Another natural pairing

[starlady]

There will be actual content again soon, I promise.

When Fics Take on a Life of Their Own (4359 words) by storiesfortravellers
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Critical Theory RPF, Feminist Ryan Gosling
Rating: Mature
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Michael Fassbender/James McAvoy
Characters: Feminist Ryan Gosling - Character, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Original Female Character, Fanfic Writer
Summary: A fanfic writer and Feminist Ryan Gosling discuss celebrity culture, gender and theory, and the political perils of Fassavoy fic.

Without taking any kind of epistemological stance on RPF as a phenomenon, I will say this is definitely a fic to be read and contemplated by people in fandom--our peccadilloes and our predilections and the reasons for all of them turned over and exposed to inspection. It's knowing and self-critical and consciously caught between and a rock and a hard place, and also frequently hilarious. (Feminist Ryan Gosling will do that.)

The follow-up rec is not a fic but a post, namely hey girl it's feminist fandom by metaphortunate:

Everybody makes their own erotic compromises with the patriarchy. We're going to die while the world is still fucked. We can't put our libidos on hold until everything is sorted out. And to sort out our libidos we'd not only have to sort out the world but we'd also have to hop in our imaginary time machine and go back and fix it so that we grew up in a fair world where people cared about what happened to people who weren't rich white men and that is also going to happen on the twelfth of never so you will forgive me if I say that there is nothing wrong with the way we live with our oppression by eroticizing it.

I would wager that all or most of us have had the experience of enjoying some piece of media that our higher cognitive functions find intensely problematic, and like the man said, I would hope that we not judge ourselves too harshly, or solely on the basis of what is said or even done in public about sex and sexuality. (Remind me to tell you the story of the prof I'm teaching for dropping surprise!Greek love into the lecture on the Hellenization of the Roman Empire into lecture yesterday. Hilarious, if you're me and knew what was coming.) But hoping for that degree of absolution doesn't absolve us from the obligation to keep questioning where we're at, as M and this fic both make clear.

Note to interested readers: neither of these pieces contain any actual RPF.

Comments

[naraht]

Hmmmm. I find myself stuck on the idea that the fic doesn't contain RPF. Doesn't it? In a way?

...Anyway, that wasn't the point of your post. Where I think that the "erotic compromise with patriarchy" stuff gets complicated is when we get into intersectionality. Women expressing ourselves and coming to terms with our own messed-up desires, one thing. But what justification can I offer as a white person for compromising with white supremacy? Putting it out of my head for a while, again, that's one thing. But saying "this hot Mandingo fic is my erotic compromise with white supremacy"? I don't know, I think that's not on.

Basically it's the difference between living with our oppression by eroticizing it and living with someone else's oppression by eroticizing it. But really that's too simplistic in a sense because even as women we have different experiences. I could write a fic eroticizing the idea of a woman suffering domestic abuse, but never having been abused myself, I'm still using someone else's experience.

I have no real conclusion here. Far be it for me to claim that my own private desires are blameless--they're not. But for the most part, they're just that--private. For me I guess that's my compromise with the kyriarchy. I don't make myself feel guilty for having whatever desires I have but, for me, sharing them would be too close to celebrating/perpetuating them.

So, no, I don't think I'd post the Michael Fassbender fic if I were the one with the moral dilemma.

[starlady]

Hmmmm. I find myself stuck on the idea that the fic doesn't contain RPF. Doesn't it? In a way?

I did think about that statement, because you're right, it does in a way, but in the end I decided it was more not-RPF than RPF and left it standing as-is. (And by "actual RPF" I am in this limited context meaning explicit descriptions of RPS, for the purposes of trying to get people to read the fic.)

Where I think that the "erotic compromise with patriarchy" stuff gets complicated is when we get into intersectionality.

Yes, definitely. (I've just been rewatching "Vogue" for a post along these lines, and…yeah. Ooky to say the least.)

I have no real conclusion here. Far be it for me to claim that my own private desires are blameless--they're not. But for the most part, they're just that--private. For me I guess that's my compromise with the kyriarchy. I don't make myself feel guilty for having whatever desires I have but, for me, sharing them would be too close to celebrating/perpetuating them.

So, no, I don't think I'd post the Michael Fassbender fic if I were the one with the moral dilemma.

Yeah, I think my own personal opinion is something along these lines. But what I really like about the fic is the way that it externalizes and makes explicit that moral dilemma, which I think (hope) is not as uncommon as public discussions of it would make it seem. Keeping the discussion of the dilemma behind closed doors, when in a general sense the desires that inspired it are wide out in the open, seems to me to be doing nothing at best or actively perpetuating the system at worst, and that exposure is what I really appreciated.

[naraht]

(And by "actual RPF" I am in this limited context meaning explicit descriptions of RPS, for the purposes of trying to get people to read the fic.)

Ah yes. Lots of people in fandom mean "explicit RPS" when they say "RPF." It's one of the things that I occasionally crusade against, but this is probably not the time or the place.

Keeping the discussion of the dilemma behind closed doors, when in a general sense the desires that inspired it are wide out in the open, seems to me to be doing nothing at best or actively perpetuating the system at worst, and that exposure is what I really appreciated.

It's a good point that the people who are not talking about it are not talking about it, as it were. Hence the vocal porny contingent win by default. I can go with that.

[seekingferret]

What struck me recently was how often stories that I didn't think of as RPF turned out to contain elements that were RPF. Looking at the last 4 stories I've posted on AO3, one is marked as explicitly RPF. The other three are fic of a historical fiction short story that uses real people, fic of a Bible story that my religion teaches involves real people, and fic crossing over two stories whose connection is that both cast an actor as Hitler. I never thought of any of those three stories as RPF while I was writing them and I never thought of the characters in those story who are based on real people as being anything but characters.

[naraht]

RPF is much broader than the specifically fannish conception of it.

[starlady]

I don't disagree, but isn't calling it RPF a specifically fannish paradigm?

[naraht]

Theoretically, yes.

But fannish discourse about RPF has been very complicated and tangled. A big part of the argument about RPF being morally legitimate to write consists of pointing and saying "look, lots of professional writers are writing Fiction About Real People too." For me it's been a big part of the legitimation process to be able to argue "look, Alan Bennett writes RPF too and no one complains about it." I want to bring it all under the same terminological umbrella in order to avoid that double standard. There's also the fact that what I write tends to be more like professional Fiction About Real People than what fans think about when they say "RPF" (namely, hot actors fucking).

So it's a term that I feel I have to either broaden or get out of entirely.

[seekingferret]

On the other hand, the RPF I write is definitely premised on "stories about real people that I am fannish about" (to go back to our recent argument about whether I can be fannish about the Yankees) and I think the same is true of you.

[naraht]

Yes, very much so. But does this distinguish it from profic? Not convinced.

[seekingferret]

No, what distinguishes profic is the paycheck. But the same is true in FPF. That never bothered me.

[naraht]

*nods*

Yup. It's all about the paycheck.

[holyschist]

Thank you so, so much for this comment: I've been struggling with how to articulate my frustration with a lot of discourse about sexual desire and I think you've hit the nail bang-on here.

[zeborah]

I possibly shouldn't have read that in the lunch room at work. Don't even know where to begin explaining my snorts of laughter to my colleagues....