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

Re: Reposting for Lois

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

In other words, the critical criteria for success would change hugely, eliminating the very thing many readers and writers seem to come to slash (or fanfic generally) to obtain: characters who closely mirror their own emotional and other concerns.

It's my impression that an enormous amount of fanfic, both gen and slash, consists of hijacking the original characters to carry out the psychological agendas of the fan writers.

Absolutely, and as you say this isn't either good or bad. On the other hand, making it original fic would remove or greatly alter the whole critical motive; the bit where sometimes what the writer wants to say it

'okay, so why in the original source material does this guy behave in a way that can only be justified by assuming he has the inner life of a thirteen year old girl?'

(The old debate in Hornblower fandom is Horatio Hornblower: Complete Emotional Defective, or just Really Really Gay? Many fandoms have one of these characters.)

Not sure I agree about "primary defining characteristic is that it subverts...", however. (Possibly because the longer I look at that sentence, the less sure I am what it means.) (Actually, I may not have correctly understood what you meant by the first part, either, now I reconsider.)

Hmm. Let me try that puppy again.

The primary defining characteristic of slash seems to me to be not that it portrays same-sex desire or relationships, but that it responds (antagonistically or semi-antagonistically) to various tropes in how culture portrays men and male relationships.

Which is not realistically, and in most of the most-slashed shows and books is deeply unrealistic, but is in fact a largely male fantasy of what men are like.

(Yes, I know there are more and more female creators. I notice mildly that their works are, outside of romance, less and less slashed. I have as yet not a big enough sample here to even begin to address that. it's a bit of slack in my system for now.)

You can even subdivide that into a fantasy version of the sort of man who appeals to men (male watchers, the 'buddy'), and a fantasy version of the sort of man who appeals to women (female watchers, the heroine).

And there are, at least to my eyes, vast deep pools of anxiety about portraying male characters with other male characters and to male viewers in a lot of pop culture, because male characters are sort of by definition objects to be looked at, and if possible desired as well as identified with. But that desire is all extremely subterranean; they tamp it down with a sledgehammer in buddy shows, for example, to make up for having two attractive men alone together a lot.

And slash grabs that anxiety by the, well, by the balls and hauls it out and makes it explicit, which is a response.

Subversion is a word I'm starting to be deeply wary of, but I see it as subversive in that, as we saw an example of recently, it

a) cuts the rug out from under a certain widely accepted model of male affection as 'surpassing the (sexual therefore impure) love of women'. (It doesn't, actually, cut the rug out from under genuine male friendship, though it can sure feel that way for a bit, I grant)

and b) normalises it. Turns the world upside down and says 'yeah, and if they are so frigging what?'

As matociquala and truepenny both very reasonably point out, in real life, this isn't and shouldn't be subversive. As a response to works in pop culture... it really is.

(comment limit; continued on next rock)

Re: Reposting for Lois

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Both for posting for Lois and for articulating what you're articulating, because I wasn't going to find the right words ANYWHERE.

Re: Reposting for Lois

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Lois, she is TEH SMRT. But we knew that.

I'm still very worried about that theory, because it's just too damn neat and pretty. But if it makes sense to Bear and to you I might be on to something at that...

Re: Reposting for Lois

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't agree with all of what you've said (and some of it, I just don't have data), but I think what you say about the anxieties in cultural representations of men and male relationships is very interesting. And it feels helpful to me as a (theoretical, partial) explanation of a bunch of things.

Re: Reposting for Lois

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I got no data. I got observation as a biased observer-participant.

I desire the data deeply, but not deeply enough to do a PhD for it, and that's about what it would take to get the funding to do the interviews to get the data to test the theory.

That's why I call it a "crackpot theory": I think this is so, I FEEL this is so, this accounts for my current pile of scattered pieces, but I got no data.

Re: Reposting for Lois

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I think it might hold up better if I could replace 'male' with 'heteronormative' in about half of the places i used it.

I'm not sure which specific half, that's the bugger of it.