Slash fiction
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Slash fiction (also known as "m/m slash" or slashfic) is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex.[1][2][3] While the term "slash" originally referred only to stories in which male characters are involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element, it is now also used to refer to any fan story containing a romantic pairing between same-sex characters. Many fans distinguish slash with female characters as a separate genre, commonly referred to as femslash (also known as "f/f slash" or "femmeslash").
These fan-written stories are not often accepted canon, and the characters are usually not engaged in such relationships in their respective fictional universes.[4]
History
It is commonly believed that slash fan fiction originated during the late 1960s, within the Star Trek: The Original Series fan fiction fandom, starting with "Kirk/Spock" stories generally authored by female fans of the series and distributed privately among friends.[5][1][6] The name arises from the use of the
The first K/S stories were not immediately accepted by all Star Trek fans.[10] Later, authors such as Joanna Russ studied and reviewed the phenomenon in essays and gave the genre some academic respectability.[11][12] Greater subsequent tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality and increased frustration with the portrayal of gay relationships in mainstream media fed a growing desire in authors to explore the subjects on their own terms, using established media characters. Star Trek slash fiction remained important to fans, while new slash fiction grew up around other television shows, movies, and books with sci-fi or action-adventure roots.
Early slash fans in England feared that they would be arrested, because slash violated the obscenity laws there at the time.[13]
Slash sources
From its earliest days, slash fiction has been particularly inspired by popular speculative fiction franchises,[14][15] possibly because speculative fiction may lack well-developed female characters or because the speculative elements allow greater freedom to reinterpret canon characters. However, other large bodies of slash fiction, such as Starsky and Hutch or The Professionals, are based on non-speculative sources.
Slash fiction follows popular media, and new stories are constantly produced. There is some correlation between the popularity and activity of each variety of slash fiction and those of the source of the material. Some slash fiction readers and writers tend to adhere closely to the canonical source of their fiction, while other participants may follow the slash content without being fans of the original source material itself.[16]
Slash on the Internet
Until the Internet became accessible to the general public in the early 1990s, slash was hard to find. It was published only in fan-edited non-profit
Forum boards and message boards were active during the first half of the first decade of the millennium, and sites such as
The Internet allowed slash authors more freedom than print: stories could include branching story lines, links, collages, song mixes, and other innovations. The Internet increased slash visibility and the number of readers, as readers were now able to access the stories from their own home at a much lower cost, since zines cost more than an Internet connection. The number of
Critical and queer attention
Slash fiction has received more academic attention than other genres of fan fiction.[6] Slash fiction was the subject of several notable academic studies in the early 1990s, as part of the cultural studies movement within the humanities: most of these, as is characteristic of cultural studies, approach slash fiction from an ethnographic perspective and talk primarily about the writers of slash fiction and the communities that form around it. Slashers have been configured as fans who resisted culture.[17] Some studies – for example by Italian anthropologist Mirna Ciconi – focus on the textual analysis of slash fiction itself.
Slash fiction was often ignored by queer theorists.[18] However, slash fiction has been described as important to the LGBT community and to the formation of queer identities, as it represents a resistance to the expectation of heterosexuality.[19] In a society in which heterosexuality is the norm and homosexuality is highly stigmatized, an online forum is sometimes the only space where young members of the LGBTQ community can be out. Young members of the community all go through a time in which they are still exploring their identity, labels, and pronouns. By writing slash fiction, queer youth can use their favorite characters and stories in order to create scenarios that allow them to explore their feelings, thoughts, and selves. Slash fiction, in this sense, offers queer youth a low-risk chance to explore who they are. They can stay anonymous while creating a world in which they can express themselves creatively and freely.[20] However, slash fiction has also been criticized as being unrepresentative of the gay community as a whole,[21] and as being used as a medium to express feminist frustration with popular and speculative fiction.[22]
The predominant demographic among slash fiction readers is female, the majority of whom identify as other than heterosexual.[citation needed] Science fiction writer Joanna Russ (herself a lesbian), author of How to Suppress Women's Writing, is one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously.[23] In her essay "Pornography by Women for Women, with Love," Russ argues that, in regard to the Kirk/Spock relationship, slash fiction combines both masculine and feminine traits of emotional vulnerability. Such an equal relationship, she contends, negates the power imbalance typically seen in regular fan fiction.
Definition and ambiguity
Slash fiction fandoms tend to be diverse and segregated, and each has its own rules of style, etiquette, history, and favorite stories and authors.
Slash cannot be commercially distributed due to copyright laws, and, until the 1990s, it was either undistributed or published in zines.[24] Today, slash fiction is most commonly published on Tumblr, LiveJournal accounts and other websites online, such as Archive Of Our Own. Legal scholars promoting copyright reform sometimes use slash fiction as an example of semiotic democracy.[25]
The term slash fiction contains several ambiguities. Due to the lack of canonical homosexual relationships in source media at the time that slash fiction began to emerge, some came to see slash fiction stories as being exclusively outside their respective canons and held that the term "slash fiction" applies only when the characters' same-sex romantic or erotic relationship about which an author writes is not part of the source's canon and that fan fiction about
Some slash authors also write slash fiction which contains
Due to the increasing popularity and prevalence of slash on the Internet in recent years, some use slash as a generic term for any erotic fan fiction, whether it depicts heterosexual or homosexual relationships. This has caused concern for other slash writers, who believe that, while it can be erotic, slash is not, by definition, so, and that defining all erotic fiction as slash makes such fiction unsuitable for potential underage readers of
The slash mark itself (/), when put between character's names, has come to mean a shorthand label for a romantic relationship, regardless of whether the pairing is heterosexual or homosexual, romantic or erotic.[9]
Slash and the original media sources
For many people, slash is a controversial subject. In addition to the legal issues associated with traditional fan fiction, some people believe that it tarnishes established media characters to portray them in a way which was never illustrated canonically.
Some media creators seem downright slash friendly. In the Angel DVD commentary for "
Due South's fandom was one of the first to go online, after the show debuted in 1994.[34] In 1999 Due South creator Paul Haggis participated in a question-and-answer panel with an online Due South newsgroup. The newsgroup asked Haggis if he had a problem with fans seeing the characters he created (Detective Ray Vecchio and Constable Benton Fraser) as being in love with each other and having a closeted relationship. Haggis replied, "Absolutely no problem at all. If ever two people loved each other, it's Ray and Fraser."[35]
Furthermore, the YouTubers Daniel Howell and Phil Lester (Daniel Howell and amazingphil) are well known for being very accepting of slash fiction and even wrote some fanfiction about themselves, which was featured in their book The Amazing Book is Not on Fire. In addition, their stage show, The Amazing Tour is Not on Fire, included a section called Fanfiction Live.
In the episode "
The revival of
Slash fandom
Conventions
Several slash conventions run throughout the year and across the globe, mostly in the United States, including Escapade in California,[36] REVELcon in Texas,[37] Connexions in Maryland,[38] MediaWest*Con in Michigan,[39] CON.TXT in Washington, D.C.,[40] Con*Strict in Nevada,[41] Connotations in England,[42] Zebracon in Illinois,[43] Yaoi-Con in California,[44] Bascon in California,[45] and others.[46]
Terminology
Slash fiction has created and appropriated words to denote peculiarities found within the fandom. "Gayfic" is sometimes used to refer to stories focusing on gay male relationships,[citation needed] and "femslash" or "f/f" used to indicate that a work features female characters in slash relationships.[citation needed]
Slash fiction, like other fan fiction, sometimes borrows the
The term no lemon is sometimes used to indicate fan fiction stories without explicit sexual content. Anything with explicit content, especially with erotic scenes without accompanying romantic scenes, may be labeled "lemon". The term lemon arose from the
The term "slasher" is used for someone who creates slash fiction, and the term "slashy" is used to mean "homoerotic". "Slashy moments" are those events in the canon storyline which slashers interpret as homoerotic, which in turn form the slashers' depiction of the characters in slash fiction.[17]
Subgenres
Femslash
Femslash or femmeslash is a subgenre of slash fiction which focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between female fictional characters.
There is less femslash than there is slash based on male couples – it has been suggested that heterosexual female slash authors generally do not write femslash,
Another suggestion in which there is less femslash is its lack of strong female characters in media. TV shows are heavily skewed toward the portrayal of men, with only two notable predominant female TV shows:
Chanslash
Chanslash is the portrayal of underage characters in sexual situations in slash fiction. The prefix
Real person slash
Real person slash (RPS), also a subgenre of real person fiction, involves taking a celebrity's public image and creating slash stories with them. Real person slash gained popularity with the 1990s rise of boy bands in the pop music industry.[59] In the Supernatural fandom, slash fans who were uncomfortable with shipping the two main brother characters moved into writing and reading Jsquared/J2 fic (slash involving the lead actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles).[60] This led to the phrase "Supernatural fandom – where RPS is the moral high ground".[citation needed] Though increasingly common, RPS is considered a potential "squick" for slash readers. In addition, the use of celebrities in fictional, sexual stories remains controversial. Journals including RPS often include disclaimers that explain their true fictional nature. Henry Jenkins says that RPS may be "troubling" to the old guard of slash.[61] Fans of real person slash state that the personas presented by the common figures of RPS such as boy bands, celebrities, athletes and pro wrestlers are "largely manufactured" for the pleasure of female fans, "so why not just run with them?"[52]
Reverse slash
Reverse slash is a term used for fanfic without any sexual content, or very little sexual content, compared to the canon. The term is believed to have originated when non-sexual fanfic based on the Anita Blake series began to circulate.[citation needed] Fanfic without sexual content can also be referred to as 'genfic', short for general fiction, non-romantic in nature.[62]
Original slash
Original slash stories are those that contain male/male content, based on perceived homoerotic subtext between fictitious characters.[63] This can be sourced from a variety of media content, such as manga, TV shows, movies and books amongst others. These works are now generally published online[64] and use the same forms of rating, warnings and terminology that is commonly used by slash writers.
Slash has a different sensibility to gay fiction, probably because most slash readers are female and in a closed community that shares their tastes, which makes most stories in the genre centered into emotional relationships, even as sex is very prominent.[citation needed]
A different variety of homoerotic amateur fiction is original yaoi, from the manga/anime genre yaoi (boy-love), popularized in the West by subbers and scanlations.
Both (original slash and original yaoi) are terms that are considered somewhat controversial by some slash fans since they feel that the term 'slash' can only refer to works of fan fiction and not original works.[citation needed]
Omegaverse
Other slash fanworks
Slash art
In addition to fiction, fans also create artwork depicting media characters in same-sex relationship contexts. Initially, slash art was mostly used in covers and interior pages of fanzines, and sold to other fans at media and slash conventions.
Slash manips
In recent years, more slash artwork has used widespread availability of imaging software, like Adobe Photoshop, to manipulate photographs of their subjects to produce romantic or erotic images (often referred to as slash manips[69][70][71]) which imply a homosexual relationship, either as static pictures or animated GIFs. When the manipulated photos depict real people instead of media characters, the creation of these images can be as contentious as real person slash, and for many of the same reasons.
Slash vidding
Vidding has existed in media fandom since the 1980s, and slash vidding is still a popular movement within vidding.[72] Slash vidders take clips of characters (generally ones not written as gay, or in a relationship together), and through juxtaposition, song choice, and other techniques, portray a slash relationship on screen.[73] Vidding used to be very guarded within the slash community, among other reasons, because the songs used in videos are copyrighted. When vidders started putting their videos online, their sites were routinely password protected, etc.
Today, there are thousands of vids, and vid-like projects, available on YouTube and other video sites.[74] Many of these vids are made by slash (and gen) fans, but enormous numbers of them are made by people who have never heard of media fandom. The previous secrecy of vidding fans has come to seem unnecessary, but there is still a community ethos of not freely giving out a vidder's URL.
Slash roleplay
Sometimes referred to as yaoi (male/male) or yuri (female/female), roleplay involving same-sex characters in relationships can be either with canon or original character creations. There are slash roleplaying based on Dungeons & Dragons, Supernatural, Naruto, World of Warcraft and Dragon Age, among others.
There are many mediums used to approach the act of internet roleplaying including message boards, AIM, IRC and specially created chatrooms on servers. Some roleplay is very strict and requires players to be able to type a paragraph or two per each turn, some use strict guidelines involving roleplay dice and some are combinations of all of the above.
Not every roleplay community accepts slash, however, and some people specifically disallow the use of it in their community as not being canon or simply the operators do not care for slash.
See also
- Erotic fantasy
- Gay romance
- Homoerotica
- Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction
- Shipping
References
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- ^ Boyd, Kelly (2001) "One index finger on the mouse scroll bar and the other on my clit" : slash writers' views on pornography, censorship, feminism and risk
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- ^ Jenna Sinclair, Short History of Kirk/Spock Slash. Retrieved 2008-06-30.
- ^ Russ, Joanna, "Pornography by Women for Women, With Love" in her book, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts. New York: The Crossing Press: 1985.
- ^ Penley, Constance, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture." In Grossberg, Lawrence, ed., Cultural Studies, Rutledge 1992, p. 479. A detailed examination of K/S in terms of (among many other things) feminism and feminist studies.
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- ^ Dundas, Zach, "Hobbits Gone Wrong Archived 2008-05-08 at the Wayback Machine." In Willamette Week, July 14, 2004, retrieved 2008-07-15. A less-than-complimentary report on slash fiction and its role in the "Bit Of Earth" scam involving fans of The Lord of the Rings films.
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Gen denotes a general story that posits no imposed romantic relationships among the characters.
- ^ Hellekson, Karen; Busse, Kristina (2006). Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson: McFarland.
- ^ Thomas, A (2006). "Fan fiction online: engagement, critical response and affective play through writing". Australian Journal of Language & Literacy. 29: 226–239.
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- ^ Alter, Alexandra (23 May 2020). "A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question". The New York Times.
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Further reading
- Cicioni, Mirna (1998). "Male Pair Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing." In C. Harris & A. Alexander (Eds.) Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity. Cresskil, New Jersey: Hampton.
- Penley, Constance (1997). NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. New York: Verso. ISBN 0-86091-617-0.
- Penley, Constance (1992). "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture." In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies. Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992. ISBN 0-415-90345-9.
- Bacon-Smith, Camile (1991). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-1379-3.
- ISBN 0-415-90572-9.
- Slash Fiction/Fanfiction – The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments
- Is Slash an Alternative Medium?
- Gay Bible stories suprise [sic] but don't worry community
- Hellekson, Karen; Busse, Kristina, eds. (2006). Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-2640-9.
- Sonia K. Katyal, 'Performance, property, and the slashing of gender in fan fiction,' in American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, vol. 14, no. 3 (2006):461–518
- Slash definition and history on the Fanlore wiki
- Scodari, Christine (May 2003). "Resistance Re-Examined: Gender, Fan Practices, and Science Fiction Television". Popular Communication. 1 (2): 111–130. S2CID 144642651.