And since some of the female authors - by no means all - are LBT, you get into sticky territory if you try to exclude them from gay space, don't you?
There have been a few people in this debate eager to do just that to queer women, unfortunately. I'm not exactly sure where slash by us bisexual/lesbian/etc. girls falls on the spectrum of queer literature. On the one hand, it's fiction by queer people, about queer (usually bisexual) characters, but on the other hand, it doesn't *feel* like most gay lit when I read it, because most gay lit is srz bnz literature, and most slash is fantasy on some level. Which is why I personally like it better (I'm a genre fan, not a literary fiction fan), but...I don't know.
I mean, I know I wouldn't publish a m/m romance under a fake male name, but I also don't know if I as a bisexual woman would have any right to submit something I'd written about male characters for something like the Lambdas or not (imagining for the sake of argument that I a)had written published original fiction and b) it wasn't pure SF pulp with an exclamation point in the title). My instincts say no, given that the general drift of the discussion seems to be that having your gender match the characters' gender is just as important or more important than sexuality, and that my writing would only count as queer lit if it was about women (and probably also only if it was realism rather than escapism, the same way comicbooks and Harlequin novels aren't usually considered for literary awards).
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Date: 2010-02-08 02:14 am (UTC)There have been a few people in this debate eager to do just that to queer women, unfortunately. I'm not exactly sure where slash by us bisexual/lesbian/etc. girls falls on the spectrum of queer literature. On the one hand, it's fiction by queer people, about queer (usually bisexual) characters, but on the other hand, it doesn't *feel* like most gay lit when I read it, because most gay lit is srz bnz literature, and most slash is fantasy on some level. Which is why I personally like it better (I'm a genre fan, not a literary fiction fan), but...I don't know.
I mean, I know I wouldn't publish a m/m romance under a fake male name, but I also don't know if I as a bisexual woman would have any right to submit something I'd written about male characters for something like the Lambdas or not (imagining for the sake of argument that I a)had written published original fiction and b) it wasn't pure SF pulp with an exclamation point in the title). My instincts say no, given that the general drift of the discussion seems to be that having your gender match the characters' gender is just as important or more important than sexuality, and that my writing would only count as queer lit if it was about women (and probably also only if it was realism rather than escapism, the same way comicbooks and Harlequin novels aren't usually considered for literary awards).