Let's talk about sex.

[truepenny]

ETA: since metafandom has apparently linked to this post sans context, let me state explicitly that I'm talking about the MISLABELING of original fiction featuring a same-sex relationship--as for example, matociquala's Carnival--as slash in reviews and commentary by people who are not slash writers themselves. I'm not trying to talk about what slash writers choose to do within their fandoms and communities. Not a slasher. Don't play one on TV. I'm arguing that slash, as a term, belongs to fanfiction, and should not be applied to works that are not fanfiction. My reasons for feeling as I do, explained in the following post, stem partly from my own career as a pro writer whose work features a lot of same-sex relationships, and partly from my appreciation, as a genre theorist, of the intertextual subversion inherent in what slash does.

The subtext, as Giles says to Buffy in "Ted," is rapidly becoming text.

hth

---

More specifically, let's talk about slash and why it is offensive and heteronormatizing to equate it with homosexual relationships.

The subversion/containment model (proposed by Foucault and applied by a bunch of New Historicist critics in the 1980s) has buried somewhere in the unexamined assumptions of its premise the notion that somehow subversion is bad. Or nonsustainable. Conservation of energy. A society tends to conserve the status quo.

This may be descriptively true (she says, looking dourly at her own society), but prescriptively, it sucks major moose cock, because it assumes that subversion exists to be contained. Hence Natalie Zemon Davis's elaboration of Foucault with her "pressure-valve" idea. (Which, btw, I think is incredibly helpful for understanding extremely conservative societies--like I said, descriptively the idea can be very helpful.)

Slash is subversion.

(For those of you who are still wondering what on earth I'm talking about, slash is a kind of fanfiction which posits a romantic/sexual relationship between two characters who in canon have no such thing. You might also describe it as an underground movement. It's named for the labelling convention that marks it; the first slash was K/S: Kirk-slash-Spock.)

Slash says, "These two canonically romantically-uninvolved characters have a close, intense, and obviously loving relationship. Our society--as inscribed on these characters by censorship and other kinds of normatizing pressure--does not allow that relationship to be developed in a sexual way. Let's transgress the taboo."

Now, obviously, that transgression can be done mindfully or otherwise, but the key component to slash is the overt sexualization of a non-sexual, or only subtextually sexual, relationship.

That relationship is, 9 times out of 10, between two men. Because, 9 times out of 10, the most intense and interesting relationship in any given canon is--wait for it--between two men. (And that has to do with a whole bunch of other factors and influences including, you know, four or five millennia worth of patriarchy.)

Now, why am I so adamant that slash is not the same as homosexual relationships?

Because I insist that homosexual relationships ought not to be categorized as subversive.

(Okay, yes, leftist liberal commie bitch, that would be me. Please don't tell me you're surprised.)

Labelling a homosexual relationship in a work of fiction as slash is wrong for a couple of reasons. One is that it's eliding the line between a work of fiction and commentary ON that work of fiction. I think it's inherent to slash that it is subverting and deconstructing and undercutting a canon text's assumptions about sexuality and love (using "text" here in a broad and metaphorical sense, rather than the literal one of words-printed-on-a-page). Slash is a game played with canon, and part of its value is in the tension it both creates and illuminates between canon text and subtext.

The other reason that it's wrong to label homosexual relationships, whether in or out of fiction, as slash is that it is reinscribing heteronormativity on our society and our discourse. It's a syllogism. Slash is gay sex. Slash is subversive. Therefore, gay sex is subversive. The subversion/containment model is a BOX, and as long as we keep putting homosexual relationships in that box, we are reinforcing the idea that heterosexuality is the standard by which all other sexualities will and ought to be judged. The same idea that is powering the (often hysterical) attempts to define marriage in such a way that gay and lesbian people cannot have it. Because their committed monogamous relationships are being judged as subversive.

And that's so horribly wrong that it's eaten all my words.

Comments

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Thanks for writing this so I didn't have to.

Me, I have been standing around looking croggled and going "Er, why is it that suddenly any m/m relationship in a work of fiction is SLASH? Whatever happened to the whole CANON part? And why can't characters just, y'know, be homo, or bi, or situationally broadminded, or simply opportunistic? Kinda like people are?"

graarrgh stompy stompy stompy

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I love you.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have never seen anyone describe the male/male relationships in Samuel Delany as slashy, and I can't see how anyone could want to. Likewise, Peg Kerr's The Wild Swans.

I think there is a thing where women write about gay men that slash is part of and Mary Renault is part of and Brokeback Mountain is part of and the "young men love stories" ritaxis has been talking about are part of. I think this thing actually doesn't have a whole lot to do with real gay men and does have a lot to do with the way women want to read and write about relationships between equals where the assumed power balance is different from the default societal power balance between men and women -- where they want to put that baggage down and write about relationships between nominal equals. I could be wrong about this bit, it could be to do with the secret and the forbidden, or something else entirely, but I'm not wrong about the existence of this huge thing.

I think that as well as subverting texts, this is going on. And I think it's significant that these things are written by women. "Slashy" might be a bad word for it when it isn't slash, but it's a thing, it exists and I bet it's what people are trying to get at when they look at a text written by a woman which has two male characters whose hidden love is so special and say "slashy" -- and wouldn't dream of using it about, for example, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.

[redbird]

I think you're right both that it's connected to slash (in terms of the writers' motivations) and that it's a different thing, in part because it isn't rewriting someone else's text or characters.

At least three things here: slash in the more-or-less original sense; the sort of non-slash stories some women write about romance and/or sex between men; and stories about romantic or sexual relationships between two men that aren't written that way, and have a lot more to do with real gay men.

All of these are fiction: real-life relationships aren't slash (you weren't suggesting they were, this is me combining two or three comments into one). If there's anything subversive about most real same-sex relationships, what we're interested in subverting is the set of beliefs that says we shouldn't be doing this, not all of Western Civilization or even the literary canon.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Might be useful to ask someone who labels a m/m relationship in a piece of fiction as slash why they perceive it is so. At least for some older fans, slash denotes not just m/m, but a type of story, in which the emotional component takes priority in the story. The story might even be about the emotional component in the relationship, and the action (such as hurt comfort) arranged to keep the reader's attention squarely on it, adumbrating all other story aspects.

A story in which a pair (m/m, f/f) are romantically involved but that is just a data point in a work whose main thrust is elsewhere won't "read slashy" by that definition. So one could say that Billy Budd by Herman Melville "reads slashy" because there is a strong focus on the emotional state of the characters, the physical descriptions keep the readerly eye squarely on those emotional tensions, and not on the ship or the sea or even the event that prompts the captain's action. An even stronger example might be Horace Vachell's The Hill, which is specifically about the emotional relationships of the boys, with no (overt) reference to sex. I've seen it referred to as the slashiest school story ever written. Contrast that to Jo Walton's recent book Farthing which includes a major m/m pair, and some f/f relationships, but the story is about murder, and about serious political threat, not about the emotions of the pairs. I have seen this aspect discussed, but have not seen anyone label it slashy.

Another thought: there are plenty of stories with gay pairs that are not "about" the emotions of gay sex in gay literature, but my strong wish is that the label "gay literature" be dropped and these works be regarded as and discussed as literature. With more characters partnering away from the old standard one m/one f popping up in all genres, I'm hoping that that label vanishes as useless.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Tom Brown and Arthur in Tom Brown's Schooldays - poss not quite as slashy? but see EF Benson's David Blaise for sheer swooniness.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Well said - and despite the fact that I don't entirely agree with you, I agree with your bottom line: that non-het relationships are not subversive and should not be seen so.

Where I disagree, at least in part, is in the notion that slash is subversive. The TV producers would probably like to think so. Some slash writers and readers probably think so. But to others, slash is a natural extrapolation of what we see on the screen - implications of sexual attraction or affection between characters. Any notion of 'subversion' is irrelevant at best; beside the point. And often, slash is written about characters who are canonically lovers: cf. Brokeback Mountain, Queer as Folk (both versions), Torchwood, Oz, and so on - a growing number. I think the 'subversion' aspect of slash is an accident of sociology, not a raison d'etre; and it's more noticeable to those outside the actual slash community, while within the slash community, it seems so normal that we tend to forget (or dismiss) that it isn't part of the original text.

[kate_nepveu]

And often, slash is written about characters who are canonically lovers

This is a definitional problem. You will note that truepenny defines this scenario out of "slash" as discussed above.

[larryhammer]

Nice. Yes. That.

Though now I'm wondering what happens when one tosses shounen ai/yaoi into the conceptual mix.

---L.

[razorsmile.livejournal.com]

Or futanari for that matter.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

It's all so complicated now...

When I was writing it, back in the Dark Ages, slash was always about someone else's characters - even if they were labelled differently - and it was basically porn for female heterosexuals.

Things have changed.

I still think, though, that if they are your characters, and if you can't see the file marks, it is, by definition, not 'slash' in the strictest sense.

[pip-malloy.livejournal.com]

I'm curious only about your definitions and subsequent use of them. When you define Slash, you make no mention of gender in the definition or in the paragraph after discussing Slash ideas. Without discussing Slash within a gender context, those paragraphs describe not slash, but most romantically-oriented fanfiction in general. Which makes the rest hard to understand, at least for me, because I really don't see the difference between a fourteen year old girl sitting down to write about an adult male character and an adult female character who do not have a relationship within the game and that same girl writing about two adult males.

Also, I disagree that slash is typically written about two male characters who do not have a sexual or romantic relationship in the canon-- there's a great deal of slash written about the rare portrayals of homosexual couples in media; the best example I can come up with at the moment being the slash from the movie Velvet Goldmine. I wonder if the discrepancy between slash written about characters that have no canonical relationship and slash written about two characters that do could be caused by the discrepancy between instances of canonical homosexual relationships within entertainment media.

I think the use of slash to label a male/male relationship is a matter of slang more than anything-- more often than not, when I see it used or have used it myself, it's just a more familiar term than Homoerotic Fiction.

I do like the idea of not labeling homosexual relationships as subversive, and you lay out an interesting argument.

-pip

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm trying to argue AGAINST using "slash" as a term for "homoerotic fiction." That's my point.

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

Because I insist that homosexual relationships ought not to be categorized as subveersive.

I understand what you're saying here, and I agree. But I'm not I can agree with your syllogism. I mean, sure, there are probably people who think that "gay sex = slash = subversive", which is an equation you don't want to reinforce. But I don't think that it has to be that way. Why can't we just define "slash (fic label, genre) = gay sex" with no regard to canon vs non-canon pairing (which is how a lot of fen use the term nowadays, I think) and keep the subversive connotations out of it entirely? Or at least teach that the connotations of subversion should not/no longer apply?

Because the meaning and connotation of words evolve over time, and maybe we first used "slash" to indicate a non-canonical relationship between Kirk and Spock, and this was considered "subversive". But now we use "slash" to indicate a canon relationship between Willow and Tara, and this isn't considered subversive at all (in fandom, at least, if not the world over). The word "gay" didn't use to mean "homosexual" but nowadays that's its main usage. Why can't "slash" be the fannish equivalent?

Anyway, I hope you don't mind my two cents. I'm mostly approaching this as a reader/writer, somebody who relies heavily on fic labels.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Because I think subversion is valuable and ought to be celebrated.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

(came by random linking)

I whole heartedly agree with you and admire the way you've formalized the issue simply and elegantly. I always felt the same way without managing to word it in a way that wouldn't sound like the typically homophobic "they're not gay they're just in love"

Slash is about the subversion, definitly... that's why the logics of incest, antagonistic shipping, crossgen (some of it, at least) and others obey to the same logic as slash. It's about eroticizing a relationship and exploring through the means of sex a relationship that is not, as standing, a relationship fit for romance. I would say that slash is definitly queer, but it's not the same thing as writing gay love stories & erotica. Without the transformating operation of slash (the famous slash googles, the shift of perception which produces such please to slash fen), it doesn't actually feel like slash to me.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I have no background in literary criticism (I was a history and artifacts classicist more than a literary classicist) and don't much read slash because I have too many other things piled up to ready already, but I get the distinct impression that many of the people running amok with the term and its derivatives are operating from a limited critical vocabulary, for one reason or another. Because of this, they take the term and extrapolate, extend, and extrude it everywhere they run into anything that happens to remind them in any way at all of slash, whatever that connection might happen to be.
If, for example, Billy Budd is deemed to have slashiness, how about Lolita? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Absalom, Absalom? Anna Karenina? Jane Eyre? Wuthering Heights? The Iliad? I could go on and on, spinning thinner and thinner threads of supposed connection, based on reasons people who have posted above have suggested the terms slash/slashy/slashiness might be applied to a work of fiction. None of these usages tells me anything other than "This work has something that I, as a regular reader of slash fanfic, find appealing." This sounds to me like a case of metonymy* with bells on; if you're using it as a shorthand, it might be helpful to unpack the thought a bit, so people will know why it rings those bells with you, because reasons which are implied but not explained may be misunderstood.**
Clear definitions are good, yes?

Also, in a world where, in my lifetime, a group of human relationships have managed to go from being The Love That Dare Not Say Its Name to The Love That Comes Into My Office To Show Me The Pictures From Its Wedding (which is not yet legal in this state but maybe someday...) it would be nice to avoid putting people back into a box, even if it's a sympathetic box.
*Which is the container, and which is the thing contained?

**If you didn't realize you were doing it, you might want to stop and consider that what you think you are saying may not be what other people are hearing. I'm just sayin'.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Well, words do change their meanings over time, even as little time as 30 years. When the words describe a cultural site that is changing like the dickens, the words will move faster rather than slower. I wisht eh word would split itself up, but the social rules of the usage community are such that lumping tends to be the desired option.

It could be worse. I once had a flamewar over whether muffalettas without olives are still considered muffalettas, or whether the olives are definitional to muffalettadom.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Slightly off-topic, I always had a problem with the term 'straight' because it implies 'bent' which I grew up hearing as a derogatory term.

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

Wow. Very well said. I Get It now.

For the longest time I thought slash was exclusively about non-canonical gay relationships. Now I see the source of my confusion.

Thank you.

[vass]

For those of you who are still wondering what on earth I'm talking about, slash is a kind of fanfiction which posits a romantic/sexual relationship between two characters who in canon have no such thing.

Correct, but incomplete: generally it also does so across the characters' presumed orientations, and it is always same-sex.*

*Well, excluding genderfuck etc.

My point (which I don't think you're pushing but which I've had to argue enough times to want to restate it) is that taking a canonically gay character and putting him or her in a heterosexual relationship is not slash and it's not subversive - it's reinstating the dominant ideology.**

** Or at least it can be. I don't mean to call names or poke sticks at people who *do* do that... unless they argue that what they're doing is subversive and/or slash. Because, *no*.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Wow.

It didn't occur to me that people would do that.

[tesseract-5.livejournal.com]

Thank you for illuminating the difference between girls (and boys) having fun putting their favorite characters in stories with non-canonical sexual tension and a queer relationship story. I recently read Henry Jenkins' new book, in which he has a chapter entitled Normal Female Interest in Male Bonking. However I was more mixed up about a definition of slash and how it differs from queer relationship stories after reading it than before. Jenkins mostly quotes various xines and message boards in which there is an infinity of opinions about why girls like slash and what consitutes slash.

[razorsmile.livejournal.com]

Slash Is A Moving Target. That said, I think we can all agree that, definitionally speaking, if it's your own characters, it's not slash. Slash is a fanfic-only term.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the problem that started the whole tizzwoz. Reviewers describing the m/m relationship in matociquala's Carnival as "slash."

So, yeah, we ought to be able to agree, but obviously we can't.

[grave-tidings.livejournal.com]

AGH! I commented but my comment is too long for LJ comments to handle, so I've shoved it over as a post to my own journal.

I'm sorry.... stupid LJ.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The thought that I am trying to get to condense is being annoyingly vague, but I think it's at least in part an irritation with the value of "subversive" being valorised here; that constructing a romantic relationship between partners other than the Western social default of one woman and one man is something which has all this energy and importance attached, but that there appears to be an underlying set of paradigms in terms of romantic love and the range of ways in which it works and how important it is which is a level that a lot fewer people are interested in subverting.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The scope of my argument is about same-sex sexual relationships in non-derivative fiction being described as slash.

It is, therefore, perforce an argument about the dominant cultural paradigm of romantic (heterosexual) love.

I agree with you completely that the dominant cultural paradigm of romantic love needs subverting in all SORTS of ways (the privileging of erotic/sexual love, the privileging of monogamy, etc. etc. etc.), but that wasn't what the post was about. Since I was starting from the definition of slash, romantic love is a given in this particular discussion.

I have three different projects in the queue that are all about subverting the teleological imperative of romantic love in a dual-protagonist narrative (one of them has a heterosexual male lead and a heterosexual female lead, one of them has one heterosexual male lead and one asexual male lead, and one has one gay male lead and one bisexual male lead (that's Mick and Jamie from "A Night in Electric Squidland")). So I'm right there with you, but that problem wasn't in the terms of this particular discussion.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I am about half an inch from coming up with the theory that

1) slash can only exist in pure form in derivative works, because

2) it is a genre whose primary defining characteristic actually not same sex desire, but rather that it responds to -- and, yes, subverts -- artistic expressins of anxiety about same sex desire in popular culture, and that

3) it therefore rightly falls to shit the very second it interacts with real humans of any stripe, a species it lacks the tools to grapple with,

4) is mutating as pop culture anxiety mutuates and will probably eventually die off peacefully/be absorbed into the Love Story Simple.

Any assistance you can offer me in NOT falling into another Unified Field Theory gratefully accepted.

But as with so MANY of my crack brained theories, at the moment I confess it sounds damn persuasive to me.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I like your crackbrained theory.

"I like your crackbrained theory." That would be a good icon.

Good argument

[otterdance.livejournal.com]

Hi! Muneraven steered me over to this discussion. As a writer who's been hit with the slash stick, too, I really appreciate the clarity of your argument.

"Labelling a homosexual relationship in a work of fiction as slash is wrong for a couple of reasons. One is that it's eliding the line between a work of fiction and commentary ON that work of fiction. I think it's inherent to slash that it is subverting and deconstructing and undercutting a canon text's assumptions about sexuality and love (using "text" here in a broad and metaphorical sense, rather than the literal one of words-printed-on-a-page). Slash is a game played with canon, and part of its value is in the tension it both creates and illuminates between canon text and subtext.

The other reason that it's wrong to label homosexual relationships, whether in or out of fiction, as slash is that it is reinscribing heteronormativity on our society and our discourse. It's a syllogism. Slash is gay sex. Slash is subversive. Therefore, gay sex is subversive. "

Beautifully put!

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Here via klgaffney, mostly to say a) I agree and b) none of the canonically homosexual relationships I write are remotely functional. What should I call them?

[heresluck]

FYI, I am sitting here reliving (with happy nostalgia) various of our now-long-ago conversations about how Willow/Tara isn't slash, Buffy/Faith is slash, and Buffy/Spike (at least pre-S6) is also slash, or at least could be, even though of course that wasn't the label for it within the fic-reading and -writing communities I knew about.

I have jumbled thoughts about the differences between homosexual (or homoerotic or gay or for that matter lesbian) and queer, and how queer actually seems to me to have more overlap with slash, for various reasons; and also about how much I loathe the term "femslash," for reasons that relate to your original post (it reifies m/m slash as "real" slash in much the way "slash" reifies het as the norm). But grading has numbed my brain to the point that the thoughts aren't coming unjumbled, so I'll stop there.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

> FYI, I am sitting here reliving (with happy nostalgia) various of our now-long-ago conversations about how Willow/Tara isn't slash, Buffy/Faith is slash, and Buffy/Spike (at least pre-S6) is also slash, or at least could be, even though of course that wasn't the label for it within the fic-reading and -writing communities I knew about.

Yeah, I know, I'm like, "This argument is so 2003! W/T isn't slash, internet! I thought we did this one already!" What other zombie debate is next-- RPF?!

[aeditimi.livejournal.com]

I'm here by way of about a million other places where your post is being discussed, and I am really glad you put forth this conversation in such a coherent way. Thank you. Do you think slash is a word that has changed in its meaning? Is it in the process? In any case, thanks for 'reclaiming' the S word!

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

This seems to have two angles, and I agree with you on one of them, I can't agree on the other. I think it's surreal that gay relationships in published fiction get dubbed "slash", because that makes no sense. The term is morphing into a meaning that doesn't square with its meaning in its natural habitat. I agree that that's inappropriate. Something in pop culture is "slashy" when it's unintentionally homoerotic, or homoerotic in a way that most people are not meant to pick up on, or can be read as homoerotic if you squint at it right. It's not slashy if a work of fiction has a gay romance at the heart of it.

I'm not sure people are calling it that because they think gayness is subversive. I suspect it's just being percieved as an aesthetic, and personally I hate that people think you can class all gay romance stories together because surely they are all of the same aesthetic. I guess it's the aethetic of "people who aren't squicked out by two men in love". That's marginalizing, and that's a problem. That makes people outside of slash, who don't understand the term, reading "gay" as "subversive". But that reading doesn't make slash the problem. The reading is the problem.

Sure slash is subversive, as it is rewriting someone else's story with a different spin or a different perspective, but so is fanfiction generally.

To presume that people write slash only because it's taboo is to allow one segment of slash writers, and its critics, to define the whole, and that doesn't seem right to me. Not all slash is designed to shock. Not all slash is using gayness to subvert something. There are whole swaths of the slash world(s) where, as you say, it's merely a logical step and has emotional resonance. It's also a contribution to a community; fanfiction is part of a conversation happening within its own bounds, and is probably hard for outsiders to understand. To the community of slash readers and writers, slash is not paticularly subversive. It has its own norms and expectations.

If homosexual relationships in fiction should be able to exist without being percieved as subversive in and of themselves, slash should be able to do the same. Slash can be subversive as fanfiction, but it shouldn't be read as subversive not just because it contains characters read as gay instead of as straight. Isn't that just feeding into the same problem?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think there's a problem here--a thing I failed to be clear about--in that I'm not talking about how slash is used and perceived within the community of people who read and write fanfiction; I'm not a slasher and have very little insight into the workings of that community, and while my arrogance may be o'erweening, I'm not that bad. I'm talking about how the term is being applied to texts that are not fanfiction by people who are not, or are not writing as, members of the community in which the term originated and has a range of meanings and nuances.

The state I live in passed legislation this November to define marriage, legally, as occuring only between one man and one woman. Therefore, sadly, I have to say that imagining two canonically straight characters as having a same-sex relationship with each other is still pretty damn subversive in the culture at large.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

Coming here off being linked, I would have to say that I contest your definition of "slash"; in fact, this post is the first time I have ever come across it. The communities I came from, and moved to original fic from, used it simply to mean "homosexual relationship". Nothing more complex, nothing more nuanced, and nothing more important. There was no subversion, there was no reference to subversion, it simply meant "there is something of a sexual nature (even if that's limited to fluffy romance) between two persons of the same sex in this story."

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

But doesn't that lose a useful and important dimension to the meaning of "slash," namely the way that it is often used as a response to or critique of the original text?