It was my lucky day today on avenue A

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Title:	It was my lucky day today on avenue A
Creator:	Betty Plotnick
Date(s):	August 8, 2003
Medium:	online
Fandom:	many
Topic:
External Links:	It was my lucky day today on avenue A, Archived version
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It was my lucky day today on avenue A is a 2002 post by Betty Plotnick.

Some Topics Discussed in the Post and the Comments

• the articles Kirk, Honey. It's Me, Spock! and How slash saved me: Why can't journalists find new things to talk about? Why did this journalist mention "completely uncool and detached from reality," "antediluvian" fandoms "without a significant internet presence" or an "influx of new blood" like Star Trek and Starsky & Hutch, rather than cool, "modern" ones like Smallville and West Wing?
• is slash feminist? is it queer?
• is there a OTP in Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Excerpt from the Essay

Okay, so who's Audrey Lemon? Anyone know her? Because this month's Utne Reader has a little squibby article about a zine thing on slash by this chick Audrey Lemon , and surely *somebody* knows who she is  ; it's a small and tiny world around here, you know. I'm curious.

The article itself was all right, except that the pairings it mentioned were so out of date or marginal as to make us look completely uncool and detached from reality. I mean, all right, I don't have anything against Angel/Xander, but I wouldn't call it one of the defining pairings of modern slash, either. I'm sorry, though: Kirk/Spock and Starsky/Hutch? What year do we think this is? They couldn't mention Smallville or LotR or West Wing or Harry Potter. No, it had to be the antediluvian slash fandoms, the ones without a significant internet presence or much influx of new blood. That's not the impression of current slash fandom that I'd like to offer to the potentially interested who pick up this article, thanks much.

Also, the obligatory two paragraphs on why anyone would do this crazy thing left me vaguely unsatisfied, but then, that's probably to be expected. There's too much to say, and it's all too personal, to expect any thumbnail sketch of the slash psyche to be more than a tiny chunk of reality as I perceive it.

My primary issue with the writer's facts, however, was that she said that the desire to infuse the media with the gay images that are largely absent was sort of a minority opinion held forth mainly by a small subsection of gay male slash writers. Which...I don't agree with. I think it's the single most defining aspect of slash, even though it's not as intriguing as the desire to write off female relational values onto male characters and blah blah blah. I tried to say this last night to Mary, and she told me I was on crack, and I couldn't quite figure out what I was trying to say, but this is what I thought about all day at work, and so here's this about that.

The question is, does slash reflect an essentially feminist (Mary's position) or queer (mine) re-interpretation of the texts? Well, it's certainly essentially *female,* in that the mores of the subculture and the fiction are set by women. It's true that lots of gay men don't particularly relate to slash, since it doesn't reflect their own experiences; I've heard that said, and I believe it. Slash is not representational (to use a word that I used recently in a related discussion) gay fiction; it's about the psychosexual desires and romantic fantasies of slashy women, not gay men, or even gay women, necessarily.

However. The analogy Mary used to shoot holes in my slash=queer text argument is that girl-on-girl porn produced by men for men is not inherently queer. By the same token, I don't think that female-produced erotica is inherently feminist, any more than the Romance aisle of your local Barnes & Noble is full of feminist texts just because it's driven by female producers and consumers. In fact, I think that romance as a publishing genre is predominantly anti-feminist, and I think that a huge amount of slash is, too, particularly in Days Gone By.

Any kind of feminist literature, in my semi-studied opinion, has to address the concept that the lives of individual women are shaped by their experiences *as women,* not just their individual experiences. One might expand that in a more gender-neutral way and say that feminist literature addresses the concept that individuals are shaped by their experiences as members of their gender. But the whole concept of feminist texts relies on the idea that gender, like class and race and nationality, is at least to some degree a sociological phenomenon which influences everyone. If you don't believe that, then there's nothing that all women have in common, and hence no particular purpose to feminism at all; you might be in favor of equality between the sexes, but you don't have what I would consider a feminist worldview. Why would you need it? If every woman is just an individual, then they should all seek individual happiness and fulfillment, but there's no particular link between my ability to achieve it and Britney's ability to achieve it and Maya Angelou's ability to achieve it. Hence, feminism, or any kind of philosophy that attempts to draw those experiences together in some kind of meaningful way, is irrelevant. We're all just folks.

I don't particularly see a specifically *feminist* view of gender and sexuality being addressed in what we might consider "traditional" slash. Sure, in some stories. But not ipso facto by the entire genre. In fact, a lot of traditional slash has been slagged, and I think rightly so, as egregiously anti-woman, or at least ambiguous on the subject, with all female characters filling either the role of shrewish obstacle to homosocial happiness or selfless facilitator of homosocial happiness, and either way, she's out of everyone's hair before too long. A lot of self-identified feminists within the slash community have been mightily displeased, lo these many years, by the genre's reluctance to deal with female characters as whole characters of complexity and importance that matches that of the male characters -- or in many cases, that matches their *canonical* complexity and importance.

More significantly, though, what about that timeless "feminization" debate? The way that slash couples are routinely jostled out of character so that one of them looks and behaves more like, well, like the heroine of a romance novel? Truly *feminist* literature, surely, would challenge the idea that in the absence of a woman, someone has to shoulder the woman's role of enabling the man to be a Real Man. Instead, slash has often created basically a parallel template to the female-fantasy romance genre, complete with many of the same tropes: hurt/comfort is familiar from the boddice [sic] rippers, too, and the use of sex as emotional catharsis, and the declaration of love/commitment to monogamy as the dramatic high-point of the story. What makes it more feminist when two men do it? There's still no critical evaluation of the basic social dichotomy of active-strong-but-incompletely-emotional partner and reactive-vulnerable-but-emotionally-generous, let alone any critical evaluation of how those archetypes map onto real-world gender identity issues.

Okay, so is it queer? Uh, yes. I think it is, without a doubt. It relfects the needs and desires of women who don't fit the received wisdom regarding what female sexuality should consist of, writing about men who don't fit the received wisdom regarding what male sexuality should consist of. It's totally bent, and even if it's written by the most un-politically-aware woman on earth, it's a de facto challenge to the idea that the purpose of a man is to love a woman and anything else is deviant and unnatural and damaged in some way. I'm not concerned that it doesn't reflect real gay male lives, any more than I'm concerned that Picasso didn't actually look like he does in his self-portrait. Picasso was an artist, though not a representational one. He used his art to say something about his subject, not just to show us what it looks like. Slash writers may be taking queer men as their subject matter, but what they're *talking* about with their art is female sexuality, specifically the desires of slashy girls, and I think that slashy girls are queer, queer, queer. That's the whole point of having that word at all, right? That it incorporates more types of marginalized sexual identities than merely homosexuality?

Now, everybody go right on ahead and poke holes in my pretty theory. I can take it. Because no matter what you say, Justin is still going to look really pretty sucking JC's cock.

Fan Comments

At the Original Post

[Betty Plotnick, replying to a deleted post]:.... slash isn't an academic discipline; it's not something that women *study.* Sure, if you're a woman writing in a sociological or cultural studies sort of way about the sexuality of gay men, you want to focus on the subject; the goal with a field of study (like history of any kind) is to minimize the inevitable intrusion of your worldview onto the worldviews of your subjects.

That's the opposite of art, and slash is a school of *art,* not an academic discipline. The goal with art is to bring as much of yourself, your perception of truth, to the story as you possibly can and still make it approachable for your audience. IMO....

I'm maybe sort of a Romantic fool, but I think that while art criticism can be a discipline, and art itself relies on craftsmanship, there's a degree to which art is only, you know, *Art* when it communicates some essential truth between the person who creates it and the person who witnesses it. That's pretentious, isn't it? Well, you know. I do feel that way.

[jennyo]: I have to disagree on the Xander/Angel thing. It is (though more accurately, was) one of the defining slash pairings of BtVS fandom. Without Xander/Angel, there would be no Xander/Spike, no Angel/Wesley, possibly even no Angel/Spike. By acknowledging the queer energies between the two, Xander/Angel made it screamingly obvious that both characters have serious subtextual things to them. Now, do I think the article needed to mention Clark/Lex? Sure. Is it still annoying that femslash is a different thing and the equally important Buffy/Faith pairing is left out? Sure. But Xander/Angel is/was extremely, extremely important because without the slashy Buffy community and its diaspora, the face of slash would be different. Period.

[Betty Plotnick]: Okay. One of the things I like about BtVS slash is that I always felt as though there was no One True Pairing, so I wasn't totally comfortable with picking out what seemed like a random BtVS pairing, but that's just a personal kink, probably. And I'm not sure I agree that those other pairings wouldn't have been major in their own right had it not been for A/X. After all, Angel and Spike have a long history together, and that's the kind of thing that always fires slashers' blood, and it's totally canonical that Wesley has a whole fascination thing going on with Angel; I don't see Xander as relevant to any of that. However, I'll grant you that he was frequently paired with Angel first, and probably a lot of Angel slash writers were influenced by their experiences reading and writing Angel/Xander.

[tavella]:

I've never been impressed with Buffy slash, and I question that it's particularly critical to slash history, as compared to say, _X-Files_. Every pairing seemed desperately strained, and even the best authors seemed very repetitive.

_Angel_ slash was a lot better; the pairings were felt natural and the writing was more creative, but I'm still not terribly convinced of it being a particularly significant step on the slash history tree.

[Betty Plotnick]:

I think the significance of BtVS fandom is exactly that: it removed the *pairing* as the central defining element of slash fandom. BtVS slashers don't tend to identify themselves with any one pairing in the way that slashers do in other fandoms; they identify themselves dually as fans of the source material and queer interpreters of that material. (SDB fandom has a similar dynamic; very few people, even the hard-core fans of a particular pairing, *solely* identify themselves as, say, Timbertrick fans. Most of them relate to SDB as a whole, with their pairing preferences as pairing preferences within it.)

If you're the kind of slasher who focuses primarily on subtext, then yes, BtVS slash is probably not something you relate to as well. But the rise of BtVS as an active slash community, I think, directly influenced slash fandom's increased acceptance of rareslash, crossovers, off-pairings, and other types of fiction that grow out of something other than "natural" on-screen chemistry.

[aproposofnothin]:

Slash writers may be taking queer men as their subject matter, but what they're *talking* about with their art is female sexuality, specifically the desires of slashy girls, and I think that slashy girls are queer, queer, queer.

Right on, sistah!

[carraway54]:

Audrey Lemon is a friend of Te's, I believe--she has a blog over at Diaryland. If it's the same person, which seems likely given the distinctive name, it seems odd she'd focus primarily on zine fandoms. I know Te's Audrey Lemon has written Lost Boys slash, and that's a small, exclusively net-based fandom.

what's really odd is that in saying 'over at diaryland' I meant it spatially, as if we're all in a city of blogs, with lj as one neighborhood, and diaryland a mile down the road and around a left.

They couldn't mention Smallville or LotR or West Wing or Harry Potter.

It's odd but unsurprising that writers explaining slash to the larger culture prefer to concentrate on older fandoms. It strikes me as a way for the culture to distance itself from slash. They're maintaining order by identifying as slashy only texts or types of media that they'd be rather embarrassed to admit they enjoy. Starsky & Hutch, these days, is the kind of show aired on daytime TNN. William Shatner shifted from being an actor to being a punchline years ago. Most of these articles also mention Holmes & Watson which, to somebody not involved in fandom and many people who are, seems not just absurd but absurdist.

Discussing the texts that are important to slash fandom today would make too many people uncomfortable. HP fandom itself has barely gotten over the 'you're all perverts and pedophiles!' hysteria; a mainstream article about the phenomenon could very well start the whole damn thing up again, but on a larger scale. West Wing and Smallville are too popular. There's so little sex in Tolkien at all that bringing up the huge LotR movie slash fandom would feel--I'm searching for an appropriate word but I can't come up with anything closer than 'weird.' News that thousands of teenage girls compose epics on the Romantical Romantic Love of Aragorn and Legolas comes out of left field for a mainstream reader--good grief, I'm a slasher and that came out of left field for me. Not to mention writers who pervert the Pure Love of Sam and Frodo with lots of healing comfort sex.

Er, I'm sorry. That doesn't follow as well as I originally meant. I can only hope it makes sense, sorta.

[Betty Plotnick]:

Yeah, but...because Mainstream Society thinks Aragorn/Legolas is freaky, we have to pretend that we don't do it? I mean, what's the point of being, for lack of a better term, out as slashers, and putting our shit on the internet and trying to talk about what we do, if we're not really going to talk about what we do?

Maybe Starsky and Hutch make people feel all warm and comfy about homosexual fanfic; I dunno. But I've been in fandom for six years, and I've never read any, or known anyone who did, or felt any desire to. It's a bad example of what I do as a slasher, and I think that most slashers that are involved in the current online slash community would say something similar; I could be underestimating the continued vitality of S&H fandom, but I dunno.

It just seems to me that if we want to publicize what slash is all about -- for us, the active slash community -- then we should do so, and if we're scared to make other people uncomfortable by suggesting that Qui-Gon was touching Obi-Wan in, well, a gay way at the end of TPM, then we should not bother to explain ourselves to non-slashers at all. Either way is all right with me, I guess, but splitting the difference by giving a technically correct definition and then distorting it to misrepresent ourselves seems wrong somehow.

Slash is about queerness, but to me it's also about our relationship with the media. I think that's important to mention -- that part of what slashers do is cultivate a different way of looking at the very same things you (the generic "you" The Public) watch every week on Ye Olde WB. By relegating slash to shows that were in first-run before I was fucking *born,* I sort of feel like an important point is being lost: we *are* the audience, we *are* the viewers, we *are* participants in the culture, albeit a minority of the audience. And personally, I strongly suspect that a slash sensibility and/or awareness of our presence as a fan bloc has influenced the way more than one tv show has been steered by TPTB.

[zvi likes tv]:

I think you're underestimating the continuing appeal of Kirk/Spock. And I think, in a short article, picking one Buffy pairing was probably clearer than naming them all.

Also, most of the other pairings you name: the producers of those shows have trademark holders actively protecting their properties. I think AL may have been practicing, you know, discretion. It's okay on occasion.

[Betty Plotnick]:

I'm not really agitated by the naming of A/X, in case anyone's worried. I'm not really *agitated* by any of it. It was a decent article and all.

It's just that I'm consistently bitter about the rap that fandom in general gets in the larger culture. We're all supposedly middle-aged virgin males who live in our parents' basements, because who else would care about a tv show? Whereas knowing every tiny statistic about every game your favorite baseball team has played in the last forty years is eccentric but cool and somehow Americana-y and even noble, knowing the name of the [Sentinel] episode where Blair dates the daughter of the Central American arms dealer is neurotic and strange and turns you into some kind of mutant social pariah. We're fine to make fun of, because we're irrelevant.

And since William Shatner and Starsky & Hutch are, in the current cultural landscape, pretty damn irrelevant themselves, I felt like there was a level at which that article played into that misconception. Admittedly, I analyze things more deeply than the average person (read: worry at them endlessly, like an OCD dog with a bone), so maybe no other reader on the planet would take that subtext away from that particular article. That's possible.

I'm just hoping to get credit for my own perceived hipness someday. So far, no go.

[Anonymous]:

I don't know exactly how alive S/H is, since the only I've read were xovers, but there are S/H slash sites and archives on the net, like this archive:

http://www.squidge.org/~flamingo/starskyhutchslash/index.htm (with amazingly bad web design, and lots of blinking)

There are mailing lists, I've seen a couple of S&H author pages, zines are still being published etc. and that all without even looking for S/H, so it's not as if S&H fandom was dead or invisible. The fanficweb.net directory lists 27 pages in the S&H category, of that 22 slash, and I remember that not too long ago a slash virtual season has been started, which I think is now its second year: http://www.zebra3productions.org/

So it may not be the latest and hippest fandom with hordes of people rushing to that pairing, but it's not exactly the mummified aunt long dead in the attic either.

[Betty Plotnick]: Okay, I may be being a bit rough on S&H *g* I just felt that using a majority of fandoms from decades-old shows presented an image of slashers as out of touch with pop culture, and one thing I'm particularly proud of on behalf of my little subculture is our immense media savvy and awareness of the next big thing. I'd like to read an article that gave us our props for that.

[ cimness/Cimorene ]:

that is a very good point, but i've been heavily into online star trek fandom, and i have to say i don't think your criticism of it above is entirely fair. it's a very small fandom, on the internet, which is tied pretty heavily into a still-tremendous print-zine fandom that's continued unflagging now for thirty years or more. it's certainly true that its character differs vastly from those of a lot of other genres: most of the people involved in it are older, and most of them are actually sf and fantasy fans, and not particularly up on pop culture. there's also an abundance of not-so-great websites, because they're not up on html either.

i guess what i'm getting out is that it's a different sort of creature from some of these younger genres. it's a lot smaller, not very dynamic, but i don't think it's stagnating--i think it's staying about the same size it has been for most of its life and growing and receding in the same way.

[Anonymous/Jenna Sinclair]:

I wanted to confirm what cimorene said in her post about K/S fandom. K/S is primarily a print zine fandom, and I know 'cause I'm one of the editors. I'm also a co-publisher of The K/S Press, a monthly letterzine that's been going strong for six years, and that replaced one that had lasted for three years, and the one before that for five years, and the one before that.... You get the picture. The KSP sponsors the K/S Zine library, which features 150 out-of-print zines in two branches, one in New Jersey and one in Scotland, for any KSP subscriber who wants to borrow. The rest of the more than 500 K/S zines that have been published since 1976 (the very first slash zine to appear in print) are in print and available to anybody who wants them. First Time 1 is still being sold though First Time 55 has just gone into print.

Yes, we are a small fandom, but there's a lot going on and we stay in touch with each other fervently. We are well organized, as I think the presence of the Library shows. We take our place as the first slash fandom pretty seriously and with a great deal of pride. Yeah, it's true, we don't have much in the way of computer skills, but we're learning. I just opened my own site (www.beyonddreamspress.com) and it has a lot of information for somebody just getting into K/S. And though it's true that we have some active fans in their 60s and even 70s, we also have plenty just joining us who are in their 20s and 30s. Yeah, really! I'm in my 40s.

As to our online presence. The primary newsgroup for Star Trek is ascem, and it has suffered from a series of flame wars directed at K/Sers and led by just a few. As a result, many of those K/Sers who participated in that public forum have dropped out of sight and are engaged in private lists, etc.

However, we do have a regularly appearing online zine called Side by Side. Go to www.kardasi.com and see. It's not big by other fandom standards, perhaps, but it's there. But it's definitely true that most of our creative effort that flows from the organized community goes into zines.

It's my opinion that most K/Sers are heirs to those who pioneered the fandom in the 70s and 80s, when writers and editors truly suffered from homophobic attacks from the Star Trek community and everybody else. There was no other slash community in which to find support and solace. Many K/Sers currently keep their interest and participation well under wraps because they remember the days when they *had* to. We definitely have quite a different perspective than the newly-sprung-up online slash fandoms. We're much, much more cautious about what we do, and we find that publishing our obsession in zines works for us most of the time.

I was more than a little put off by your initial comments about the staleness and lack of relevance that S/H and K/S have to the general slash community, but I do understand why you said that and where you're coming from. Perhaps more moderate comments in the future?

Yours, Jenna Sinclair

[Betty Plotnick]:

Perhaps *g*

Actually, thanks very much for this information. I knew that there were still K/S zines around, but this was a really interesting insight into kind of where the mental state of that fandom is now, which I have been curious about.

I still feel like the fandom is definitely outside the mainstream of slash fandom as a whole, and it's really not a good *example,* if you're trying to explain to people what slashers do and where to find them. I mean, just from the perspective of numbers, I think there are a lot more slashers who operate primarily on the internet than there are slashers who are plugged in to the zine thing.

Nonetheless, I was awfully snarky, and I apologize. I was just thinking recently, in the wake of all this, that it would be cool to have some kind of archiving project, where some of that groundbreaking stuff from the genre's first twenty years could be made more available to newer fans who have very little real sense of pre-1997, pre-internet slash, myself included. But on the other hand, what you're saying is that it might still be hard to get authors to give permission for something like that, is that right? See, that's too bad. I do think none of us would be here, or not in this way precisely, if it hadn't been for K/S fandom, and I think that now that the world is a different place, it would be a good time for some of those writers to get the credit they deserve.

Uh, not to imply that K/S is solely a historical phenomenon. I do get what you're saying, that it still exists, just not in the form that the rest of us are hip to, which is why we tend to overlook it. But hey, that's the interesting thing about it, I think -- that it has a *continuous* history over a period of decades. We should all be so lucky with our pet fandoms.

Thanks for writing, and I'm sorry again that I can be so bratty when I'm not watching myself *g*

[Anonymouse/jat sapphire]:

Nonetheless, I was awfully snarky, and I apologize. I was just thinking recently, in the wake of all this, that it would be cool to have some kind of archiving project, where some of that groundbreaking stuff from the genre's first twenty years could be made more available to newer fans who have very little real sense of pre-1997, pre-internet slash, myself included.

I don't want to get too snarky myself, because I think that the basic point is true: that print-media reportage of slash is framed in the older fandoms because they're safely remote, or safely nostalgic, or safely something so the safely straight mundane reader can keep (safely) reading about it and feeling superior --and not having to wonder what their own kids or wives or friends are reading about that *new* show online.

Still, you know, if one wants to find the slash fandoms of yore... there's always Google.

There are archives of online K/S, the largest collection of which is in the big ASCEM archive, Trekkiverse. There are individuals' pages, like Killashandra's, which also has a fab recs page--and as it's multifandom, might even serve to connect those in the newer fandoms to the older ones. Some currently-archived fic is pre-1997, too. Due to Mary Ellen Curtin's Foresmutters Project, some of the earliest zine slash by Leslie Fish is in Trekkiverse (and was also on MEC's site until she ran for local office and took it down).

The Starsky and Hutch slash archive has a bunch of older stories on it, too, and as Flamingo gets permission she is republishing more of the older stories as well as the new ones. She is an indefatigable zine publisher and eventually puts the whole texts of her own zines online.

Honest, if you look for it, it's there. And as someone who found all slash through the internet and who has been in online fandom only since 1999, I actually find K/S and S/H to be a great place to look for fundamental slash conventions and concerns that I don't necessarily see as clearly in, say, LOTR or HP.

[carraway54]:

In large part I agree with you. It's frustrating to see article after article rehash the same points and name-check the same fandoms. You wonder, sometimes, how many times the same people have read a 'wtf is slash' article, and how many times they'll have to read the same information before *getting* it.

This point was more eloquent in my head, but my brain is going mushy and if I'm going to say it at all it'll have to be this abrupt. I'm not arguing a point so much as explaining my previous point; all of this is still coalescing in my head.

It's not S&H per se that makes the non-fandom mainstream feel comfortable with slash. It's their lack of familiarity with S&H as a medium. Slash can be something other people do, those weird people who're obsessed with 70s cop shows and 60s SF.

People tend to not feel safe with ambiguity. Talking about the slash fandom for a media text currently popular--like The West Wing, or Star Wars: Eps I & II, or Harry Potter, or whatever--forces people to acknowledge the sexual or gender ambiguities within those texts. As slashers, we can evaluate a given same-sex relationship in terms of the infinite variations of platonic and erotic love. But we can do that because we see media texts as things that exist *to be interpreted*.

[disclaimer: I've never seen this movie, so definitely grain-of-salt here] Ep. I gives Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan a potentially ambiguous relationship; are they gay? not gay? sorta gay? very, very gay? Fan writers took the characters, an interpretation of their dynamic, and resolved the ambiguity, mostly in favor of 'very, very gay'.

But if you--generic you--wanted to explain this to a mainstream audience, you'd have trouble even getting to the gay part, because many people don't reinterpret texts, or see movies and television as texts in the first place. 'It's just a movie, and the movie is what it is, and they're not gay because that isn't in the movie, QED.'

Plus there's the issue of copyright holders, like Lucasfilm, who try to suppress fan reinterpretation in the interest of controlling the product. They don't like the 'very, very gay' version of their text, so they insist and reiterate that the text isn't ambiguous, that there's no point in reading into it elements they didn't intend to put there.

What would make the mainstream uncomfortable is the knowledge that slashers consume the same media they do, we just interpret it differently. I'm not saying we should avoid explaining who we are and what we do. I just think that's one reason why, in recent articles, mainstream writers haven't.

[Betty Plotnick]:

Yeah, I understand. And you're right, I think that's why it doesn't happen. I'm just bummed out by it, is all.

And you make an excellent point in that before you can really explain slash in a way that makes any sense to an outsider, you really have to explain fandom in a way that makes sense. The general media-driven image of fans as those people who wear latex ears to conventions (i.e., for some inexplicable reason which we can't comprehend and won't even bother to attempt) is the first stumbling block, even before you get into the realm of gender and sexuality.

[twistedchick]: Explaining media fandom isn't that difficult if you use sports fandom as the metaphor. People understand sports fandom -- baseball cards, rotisserie teams, the football pool at work, wearing team logos and slogans on clothes -- but don't realize that it's the same kind of fandom (done differently) as media slash fandom. We do it with pretty boys and sex; they do it with pretty boys and statistics. It's still a story, either way you cut it.

[Betty Plotnick]: I had a male friend who finally grokked the concept when I said, "You know how you get together with your friends and you try to figure out how it would work if Wolverine and Batman met and got into a fight? Well, I get together with my friends and try to figure out how it would work if Logan and Bruce met and got it on." 'S all about knowing how to communicate with your audience, yeah? *g*

[yay4pikas]:

I agree that slash is inherently queer is a way that f/f erotic/porn written by men is not -- maybe slash will someday *be* that accepted as a relatively normal, if slightly scoffed at, female desire, but until then it's queer.

Feminism -- well, writing about the female desires can in some light be feminist, but I don't think that writing about gay man (and sometimes projecting feminine social roles/relationships onto them) is automatically feminist.

[Anonymous/Cesare]:

You'd think, at this late date, the notion of media texts would be a little more widely understood. After all, the nineties saw Mystery Science Theater 3000 (guy and two robots, silhouetted in front of a film screen, make fun of bad movies), Beavis and Butthead (the voices of two moronic teenage boys comment on music videos), and Pop-Up Video (trivia appears in text bubbles over the video. And by the way, can I just insert a subliminal message here? Betty, you know you wanna write that Trickyfish story. C'mon. Feed the FuLa. The snark, the clash, the slash-- mmmmm, Trickyfish. Anyway.) This idea of talking back at the culture has become a lot more visible and widespread than it used to be.

For some of us, maybe the charge of slash comes from the re-interpretation and interpolation of canonically hetero(sexual)/(genous) mainstream media. There's something sexy, in other words, about queering the text, 'perverting' what the larger culture presents as manly and straight.

In my mind, it relates to the way that gay jokes don't ordinarily make me laugh-- but gay jokes on MST3K make me laugh, because those jokes aren't about homosexuality, they're about the bland and clueless assumptions of the original films' creators, hidebound assumptions which prevented them from perceiving the obvious subtexts in their own work.

In this view of slash, the urge to pair off Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan isn't just a gal's desire to imagine two juicy guys going at it. It's also a defiant prank on the SW universe and on the culture as a whole-- taking their raw materials and using it to carve out a queer space in fandom. Part of the thrill comes from subverting the status quo and flaunting mainstream taboos.

But for some slashers, the charge isn't so much from the reinterpretation, but from the characterization of good slash. Because (in the slash I like, anyway) two men don't relate to one another the way a man and a woman traditionally do. They don't have the prescripted rules of a thousand fairy tales, teen movies, sitcoms, family anecdotes, romantic comedies and tearful dramas to steer them; they're on their own-- and since they're guys, they don't usually discuss it much. It can give the fictional bond a strong, deep quality, and it can also create misunderstanding and uncertainty between them. Instant drama.

For me, a slash relationship happens when two people feel a powerful connection to one another that doesn't fit into any of their culture's neat, restrictive little checkboxes. If they're off the beaten track without a road map, if they're tied to each other but they don't know exactly what the nature of their bond is going to be or where it's going to take them: to me, that's slashy, no matter what the gender of the people involved. It's what makes Mulder and Scully a slashy pairing to me, even though they're m/f. It's this dynamic that drives my favorite slash. So for me, I'm not sure it's so much about queerness as it is about people.

(But there's so much more to the question of gender, fic, and slash. Why is most fan fiction overall written by women? We can theorize about slash as a female pursuit, but how do you explain the overwhelming percentage of women in fan fiction as a whole? And on a related note, doesn't it seem like there are a lot of lesbian and/or bi girls writing slash? Do gay men write about lesbians?)

[lysimache]:

The question is, does slash reflect an essentially feminist (Mary's position) or queer (mine) re-interpretation of the texts?

It's interesting, because while I agree with most of the points you make, I would answer this question in exactly the opposite way, that slash is inherently feminist, but not necessarily queer.

It's a question of terms and viewpoint, I suppose. I also think that, at its core, slash is about women's desire. To me, that is without question a feminist project.

I consider it feminist because it is reshaping a woman's role (as reader or writer) from desired object to desiring subject. That move, asserting that women are subjects themselves, capable of forming independent thoughts and desires, that they have a valid existence that does not need a man's desire for validation, and that they are more than just man's o/Other , is at the heart of feminism. It's not quite as simple as acknowledging that women (can) have erotic feelings, but instead is insistent upon the position of that desire, that the woman herself desires someone/something. The reason that traditional romances do not constitute (imo) a feminist enterprise is that, as I understand them, though I admittedly haven't read that man, is that the position occupied by the woman in them is that of desired object, still. Their fantasy is that of *being loved* by a man, that the man will fall in love with the woman and desire her. Yes, the female character has erotic feelings for the male character, but positionally, she is still Beloved Object. If a romance novel is an exception to that, and presents the woman's wish to love rather than (just) be loved, then I would consider it feminist (though it probably still wouldn't be doing much to tear down the heteropatriarchy, I'll grant you).

Slash is an expression of the reader/author's position as desiring subject. Though that desire is mediated (usually1) through m/m subject matter, one man desiring and being desired by another, the fact that the slash text is not explicitly about women does not in any way make it less about women implicitly. It is about the *acts* of writing and reading -- thus of desiring -- rather than merely about the texts themselves. Slash is about a community of women writing, reading, and desiring.

Women as characters are left out of the slash texts precisely because it can be so difficult to locate a desiring woman within mainstream media2. By taking two male characters and showing their mutual desire, the difficulties of presenting a balanced ('feminist') m/f relationship are obviated, and identification diffused, so that the writer/reader need not identify herself with the female character based on shared sex/gender. She is able to identify with either, both, or neither3 of the two characters, in a shifting, fluid, non-constrained manner.

Sure, slash has not always been enacted in a manner consistent with its basic feminist impulses; it can be misogynist or sexist in its use of female characters, and it often does feminize one (or sometimes both) of the male characters. Imperfect execution doesn't nullify the original feminist nature of the project. Nor is the frequent feminization of one of the characters necessarily anti-feminist; it implies a certain belief (probably unconscious) about how a same-sex couple is going to behave, which is more of a heterosexist assumption than a sexist one, if it is not merely a product of poor writing (many women writers are going to feminize a male character because they themselves are women). And again, there is a gap here perhaps between the actual texts of slash fics, which can be misogynistic/sexist, and the act of reading/writing slash, which I believe is inherently feminist.

On the other hand, I do not believe that slash is at all inherently queer, particularly viewed diachronically, rather than primarily considering more recent slash. Yes, it is on a surface level about same-sex sexual relationships. Those relationships, however, are not about being same-sex as opposed to opposite-sex4, but tend to be, at least in older slash, about two people who "happen" to be of the same sex/gender. Until more recently, most slash fics never posited their characters were queer at all; they generally hadn't had other homosexual experiences, they didn't evince desire for any other males besides the other member of the pairing, and there was almost no mention of any real-world queer experience (they don't come out, they don't deal with prejudice, they don't start going to their local GLBT center, etc.). The characters avoid questions of orientation, not dwelling on whether they're now gay, bi, queer, etc. Usually, they come to the conclusion, if they think about it at all, that "it's just him." "Classic" slash is about love in which gender and orientation is not a factor, and to me, a queer text *must* take notice of those things. Yes, slash does challenge the notion that only m/f relationships are valid and possible, and more contemporary slash often does so head on because its characters often are queer, and response from people who are not slash fen often focuses on that, but I've never seen it as being about that. It's about a way of looking at the characters' relationship, of seeing the erotic potentials inherent in it, that would not be acknowledged under heterosexist assumptions, and in that, it is a queer project, but it differs significantly from, to take an example, recognizing that there exists queer subtext in the movie Spartacus (the bathtub scene), I think. To me, the texts themselves are about a queer subject matter without somehow *being* queer. I don't like slash because I can locate my experience in it as a queer woman, because I usually can't, but because to me, it interprets the source texts in a way that I find compelling because of who the two characters are, not because of "what" they are. I like Fraser/Kowalski (dueSouth) not because I think it's important to read the characters as queer (though I certainly don't mind queer readings of the show, and I do think there's a lot of reason to make them), but because I like how the characters interact, how I see them loving and wanting each other, with a singular passion and devotion that I do not see in any of the m/f possibilities on the show. If it were truly a queer project, I would expect slash to focus on *one* character, as queer, rather than on two.

And as for the assertion that by liking m/m slash a slash fan is herself queer, I really can't agree. Yes, one of the reasons that "queer" has become a popular term is because it is broader in scope than "gay," "straight," "bi," etc., but I just feel that's taking the term a bit far. Not that I would say any individual slash fan doesn't have the right to identify herself as "queer" on that basis, because she certainly does and I wouldn't argue with her, but as a community I don't feel that we can apply the label universally. I suppose it's that I don't think of "slash fan" as a sexual *identity* at all, such that it could be subsumed under "queer." If I think of it as something to do with sexuality at all, it seems to me a kink, rather. (I wouldn't want to say that all shoe fetishists, to take a different example, are queer, either.) Allies of the queer community may be somewhat marginalized themselves by that position, but that doesn't make them queer, either. But it's not an easy term to define, since its denota are so debatable.

[ardent muses]:

Hey Betty. I enjoy reading your LJ and this is a great discussion. Thanks for having us all over to your place for it. *g*

The question is, does slash reflect an essentially feminist (Mary's position) or queer (mine) re-interpretation of the texts?

Depends which slasher you talk with, I think. And a whole lot of slashers would reject both of those labels. I agree with you that slash isn't ipso facto "feminist" although a lot of it is. And although I would happily accept the label of "queer", I wouldn't presume to claim it for myself.

I don't see *all* slash (or slashers) as essentially one thing. We come to slash from a lot of different places. If someone finds the defining characteristic, I'd really like to know it.

On a few points in your original entry and your later responses, I disagree with you very strongly. I slept on it, *g* and now have come back and to read through the discussion again. I still feel disturbed by the tone and what I see as a set of definitions that distances us from other women.

I know this wasn't the thrust of your argument but, throughout what you said, there's a theme of bashing traditional romance lit that I have to take issue with.

I consider myself a capital-F Feminist as well as a slasher. However, I read and write het romance as well as slash. Does that mean I'm not as Feminist as those who only read and write slash? Does that mean I'm less "queer"? Not a "real" slasher?

A few days ago, you wrote a very articulate entry about why lesbians shouldn't devalue the few strong, smart, women characters on TV just because they aren't lesbians. You wrote a couple of things I really loved:

The fact is, the world does still need to learn to cope with the idea that desiring men sexually and emotionally is not the same thing as being dependent on or subordinate to men.

[snip]

The idea that it's impossible to be straight and a feminist, straight and an athlete, straight and self-determining, is still all too real in this culture,

I appreciated that openness, so that's why I'm confused to see you putting "us" (slashers) in a different category from "them" (Other Women).

I'm very uncomfortable with any definition of Feminism that requires me to distance myself from the hundreds of thousands of women, just in the U.S., who read traditional romance. In fact, it feels elitist and even *anti-feminist* to me to simply dismiss those women and their choice of reading material as if they are less enlightened than you and me.

I think we should support their right to choose what they want to read without assuming that they are simply sheep who have no other options.

The stigma against romance is IMHO just one example of women's art being devalued. If most mysteries -- or any other genre -- were written almost exclusively by women and edited by women and read by women, I think you'd find that mystery would have the same stigma as romance. In fact, romance is a genre that many women find satisfying to read, for some reason, and I think it's dangerous to assume why they/we do so.

There are a lot of people out there who would say I read slash because I have some kind of crippling emotional problem. I know that's not true although I don't know *why* I enjoy reading and writing slash. It's not for me to judge why another woman enjoys reading romance, or to judge what types of messages she might be taking away from it.

I admire your fairness and honesty, so I have to say that I think it's important not to slam an entire genre of literature when you admit you haven't read anything in that genre for 15 years. Society changes and so do romance novels, thank God. *g* If you'd like a reading list of some wonderful pro-women romance novels, I'd be happy to provide one. (I'm serious about this, although I certainly won't blame you for not taking me up on it. Romance isn't for everyone, any more than mystery novels -- or slash stories -- are for everyone.*g*)

[Betty Plotnick]:

I really think that you've unfortunately misunderstood me. I don't have anything against romance novels or the women who read them; it just so happens that I bought one just last week for my mom to read on the plane home, and rest assured, I wouldn't have done that if I thought that it were somehow an immoral thing to be into, and I absolutely don't consider Mom an unenlightened sheep with crippling emotional problems.

What I said was that I don't think romance novels are necessarily feminist texts, even though they are written principally by and for women. My point is that women can do and say and write and want things *as individuals* that don't address what is to me the central tenet of feminism, which is that women have pressing concerns *as women* that need to be fixed on a social instead of an individual level.

Some of them may well be feminist stories; many I know for a fact are woman-positive, which I don't think means the same thing as feminist, but it's a pretty good thing to be, too. (Star Trek, for example, produced some excellent female characters in its later years, but I wouldn't consider it a feminist show.)

I did use the term "anti-feminist," and I probably shouldn't have left that open to the interpretation that I was saying all romance novels were *by necessity* anti-feminist. Some are and some aren't, and I think some slash is and some isn't; I was just questioning how a whole genre could be feminist when it produced work that was anti-feminist, as I think both the slash and romance genres have. (That's key, I think, if you read over my post; I was pointing out the similarities between the two genres, and I think it's pretty obvious that I don't consider a fondness for slash to be a moral or intellectual weakness. Same with romance novels.)

Your points are excellently taken and well-stated, and I couldn't agree with them more. You know, I even describe myself as a romance writer, although the publishing houses certainly wouldn't recognize me as such. Why on earth would I slag anyone else for wanting to read them? Christ, I'm hoping they do; thereby hangs my potential writing career, you know?

Elsewhere

there's a bit of a snipe at trekdom that made me bristle somewhat, but it's well worth reading for the rest.

she addresses the old old issue of feminization of male characters in slash and the similarities between commercial romance novels and slash.

there's a particularly intriguing bit about whether slash is an inherently feminist movement or an inherently queer one. betty argues for the latter, very persuasively, i believe.

actually, on second thought, i believe i'll paste and snip a little for your convenience, but i highly recommend that you go to read the entire argument for yourselves.

Well, I waded my way through the article and some of the discussion, but I don't understand this impulse to categorise slash as this or that (in her case feminist or queer), and to find the one true reason why slash readers and writers like it. Is it so difficult to conceive that different people might be attracted to slash for different reasons?

I think you're absolutely right that there is no "one true reason" that accounts for slash and its writers/readers. Like you, I believe that "different people might be attracted to slash for different reasons."

But the fact that there are probably many reasons rather than just one doesn't mean that it's not a useful exercise to try to "categorize" slash. It's such a powerful cultural phenomenon that we can learn a lot by trying to analyze its appeals, its nature, its demographics, etc. I agree that we're not likely to find "one true" answer -- but even a lot of different answers can be interesting and illuminating.

So for me, anyway, that's where the "impulse" to categorize comes from: I really enjoy reading and writing slash (or at least, f/f stories), and I enjoy trying to make analytical sense of it, too.

I think it comes down to the fact that these days, slash is increasingly becoming fodder for 'legitimate' main stream academia to write about, and is being weened away from its traditional underground nature/status. And one of the problems of being fodder for academics is that they do very much like to pigeonhole and label things.

Then of course you have the whole 'what is feminism' thing going on, because depending how you choose to define the term may influence your opinion of things associated with that term, and some people because of that may feel more comfortable identifying slash as being queer rather than feminist, particularly when faced with the dichotomy of 'women writing about gays for their own pleasure-good'/'men writing about lesbians for their own pleasure=bad'

I think of slash as queer, for 2 reasons:

1. First, it's outside our cultural norms for women (mostly) to write sexually explicit material. And even more outside those norms for it to be about m/m sex. And even further outside the norm to try to make it artistically good.

2. Second, it can get you in trouble. Anyone who's in an environment where it would be dangerous to come out as homosexual (work with minors, military, underage and living with repressive parents, etc.) probably cannot afford to be identified as a slasher.

To me, "feminist" is a historical precursor or subset of "happy queer", so I don't quite understand the dichotomy.

To me, "feminist" is a historical precursor or subset of "happy queer", so I don't quite understand the dichotomy.

If queer is what I read it to be, I don't see it that way :)

I doubt we are feminist or queer just because of slash, especially since several feminist and lesbian groups are not at all happy about sexuality they don't see fitting into their own scheme of "what-women- shall-do". So female Slashers (esp. those who even write about BDSM, or non-cons stuff) are rather challenging the view of women and female sexuality in whole than only the manly ideals ;)

Um, yeah, but my impression is that the seperatists are a dying breed.

Aren't the lesbian sex wars over? Didn't the kinks and the sex-positives win? I'm not terribly well-connected to the lesbian community these days (imagine that) but I kind of thought the "women aren't genitally-oriented, lesbians don't use dildos or engage in 'hierarchical' sex" refrain was fading in the distance.

Bwah ha hah ha ha.

[...]

But if slash does not reflect a queer sensibility (and the portion that does is considered "icky" by the majority), can you really call it queer?

One thing I think is important to remember is that feminism is not a monolith (no matter what the mass media says). There are many different feminisms and kinds of feminists. Many femininst organizations, including mainstream ones like NOW, do actively support the cause of protecting/recognizing the rights of gays and lesbians.

However, there certainly are also feminists who consider any kind of "pornography" to be oppressive of women (a view that I do not share, and I do indeed call myself a feminist). OTOH, feminism has also influenced the movement to create erotica and porn that caters to women's needs and desires rather than men's. So in the sense that "men like to look at 'lesbian' porn, why shouldn't women write about two guys?" slash is probably seen by many as having a feminist spin. However, other feminists may wonder why the same authors aren't writing about female bodies and experiences, while still others may be wary about rape stories, S&M, or whatever.

In other words, the issue is very much more complicated than it may at first appear, and there is room for a wide variety of takes. In academia, the alliance between feminist and queer theorists is sometimes a tenuous one, but certainly I believe that slash and other forms of fannish erotica, including f/f and hetfic, are not incompatible with the goals of feminism.

So, after spending my afternoon doing research and chatting with friends to find out more about the actual state in the German lesbian scene *wiping sweat*, I have to claim first that "lesbian" is not necessarily connected with "feminist", and what I write now is only the state of the scene as I and my female friends perceive it, not of the theory.

The lesbian wars are quite calmed, though they are not completely over, but the "problems" with bisexuals, MTF, FTM and BDSM have gone more into the underground. Means, one would not claim a party closed for "genetic males" (as happened two years ago to a friend of mine), but one may talk behind her/his back. It also might happen, that people don't join courses on a lesbian meeting (even if it is bodypainting), if the girls who lead it are known as SMers. "No bi" is still often seen in ads. But dildos and stuff like that are quite ok, obviously :)

The BDSM lesbian scene here is still rather apart from the lesbian scene in whole, and these women are very open. (But that is my experience anyway, that most SMers play with all genders, as long as no genital sex is involved - mostly personal sympathy rulez.)

Well, my 0.2 pennies - and don't sue me for anything, it's all my little bit of knowledge and point of view. If someone sees it different, I'd like to read that.