Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing

Academic Commentary
Title:	Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing
Commentator:	Mirna Cicioni
Date(s):	1998
Medium:	letterzines
Fandom:	Slash, The Professionals, Inspector Morse
External Links:
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Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing is an academic paper written by Mirna Cicioni in 1998.

The intro:

Representations of male pair-bonding - a constant feature of many genres of action films and television series - have often been criticized as adolescent and mysogynist... Yet it can be argued that they have a complex appeal for some women, who read them within a specifically female perspective and reconstruct them to give form to some of their own needs and desires.

Some Topics Discussed

• The Professionals (British TV series between 1978 and 1983)
• Inspector Morse (British TV series between 1987 and 1993)
• The popularity of both TV series and the relative popularity of The Professionals versus Inspector Morse.
• Her analysis is based on an examination of approximately 350 Professionals stories (popularly known as 'hatstands') and approximately 20 Inspector Morse stories.
• One role of fantasy is postulated to "be a setting for desire" (Laplanche, J, and Pontalis, JB, 'Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality", Paris: Hachette, 1964, p. 27).
• Settings and roles for slash fiction.
• Many slash stories feature the 'first time' for one of the characters.
• An important feature of the 'first time' stories is that the sex is linked to the pre-existing partnership.
• 'First time' stories can be read primarily as a metaphor for the making of a priority commitment between the partners.
• A recurrent feature of many slash stories is the 'hurt/comfort' (h/c) formula, wherein one partner is sick, wounded or troubled; and the other provides physical or emotional support.
• Warmth and food might be eroticized because they provide physical expression of the intimacy between the partners.
• Stories that focus on the developing relationship focus on the aspects of their lives that present a virtual marriage.
• In the literature on slash, sex scenes have been interpreted either as romantic metaphors or as outright women's pornography.
• The 'virtual marriage' element demonstrates the fantasy of many women to express a desire for lasting monogamous commitment and to recognise forms of family ties.
• Slash scenes are postulated by Russ and Penley as reflecting some heterosexual women's arousing fantasies of what they desire with men.
• Comparatively few stories present the characters as explicitly gay-identified or concerned with gay-related political issues such as discrimination or AIDS.

From the Essay

Slash Fiction

The authors of slash fiction are almost entirely female and prevailingly heterosexual. However, the focus of slash production, and the only relationship represented as a fully satisfying one between equals, is apparently a homosexual bond in which women are excluded or marginalised. This apparent contradiction is discussed in early analyses of K/S fiction... they conclude that slash texts are not discourses about homosexuality, but rather fantasies that articulate women's desires concerning relationships in which men are involved.

I argue that slash writing also reflects some of the ambiguities that characterize the position of women with respect to heterosexuality.

My approach to slash texts is concerned with what the texts reveal about the desires of their writers and implied readers rather than with their literary merit; I also deliberately avoid value judgements of all kinds as irrelevant to the question of 'what some women want'.

After a brief examination of the way the two series and their main characters are recontextualized in slash fiction, I look at several subgenres and features of slash ("first-time" stories; "virtual marriage" stories; "hurt/comfort" and nurturance; sex scenes) in order to ascertain what female desires find expression and fulfillment there. My argument is that slash writing is at the same time an eroticization of same-sex nurturance, the expression of a desire for a relationship that satisfies all the basic needs of the people involved, and an unspoken reflection of the writers' tensions about heterosexual relationships.

A reading of slash texts as repetitive scenarios of "what some women want" coincides to some extent with the conclusions of recent analyses of heterosexual romance fiction. As the fans themselves acknowledge, these two genres have evident similarities, based on a number of shared features.

Slash fiction is a complex and constantly evolving genre. Just as there can be no one definitive answer to the question of women's motivations in writing and reading it, there can be no single evaluation of its functions and potential.

Slash fans are - unlike the readers of romance fiction - much more than passive consumers.

The Professionals

Throughout the series a homoerotic subtext - an implicit emphasis on the closeness between Bodie and Doyle as the main emotional focus of the series - is clearly visible.

Professionals slash fiction has continued uninterruptedly for nearly 15 years among women from several countries and various levels of education, and by 1993 it had produced almost 3,000 stories and novels (ranging in length from one to over 300 pages), 45 fanzines, and 5 letterzines.

My most recent source of information, a database list published in the United States in early 1992 and entitled THE LIST of PROFESSIONALS stories, or the Ultimate "Hatstand" List, gives 2.024 titles of stories, 32 titles of novels, 49 titles of fanzines, and 5 titles of letterzines My estimate of the 1992-93 production is extremely conservative.

The term hatstands is used by fans exclusively with reference to The Professionals slash stories. Its origin is the British idiom "bent as a hatstand", used to refer to male homosexuals. (Footnote on page 155)

Inspector Morse

Like Bodie and Doyle, Morse and Lewis are constructed as heterosexual in both Dexter's books and the television series... The relationship between the two men has, rather than an obvious homoerotic subtext, clear elements of emotional closeness and trust demonstrated through unspoken dependence on each other in times of crisis instead of through dramatic shootout or rescue scenes.

Inspector Morse fandom started in early 1991 and is much less extensive than that of The Professionals. It seems to be restricted to educated women over 30, living prevailingly in Great Britain, with smaller groups in the United States and Australia, and its output appears to be limited. It is exclusively slash, and by the end of 1993 it had produced one letterzine and almost 20 stories, none longer than 40 pages.

2024 Afterword

This article was originally published in the book:

Cheryl Harris & Alison Alexander (eds.), Theorizing fandom: fans, subculture and identity, Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1998.

Mirna is keen to acknowledge the age of the material, and suggests that those seeking more contemporary perspectives should refer to books such as:

Karen Hellekson & Kristina Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 2006.