WNG Femslash

Some of the WNGWJLEO meta that has been going around has made me think about the rôle of sexual identities in my own fanfic writing. I've already mentioned before that I've noticed that WNGWJLEO doesn't seem to be a trope in femslash--or at least the femslash I've read--the way it is (or has been) in m/m slash fandom. (I do wonder if WNG is more likely to be a trope in fandoms which are more OTP-centric than Buffy femslash fandom tends to be, fandoms like XWP or Law and Order or Wicked.)

There's been a lot of talk about how characters understand their own sexuality in fic, especially when they find themselves in a type of relationship different than the sort they may have had in canon, and--I suppose--what that means about us as writers and readers and a community. It's been much noted, although no one is quite sure what to make of it, that while the WNG trope doesn't seem to as common as it was (depending on how one defines) the characters in same-sex relationships don't exactly seem to be identifying as gay (or even bi, in most cases), either. Is fandom a post-gay space? No one seems to know for sure.

Anyway, all the discussion made me want to navel-gaze and to look at how sexual identities function--or don't--in my writing. (That is, I'm not talking about how the characters are portrayed in canon, but how I think about them when I'm reading, and how I might expect a reader of my fanfic to respond to them in those stories.)

Some of my characters do have sexual orientations as such, in my imagination if nowhere else, even if they're never really seen identifying with those orientations. Dawn and Faith are in my mind bisexual, even though I really don't see Faith spending much time on coming up with labels for herself. Willow and Kennedy are lesbians, and identify as such in a fashion which is more overtly political and self-aware even while at the same time their queerness is very domestic and in some ways heteronormative. (Kennedy'll have sex with a man in the context of an orgy--I'm thinking mainly of Dawn/Giles/Faith/Kennedy foursomes here--but it's really not her cup of tea. Willow's orientation builds upon her statements in canon, and in part as a resistant measure against all those who paint her bisexual.)

However, I think ambiguity can be important in fic, so other characters have less well-defined sexualities. Buffy is straight unless she's with Faith (a whiff of WNGWJLEO) or appearing in the fic. (I jest, but the fact that Buffy does revolve around her means I have written femslash about her. I see those stories--unlike most of my stories--as sort of AU's, being about a slightly different Buffy than the one we know.) My Andrew is not strictly gay, which leaves open various levels of queerness. I pair him with female characters, but try and keep his mannerisms and dialogue in line with canon, so if he reads as gay there he'll probably read as gay in my fic, too. My Giles is straight insofar as we know but with a deliberate attempt to recreate the Giles/Ethan subtext whenever they meet, to keep open the possibility they may have been lovers. I've only shown Ethan involved with women or talking about being involved with women, but he has subtext not only with Giles but also Beth (an OC who is, despite the name, male). Xander and Oz are presumably straight, as I don't like to write them that often, but that assumption should probably be problematized as well. . . .

A lot of what I write is femslash, so I don't have a lot of straight people appearing in my fics, or at least not a lot of female straight people. This isn't problematic until one considers that I write a lot of my fic in the same universe, so that slowly everyone is becoming bi: not just Dawn and Faith, but also Amanda, Vi, Lilah, Eve, Harmony, Amy. . . who's left? Samantha Finn? (Only until the next 'thon. . . .)

And of course my characters are queer in other ways than just being bi or gay or lesbian, although that opens the can of worms of just how much we're going to let into the term before we've let in every relationship without a picket fence. (Is Dawn and Giles' open marriage queer? Maybe? Would the age-difference and previous power-differential itself be enough to make it queer? Maybe not?)

Homophobia isn't really a present force in my stories, although of course the world they take place in is heteronormative. In part that's because the characters I'm writing about are priveleged enough, with the resources of the Watcher's Council behind them, to do what they like--who really is going to tell a Slayer and a Wiccan who they can sleep with? Of course, that's unrealistic in that it assumes the Council itself is totally accepting of queerness. (Of course, we don't know that such judging doesn't go on in my Watcher!verse, but if it does it happens outside of the stories I am telling.)

Homophobia is touched upon in my "St. Clare's" fics, where Faith and Kennedy are teaching at a Catholic school, but even there it's mostly for humor: the juxtaposition of the Vatican's outdated morality and the reality of the school itself, where no one is taking that morality seriously despite paying a certain obligatory amount of lip-service to it.