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Let's talk about sex.
ETA: since ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
no subject
From what I know of the 'original slash' community, it's more like a large scale writing workshop than an interpretative community. I hate the writing workshop view of fandom, and I think 'original slash' confuses the issue.
As an alternative, why not try:
'slashy' fiction
'bent' fiction (re: UK slang for gay, which has not, I think, been turned into a publishing/academic category the way 'queer' has in the US)
'mariposa' fiction (mexican/chicano slang for faggot)
'torch' fiction (i.e. like what torquere press does)
'blur' fiction (for that Blur song Girls & Boys (http://www.lyrics007.com/Bush%20Lyrics/Girls%20And%20Boys%20Lyrics.html))
'platypus' fiction (because it is a funny looking animal)
'guysex'
'guylove' (along the lines of 'boyslove' in anime, but Western.)
sss or s3 (same sex stories)
'gaydy' fiction (GAY stories for a laDY)
It's not that hard to come up with names for things. Some of the ones above are stupid, true, but a lot of them aren't. It's harder to get people to use a new name, but coming up with a reasonable new name is easy.
no subject
I'm fond of "boysmoochies" and "girlsmoochies" and just "smoochies." *g*
As in: "may contain smoochies."
Because it describes a part of the narrative rather than describing the narrative as a whole, and because it's really hard to take a word like "smoochies" overseriously.
no subject
But I would like to say a few things.
First of all, you wrote so I gave you a list of suggestions of what you might call such stories.
You ask why slashy fiction is superior to 'original slash'. The construction "[Media property] slash" is used in fandom to denote what canon the slash story concerns. Original is not a fandom, so the stories described by the term 'original slash' are not fanfiction, and the term is creates a misleading connection between itself and that which it is not. Calling something noun-y, on the other hand, denotes that it is like the noun, without actually being the noun. So milky things resemble milk in some way, without necessarily having anything to do with bodily fluids from mammaries. In the same way, slashy indicates that the fiction you are writing resembles slash, but is not actually slash. Slashy gets applied to original material all the time, indicating that it is a book or movie or tv show which would be of interest to slash fans, but is not in fact a fannish product.
The reason I care is because the construction 'original slash' gives the impression that you are writing fanfiction and operating in a fandom. I care about fandom and fanfiction. I don't actually care about what you are doing, but I do care that the way you name what you are doing makes it appear that what you are doing is related to fandom, fanfiction, and fannishness, since it is not. Your marketing schema apparently matters to you more than the fact that you are irritating the fuck out of me every time I see the term 'original slash.' That's fair enough. But every time I see you say, "Oh, but what term could possibly substitute for original slash and still convey to our audience what we are doing?" I am, in fact, going to answer you, in hopes that you will eventually pick something.
no subject
I'm speaking here as a reader, not a writer... but I would disagree that "Original" is not a fandom, because I am a huge fan of original slash fiction. So even just assuming that I'm the one lone person on the planet who doesn't write it but still goes out of their way to seek it out (which I know quite well that I'm not), wouldn't that still make it a fandom, albeit a small one? And when I go looking for it, I don't type "gay fiction" or any other sort of combination into a search engine. Because I know that "original slash fiction" will bring up exactly what I want. If I wanted original m/m stories where the author is coming from an obvious background of anime, then I'd type in "original yaoi fiction."
The bottom line is, you gotta go with what will bring people to you. The people who know and love to read this sort of fiction aren't going to be looking for "bent" fiction or whatever you'd want to call it. They're looking for writing in the slash tradition by women for women... so "original slash" is what's going to bring it up.
And then there were two
"Original Slash" makes sense to me. It's slash fiction based on an original story line instead of X storyline. Nice and simple, just the way I like it. I've seen the argument crop up here and there before and to be honest I don't have any idea why it's such a big deal, but I guess that's what I get for being a reader, not a writer.
While I appreciate the time and effort you put into manufacturing still more creative alternatives for Original Slash, I'm going to continue to use the term. It's what I'm looking for and how I find it. From your perspective that may mean I'm part of the problem, but I'm just doing what works.
no subject
From what you say, I don't think you have any idea at all what it's about. Did you ever attend a writing workshop? I did, and let me tell you that while I learned a lot of things there, applying those things to my writing didn't necessarily produce the best results. We (and by this I mean writers) each use our own methods, and the only difference between fanfic writers and original writers is that fan fiction writers already have a setting, characters and events to work with. Original fiction provides much more flexibility (and more difficulty, too) in that regard, in that we create our own.
Also, keep in mind that English is a flexible language, and 'original slash' is the term is slowly evolving to be the official label of the genre. Changing it now would be pointless, and to some extent stupid.
Original is not a fandom
According to the definition given in Wikipedia, fandom is "a subculture composed by like-minded fans (aficionados) characterized by a feeling of closeness to others who share the same interest".
Therefore, "original slash" is a fandom and will continue to be one for as long as there are writers and readers involved. If you don't like the terms we use to label things, that's your problem. But if you're not even interested in what we write and read, I don't see why you bother working up a fuss about it in the first place.