Ari (creature of dust, child of God) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wisdomeagle) wrote2004-10-01 02:02 am
wisdomeagle) wrote2004-10-01 02:02 am
Entry tags:
gender-marked writing and the OT4
So I took this meme three times, with "wisdomeagle," "Ari," and "Ruth Ellen" in the "Name" slot. And all three times it churned out that I was a physics geek.
I think internet is confusing me with my girlfriend. Very puzzling, as am not, in any way shape or form, my girlfriend. Except that we happen to share the same brain. But that is very minor indeed. Also, am not a physics geek in any way shape or form, except dating and sharing brain with one. All very confused.
Rather like my women's studies paper. It's a brief 857 words long, which would probably be fine except for the fact that several of those words are made up and one of them is Angelus. Four of them are some variation on the word "porn". Rather long night ahead of me.
Actually, since the paper is written... well, it's about you-me-us, about the internet, about fandom... all in the very vaguest of terms, of course. But I thought you might be vaguely interested. Don't worry, there's not a word of bullshit in here. I haven't edited it into submission yet.
Is writing gender marked? Is écriture feminine possible? How could you identify the author's gender from the text--or could you?
According to Cixous, women's writing will be incredibly purple soft-core porn. I think this is fair. My knowledge of writing done specifically by female people is primarily from the internet, where female people write soft-core and hard-core erotic literature about fictional people for each other, and the result is usually incredibly purple soft-core porn. Men's writing is goal-oriented, linear, not curvaceous, like women's writing. Even when men do new things with words, the experiment, the achievement of something new, is the goal. When women invent new literary forms, they need these forms to express the experience/emotion that is the need fulfilled by their writing. Cixous is not suggesting that women adopt new literary forms, that women be intentionally innovative, but that when women write what comes naturally, new forms will automatically emerge. I think this is bullshit. I mean, yes and no, this is bullshit. I have no clue what male people are writing these days. Maybe it is extremely gender-marked and they are all Hemingway and all Tolstoy and it is women who are innovating. But I think this is hardly an adequate explanation. To say that look, these women, all these women in history, have written this one way, which is obviously masculine, thus their work does not count, they are not writing as women. Their experience has been entirely invalidated by the social filters they must pass through to get their writing validated by society. This is not really women's writing, even though it is all that has been written by women for thousands of years.
And some men have managed to transcend the boundaries of their own masculinity and write as-women-would-write. This makes no-sense-to-me. We write as we write.
OTOH, when we are writing for a different purpose, when we are writing for ourselves and each other and not for the literary audience, when we are writing as ourselves and not as Authors, then perhaps our writing is gender-marked, just as it is also more marked as ours-and-ours-alone, when we are not writing for an audience who will judge us on our literary merits or our syntax or our creativity but on the depth of feeling we elicit, by the way our words evoke responses. So writing by African American and by European American academics will be unmarked by race, but the sermons preached by those same academics, those will be marked! This paper will not be gender-marked, but the Angelus/Spike porn I am writing will be more gender-marked, and the diary entry I write will be entirely gender-marked and also entirely Ruth Ellen. In academia we separate ourselves entirely from our personalities; we become the omniscient voice speaking to the academic world from an empty mind-place without form and void. But when we write for each other/ourselves, whether fiction or nonfiction, when we write exactly what we want, when we write what turns us on and what makes us sad and what we want, when we write the damned Mary Sue fics, then our writing is gender-marked in the sense that our own desires hopes wishes are written, and that these desires hopes wishes will vary from person to person, and desire varies with gender. If female, then homefamilyemotionromance. If male, then successsexwomensex, etc. If society tells us this is what we must be, if for whatever reason these differences do exist, then. Because our desires are constructed simultaneously with gender, so our personalwriting, our diariesstoriesletters, will be similarly transparent re: gender.
The place to look for gender-marked writing is not in the halls of academia! It is not in Jane Eyre, no, nor not in Ulysses! How can it be, when you say it must pass through the eyes of a scorning, derisionary social system, when it is intended to be Great Literature. The more intentional our writing is for some purpose outside ourselves, the less it is marked. The more it is free, the more it is marked, the more it is ours. Read the pornographic novels! Read the letters to Playboy and the cheesy lesbian romances of the seventies. This is gender-marked literature! It is terrible writing on one level, on the level of the academic, who looks at form and structure and the overuse of adjectives and the points of view that change willy-nilly in the midst of paragraphs. But this is genuine writing women's writing what women would write if free what women would desire if free.
But there is no clear line, no way to say online whether you are reading the masturbatory fantasy of a man or a women, though there are probabilities. The story where the main characters weep and cry and profess undying love and comfort each other and hold each other and are soft and smooth? This is women's writing. And the story where the main characters have sex first and last and emotion is absent, not only from the characters but from the entire narrative, this is man's writing. But not always and not neatly and there are always exceptions.
But the Angelus/Spike? It's so not happening. I love the Fanged Four, but they are all so messy and complicated. They are way too complicated for PWP, which is weird, since they've got more time than just about any other pairing when they are together, relatively happy, relatively settled... and they do fun stuff! They go hunting! They kill things! They all have sex with each other, and it's practically canon! I really dig my OT4, but I just can't write it.
To start with, the voices are mostly so distinctive. I mean, let's face it, there are 2 and a half cool characters in the pairing. Darla's annoying and has approximately twelve different canonical characterizations, which makes her kind of difficult to write in and of herself. I have brief moments of Darla-love in which I realize she is kind of a kick-ass chick, like in WttH. That's kind of cool. I wish I could kill creepy guys who hit on me without feeling any moral qualms. That would kick ass. But most of the time she is so boring that all the Darla-love goes away.
But Spike and Dru are the kick-ass-est characters ever. And they're bloody impossible to write because:
1: they have accents
2: they have mannerisms
3: Spike is sarcastic
4: Dru is nuts
5: they're usually written by Joss, who is infinitely more sarcastic, nuts, and witty than I am, which makes me a very poor candidate for writing them well.
Second of all, they're just so complicated. Darla loves Angelus madly, but isn't really capable of love, and ditto Angelus to Darla, only he's also obsessed with Dru, and Dru loves Angelus as a sire, so Spike is jealous of Angelus but obviously admires and possibly loves him too and might be jealous of the Aus/Dr for more reasons than one. Darla is jealous of Dru; Dru might be jealous of Darla. Darla has no respect for Spike; Spike doesn't really like Darla all that much. Dru thinks of Darla as her grandmother. And all this only in pastfic.
It only gets more complicated after Angel's soul iz pastede on.
Thirdly, they are and aren't really in love. It's one of the most complex relationships in this regard, and I don't havemuch any experience writing a pairing that's complex on that level. I adore love-hate, but I haven't actually written any--or read much. Since much of it simply ignores the complexity and makes it all happy-sappy. Ew. I've written Jack/Kinsey, but that's hate-hate. There is no love. It's very clear in my head exactly why they're both doing it, what they're each bringing to the table, and it's not love.
With D/A/S/D, there is love. Spike/Dru is probably my favorite individual pairing in the foursome, because it is such a romance. A twisted, ugly, beautiful, insane, bloody romance, but a romance. It's the other stuff that I can't write. That I love and adore but don't understand.
Ah, well, enough babbling. I'm over on the Fanged Four Archive, reading this and praying I don't get spoiled. Mmm, smut like whoa.
I think internet is confusing me with my girlfriend. Very puzzling, as am not, in any way shape or form, my girlfriend. Except that we happen to share the same brain. But that is very minor indeed. Also, am not a physics geek in any way shape or form, except dating and sharing brain with one. All very confused.
Rather like my women's studies paper. It's a brief 857 words long, which would probably be fine except for the fact that several of those words are made up and one of them is Angelus. Four of them are some variation on the word "porn". Rather long night ahead of me.
Actually, since the paper is written... well, it's about you-me-us, about the internet, about fandom... all in the very vaguest of terms, of course. But I thought you might be vaguely interested. Don't worry, there's not a word of bullshit in here. I haven't edited it into submission yet.
Is writing gender marked? Is écriture feminine possible? How could you identify the author's gender from the text--or could you?
According to Cixous, women's writing will be incredibly purple soft-core porn. I think this is fair. My knowledge of writing done specifically by female people is primarily from the internet, where female people write soft-core and hard-core erotic literature about fictional people for each other, and the result is usually incredibly purple soft-core porn. Men's writing is goal-oriented, linear, not curvaceous, like women's writing. Even when men do new things with words, the experiment, the achievement of something new, is the goal. When women invent new literary forms, they need these forms to express the experience/emotion that is the need fulfilled by their writing. Cixous is not suggesting that women adopt new literary forms, that women be intentionally innovative, but that when women write what comes naturally, new forms will automatically emerge. I think this is bullshit. I mean, yes and no, this is bullshit. I have no clue what male people are writing these days. Maybe it is extremely gender-marked and they are all Hemingway and all Tolstoy and it is women who are innovating. But I think this is hardly an adequate explanation. To say that look, these women, all these women in history, have written this one way, which is obviously masculine, thus their work does not count, they are not writing as women. Their experience has been entirely invalidated by the social filters they must pass through to get their writing validated by society. This is not really women's writing, even though it is all that has been written by women for thousands of years.
And some men have managed to transcend the boundaries of their own masculinity and write as-women-would-write. This makes no-sense-to-me. We write as we write.
OTOH, when we are writing for a different purpose, when we are writing for ourselves and each other and not for the literary audience, when we are writing as ourselves and not as Authors, then perhaps our writing is gender-marked, just as it is also more marked as ours-and-ours-alone, when we are not writing for an audience who will judge us on our literary merits or our syntax or our creativity but on the depth of feeling we elicit, by the way our words evoke responses. So writing by African American and by European American academics will be unmarked by race, but the sermons preached by those same academics, those will be marked! This paper will not be gender-marked, but the Angelus/Spike porn I am writing will be more gender-marked, and the diary entry I write will be entirely gender-marked and also entirely Ruth Ellen. In academia we separate ourselves entirely from our personalities; we become the omniscient voice speaking to the academic world from an empty mind-place without form and void. But when we write for each other/ourselves, whether fiction or nonfiction, when we write exactly what we want, when we write what turns us on and what makes us sad and what we want, when we write the damned Mary Sue fics, then our writing is gender-marked in the sense that our own desires hopes wishes are written, and that these desires hopes wishes will vary from person to person, and desire varies with gender. If female, then homefamilyemotionromance. If male, then successsexwomensex, etc. If society tells us this is what we must be, if for whatever reason these differences do exist, then. Because our desires are constructed simultaneously with gender, so our personalwriting, our diariesstoriesletters, will be similarly transparent re: gender.
The place to look for gender-marked writing is not in the halls of academia! It is not in Jane Eyre, no, nor not in Ulysses! How can it be, when you say it must pass through the eyes of a scorning, derisionary social system, when it is intended to be Great Literature. The more intentional our writing is for some purpose outside ourselves, the less it is marked. The more it is free, the more it is marked, the more it is ours. Read the pornographic novels! Read the letters to Playboy and the cheesy lesbian romances of the seventies. This is gender-marked literature! It is terrible writing on one level, on the level of the academic, who looks at form and structure and the overuse of adjectives and the points of view that change willy-nilly in the midst of paragraphs. But this is genuine writing women's writing what women would write if free what women would desire if free.
But there is no clear line, no way to say online whether you are reading the masturbatory fantasy of a man or a women, though there are probabilities. The story where the main characters weep and cry and profess undying love and comfort each other and hold each other and are soft and smooth? This is women's writing. And the story where the main characters have sex first and last and emotion is absent, not only from the characters but from the entire narrative, this is man's writing. But not always and not neatly and there are always exceptions.
But the Angelus/Spike? It's so not happening. I love the Fanged Four, but they are all so messy and complicated. They are way too complicated for PWP, which is weird, since they've got more time than just about any other pairing when they are together, relatively happy, relatively settled... and they do fun stuff! They go hunting! They kill things! They all have sex with each other, and it's practically canon! I really dig my OT4, but I just can't write it.
To start with, the voices are mostly so distinctive. I mean, let's face it, there are 2 and a half cool characters in the pairing. Darla's annoying and has approximately twelve different canonical characterizations, which makes her kind of difficult to write in and of herself. I have brief moments of Darla-love in which I realize she is kind of a kick-ass chick, like in WttH. That's kind of cool. I wish I could kill creepy guys who hit on me without feeling any moral qualms. That would kick ass. But most of the time she is so boring that all the Darla-love goes away.
But Spike and Dru are the kick-ass-est characters ever. And they're bloody impossible to write because:
1: they have accents
2: they have mannerisms
3: Spike is sarcastic
4: Dru is nuts
5: they're usually written by Joss, who is infinitely more sarcastic, nuts, and witty than I am, which makes me a very poor candidate for writing them well.
Second of all, they're just so complicated. Darla loves Angelus madly, but isn't really capable of love, and ditto Angelus to Darla, only he's also obsessed with Dru, and Dru loves Angelus as a sire, so Spike is jealous of Angelus but obviously admires and possibly loves him too and might be jealous of the Aus/Dr for more reasons than one. Darla is jealous of Dru; Dru might be jealous of Darla. Darla has no respect for Spike; Spike doesn't really like Darla all that much. Dru thinks of Darla as her grandmother. And all this only in pastfic.
It only gets more complicated after Angel's soul iz pastede on.
Thirdly, they are and aren't really in love. It's one of the most complex relationships in this regard, and I don't have
With D/A/S/D, there is love. Spike/Dru is probably my favorite individual pairing in the foursome, because it is such a romance. A twisted, ugly, beautiful, insane, bloody romance, but a romance. It's the other stuff that I can't write. That I love and adore but don't understand.
Ah, well, enough babbling. I'm over on the Fanged Four Archive, reading this and praying I don't get spoiled. Mmm, smut like whoa.