Author: lake-desire

Feminism through Fandom

lake-desire

Via Fanthropology, LJ user Schemingreader has written a great two-parter on Something Good About Fandom and Women Writing Slash: An Idiosyncratically Feminist Meditation.

In her first essay, Schemingreader discusses “challenging mass media hegemonic discourse” and passive viewing through fandom. She also talks about fandom celebrating women’s creativity. My favorite part of her essay:

Though we don’t all agree about what it should look like, fandom provides a model for pro-sex feminism, for women reclaiming control over their sexuality, minds first. I really love the model of having people post warnings at the tops of their stories. It shows we have figured out, at least to some small degree, that we don’t all feel sexuality the same way. We get that everyone is different, and can encourage more than one view of sexuality. Our whole vocabulary of kinks and squicks is a sophisticated acknowledgement of the varieties of human sexual experience.

Fandom is one area where women’s sexualities are embraced and explored as positives and valued for their diversity. (Even asexuality is welcomed, something I’d like to see portrayed more positively across the board, especially in pro-sex paradigms.) I hope the multifariousness Schemingreader describes will spiral beyond fandom.

Attractiveness, Disabilities, and Feminism

lake-desire

There is a post on feminist_rage today on a topic I haven’t read about before: the intersection of ablism, sexism, and attractiveness. LiveJournal user mahlia miles writes about being a conventionally attractive woman using a wheelchair, faced with chivalry and masculine entitlement:

I hate feeling like a side show. As a pretty woman in a wheelchair, boy, I am quite the novelty in people’s day.

I sometimes see ablism–power and prejudice over those perceived as having a disability–included in lists of forms of oppression. But it’s still to easy to forget how having a disability can intersect with other the other -isms because people with disabilities are all too often rendered invisible by the rest of society.

I fucking HATE the fact that men have used my disability and “need for help” to get close to me. The next fucker who puts his hands on my chair, trying to get his good-citizen jollies and maybe a phone number, is going to get yelled at publicly on a city bus. I hate the feeling of looking over and realizing that the guy who’s been staring at me for the past fifteen minutes, trying to get my attention, is now three inches away from my face because he’s “trying to help” get the buckles off my chair. HE’S TOUCHING MY CHAIR, which is a hell of a lot like TOUCHING ME.

Shout back! Challenge the stereotypes marginalized people are expected to fill. And to that “nice guy”: using a wheelchair is not an invitation to invade someone else’s space. Helping someone, when asked, is polite. Being polite is fine, but it does not entitle you to anything, including touching someone without her invitation.

An Introduction

lake-desire

It’s been almost a week now since Tekanji invited me to blog here, so I figure I’ve kept you all in suspense long enough.

My name is Ariel Wetzel, although I usually go by Lake Desire online. The alias refers to the lake I grew up near. I’m a 21 year old senior at Western Washington University. I designed my BA major through a smaller college, Fairhaven, within the university. The title? Speculative Visions: Gender and Imaginative Composition. Basically, it’s an intersection of creative writing, gender studies, and the speculative fiction umbrella (scifi, fantasy, dystopias, and the like).

I keep a blog called New Game Plus on primarily gender and my geeky interests like gaming and scifi. I also enjoy writing fiction, vegan cooking (I’m an animal rights activist and accordingly an herbivore), reading young adult literature, activism, and the outdoors.

Any questions?