My Hair Stood on End!: Talking with Joanna Russ about Slash, Community, and Female Sexuality

Interviews by Fans
Title:	My Hair Stood on End!: Talking with Joanna Russ about Slash, Community, and Female Sexuality (title on the PDF), Interview: Joanna Russ (title at http://www.jprstudies.org/)
Interviewer:	Conseula Francis and Alison Piepmeier
Interviewee:	Joanna Russ
Date(s):	conducted 2007, published March 31, 2011
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	science fiction, Star Trek: TOS, slash
External Links:	Journal of Popular Romance Studies: Interview: Joanna Russ (March 31, 2011)
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Conducted in 2007, it was published a month before Russ' death.

Some Topics Discussed

• Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts (1985)
• Pornography By Women For Women, With Love (1985)
• slash (as a genre, as communication, as a community)
• female sexuality and female desire
• Star Trek: TOS and Kirk/Spock fanworks (her own and other's)
• sending her papers, including slash stories, to be archived at Bowling Green University
• Russ' comments about characters in slash fiction "are not exactly male," and are "in disguise"
• is writing slash an activist decision?
• Sexy is different than sexual, depending on who is the audience, and the male gaze
• slash as a way of extending conversations

Some Excerpts

JR = Joanna Russ

CF = Consuela Francis

AP = Alison Piepmeier

---

JR: Many of ["fanfic writers aren’t really writers or they can’t ever be very good writers because they’re just sort of playing in somebody else’s yard."], yes, that’s true, but some of them are good writers. I don’t know, it’s hard to say. If you don’t know the show, you can’t really pick up what’s going on, and that in a way makes it easier, that you don’t have to create everything from scratch. The base, the foundation is already there. I couldn’t talk about anybody else, but that’s the way I felt, and it’s kind of freeing in a way. It sort of is like talking about King Arthur and his knights; well you know who they are, come on, I don’t have to tell you. Especially when you’re writing science fiction, everything is new, and that’s hard. And of course the other thing I think that got writers into [Star Trek] was that it’s character-driven. It has ideas and it’s character-driven. And that’s Buffy too. What many of them do in other kinds of fan fiction is to say “you know all the public stuff, I’m going to give you their private lives, filling in what isn’t there

JR: I remember when I first got a phone call from a friend. She told me about slash, and I didn’t get mildly interested, my hair stood up on end! I said “What? Can I get that?” “Yes,” she said, “you can,” and I began collecting them, and finally when the collection began to get utterly unwieldy and huge, I sent them to Bowling Green University, the Popular Culture Institute there. I wanted them to go somewhere they would last and not just be thrown out or whatever.

[...]

JR: I don’t have them with me, no. I have the few stories I wrote, copies of those, but that’s it. I’ve found that because they’re so erotic, after I finished one of them I would have this terrible thud as I came back to reality, and I decided I just didn’t like that. So, sorrowfully, I sent them away, where they would be loved. I might think they are.

AP: Did you or do you see slash as potentially a kind of activist writing? Is it, for instance, a kind of writing that could challenge compulsory heterosexuality?

JR: The second thing, no, I don’t think so; the first, maybe. I think the women who write it were, at least in the eighties, aware that they were doing something they probably should not tell people about, especially their employers. I remember Syn Ferguson, who is a good writer, saying to me at one point “my readers need this, they really need it, and I know women who are keeping this a secret from everybody, including their husbands.”

AP: Why do they need it?

JR: Because, as you say, this is a public discourse in which female sexuality really doesn’t exist. I lived that out. I can still remember riding in the subway at about the age of seventeen, and I remember thinking oh my god, sex is so common, it’s all over the place. I didn’t think it was because I learned what the movies taught me.

CF: Do you think that these women who are writing slash are doing a disservice by keeping it out of the public discourse? I think this is part of what that fury was about the woman who wrote about your book, that we’re doing ourselves a disservice by keeping it secret. I write slash and I certainly don’t publish it under my actual name.

JR: Most of the women don’t, they write it under pseudonyms.

CF: Should we be? Should I go out tomorrow and publish it under my own name? Would that be better?

AP: Is the secrecy actually serving the interest of the patriarchy that wants to keep women’s desire under wraps?

JR: It’s probably doing both. I don’t think you can separate the yes and the no on that, absolutely. Think of what it would do for you. What would be the consequences? I think that women who wrote it in the seventies and eighties had some idea of what they were doing, because I did see one group of slash writers in the eighties at a science fiction convention, and some guy came over and said “who are you?” which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do at a convention, and one of the women looked at him and said “we’re a knitting society,” or something along that line, and one of them called themselves the Women’s Terrorist Society from Hell . Everybody laughed, and he laughed, but I think there was some truth to it. If you believe the public discourse then you have to also believe that female sexuality is a dreadful thing and must be squashed at all costs, and so on. I just hope there are many, many more young people who are growing up without that, without all of it, anyway. I think that’s true. Let me tell you an anecdote about that. When I was in my teens I do remember reading Forever Amber, which was the scandalous book of the time, and the sex scenes always ended with three or four dots. I got to the point where if I saw three or four dots, it would turn me on, and now you think of it and it seems so absolutely asinine, three dots.

AP: So did you have other female friends who read and/or wrote slash?

JR: Only this one. I did write to several of the women whose stories were published, and one of them got to be quite a nice friend, and quite interesting. I don’t know where she is now, though, or what she’s doing. But no, I never really got into the community. There is a woman, an academic, who wrote a book about the community [Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (1991)]. It’s not so much about the stories per se, although she certainly does a lot of that, it’s about the kind of people who are in the community and what they feel and what is the kind of emotional center of the stories. I found it just fascinating.

AP: Is she coming at it from a feminist perspective?

JR: I think she gets to the center of the thing there. She’s interested in the topics, the themes they’re exploring, and it rang true to me, it really did. There was a guy in academia who did another book about it which is, I think, very schematic.

AP: Was it Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins?

JR: I think so.

AP: He’s actually come a long way since that book, but that has become a touchstone book in the field of fan fiction studies and fan scholarship more broadly. It’s a book that everybody refers to.

JR: It’s not nearly as good as this one [Enterprising Women], I think, not nearly. He’s somewhat schematic, and a little rigid. She’s not interested in that. She says at one point that the material is like the stories of King Arthur — many, many different writers saying many, many different things, but that’s all.

JR: Some of the [slash writers are professional writers] too. Don’t assume they’re not. One of them is a lawyer, as far as I know, one is living on disability and worked for a while as a social worker. They turn up all over the place, and there are all sorts of theories about why. I think, to put it in a nutshell as far as I can remember, they’re writing about issues that concern women very much, but they’re doing it undercover in a way. These [the characters the writers create] are sort of men but they’re not really, you know? So [the women writers] can treat things that they could not do at all.

AP: And that was one of the great points that you made in your essay about slash, the fact that people who don’t get it, who are not turned on by it, are not the right people to criticize it because they’re missing some crucial elements, and I thought that was exactly right.

JR: I think that applies to all kinds of fiction and all kinds of drama. If it doesn’t affect you, then why read it?

AP: And are you going to be able to have really useful insights about how it does or doesn’t work if it doesn’t work on you? So were your slash stories sexy? I mean, your regular novels are sexy, did the slash allow you to be more explicit?

JR: Yes, and make my scenes longer. Yeah, it did I think. And yet there’s a good deal of slash where that doesn’t happen, but even there it’s full of emotion and emotional intensity. I know from secondhand that many of the male fans of Star Trek who don’t write this kind of thing were very offended by it. “That couldn’t happen in a million years.”

CF: Many male fans are still not just offended, but incredibly vocal and hostile to slash.

JR: “You’re playing in my field, get out, take your little red wagon and go home.” Yeah, something like that. I don’t really know, apparently it’s really threatening stuff.

CF: I think slash, too, makes visible female desire, and I think that freaks men out. Recently in the fangirl community someone had just read your How to Suppress Women’s Writing, and she was very moved and excited, and she wrote this really long post about your book in relation to fanfic. The title of the post was “How Fanfic Makes Women Poor.” She wrote this thing and basically what she said is that fanfic keeps women poor and silenced and marginalized because we are sort of over here doing our own thing out of the way and not competing in mainstream culture with men. And so regardless of what she actually said in the post, what it did is that all sorts of people came out of the woodwork to comment about fanfic, and why women do it and why they don’t do it, and whether or not fanfic violates copyright law, and there have been weeks and weeks of this stuff, and “you didn’t understand what Joanna Russ actually meant,” and weeks and weeks of this stuff. And one of the posts that came out of it was by a male academic who thought that all of this uproar was completely silly, and discussed people who write fanfic, particularly people who write slash. He said that fanfic was horrifying and that fanfic writers were pathological, that fandom as practiced by women represents a regression to adolescent, juvenile, child-like modes of expression, and that fanfic writers were bad readers and demonstrated their childlike nature by being unable to engage. He even to some extent recognized the ways in which that critique was completely gendered, that here were a bunch of women doing a bunch of silly things, over, in private, giggling, and that there was something deeply, deeply wrong about that, and that instead of doing that what we should be concerned with is creative art with a capital A.

JR: Oh, that again. That’s an old one, oh my god, several centuries old. [Samuel] Delaney once pointed out that in the nineteenth century the number, the amount of fiction written, began to just grow like crazy. And it got to the point where nobody could read all of it, and what happened was that it first split into two, there was high art and there was slush, so you knew what you should be paying attention to. Rider Haggard’s book She, I don’t know if you know the novel; it’s a fantasy, it’s the kind of thing that today if you saw it, it would have a swordsman and an incredibly buxom lady on the cover, and you’d say it’s just trash. It is, actually, but he was considered absolutely on par with others. I mean, he might not be as good as they were, but this was serious fiction. And now we’ve been living with this split for so long, that that’s the automatic thing you can defend yourself with. “Oh, but this isn’t art, it isn’t serious, it isn’t real. It’s juvenile.” Anyway, I don’t know. I hope there are a lot of young men growing up who don’t hear of this and who don’t think about it and won’t do it anymore.

AP: I think that the value, the categories of evaluation that we so often use to say this is pornography, versus this which is art, are suspect at best. I also think those judgments tell us a lot more about the culture itself and its assumptions than they do about the works they judge.

JR: Yes, I would agree. You notice that some of the stuff by men that I would call certainly pornographic, Henry Miller, for instance, is taken very seriously. It’s all so obvious. When women do it, it’s silly, when men do it, it’s serious.

AP: It’s either silly or it’s horrifying, you know? It’s either “oh, that’s trivial, we can laugh that off,” or it’s that this is deviant. I think slash is an interesting space to look at in terms of that, because it is so erotically-driven, it is so explicit, it is so sexy. I mean, to me, when you said “my hair stood up on end,” that was absolutely my response when I started reading slash, it was like “oh my god.” The first thought was “oh my god,” and the second thought was “how have I gone this long without having read this stuff,” you know? I think it’s really interesting that this sub-culture of literature exists and in thriving, but I also think it raises a lot of questions about our culture and female desire, which of course is one of the big things you talked about in your essay in 1985. We wanted to talk to you about to what extent those things are still happening and still true today. Do you feel that our cultural approach or cultural understanding of female desire is about the same now in 2007 as it was in 1985?

JR: Well, it’s a little different than it was in 1958. If I look really far back, yeah, a lot has changed, but it’s weird, it’s as if the guys are still running television and the movies, and they’re trying very hard to keep it the way it was.

JR: ... when I was an adolescent which was in the 1950’s, nobody would have imagined [slash], let alone written it. And that’s why when Patricia, my friend, said it’s a world in which Kirk and Spock are lovers, and I said, “Where do I find that?” I remember once I was having one of the [fanzines] duplicated, and the illustrations I had forgotten about, and I was there watching them do it in this Xerox place. This elderly man kind of stood next to me and he saw one of the illustrations, and he went gray—shocked, very shocked. Yet I took [these same pictures] to a feminist group and I remember one woman saying “I don’t want to see that,” and I showed it to her and she said, “they’re not there for us, they’re there for each other,” which was very subtle, it was true, in the illustration.

AP: And yet I don’t know that’s true of the stuff that I read. In fact, I would say it’s the exact opposite, that the characters are not there for each other, they’re entirely there to create erotic bonds between the women who are writing and reading the stories. They’re explicitly there for us.

JR: Yes, I would say so, yes.

AP: Not for each other.

JR: Yet the woman I heard this from, my friend, is definitely heterosexual, and she loves [slash] too. I think it’s fairly flexible stuff. You don’t have to identify with this character or that, you can do both or neither; writing can do that. It’s only after thinking, like today, about this that I realize how male-identified most science fiction is, especially since I’ve been reading anything from the sixties on, in science fiction. It’s that idea of disguise that I find myself coming back to. You can really, in a sense, be anybody or anybodies, plural, in writing. I used to write in the sixties, in the early sixties; I was writing stories, not science fiction then, in which the main characters were men. One day I sat myself down and began thinking, and I just tried to write a story about a thief and pick-pocket and that kind of person you keep finding in those books, who was female. I couldn’t. And then I started writing and when I wrote I realized that it was a creation story, and the creation story for this particular world was that men were made from the sixth finger of the first woman, and that is why women only have five fingers on each hand. That worked, and suddenly I did this whole series about Alex, but she is still an exception in that world. And by the time I got to The Female Man, they aren’t, in the whole population.

CF: Yet we might be walking down the street with tons of people who are reading and writing slash, but they’re publishing it under pseudonyms. So that even if it’s this ground-swelling stuff, it’s still a secret.

JR: They’ve got to keep it secret because they’re violating copyrights, and so are the others.

AP: Right, but that’s another whole gendered issue that some folks have talked about, the fact that parody [in Harry Potter fandom] is looked on by the courts and by copyright holders much more favorably than slash. So people who are writing parodies that aren’t sexual, who are often men, are not as liable as people who are writing slash, who are usually women. So it’s an interesting gendered thing about what’s considered copyright violation and what isn’t.

JR: There’s something legal there, too, which is that parodies are making fun of the object, and they’re not trespassing, really, on the same territory.

AP: Well, it’s considered a first amendment issue, which I think is right, but slash is not.

JR: It’s serious, that’s why.

AP: It’s also, I think, because of all the stigma around women being into this dirty stuff.

JR: I know there are women, some have told me, who don’t want to sign their names because they’re quite sure they’d lose their jobs, and they might. It’s a pity, it is a pity. And there is very explosive stuff in there, I know. And one of the reasons I gave my collection away is I was spending too much time and energy on it, and it costs a bundle.

AP: Well, this is a bad sign for us, Conseula. The fact that she’s actually had to give it up, cause we have constant conversations about, is this bad that we’re spending this much time reading slash?

JR: It wasn’t a matter of it being objectively bad. It was that every time I finished a [fanzine], the exuberance would carry me across the apartment and then I’d go, oh no, it’s over.

AP: And I think that may be one thing that’s somewhat different with the internet communities, because now you finish the stories and you write to the author, and then you write to your girlfriend and you say “oh my god, go read this story,” and then you excerpt, “here’s a really sexy passage.” This is what Conseula does to me all the time, “here’s something really sexy,” so that you won’t be able to resist reading the story right now. And so it’s sort of like, we don’t have that thud because of the community.

JR: I know, the characters have sort of become community personas, and I did not have that.

Coda

Added five years later, at the time this interview was published:

Coda: After the interview concluded, we gave Russ some slash stories we had printed out for her. While at the time she seemed to accept them more out of a desire to be polite rather than a genuine interest in the love affair between Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, those stories actually began a year-long correspondence with Russ. She wrote to us (in letters that she composed on the typewriter—she doesn’t own a computer), commenting on the stories we’d given her and on slash and women and sexuality generally; we wrote back and sent more stories. When we met her she had opted out of the slash community (to a certain extent, she had never been part of that community), but we introduced her back into the community, and that community of female desire seemed to delight her as much as it has delighted us and other women who read and write slash in the communities that proliferate online today.

Russ is now 75 years old, but she is still a rigorous thinker—creative and critical—whose writings have been important to science fiction and feminism. Although we didn’t agree with everything she said in our interview, we were struck by how thoughtfully she engaged with a world that she now mostly views from the outside. We also remain impressed with how relevant her writings still are. Although much has changed from the world she intervened in with her fiction and her critical essays, too much remains the same, and her arguments and visions—about women, about gays and lesbians, about a society that allows everyone the space to enact their full humanity—still need to be acknowledged.