Slash Fandom on the Internet, Or, Is the Carnival Over?
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
| Academic Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Slash Fandom on the Internet, Or, Is the Carnival Over? |
| Commentator: | Rachel Shave |
| Date(s): | June 17, 2004 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Multiple Fandoms but mostly Harry Potter |
| External Links: | available online |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Slash Fandom on the Internet, Or, Is the Carnival Over? is an essay published by Rachel Shave in Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media on June 17, 2004.
Some Topics Discussed
- Harry Potter
- FictionAlley
- disclaimers
- The Severus Snape Fuh-Q Fest
- carnivalesque "gleeful vulgarity"
Excerpts
In this paper, I utilise Mikhail Bakhtin’ s work to establish whether slash fandom on the Internet constitutes a contemporary site of carnival. I am situated as slash fan (since the early 1980s) and feminist academic whose interests include Cultural Studies and English Literature. My intent is to broaden the theoretical paradigms for analysing slash by exploring the potential of this concept to probe the subversive pleasures of slash fandom. While my focus is on slash, I believe that the concept of carnival could usefully be employed to explore other resistant Internet communities, including other fan fiction sites. Commencing with outlines of slash and carnival, I then explore some of carnival’ s specific features in relation to slash fandom, that is the festive crowd and masquerade, the two-world condition, its transitory nature and carnival laughter. For Bakhtin, the potency of carnival declined with the rise of bourgeois, private society. In our post-industrial environment, the expanded middle class has increased access to knowledge and technology, including that of the Internet. I believe that the convergence of slash and the Internet has created a new, imagined, carnival space.
The carnivalesque is a theoretical framework that captures the resistant nature of slash, enabling a new perspective of slash in the trajectory of an historical tradition. Slash fandom continues this carnival tradition through establishing a niche on the Internet. Both Internet slash fandom and carnival are participatory cultures that are subversive and transitory; both incorporate a sense of play and disguise.
As with most slash fandoms, the vast majority of Harry Potter slash fiction is male/male (m/m) although there is also limited female/female slash and threesomes. There is no overwhelming concentration on a single pairing in this fandom. Instead, most characters have been paired with at least one other person. This slash fandom evolved on the Internet and the fandom is so entrenched on the net that the first fanzine containing Harry Potter slash was only published in January 2003 (Starkiller [pseud.], 2003). Harry Potter slash on the Internet includes literally hundreds of m/m slash sites; a few f/f slash sites; mailing lists; live journals; sites dedicated to artwork, and webrings. The overwhelming majority of fans are women, but there are also a few males involved. In these respects, Harry Potter slash fandom is representative of most media slash fandoms.
Slash fiction is overwhelmingly produced and consumed by women, although larger numbers of males are entering the fandom. Slash often contains explicit descriptions of sex, leading to it being described as both erotica and pornography. The fiction exhibits many elements of the carnivalesque, which is how carnival enters the realm of literature. These include humour, coarse language and grotesque realism. However, in this paper I am not focusing on the fiction, but on slash fandom as a community that has developed a niche on the Internet. This community is not a singular, cohesive mass. Some fans are interested in particular shows while others are fans of slash itself, participating in a vast range of slash fandoms. Several archives do not accept Real Person Slash fiction, while this is the primary area of interest for some fans. Numbers are difficult to assess due to the nature of the fandom, but a recent Google search for ” Harry Potter slash” provided just under 70,000 results while one Harry Potter slash list has over 7000 members. I believe that the concept of carnival helps provide a more complex understanding of the subversive pleasures created by the intersections between this fandom and the Internet.
The carnivalesque is idealistic in nature, but so too is slash fandom, with its textual poaching and its re-writing of masculinity. Like Bakhtin’ s carnival, slash exposes the arbitrariness of the social relations of power. Even though slash is unlike carnival in that it is not sanctioned by institutional authority, it still helps to preserve patriarchal hegemony by providing these fans an outlet, which thereby prevents insurrection at a societal level.
This is my primary concern regarding the nature of slash fandom and its fiction: while it provides pleasures and empowerment on a personal level, it does little in the way of greater societal change. I take heart from David Caroll’ s suggestion that this concern can be countered by recognising that carnival questions societal hierarchies and thereby exposes them as being both momentary and arbitrary (Carroll, 1983:80-81). Social institutions are naturalised historical formations. Both slash and carnival render these formations visible. Resistance need not be large-scale or highly public as identities and values are constantly subject to change. The carnivalesque nature of slash is enabling females to undertake a resistance against dominant norms. The tactics include reading, writing and discussing sexually explicit material that disrupts the normativity of heterosexuality and the impenetrable masculine hero. Further, these activities entail females using the Internet for their own purposes, using technology to create a space for themselves and for their pleasure.