Naughty Girls and Gay Male Romance/Porn: Slash Fiction, Boys' Love Manga, and Other Works by Female 'Cross-Voyeurs' in the U.S. Academic Discourses (eBook)

Carola Bauer (M.A.) studied 'Europäische Kulturgeschichte' at the University of Augsburg and 'Literatur im kulturellen Kontext' at the University of Bayreuth. Presently, she lives in Ludwigsburg.

Naughty Girls and Gay Male Romance/Porn 1
Table of Contents 3
1. Introduction: John Donne and “American Girl-on-Girl Action” vs.the Strange Case of Female “Cross-Voyeurs” 5
2. Theoretical Framework: Queer Theory Meets Feminism Meets Foucauldian Discourse Analysis 9
2.1 A “Deliberately Disruptive” Challenge to Heterosexism: Queer Theory and Its Key Concepts 9
2.2 Troubling Gender & Sexuality: Judith Butler “in the Interstices” of Feminist and Queer Theory
2.3 Technologies of Power/Knowledge: Using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis 17
3. “Cross-Writing” Female Novelists under Scrutiny: Mary Renault & Others in the U.S. Academic Discourses (1969 – Today)
3.1 Gay Male Fiction by Women – An Inventory 20
3.2 From Victims of “Misfortune” to “Fag Hags” and the “New Couple”: Speaking about (Heterosexual) Women and Gay Men since 1969 23
3.3 About the Three Ways to Conceptualize Your “Faghagging” Novelist: Interpretations of “Cross-Writing” Women and Their Works in U.S. Academia 29
3.4 Heresies, Girlfags, and “Faghagging” Novelists – A Conclusion Regarding the “Do’s and Don’ts” of the Academic Discourse(s) about Renault & Other Cross-Writers
4. Female “Cross-Readers”: Talking about “Textual Poachers” and Slash Fiction in American Fan Fiction Studies since the 1980s 48
4.1 Snape and Harry Sitting in a Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G: Defining the Genre of Slash Fiction 48
4.2 A Fateful Encounter: Feminist Theory and Media Studies Meet Slash Fiction – The Beginnings of an Academic Debate (1985-1992) 52
4.3 “Let’s Talk about Slash, Baby.” Characteristics of an Academic Debate (1985- Today) 63
4.4 A Tale of Two Academic Discourses: Slash Fiction Fans vs. “Cross-Writing” Novelists 81
5. Boys’ Love for Women, Made in Japan: Yaoi and Shounen-ai Manga in the U.S. Academic Discourse (1983-2011) 84
5.1 Beautiful Men and “Rotten Girls”: Boys’ Love Manga in Japan and the USA 84
5.2 Female “Cross-voyeurism,” an Intrinsically Japanese Phenomenon? Yaoi and Shounen-ai in U.S. Scholarly Accounts since 1983 90
5.3 An Exciting “Import” and Its American Counterpart – Discussing Boys’ Love and Slash Fiction in the U.S. Academic Discourses 101
6. Conclusion: Theorizing Female “Cross-Voyeurism” in U.S. Academia- A “Vicious Circle” 103
7. Works Cited 110

Text Sample: Chapter 3, 'Cross-Writing' Female Novelists under Scrutiny: Mary Renault & Others in the U.S. Academic Discourses (1969 - Today): 3.1, Gay Male Fiction by Women - An Inventory: 'Much of the literature that has been discussed in connection with homosexuality has not been written by writers who would identify themselves as gay.' (Stephens 2). Thus, Hugh Stephens discusses the definition of 'gay male literature' in the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing (2011), and simultaneously reveals one basic characteristic usually associated with this genre: the autobiographical component (Bergman 309). As Sneja Gunew mentions in Framing Marginality (1994) 'minority writing' in general is often 'characterized by offering the authority and authenticity of the marginal experience' (Gunew 53): Whereas Gunew makes this statement with feminist literature and ethnic minority writing in mind, the same can be said about gay and lesbian literature - something that becomes even more obvious when looking more closely at Stephens' 'Homosexuality and Literature: An Introduction.' One might deduce from the quotation cited above that Stephens wants to base his definition of 'gay literature' on the same-sex content alone in order to circumvent the 'autobiographical prerequisite.' But this impression is deceptive: Stephens just refers to the Foucauldian realization that the identification with 'homosexuality' is a modern phenomenon - meaning that writers of 'homoerotic' literature such as Shakespeare or Plato could definitely not be gay-identified - while still upholding the condition that an author of 'gay male literature' has to have personal experience with male same-sex desire (Stephens 3-5). That such a restriction of the 'gay canon' is problematic becomes particularly evident when noticing the - not to be underestimated - number of women involved in the writing of male homosexual fiction. In French literature, it is especially Marguerite Yourcenar that springs to mind: With her novella Alexis - a story about a man leaving his wife in order to live out his homosexual tendencies - she celebrated her first literary success in 1929. And this is not her only work about same-sex desire between men: In Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), which is written in the form of testamentary letters from the Roman emperor to his successor Marcus Aurelius, the love relationship between Hadrian and a Bithynian youth called Antinuous forms an important part of the novel (Griffin 221-222; Kiebuzinski 160-1). But Yourcenar is by no means an exception. In Anglophone literature, there are plenty of female novelists in the 20th century writing about gay men as well: Mary Renault constitutes an example of a British female author whose homoerotic novels were 'enormously popular with the general public' in England and the U.S. of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, even 'though they contained explicit and positive representations of same-sex love' (Bergman 311). Partly, this success might be attributed to something the gay liberationist scholar Roger Austen calls the 'historical remove' in his groundbreaking study about the American homosexual novel, Playing the Game (Austen 91). Set in the antique world, literary works such as The Last of the Wine (1956), describing Athenian pederasty, and The Persian Boy (1972) - a novel about the love between Alexander the Great and his Persian eunuch called Bagoas - may have been less problematic for 'middle-class novel readers' because of their historical and geographical distance to 'real' homosexuality in the U.S., which was still considered to be an illness by the American Psychiatric Association in the 1950s (Ritter and Terndrup 29; Austen 91-2). Whereas the number of historical novels about same-sex love by female novelists might be attributed to the importance of female writers as writers of historical fiction in the 20th century (Wallace 3-4), there are also many novels about 'modern' male homosexuality by Anglophone women: Renault chooses a more contemporary setting in The Charioteer (1953), published in the U.S. in 1959, in which the injured soldier Laurie Odell comes to terms with his own homosexuality in a hospital in Britain during World War II (Dick, Hellenism 30-1). The American fantasy author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, mostly remembered for her Darkover series (which also contains LGBT themes), equally wrote a novel about gay men in the middle of the 20th century (Smith 99-100): In The Catch Trap (1979), set in the circus milieu of the 1940s and 1950s, the trapeze artists of an aerial troupe, Mario Santelli and Tommy Zane, manage to build a healthy, stable love relationship, despite the difficulties stemming from living in a homophobic society (Tait 111). Above all, the popularity of some of these novels within gay American subculture is an especially valid argument for the inclusion of female writers into the 'gay canon,' i.e. a re-definition of gay male literature emphasizing also the content, not only the sexual orientation of the author. Robert Drake's definition of a 'gay book [...] as a book that addresses issues of same-sex love or a book written by an author who enjoys the same gender for sexual fulfillment and/or relief' therefore seems quite adequate (Haggerty, 'Canon' 286-7). Renault's books in particular managed to gain a large following within the gay community, as her biographer David Sweetman emphasizes when he writes that 'The Last of the Wine was a rite of passage, The Persian Boy a gift for young male lovers. Gay bookshops in San Francisco had prominent 'Renault' sections' (Sweetman 273). Equally famous among gay men was U.S. writer Patricia Nell Warren - scholar Eric Anderson, for example, names her as one of the influences that inspired him to write his own autobiography in his study In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity (2005) (E. Anderson xi). Her now mostly forgotten bestselling novel of the 1970s, The Front Runner (1974), has been influenced by the gay liberationist movement (Levin 265-6) and deals with discrimination against homosexuals in male-dominated sports by telling the story of a gay track coach falling in love with the young athlete Billy Sive. While there is also a sequel called Harlan's Race (1994), Warren's books do not only circle around sports, but gay male love always remains an important issue: Fancy Dancer (1976), for example, tells the story of the young priest Tom Meeker who comes to terms with his own homosexuality, thus problematizing the negative attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards same-sex desire (Ridinger 388-9). Other, more recent female novelists writing stories with homoerotic content might easily be named. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (1976-2003) as well as Annie Proulx's short story Brokeback Mountain (1997) are examples that instantly spring to mind (Haggerty, 'Rice' 5-18; Miller 50-56). But - for reasons of practicability - the following analysis will concentrate on Marguerite Yourcenar, Patricia Nell Warren, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mary Renault, i.e. on their portrayal in the U.S. academic papers and intellectual writing. With regard to the 'autobiographical prerequisite' of gay male fiction - in gay studies and beyond - it is not surprising that the sex and sexual orientation of those 'cross-writing' women constitute an important subtext, which influences the interpretations of those gay-themed novels considerably. Using the method of Foucauldian discourse analysis, the scholarly accounts about this topic are going to be analyzed in this chapter. On the basis of Judith Butler's theory about the performative nature of sex/gender, the academic explanations for the women's affinity to male homosexuality will be evaluated with special regard to the gender roles/conceptions of 'women' recited in them. However, as the academic discourses about female 'cross-writers' are partly influenced by the new perceptions of homosexuals - and the women associated with them - since the beginning of the gay liberationist movement in 1969, there will be a brief discussion of the new views on the pair 'gay men and (heterosexual) women' emerging in the second half of the 20th century first - another development, which is in need of further research, as it has not been addressed sufficiently in academia, yet.