For a long time now, I’ve been feeling increasingly alienated by a lot of the ways in which (the shipping side of) fandom, relationship categories, and the push for queer visibility intersect. I haven’t known how to talk about it, because it seems like whichever way I turn I’m likely to step on toes; also it intersects with my own life in ways that are pretty personal. But my compulsion to get it down in words isn’t decreasing, so here goes.
The narrative tension between “sexually/romantically involved” and “something else” is the fuel that powers the shipping side of fandom. And while “something else,” in this context, can sometimes be enmity or competition or a professional relationship, a significant percentage of the time it’s close friendship, or one of the above in combination with close friendship. Inherent in the construction “sex/romance versus something else” is a bright line distinguishing one from the other: a dichotomy analogous, in ways, to male-typical Christian conversion narratives from Augustine on: I (we) was (were) something inferior (friends, heathens); then there was an event (a kiss backed with swelling music; a welcoming of Christianity into one’s heart), and I/we transmogrified into something fundamentally different—something more intense, something more meaningful, something intrinsically better and, more basically, something qualitatively distinct. Since close friendship is often the “something else” positioned on the starting side of a pair’s personal secular conversion narrative, it gets trivialized, shunted aside, cast as a pale imitation of the requited sex-romance bundle to come. This is disparaging to those incredibly precious and unique relationships that exist squarely in friend territory and also, incidentally, pretty simplistic in terms of equating sex with romance—all of which is bad enough. But more and more I feel incredibly alienated by the entire bright-line friend-versus-sex/romance construction at all, and everything it implies about the clarity and impermeability of boundaries between those categories. Like Teresa of Avila (likely the only time I will ever compare myself to her) I object to the presentation of a one-way conversion narrative. And I object to the idea of a substantive, alchemical transformation between sinner/friend and saint/lover.
Of course, discourse around this stuff gets even more complicated when queerness enters the picture, because our cultural master narrative has a long history of using close same-sex friendship as a blind to deny queer sexual desire and romance.
On queer friendship, fandom, and negative capability
Published
Question of Smoke 