slash thought

[truepenny]

Bouncing off sartorias bouncing off Teresa Nielsen Hayden bouncing off ellen fremedon, because matociquala asked me to.

sartorias is right that slash itself, slash qua slash, is basically hobbled by the copyright issues. Slash, as a phenomenon, is inherently a subrosa, subterranean, subversive re-visioning of its canon, and therefore it exists only in relationship to its originary text. But the worldview of slash I think may have a lot of effect on the next generation of genre writers.

The worldview of slash seems to me to be founded on three principles:

(1) Any character may be having sex with any other character. It isn't that they are; it's that the potential exists.

(2) Sex matters. Not all slash is erotica, but all slash assumes that characters are sexual beings and that their sexuality is a driving force in their world.

(3) (and the one that most interests me) Relationships are about power. Love, yes, desire, yes, but slash (at its best, and you know, Sturgeon's Law bites everybody on the ass) is about the negotiations between top and bottom.

Ursula K. Le Guin says somewhere (and I cannot for the life of me find the quote) that she thinks the reason women respond so strongly to Genly Ai and Estraven's understated love-scene on the ice is that it's a love-scene between two men, one of whom has the label WOMAN: HIGH STATUS pasted on his forehead. I think she goes on to invert that idea somehow, but as I said, I cannot find the damn quote--nor could I find it the last two times I went looking. Because slash is m/m or f/f, it denaturalizes--not in the sense that same-sex relationships are "unnatural," whatever that is supposed to mean, but in the sense that all good sff denaturalizes the world as we receive it through ideology--the power structure of a sexual relationship and therefore allows it to be examined. (N.b., I am not saying this can't be done with heterosexual relationships, but for these particular purposes, slash makes it easier to see what you're doing. It's like turning on the lights in the operating theater before you try to do open-heart surgery.)

All IMHO of course--which I wouldn't feel it necessary to point out except that I'm sure I've gotten at least one or two things quite quite wrong.

Comments

Re: Le Guin

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sadly, no. I can find that quote.

The bit about the label is as close to verbatim as my reconstructing can get. ... Unless I just made it all up, which is beginning to look a more and more likely hypothesis. But I swear she said it!

[copracat]

Man, I wish I had the big analytical writing skills. I'm respondiing to your statements about tops and bottoms. I've been thinking for some time about what I like about intergeneration slash - Harry/Snape, Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon, Will/Dr Smith.

As a side note: I don't like stories where the younger person is childish or child-like. I particularly don't like them when they are nominally 18 or 21 but behave like 12 year olds because frankly, that's cheating. If your fetish is intergenerational sex then own up, okay? There's a place for you here.

What I like is that these two people appear to be unequal but in all the ways that count - for the purpose of narrative and emotion and sympathy - they are equal, or the younger is the better, braver, more skilled person. The norm, the societal understanding is that there is significant and unsurmountable power difference but the emotional truth is that there is not.

Will Robinson is the actual hero - he faces the most danger and consistently overcomes it. He's brave and clever. Dr Smith is a coward for all his adulthood.

Obi-Wan is consistently a superior Jedi - from his mad, brave willingness to die to save Qui-Gon in the first Jedi apprentice to where he is in Phantom Menace. Clearly his master's equal or more, since it is he who lives and defeats Maul.

Snape is older, but Harry is the more powerful wizard. They are equally as brave, though Snape obviously is more aware of the consequences of danger than Harry is. I would love to see more fiction that compares Harry's scars from Umbridge's treatment with Snape's dark mark.

Oh dear. I do appear to have a thing for brave young men and their older sidekicks...

[copracat]

Ha. Have just read the pro writer links. We're going to have to wait a while as they all work through the same arguments and discussions het/gen and slash fans have been having for thirty years, right?

Sturgeon's Law applies to everything. Do people who quote him remember that he was a professional genre fiction writer?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um.

I am a pro writer.

[copracat]

Yes! Check my shameless bias! I think of you as a fan first, as I do all the fans who are also pro writers - oracne, and - damn, I can never remember how secret people's secret online identities are! Anyway, others. You will know who they are and more, I'm sure. I'm sorry - I ignored the possibility that our hierarchy of self-definition is not necessarily the same.

I should alter my statement to say "pro writers who are not also media fans/fan fiction fans/slash fans" as that is who I meant.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I could have sworn that one of the things Teresa was saying was "look, there is this interesting subculture which has been spending a lot of energy for years coming to grips with some big esthetic and narrative issues. They've got a lot to say."

What about this means "We're going to have to wait a while as they all work through the same arguments and discussions het/gen and slash fans have been having for thirty years, right?" What a peculiarly and, really, unnecessarily unpleasant thing to say.

[copracat]

Of course. I apologise.

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

Or, you know, some of them could also just be new to fandom [like me] and therefore be having the arguments regardless of pro association.

Zhaneel

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

(3) (and the one that most interests me) Relationships are about power. Love, yes, desire, yes, but slash (at its best, and you know, Sturgeon's Law bites everybody on the ass) is about the negotiations between top and bottom.


Interesting that you should say that, because to me, slash is about equality. There is never, in my experience, true equality between characters of different genders, because that equality does not exist in our society as it stands and it is therefore difficult, to matter what, to induce the reader to see a m/f relationship as that of two equals. However, when you have a same sex relationship, you start from an assumption of equality. That is what 'turns my crank' to quote a favorite character.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, that was kind of my point, from the other side. Because they start from a position of equality, the negotiations for power are out in the open. And in slash that isn't deliberately portraying a one-sided relationship (or isn't inadvertantly reflecting its author's unexamined assumptions), they mostly end at equality, too ... although what that equality looks like may be extremely idiosyncratic.

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

Aha. Sorry, misinterpreted your post. It's that top/bottom thing-- so many people (both in and out of fandom) interpret those as Top=Man and Bottom=Woman that I've kind of tried to stop using those terms, since they don't mean that at all.

[wickedwords.livejournal.com]

Yes. Slash fandom is a huge exploration of power dynamics, and the explict sex is a part of that. (well, power and asthetics) The fact that the most obvious (and visual) power imbalance -- the gender issue -- is eliminated allows for a lot of other ideas and thoughts to be explored from an external superfical vision of what equality is. Trust, love, brute, victim -- there's a whole lot in that to be stirred with that is just different when gender is involved. By eliminating it, a more lazer-like focus on 'what it means to be equal' is allowed.

One of the things that didn't come up in the other thread is the constant re-discovery of that dynamic, such as in Xena fandom. Slash is termed 'alt' in that community, and existed on its own without a ton of fans having explicit prior exposure to slash fandom. So to me, it seems that there is a craving inherent in some to play with an equal gender relationship structure, and that isn't necessarily being provided pro fiction.

[nadai.livejournal.com]

One of the things I like about slash is the implication that there isn't one reality - that here you have the canon/public world, but underneath there's this whole other non-canon/private life. It reminds me that people are not only what's on the surface, but also those hidden pieces of ourselves - that we all have secret lives.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I didn't say that one, because I thought it was just me. But, yes, definitely.

[winter]

(here from metablog)

I agree very much with the power thing - for me it's one of the chief attractions of writing slash (and reading it, of course). With a het relationship, you have the writer's and reader's cultural biases projecting onto the situation, so it's harder to establish equality or a position with the woman in power. With two people of the same gender, the power tangle is clearer - and more importantly, the balance can swing in either direction. In a way, slash presents us with a clear slate on which to sketch the relationship.

As for "sex matters", I think that's the Id Vortex ellen_fremdon mentioned: slash treats the sexual side of characters as something completely natural. This is also easier if we're dealing with two males, who are stereotypically "allowed" to have sex on the brain all the time, and aren't branded as sluts in the popular sense if they act on it.

But slash is also about emotions, like a lot of fanfic in general. The emotions are presented in a raw, visceral format: often emotionally charged themes like death, grief, violence and sexual assault are explored. Not always successfully, but they are there. I think it's that emotional intensity that might be slash writers' future pro strength.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I agree.

What I meant by "sex matters," aside what you're pointing out, is that sex is allowed to be part of the plot, rather than simply a Must Put Sex-Scene Here kind of thing.

I'm probably not putting that very well, but slash privileges sex as a motivation and a structural device, even when it isn't explicitly and intentionally erotica.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Bless you. Possible the single most succinct essence of slash post I've ever read -- and I've read dozens, if not hundreds.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thank you!

[jadelennox]

Thank you for eloquently saying in one short post what takes poor old Henry Jenkins a chapter or three (not that I'm not greatful to him for the book). That's what slash is all about, for me. Sure, I read sometimes for the porn -- but why not straight porn? And sure, I read often for the plot -- but there's plenty of great fiction out there that isn't slash, so why am I so often found in the slash pit with the boys?

It's the power dynamic. It's building characters based on character, and not on prebuilt stereotypes. In a good slash universe, even the characters who aren't getting any are restructured as people in a universe with different rules, one where, as you say, anyone could potentially be involved with anyone else. It complicates life, which is lovely. In theory, there's no reason this couldn't be so in non-slash. In some of my favorite books, in fact, it's there.

Most of my fanfic pet peeves are slash stories that recreate the dynamic, creating a weepy, clingy bottom and a powerful top. Then they think they mix it up by making the top bottom to someone else (Wuss!Xander:CaringStrong!Spike :: NeedyWilliam!Spike:Fatherly!Angel), but unless you add extra levels of interpairing complication, it doesn't work. It loses the wonder of slash.

[gloss]

I'm very taken with your points one and two, though in *my* experience as a writer and reader, the potential of characters as polymorphously-oriented sexual beings isn't original to slash.

slash is about the negotiations between top and bottom
But this is what gets me - in your exegesis, you mention f/f, but the top/bottom dynamic is so very (stereotypically) *male* and, what's more, derived from (stereotypical/archetypal) heterosexual norms, that I'm more than slightly discomfited by its use as a genre characteristic of slash.

Which isn't to say it's *not*, I just think/wish/hope that slash could be more than a wonderland mirror of "standard" relationship dynamics.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

in *my* experience as a writer and reader, the potential of characters as polymorphously-oriented sexual beings isn't original to slash.

Of course not. But slash is the only genre I'm aware of that has that as a convention.

Which may merely indicate that I am naive and underread.

... the top/bottom dynamic is so very (stereotypically) *male* ...

Argh. I have clearly said this badly. I meant top/bottom only as a relatively recognizable example (I know that's not how the paragraph came out. Mea culpa.) I think that on some level all human relationships are about power. (This is quite possibly a fault in my wiring rather than a truth, but it is what I believe.) As You Know Bob, the heterosexist norm in sexual relationships is dominant male, submissive female, and while it's more than posssible to write against that norm (I do it myself), it's also hard because there's SO MUCH baggage to fight with.

In slash, whether m/m or f/f, there is the potential to step away from that norm and negotiate something different. Not all slash writers do this, of course, many being perfectly content, as you say, to remap the heterosexual power dynamic onto their same-sex couple. And slash that does use the top/bottom dynamic generally subverts it by pointing out the ways in which the bottom has power/control over the top or the top fails in significant ways to have power/control over the bottom.

(Gaah. I said that really really badly in my original post, didn't I?)

Essentially, what I meant was, power is up for grabs in slash, even in relationships that look like they conform to heterosexist binary thinking.

Again, not all slash does this, and I know that. But it can

[shaychana.livejournal.com]

thanks for posting this. i like your idea of a 'slash worldview', and i was going to quibble with your third point, but then i read the comments and yes, i do agree with you (after your clarifications) and the others on this. i've linked from my lj (http://www.livejournal.com/users/shaychana/15248.html), hope you don't mind.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't mind at all.