidered now in reaction to Lunsing’s paper by Keith Vincent and other Western academics (Vincent 2007, 69-72), the initial omission once

94 again indicates a tendency to belittle Asia’s own tradition of intellectual criticism and respectively its gay/feminist rights movement. But on another note, the “outsider perspective” assumed by American/Western scholars in the yaoi/shounen-ai discourse seems to have its “benefits” as well – at least with regard to a different conceptualization of female “cross-voyeurism.” Probably due the fact that early American distributors of Boys’ Love manga and anime marketed them to a “gay male audience” (Levi, Introduction 3), the status of this genre as shoujo (girls’ comics) has been increasingly questioned in the Western context. Whereas slash fiction’s readership is still mostly theorized as female and heterosexual, scholars like Dru Pagliassotti underline the existence of a lesbian and gay readership of yaoi (Pagliassotti “Reading”). Wim Lunsing even starts to question the assumption of an essential difference between gay pornographic manga written by and for male homo- sexuals and Boys’ Love manga (Lunsing, “Intersections”) – a criticism that is unique in the history of the academic discourses about female “cross-voyeurism,” as it is general- ly assumed that there has to be a dissimilarity between a woman writing about gay men and a male homosexual “authentic” voice. While McLelland and Masaki as well as the Japanese media system differentiate between (lit. rose)43 or gei comi – homoerotic manga targeted at gay men, featur- ing more masculine, muscled characters instead of bishounen (T. Anderson) – and yaoi/shounen-ai, Lunsing compares both genres and discovers interesting parallels. With Satou Masaki’s harsh judgment about yaoi in mind – who claimed that it harmed gay men’s human rights by portraying them in a discriminative and unrealistic way – he looks more closely at Japanese pornographic comics for and by gay men. Based on bara’s equally idealized portrayal of “broad shouldered, muscular and hairy men” and the fact that many gay men also draw the “handsome, slender” male characters that can be found in women’s yaoi, Lunsing questions the denial of a connection between the two genres. Whereas Masaki claimed that the importance of sexual violence in yaoi proved that the female readers only wanted to see gay men suffering, Lunsing shows that rape and abuse are important aspects of the pornographic effect in manga for gay men, as well. In a critique of the frequent reproach that Boys’ Love manga would not address the discrimination against male homosexuals in Japan, he argues that in most Japanese gei comi, a gay identity would equally be of no importance. As a positive counterexample for BL, which relate to issues like Aids and “coming-out,” Lunsing

43 The use of the term bara in connection with gay erotica in Japan was established/popularized with the publication of the first commercially successful gay Japanese magazine Barazoku in 1971 (Mackintosh).

95 cites Marimo Ragawa’s New York, New York (1995) – a yaoi manga about a policeman in North America, dealing with a gay man’s problems in a homophobic culture. Overall, Wim Lunsing’s unusually open-minded comparison reveals the prejudices against female “cross-voyeurs” and is thus quite unique in the history of the academic discours- es about this phenomenon: Behind the accusations of the Japanese gay activist, Satou Masaki, he thus suspects a “difficulty” of accepting the idea that “women may look at […] [gay men] as sex objects” (Lunsing, “Intersections”) – a problem that is mirrored in the academic discourses about slash fiction and “cross-writing novelists” as well. The Western academic discourse about Boys’ Love manga additionally offers new perspectives on the subject of female “cross-voyeurism” with regard to its “queerness.” In the attempt to emphasize the “outlandishness” and “strangeness” of yaoi and shounen-ai, elements that confuse and question the “regular” homosexual/heterosexual binary and conventional conceptualizations of gender and sexual identity are pointed out and exaggerated. In contrast to the scholarly accounts about slash fiction, the “voyeuristic pleasure” that female readers may find in the depiction of “scenes of anal sex and between beautiful men,” i.e. in the portrayal of male homosexual acts is clearly recognized as an important part of the genre – for instance by Andrea Wood in “‘Straight’ Women, Queer Texts” (Wood, “Global” 401). Similarly, the “queering” of the female viewer though the act of reading yaoi is ad- dressed more often: By citing Sakakibara Shihomi – a female Boys’ Love novelist, whose profession is inspired by her wish to be a gay man – Matthew Thorn addresses the allure of imaging oneself as a person with another “sex/sexual identity” in connec- tion with homoerotic manga. Especially when describing yaoi (Japanese costume play) on a Japanese convention – in which two girls dress up as their favorite BL characters and participate in “homoerotic” role play – Thorn depicts the genre as an epitome of “queerness” (Thorn 175-177), reinforcing its “exotic” character as the “other” due to its Asian origins. The fact that Boys’ Love is taken more seriously with regard to its male homosexuality could also be partly because of the genre’s more visual character. Due to yaoi’s clearly pornographic images, its partly legally and morally problematic aspects have come into focus in recent years as well. As certain subgenres of Boys’ Love such as – manga about relationships between older men and young or under-age boys – are liable to censorship on the basis of laws against child pornography in some Western countries, their moral value has been discussed by McLelland and Zanghellini (Zanghellini 159-177; McLelland and Yoo 1-29) – a debate that would be unthinkable in the academic discourse about slash fiction (where there is

96 also something similar, called chanslash), because m/m fan fiction’s status as pornogra- phy and its relationship to “real” gay people is denied in general.

5.3 An Exciting “Import” and Its American Counterpart – Discussing Boys’ Love and Slash Fiction in the U.S. Academic Discourses

“‘My Parents would totally freak if they knew what I was watching,’ a fourteen-year-old girl told me happily as she displayed the videotapes of Earthian she had just acquired at an animé convention. ‘They think Japanimation is all Pokémon and Card Captor Sakura.’ She was undoubtedly correct about her parents’ probable reaction to Earthian, which is a typical example of yaoi – gay male romance written by women for girls.”(Levi, “North American” 147)

Thus, Antonia Levi introduces Boys’ Love manga/anime in “North American Reactions to Yaoi” – an adequately named article in which the female scholar describes the genre as a completely “outlandish” and exotic import that is destined to shock “Puritan American.” As a medium for “sexual experimentation” for women, and a queer way of playing with gender and sexual identity, the Japanese genre is viewed as a positive influence on young American teenagers by Levi (Levi, “North American” 148-9, 169) – a reaction that is quite typical for the American discourse about yaoi and shounen-ai. Whereas the Western scholarly accounts about slash fiction mainly tried to reduce its appeal to a heterosexual attraction towards the male characters or the yearning after a feminist romance, the “queer” and “queering” nature of Japanese female “cross- voyeurism” is recognized by many. Nevertheless, it is mainly due to an Orientalist interpretation of Asian sexuality, that these more complex aspects of women writing/reading about gay men are recognized – a tendency, which becomes especially evident in the long neglect of the parallels between Boys’ Love manga and its Western equivalent, slash fiction. But while former accounts about yaoi and shounen-ai mainly ignored the connections between the two genres or mentioned them too briefly in footnotes and short in-between-paragraphs (e.g. Levi, “North American” 149; Thorn 172), the similarities and differences seem to get recognized in the excellent 2010 anthology Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre: Dru Pagliassotti compares both slash fiction’s and yaoi’s roots in the romance genre in “Better Than Romance” and recommends addressing its connections with the genre of m/m romance fiction in general while ignoring the implied gender of the reader – an excellent and promising proposal that would permit new perspectives (Pagliassotti, “Romance” 78). Similarly, Mark John Isola suggests thinking about reasons for the “synchronicity between the

97 contemporaneous evolutions of yaoi and slash” despite their different cultural origins (Isola 96). Overall, the conceptualization of Boys’ Love as a foreign concept breaking the Western hetero/homo binary seems to get questioned, as the queerness of North America and Europe’s own “female cross-voyeurs” comes into focus in this new 2010 anthology – a development that promises an end to the Orientalist perception of yaoi and shounen-ai. However, the stereotypes against Japan that have influenced the academic discourse about Boys’ Love manga so far should not be neglected, despite these new positive tendencies. Instead, the persistence of Orientalist preconceptions about Asia in the American scholarly accounts serves as a reminder of the fact that “race” and cultural “otherness” are important factors that cannot be neglected when analyzing the concep- tualization of sexual identity and gender in queer and feminist studies (Sullivan 57-80) – a dimension, which has also been reconsidered by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter (1993) (Salih 74).

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6. Conclusion: Theorizing Female “Cross-Voyeurism” in U.S. Aca- demia – A “Vicious Circle”

“No one asks ‘Why Het [i.e. heterosexual fan fiction]?’ If you cruise on by Metafandom, as a rule you'll find plenty of dissertation-length discussions as to why women turn out in droves to write about two men getting it on, and you'll even find the occasional essay about why they do the same for two women.” (Merlin Missy)

In her article on Firefox News – a news site by writers, who are “part of [the] fandom” of the topics they report on – Merlin Missy emphasizes that the “Why Slash?” question reappears frequently within fandom: Busse and Hellekson also speak of this fan-intern phenomenon and admit that while many fan essays on this topic are written in a “non- academic style,” they nevertheless “reflect the community and its concerns” quite adequately, while simultaneously being influenced by insights from theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick (Busse and Hellekson 24). Similarly, discussions about BL manga by fans on the Internet focus on this complex, too. “Why do girls like yaoi?” is a formulation that gets over 1.330.000 results in a Google search – texts, in which fans try to justify their “obsession” with Boys’ Love equally are numerous and often several pages long (e.g. Firedancer). Obviously, female “cross-voyeurism” really is a phenomenon in need of an explana- tion, as it does not agree with traditional notions of gender and sexuality in Western culture. This can be especially witnessed with regard to the academic discourses. It is thus no coincidence that the scholarly accounts about Boys’ Love manga and slash fiction are – at times – notorious among fans for their “unbidden intrusion” in their realm (e.g. Yost) – fujoshi in Japan even literally “screamed” “Leave Us Alone!” (“Hottoite!”) in reaction to the increasing interest of academia in them (Kamm 66). As has been shown in this publication, the quantity of scholarly publications dedicated to female “cross-voyeurism” is indeed astonishing. Since the 1970s, a multiplication of the discourses about women consuming/producing gay fiction in academia can be recog- nized, which puts those female “cross-voyeurs” increasingly under “the regiment of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world” (Foucault, Will 11). To recapitulate: there are at least three different discourses recognizable in academia, which conceptualize the emergence of “faghagging” women since 1970 in detail – with quite different focus points and characteristic tendencies: the scholarly discussion of “cross-writing” novelists like Mary Renault and Patricia Nell Warren since the 1970s,

99 the academic theorization of slash fiction, and the debates about Japanese Boys’ Love manga since the 1980s. However, despite the quite different features of these genres of “gay fiction” by/for women – m/m fan fiction is based on an original work, whereas Boys’ Love manga are characterized by their visual character – the academic discourses about these phenomena are remarkably similar to each other. These common features thus illustrate the Foucauldian assumption of an underlying set of rules, i.e. a certain weltanschauung with regard to sexual orientation and gender that influences those scholarly statements tremendously and is one of the controlling mechanisms determin- ing which interpretations are repeated and varied and which ones “vanish into oblivion.” In this study, at least four recurring, underlying patterns of thought have been distin- guished, which are problematic due to their adherence to a homosexual/heterosexual binary as well their performative re-citation of gender/sex stereotypes – tendencies that scholars need to be aware of in order to stop the “vicious circle” of theorizing female “cross-voyeurism” in a heterosexist and phallocentric way.

1) “Look what I found!” The unique/exotic character of female “cross- voyeurism” On the one hand, there is a repeated exclamation of the “uniqueness” and “strangeness” of “faghagging” writers/readers, which can be found in each of the analyzed academic discourses – a repetitive reassurance of the “normal” lines of homo- and heterosexuality, which the “extraordinariness” of this phenomenon validates within the logic of the scholarly accounts. Bacon-Smith’s emphasis on the fact that she wanted to “jump up and down and scream: ‘Look what I found!’” (Bacon-Smith 3) in reaction to her “discovery” of slash fiction is quite typical in that respect, as it creates the impression of an “exceptionality” of fe- male “cross-voyeurism.” Thus, it is no surprise that comparative studies proving the commonness of these phenomena are rare and usually try to re-establish conventional concepts of sex and gender in some other way – another reason why my analysis is an important contribution to the academic discourse, by be- ing the first to properly focus on the variety and quantity of female “cross- voyeurism” in modern culture. The point of culmination in this process of under- lining the “uniqueness” of female “cross-voyeurism” surely is the academic dis- course about Boys’ Love manga, which is clearly influenced by Orientalist stere- otypes about Asia: By neglecting its American “counterparts,” the U.S. scholarly accounts interpret yaoi and shounen-ai as “intrinsically Japanese” phenomena and thus define female “cross-voyeurism” per se as “outlandish” and “exotic.”

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2) Immature teenagers and ugly women: The “fag hag” as sexually and emo- tionally confused On the other hand, the sexual deviance of female “cross-voyeurs” is underlined in all three of the analyzed academic discourses at some point, by depicting them as sexually and emotionally confused or dissatisfied. Whether literary scholars make use of the pejorative “fag hag” stereotypes when referring to the “cross-writing” novelists, or Bacon-Smith characterizes slash fiction fans as ug- ly/lonely women – often, female “cross-voyeurism” is depicted as a replacement activity for “real” relationships. The frequent conceptualization of the American Boys’ Love manga fan as an “experimenting” teenager (e.g. Levi, “North Ameri- can” 148) continues this tradition, by reducing the interest in this genre to an “adolescent phase.” Overall, “faghagging” is often evaluated as “low ranking” within the “hierarchical valuation of sex acts” (compared to the “ideal” of repro- ductive sex, marriage and love) (Rubin, “Thinking” 288, 278) in these scholarly accounts, and even occasionally shown as indicative of a failure to be a “proper” woman – a conceptualization that somehow “clashes” with the next, more fre- quent interpretation that underlines the “femininity” of those “cross-voyeurs.”

3) A “feminization” of gay male relationships? Female “cross-voyeurs” as the epitome of “womanhood” In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler reveals the “unnaturalness” and the per- formatively produced character of the gender/sex binary in Western culture and underlines the problematic reliance of feminist theory/politics on the category of “women” as opposed to “men” (Butler, Trouble 2-4) – a critique of the concept of a common gender identity that has, however, remained sadly un-influential with regard to the academic conceptualization of female “cross-voyeurs.” This especially shows in the definition of their works as “typically female.” Anxious to underline their contrast to “real” or “authentic” gay male fiction, the scholarly accounts about Renault, Yourcenar, and Warren describe their works as false, kitschy and glorifying “ersatz works,” thus declaring that a heterosexu- al/homosexual woman can never accurately depict the opposite sex/gay men. This tendency of over-emphasizing the difference between “male” and “female” is increased in the scholarly accounts about slash fiction: By defining it as some kind of “ideal” erotica for women/women’s fiction – with a supposed focus on

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“intimacy,” “emotion” and “romance”– the connection between m/m fan fiction and gay fiction/subculture is completely neglected. Butler’s concern in the face of such “regimes of truth,” which stipulate “that certain kinds of gendered ex- pressions […] [are] found to be false or derivative, and others, true and original” (Butler, “Preface” vii) is appropriate in this case as well: By upholding gen- der/sex stereotypes, the academic discourse about slash fiction conceptualizes “women” and “men” in a way, which reduces minor phenomena such as male readers/writers of m/m fan fiction or non-feminist slash fans to “gender devi- ants.” Such a problematic adherence to traditional notions of gender and sexual orientation can be observed in the conceptualization of the “queer” desire of fe- male cross-voyeurs in the academic discourses as well.

4) Female “cross-voyeurism” and the heterosexualization of “queer” desires Astonishing is especially the frequent neglect of the much “queerer” possibilities of “faghagging,” which is seldom conceptualized as a phenomenon crashing the stable/fixed boundaries of the homosexual/heterosexual binary. Instead, interpre- tations of slash fiction and gay novels by women quite often neglect the genres’ concentration on gay masculinity. By underlining other “benefits” of focusing on male homosexual couples, such as their function as metaphors for the ideal, equal (heterosexual) relationship every woman dreams of, the “queer” desire of many readers/writers as “fag hags” is usually ignored. Lesbians as female “cross-voyeurs” are seldom conceptualized at all: If they are discussed, their de- sire for gay men is equally re-integrated into the common logic of a sexuality that is merely determined by the “gender of [one’s] object-choice” (Sedgwick, Closet 35). Thus, the gay men envisioned in a lesbian’s “gay male fiction” natu- rally are “really” two women in “disguise” in the academic interpretations – a reductionist logic ignoring the complexity of human sexuality. However, espe- cially in the academic discourse about Boys’ Love manga, new interpretations began to emerge, which dared to conceptualize sexual and emotional “desires,” transgressing the “heterosexual matrix,” recently. Uli Meyer’s “girlfag” concept is one of the most interesting alternatives to the old formula of gay fiction as a symbol for women’s dream of the “ideal relationship”: By actually acknowledg- ing the similarities between female-to-gay-male transsexuals and “faghagging,” Meyer has been the first to openly speak about the desire for gay men per se, which is an important aspect of this phenomenon. It is with queer theory’s prem-

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ise of the unnaturalness of “fixed” sexual identities in mind that I suggest a theo- rization, which is more open to sexual desires transgressing those cultural boundaries of sex and gender: To acknowledge a female yearning to become a gay men/ women taking voyeuristic pleasure in gay male sex is definitely one step in the right direction.

Overall, the academic contributions about female “cross-voyeurism”, i.e. gay fiction by women as well as slash fiction and Boys’ Love manga are manifold and multi- faceted. A large quantity of the scholarly accounts, however, are highly repetitive in their attempt at “normalizing” the “strange case of female ‘cross-voyeurs’” – which is why this study has tried to reveal the recurring elements, while hoping to inspire other ways of conceptualizing and theorizing these works/genres. With regard to future academic works, it seems especially important to question existing categories of sexual/gender identity more radically with the help of queer theory in order to escape this “vicious circle” of heterosexism and sexism – an endeavor that has not been successfully achieved yet in academia, as Mark Norris Lance and Alessandra Tanesini argue in their paper “Identity Judgments, Queer Politics” (2000) (Lance and Tanesini 171-2). And whereas Mark McLelland’s provocative question “If heterosexual men enjoy the idea of two women getting it on, why should heterosexual women not enjoy the idea of two men bonking?” (McLelland, “Bonking”) emphasizes the importance of gender for the perception of “cross-voyeurism” once again; further research with regard to the portrayal of male “cross-voyeurism” in U.S. scholarly accounts would be certain- ly of interest and a valuable point of comparison. Similar to the various “cross-writing” women like Patricia Nell Warren or Anne Rice, there is equally a – significantly larger – tradition of male “cross-writing” (Norton 689). Works such as Honoré de Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or (1835) – a French novella about two female lovers whose idyll is interrupted by a man – as well as Henry James’ novel The Bostonians (1885/6) – in which the feminist Olive Chancellor desires her protégée Verena Tarrant in vain – depict women’s same-sex attraction as early as in the 19th century (Castle 410-423, 555-560). D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox (1921) and The Rainbow (1915) – a novel, which contains a brief passionate affair between the adoles- cent Ursula and her teacher (690) – continue this form of male “cross-voyeurism” throughout the 20th century. There is even a Japanese “counter-part” to yaoi/shounen-ai in this respect: (lit. lily) or shoujo-ai (girls’ love) is a female- and male-targeted genre of manga/anime, describing lesbian relationships (Bee Kee 146). In the face of this multitude of forms of male “cross-voyeurism,” it would be quite interesting to

103 analyze the way in which those men writing/reading about female homosexuals are conceptualized. In the light of certain prejudices against male “cross-writers” – such as the contem- porary cliché of the “hotness” of “girl-on-girl action” for heterosexual men – the question as to how the gender and sexual orientation influences the evaluation of their works promises to provide new perspectives. In the awareness that being male does not necessarily imply an especially patriarchal view or the treatment of lesbian women as “sex objects” in the literary works, a re-evaluation of some academic analyses might be necessary. Whereas Corthell’s interpretation of John Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis” (1633) has already been criticized in the introduction, the fact that the writer is a man especially seems to be “suspicious” when it comes to sexually explicit female homoe- rotic literature. Gender and sexual orientation has proved to be an important factor, for instance, in the academic analyses of – cheap novels with overtly lesbian themes, written for the mass-market, which were successful in the 1950s and 1960s (Y. Keller, “Right” 385). As a large part of the genre’s audience was hetero- sexual and male, the reproach of a “voyeuristic” and “homophobic” treatment of female same-sex desire, which reduces women to “sex objects,” has been frequently associated with lesbian pulp fiction in academia (Y. Keller, “Politics” 4) – and this accusation is clearly accurate for the majority of the novels. Nevertheless, a generalization of virtual- ly all male writers and readers to sex-hungry misogynists seems problematic and reductionist. Recent scholarly accounts by Yvonne Keller and others about the few actual homo- sexual women writing lesbian pulp fiction – who, like Valerie Taylor, often tried to write against the genre’s homophobic conventions – have been important contributions to lesbian literature studies (Y. Keller, “Right” 392). The strict division of the genre into “virile” lesbian pulp fiction – i.e. novels written by and intended for a male heterosexual audience – and pro-lesbian pulp – i.e. positive representations of female same-sex desire, written for and mostly by women – however, seems to be too simplistic (400). As even Yvonne Keller admits that there were actually some male writers, who wrote pro-lesbian pulp novels under female pennames (390-2), a general condemnation of the male interest in lesbian pulp fiction, which reduces its appeal for men to its “voyeuris- tic” and misogynic pornographic quality, can definitely be questioned. A theorization of the possibility of a male emotional and sexual cross-gender identification would capture the “queerness” of male “cross-voyeurism” – a new perspective, revealing the performa- tive character of “masculinity” and “maleness,” too.

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Anthologies such as Carol Queen’s and Lawrence Schimel’s Switch Hitters (1996) – a collection of lesbian porn by gay writers and gay erotica by lesbian authors – promise a “refreshing” acknowledgment of the complexities of male (and female) “cross- voyeurism” as well (Queen and Schimel): Switch Hitters’ project questions “labels” like gender and sexual orientation – a truly “queer”/”queering” undertaking that sadly has found no imitators, yet. Overall, it would certainly be worthwhile to re-think the heterosexual/homosexual binary with the help of phenomena like “cross-voyeurism.” Because, as John Champagne has argued, even a categorization into “homosexual” and “heterosexual” pornography is misleading: “While a given text” might be “advertised as featuring heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual activity, there is no necessary corre- spondence between the images and the audiences who consume them” (Champagne 701) – a useful hint that promises new possibilities for further research in the field of queer studies.

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