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Abstract
This essay tackles the controversy of heterosexual-identified women who derive erotic and psychic pleasure from writing and/or reading popular literature in which the central romantic couple is two men. Such narratives are known as M/M fiction and comprise a subgenre within the larger romance market. Criticism directed at this cultural practice often argues that such narratives merely substitute two male bodies for a male/female pair without substantively altering the emotional and sexual dynamics of the relationship. Hence, the male lovers in such narratives are simply acting out a heterosexual fantasy of gay male intimacy. To challenge this view, this essay turns to revisions to Freudian understandings of bisexuality. In so doing, it attempts to relocate this pleasure in the repudiated male identities and homosexual object cathexes that all women are urged to give up in the pre-Oedipal phase as a condition of assuming (hetero)normative gender and sexual subjectivities.
Notes
1Indeed, in her own response to Brownworth's inflammatory article, Sarah G. Frantz (Citation2010) wrote: “No, most m/m authors are not straight women. Or at least, in my experience, most of the best m/m authors are in some way either gender queer or have some sort of alternate sexuality.”
2Given the large female audience that flocked to the 2005 Academy Award-winning film Brokeback Mountain, the case could be made that it represents the filmic version of an M/M literary narrative. Indeed, film scholar Gary Needham, working from a dominant assumption linking gay men and women as “feminine passives,” argues that the film employs melodrama of the 1940s woman's film to lure female spectators. Needham wrote: “A good deal of the pleasure of Brokeback Mountain is about ‘letting go’ and allowing oneself to be emotionally overcome by the devastation caused by closetedness and repressed desire as we wait for Jack and Ennis [the male lovers in the story] to get together, which of course never happens. Brokeback Mountain, like the woman's film of the 1940s … emphasizes a constant waiting; waiting to see how they will respond in particular narrative occasions; waiting to see what will happen next with the hope that it is joyful rather than tragic. This foregrounds ‘waiting’ as a particular manifestation of passive desires … This is because it is commonly assumed that women are naturally constituted to take pleasure from a passive surrender to their feelings, of which delay and tears are two such consequences, a theme perhaps crystallized by Jack's tearful moments in the truck” (p. 91).
3For example, in this earlier work, Salmon & Symons (2001) refer to research they conducted with a group of romance readers to determine if these women could enjoy reading popular “male/male romance” the same as they did titles with heterosexual lovers at the center. The authors assigned the group a romance novel titled, The Catch Trap by Marion Zimmer Bradley. This is a novel, they wrote, “in which the protagonists are original creations rather than a media pairing. A slash novel would have been completely inappropriate for our purposes, because slash is, first and foremost, fan fiction. The slash writer can and does assume that her readers are intimately familiar with the fictional setting and characters in her story, hence she does not need to supply these dramatic elements. To really appreciate a work of slash fiction one must be familiar with the show from which it is derived, one must like the show and one must find at least one of the male leads attractive. It is extremely unlikely that an example of slash would have met these criteria for a majority of our subjects” (p. 78; my emphasis). As this quote demonstrates, the authors conflate slash and m/m fiction. In fact, at least one of the characters in Bradley's novel identifies as gay.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Guy Mark Foster
Dr. Guy Mark Foster is an associate professor of English at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of his teaching and research, he also enjoys affiliations with Gender and Women's Studies and Africana Studies. Dr. Foster received his PhD in English from Brown University in 2003. His areas of interest include African American literature; LGBTQ literature; the romance novel; interracial narratives; literary memoir; feminist, queer, and critical race theories; sexuality studies; Africana philosophy; and psychoanalysis. He is the author of the story collection The Rest of Us (Lethe Press, 2013) and is currently revising his book manuscript titled, “Waking up to the Enemy: Towards a New Ethics of Interracial Intimacy in African American Literature.”