Hetslash

Synonyms:
See also:	Queer Het, Femslash, Slash, Het
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Het Slash (Hetslash) is a fairly rare term used by fans in a variety of ways to describe a genre of fan fiction.

It appears to have fallen out of use.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, La Femme Nikita, The X-Files, Harry Potter are fandoms which have deployed it.

Some Definitions

Describes a relationship that can never be public:

Since slash, for me, has long been about that underlying relationship that should never be public, realizing these three het couples were either hiding, having to hide, or deathly afraid to acknowledge, their feelings for each other carried with it the same frisson as Bodie and Doyle or Mulder and Skinner hiding their relationships from the prying eyes of CI5 in the '70s and the FBI in the '90s. It's a thwarted love wing-ding, but they're straight!

It's helped a lot, too, by the fact that the female characters are strong and independent, are not there for window-dressing, and are either the titular lead of the show (it is, after all, Buffy who's the vampire slayer, and Nikita who is our femme fatale) or are a part of the central focus of the show (Mulder without Scully would be boring, as he would lose his foil). I'm not sure that an idea like het slash could have existed before this surge of such strong female leads.

Mulder/Scully, say, or Buffy/Angel. What makes them slashy for me is that they have the same sort of unresolved sexual tension that you find in the same-sex relationships that get slashed, or rather, the same sort of sexual tension that we know is unlikely to be resolved in canon in our lifetime, and that sets our fannish imaginations to work filling in the gaps. That's how my fannish imagination works, anyway.

Catherine/Vincent was one of the great anomalies of slash fandom, being popular among K/S fans and appearing in whole zines dripping with flowers and phallic candlesticks and dimly-lit roseate tunnels, at otherwise exclusively slash conventions. There was no question of it being "slash" or analogous to slash in anyone's discussion, except that it exemplified capital-R Romance (as, for some, perhaps K/S did — the only connection I have ever been able to fathom), and I have no intention of including it as truly slash-like m/f writing. But, it should have been slashy: Catherine had her own sphere of influence and expertise to which Vincent could not aspire, as well as vice versa, and note further that Vincent was presented as the underground, beastly, earthy, intuitive, poetry-loving member of the couple and Catherine was the cold-light-of-day, yuppie lawyer who needed to be humanized out of a patriarchically-defined role. Enough said — not but enough done about it.

As a term for femslash:

I want women who dig femme and het slash to have more to read. I want to be able to produce the kind of diverse, liberatory erotic writing people are demanding. But I write from my own desires.

As a term for m/f fiction with specifications:

Well, I recently saw someone describe a story as "hetslash." I eventually worked out that she meant "story with heterosexual anal sex." I'd never seen that one before.

A term for threesomes and moresomes:

Crossovers and RPF are allowed. Slash, het, and hetslash (in the case of threesomes and moresomes) are all welcome.

Disagreement

... you don’t write “het slash.” You can write het and slash, but they’re two very different things. m/f as opposed to m/m or f/f.

Meta

• Slash without the slash: A ramble on how I finally came to understand het slash by Gwyneth Rhys (2002)
• Must. Not. Comment archive link by Helen Raven (2004)
• see The Topic of Slash As It Applied to Mulder/Scully