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

[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.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Yes! thus (because Mitchison is still on my mind), her early The Conquered is somewhat slashy (Meromic/Barrus OTP, right?), but the male-male relationships in The Corn King and The Spring Queen aren't, because they have a social context and are shown to have both strengths and weaknesses - including their impact on the marriages of the characters involved. Also, different kinds of strong women and balanced, if not strictly egalitarian, hetero-relationships.

[cassiphone.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that no one would call a work of literature containing a m/m relationship "slash" if it was written by a man.

It's not so much the gay love story that is being read as "slash" in these instances, but a m/m relationship depicted by a female author.

[diony.livejournal.com]

I have seen people call works of literature written by men 'slashy', because for some number of people in the world this is a term which describes the way in which a romantic relationship is being handled, and is thus something of a content marker.

This definition has, however, little resemblance to the definition truepenny has put together in her post.

[mistressvenera.livejournal.com]

I can second your opinion.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I think that exactly nails down my objection to it. Because the fact that some readers have a different response to books that I write in which a m/m (or f/f, I do those too) relationship exists than books in which all the relationships are opposite sex does not change the protocols I use to write those books.

And that's why it gets up my nose. Because as far as I'm concerned, this relationship *isn't* any different from any of the other relationships I write.

:-P