Fess up
As some perceptive folks have already speculated, I wrote In the Black, for the Multiverse Challenge, a short Farscape/Firefly cross.

Title: In the Black
Author: feldman
Notes: Written for Ghost in the 2005 Multiverse Challenge.
Disclaimer Haiku: Though I love them so / And they are fun to play with / I do not own them
Summary: Simon had given her these shoes so she wouldn't go barefoot, but she hadn't recognized them as ballet shoes until some alien had. Deduction: there were other humans here.

( In the Black )

ch1pper made me this icon! And she wanted angsty John, but then she mentioned detox and this happened instead, less with the angsty and more with the physically ill and emotionally uncomfortable...

~*~

Porcelain Skin


He knew from earth that it would be difficult, that his body had become accustomed

addicted

to the hit.

If Granny hadn't slipped an extra in her pocket, he would have been this bad, or worse, in front of his family. In front of his dad, his baby sister.

Instead it's Aeryn who watches him, arms crossed and forehead crumpled, mouth emotionless as she holds up the doorway. He curls away from the waste funnel, arms shaking as he braces against the warm floor.

"Know what the worst part is?" Besides Aeryn watching him detox with that careful expression, calculating the differentials between empathy and hurt.

Her voice isn't unsympathetic, even though she hasn't touched him since the cold turkey set in with a vengeance. "That you did this to yourself?"

He doesn't shake his head, doesn't goad the vertigo, just squeezes his eyes shut and hunches back on his knees, spine collapsed around the vibrating clench of his belly. "The floor is warm. Sick as a dog and not a cold tile in the place."

"Cold floors." She pushes off from the doorway and takes a step closer.

"You rest your forehead on the cold floor. Helps."

"Cold." He watches her arms unfold, her hands careful as she unholsters her weapon and turns it as if to pistol whip him in slow mo. "Against the forehead?"

He risks a single nod, and then the flat of the grip is cool against his head, the chill of the chakkan oil inside bleeding off some of the sick heat of his brain. Eyes closed, his hands involuntarily cup the grip and shift her cool fingers against his skin. Her other hand strokes through his damp hair, tentative, and he swallows against the rising tremor.

~*~

I need to stop watching vampire flicks. They always disappoint me, make me want to rewrite them, make them better, stronger, faster, smarter. Or perhaps just slightly more kinky.

Because if you're going to threaten a character with his worst nightmare, you should follow through.

( spoilers for Blade: Trinity (and small scene re-write) )

I must admit it's taken me a while to let that visceral reaction settle out to leave the more reasoned response below.

Queer het seems to mean the stuff that's outside of the boundaries of preconceived notions of heterosexuality--thing is, how much territory must fall outside of the boundary before we can all agree to step back and question how useful those preconceived notions really are?

One or two folks have pointed to "Scientist, Astronaut, Nymphomaniac: The nine lives of John Crichton" as an example of what they might call "queer het"; het that is unconventional to the point of no longer being true het. Leaving aside the reactions of the POV character overcoming the niggling after-effects of his American male homophobia vaccination and also coming to terms with bodily penetration, my argument re: " 'Nine Lives' as 'queer het' " specifically is that gender play is just as much a part of heterosex as it is homosex. We don't tend to assume other fetishes or explorations are the home territory of one vs. the other (right? I mean, I don't, and while I'm not fresh off the farm truck I'm no wild child either). So why this need to label heterosex that plays with the conventional "ideals" of gender roles?

Just because our society takes a greater stake in prescribing certain roles for each heterosex participant doesn't mean that those strictures and rules apply in private, or that the blurring of those lines is therefore automatically outside of the territory of heterosex. It may be outside of the expectations of some particular portions of our society, yes. But outside of the very nature of heterosex? Hardly.

The point I'm seeking to make is that these stories/ideas/experiences are not transgressive of heterosexuality. If they are trangressive at all, it's of the structures and strictures that some people/institutions/traditions have perennially sought to impose on the expression of heterosexuality.

These people and/or institutions wouldn't have to fight so hard to keep heterosex "in line" if it were naturally restricted to missionary-style penetration in order to conceive. But there has always been a push/pull dynamic in heterosexuality between the pleasure, the intimacy, the societal power of women vs. men and the fact that fucking very often results in babies (if anything, that fact has through history been a prime motivator to explore avenues of sexual expression other than the old in-and-out). Effective birth control is a relatively new thing, and our society is going to be figuring out the ramifications of this for generations.

I find I'm also concerned with the use of the word "queer" to denote interesting expressions of heterosex. It's a hurtful word that has been reclaimed and embraced by many in the community it used to be targeted at, redefined (it seems to me in context) as something both joyful and assertive. We're here, we're queer, get used to it; it's another way to be. It's a great word and a useful one. But I think using it as a modifier in "queer het" leads to ambiguity and confusion, and it allows for inferences that the speaker may not be aware of or support.

It's unclear what lines are being blurred with this deliberate oxymoron, or whether that blurring is even deliberate. Is it supposed to reflect the continuum of sexual expression; that there is no pure het or pure homo? Then why coin more labels at all, why not simply point to the wide variety of expression and say, "yes, this shows the continuum, this is what I like to see"? What about slash that conforms to traditional gender role expectations, would that be "het slash"? Wouldn't that mean conflating gender-preference with gender-role rigidity? If the purpose of a label is to clarify, "queer het" fails miserably.

One of those inferences that can be made, which was unfortunately one of my knee-jerk reactions to the phrase when I first read these discussions, is that by segregating "queer het" from "het", one condemns the whole of heterosexuality to the very worst of those gender role strictures I mentioned above. I don't think this has been supported by much of anyone in these discussions, but it remains a ramification that I can't help seeing and getting riled up about. It's as if those folks who keep trying to shove my unparalleled favorite flavor of sex into that small marriage/procreation box are right to do so; that the width and breadth and depth of heterosexuality can be pruned without killing the tree.

There's a struggle in this society over the roles of women and men, over the use and the nature of sex and marriage and family. It doesn't just involve gay marriage, or abortion or the right to die with dignity; it involves everyone who gets married, everyone who uses contraception, everyone who works, dates, expects protection from the law, seeks medical care, is a member of a family, everyone. I realize this is not what is under discussion, that "queer het" is a fluffy fandom label that has no truck in the real world, but it struck me as another stab at labeling and segregating, at defining the Squares as the negative space around the Cool Kids, and that it only muddied the waters and raised hackles instead of fostering any kind of useful discussion about: what the hell is het, anyway, if it also encompasses this weird shit?

Ziggy Stardust vs. the new Starbuck; androgyny in pop culture. It's a discussion still waiting to happen, it seems, and it's the one I really want to have. If you didn't know before, if it weren't apparent from the story linked above, I've got a bit of a gender kink myself.

So here's my stab at discussion: Have we been sold a bill of goods on het? Perhaps we have; so how about those nifty new androgynous characters in tv, you know, the ones who hook us like trout because they're so much like real people? Have we come far enough now as a society that the androgyny that sells is no longer the ethereal David Bowie Starman ideal, but something far more meaty and visceral, expressively male and expressively female, like Starbuck?

Discuss.

I guess I should catch up on that BSG now, huh?

edited for clarity, 10:32am 4-15

SPOILERS: Peacekeeper Wars
SUMMARY: Thea and I were feeling domestic; set 16 years after PKW.
NOTES: beta and title by the wonderful Crankygrrl
EMAIL: thassalia @ yahoo.com; mochaphine @ gmail.com
DISCLAIMER HAIKU:
Though we love them so
and they are fun to to play with
we do not own them

( The Break-out Club 1/2 )

I'm still not entirely happy with this, been working on it for months now and still haven't figured it out totally, still haven't answered fbf's beta questions to anyone's satisfaction...

...but it's "Use it or Lose it" at farscapefriday so here goes.

Fairytale challenge. Any political aspects are completely coincidental.

( Legacy )

sophia_helix wrote something brave this morning about size and self-perception that not only hit close to home, it also made me think that perhaps I might have something to add.

I've been that person (and sometimes I still am); ashamed of my body, disgusted with what it says about my life history, seeing the flesh I'm in as the accumulated evidence of failure and weakness. I'm still there in some respects, having only traveled halfway toward the body I'd like to live in. I remember that disconnect whenever I saw myself in a photo and was forced to see my body from the outside, forced to acknowledge that the dark hot embarrassed thoughts I had when I looked down at my rolls and my infant-soft proportions were based in truth: I was burying the familiar lines of my body underneath material evidence of how much I sucked.

Right now, halfway between my heaviest and my goal, I've maybe gained some perspective on the situation that I couldn't see before. I'm sure it will still be a confusing jumble, but maybe I'll say something that clicks.

I don't have answers, because those answers are always going to be personal. But I can at least tell you how I started walking away from that place.

( First and foremost you must realize that America is set up for the manufacture of human veal. )


Up next: rants on the Zen of human body maintenance, and the lack of mirroring images for women in media (note to self: lack of Tara-sized women; tall or muscular women, cushy women in non-mom roles, Firefly as a (sad) standout with Zoe and Kaylee as healthy body-types; standard commercial pairing of doughy man and slim wife; commercially-perpetuated myth that only slim women can have fun in public or sex in private (we don't think that only white women in chinos clean their houses, do we? then why do we buy this?) maybe wrap up with the fact that BMI is a sick joke that feeds into the perception that the only 'healthy' woman is a thin weedy one).