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

[pip-malloy.livejournal.com]

Yes, but it _is_ a term for homoerotic fanfiction, right? The following argument, that it shouldn't be used for general fiction at all, I understand, its the opening premise that threw me.

I should probably add that using slash as slang for homoerotic fiction is also laziness, which doesn't impact your argument at all and pretty much makes that part of my post useless. ^^ But I stand by the first two parts.

Also, big props for an intelligent and interesting argument.

-pip

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to argue (and this is a prescriptive rather than descriptive argument, because obviously people are using "slash" in all SORTS of ways) that slash is a particular kind of erotic fanfiction which definitionally involves a NONCANONICAL relationship. 9 times out of 10 this is m/m--10 times out of 10 in ordinary usage.

In other words, I think Scully/Mulder should have been labeled slash during the first 5 (?) seasons.

(I also think Scully/Mulder should have STAYED slash, but that's a very different argument.)

[vass]

...Oh. I didn't realise you were trying to argue against same-sex pairing being part of the definition of slash at all.

Um.

What's wrong with 'subtext' or 'UST' as terms for the Mulder/Scully relationship?

I think there's an important difference in kind between people writing Mulder/Scully (before that became canon) and people writing Mulder/Krycek or Mulder/Skinner (or Mulder/Scully/Skinner, for which the label would be 'polyfic', but it still contains slash.) I think this distinction is particularly important in that there's such a history of bad feeling and hard words between the various shippers.

I agree that slash should not be equated with homosexual relationships, but it's still been part of the definition all along, and I think is as necessary to the definition as is the subversive element.

And even if homosexual relationships ought not to be categorised as subversive, they still bloody are.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm not arguing against same-sex being part of the definition of slash. Because, 9 times out of 10, it is

I think the "subversive" part of the definition is more important than the "same-sex" part. So whereas many people are expanding "slash" to include canonical same-sex, I'm trying to expand it to include non-canonical het.

[seajules]

I'm trying to argue (and this is a prescriptive rather than descriptive argument, because obviously people are using "slash" in all SORTS of ways) that slash is a particular kind of erotic fanfiction which definitionally involves a NONCANONICAL relationship.

Except that's not the usage in current practice in the slash community, and I think this is part of what's tripping people up in this discussion. Your definition not only discludes the work that seems to have started this round of the slash debate, but also discludes several works recognized as slash within the slash community. A lot of us are resistant to that, even if we see the arguments against calling that one work slash.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You're talking as if the slash community were (a.) monologic and (b.) in agreement on what "slash" is.

I'm not a slasher. I know I have no street cred here. And I'm not talking about people in the slash community communicating with each other. I'm talking about how the word is seeping out into common usage and how distressed I am that it's seeping out in the way that it is. I don't think it's useful for "slash" to be used as a synonym for "gay romance" or "gay erotica," and as I've said at various other points in this thread, I think it's potentially really kind of BAD for a word with connotations of fanfiction (and therefore--in common as opposed to fanficwriter/readetr usage--slightly derogatory) to be applied indiscriminately to works that focus on a same-sex relationship.

[seajules]

What I meant to say, and I said it badly, is that the usage in practice is that slash=same-sex pairings. There are of course fans who hold that noncanonical pairings are the only ones that count, but if you look at archives and comms for, say, Velvet Goldmine and Queer As Folk, the term slash is applied both to the same-sex couples who are involved in the canon and the same-sex couples who aren't. Het is applied to all opposite-sex couples in the same manner. Neither is privileged.

That said, I agree the way the term has been snapped up and misapplied outside the community is problematic, and since I do believe to a certain degree that slash is in the eye (or intent) of the writer, then I don't feel it should be applied to a book if the author says that wasn't her intent. Those who are arguing that it might reasonably be called "slashy" are closer to the mark, I think, because "slashy" is what the consumer picks up from the source and transforms into slash. "Reads like slash" could also work. Again, though, those are terms I don't feel comfortable being applied by reviewers outside the slash community, who don't share the slash sensibility. I worry they mean the term to be dismissive, not least because it is so well-known to be an expression of "female desire."

This is interesting!

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if this idea of female desire is key to something here. I've been reading the Lois Bujold list for some time and have seen some expression of fan disappointment with her latest novel, The Sharing Knife: The Beguilement, which is the first part of a two-part series. The novel belongs squarely in the SF genre because of its setting. However it has at its heart a romance between a man and a woman. This is what is upsetting a number of the fans, mostly men. They seem to be bothered that a favorite writer has turned out a "kissing book", to quote "The Princess Bride".

Are those who are so repelled by slash not being disgusted because the women who write it are being gratified by homoeroticism but because they're being gratified at all? Maybe I'm taking the idea a bit too far, but Puritanism's not dead, you know!

Re: This is interesting!

[seajules]

I'm not party to the particular conversation to which you're referring, but I've seen that kind of reaction before, and I got the same feeling that the objection isn't really what is gratifying women, but that women are being gratified at all.