This is Totally Just a Placeholder for Actual Thoughts

[alixtii]

carmarthen has a post here where she refers to this post by kalpurna and she (for both values of "she") talks about romantic friendships. And this made me think about the romantic parent-child relationship Ari sees in her reading of Matilda and the romantic sibling relationship I see in my reading of The Parent Trap (more about that when I write my yuletide letter), and about the overarching concept of non-inherently sexual--but eminently sexualizable, as Ari and I both make that jump more or less without thinking, and I guess my main point in this post is that maybe there is a jump there, and there is a trans-category "romance" which isn't inherently sexual--romance in general. (And my mind goes back to my Yuletide letter again--how does this relate to the Carmen/Player dynamic in WoEiCS? canon?)

Taken as granted that we as--I want to say "slashers" but that's not even a term with which I really identify (I'm a femslasher), but as those of us who do this highly sexualized fanfic thing kalpurna talks about in her essay, who inhabit this queer female space (he says, being neither queer nor female)--use sex as a metaphor for emotional intimacy, would it be accurate to say that, at heart, what it is we are doing is sexualizing "romance"? (And how does hatesex/antagonistic relationships fit into that paradigm?)

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

use sex as a metaphor for emotional intimacy, would it be accurate to say that, at heart, what it is we are doing is sexualizing "romance"

i'd definitely say so...but then I'm clearly oppressing all those straight women who think that writing gay sex with/for other women is just b/c two men are better than one :D

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Because they would disagree with the premise that fandom's use of sex is a metaphor for emotional intimacy? But I'm not sure how that would follow from their being straight--certainly there isn't anything particularly queer about a desire for emotional intimacy as experienced through the text (we're not necessarily making a claim about the fannish relations here, although of course you and I would)? If anything, it seems heteronormative. (And now my mind is thinking back to Radway and the manifold nature of her conclusions.)

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

No, I agree that it's ultimately more heteronormative than not, esp. since the emotional intimacy tends to be in pairs.

In fact, the pieces that have fascinated me most recently as "queer" are the ones where intimacy and sex are divorced, where multiple intimacies can co-exist, where the two are *not* conflated (I'm thinking of SamDonne's amazing Thoughtcrimes story here, for example).

In the end, I have to admit, though, I adore that conceit :D

as for the straight women...i just had read one too many rejections of kalpurna's piece that were a bit too simplistic (as opposed to some of the more insightful rejections that I've also seen)