It really is fascinating. I wonder if top/bottom has always been relatively 'unimportant' in slash fic, or if these roles losing meaning is some recent development. My personal experiences are a bit useless here, because when I first started reading fic somewhere in the late nineties, I read very little that wasn't based on Japanese works, and my slash reading is comparatively recent. What do you think? How would you judge the importance of top/bottom roles in slash?
I forgot to respond to this! I personally think that from its origins there's been a strong streak of resistance to assigning top/bottom roles rigidly (um, so to speak). If you want an early contemporaneous take on the topic, you should find a copy of Joanna Russ's Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts: Feminist Essays, which has a fantastic essay in it called "Pornography for Women, by Women, with Love" which is the earliest academic writing about slash out there (1985). I was very struck by a passage where she discusses how a lot of slash is a fantasy of fluid gender roles, using Kirk/Spock to discuss how the "coding" of the two switches back and forth a lot. I think there's becoming more tendency to assign clearer roles, but there's a strong history of just the opposite--and I think a lot of bone-deep dislike of it in a lot of places. Like I mentioned, people will start to kick and complain a lot in certain circles if a male character is "the girl" (though in some cases I suspect it's because the WRONG character is being coded "the girl," not simply that one of them is...)
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2010-02-22 02:47 pm (UTC)I forgot to respond to this! I personally think that from its origins there's been a strong streak of resistance to assigning top/bottom roles rigidly (um, so to speak). If you want an early contemporaneous take on the topic, you should find a copy of Joanna Russ's Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts:
Feminist Essays, which has a fantastic essay in it called "Pornography for Women, by Women, with Love" which is the earliest academic writing about slash out there (1985). I was very struck by a passage where she discusses how a lot of slash is a fantasy of fluid gender roles, using Kirk/Spock to discuss how the "coding" of the two switches back and forth a lot. I think there's becoming more tendency to assign clearer roles, but there's a strong history of just the opposite--and I think a lot of bone-deep dislike of it in a lot of places. Like I mentioned, people will start to kick and complain a lot in certain circles if a male character is "the girl" (though in some cases I suspect it's because the WRONG character is being coded "the girl," not simply that one of them is...)