slash thought
Dec. 5th, 2004 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBouncing off sartorias bouncing off Teresa Nielsen Hayden bouncing off ellen fremedon, because ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
