Star Wars, queer representation and the mainstreaming of slash

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News Media Commentary
Title: Star Wars, queer representation and the mainstreaming of slash
Commentator: Elizabeth Minkel
Date(s): January 8, 2016
Venue:
Fandom: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
External Links: Star Wars, queer representation and the mainstreaming of slash, Archived version
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Star Wars, queer representation and the mainstreaming of slash is a 2016 article by Elizabeth Minkel for the "NewStatesmen."

"Suddenly, the media has woken up to something that fans have known for a long time: there is a whole world of explicit and implicit relationships beyond what we see on screen."

Some Topics Discussed

Some Excerpts

There are a huge variety of ways to be a fan, and to identify as one: you can collect facts, for example, or experiences, or material objects, or a whole host of other things. But for a lot fans – and this corner of fandom tends to be pretty heavily female-dominated – being really into a book or film or television show is about collecting emotional capital, spending a lot of our time thinking about fictional characters, or fictional relationships, or, best of all, potential fictional relationships. That’s the act of shipping, and we’ve got it down to a science.

Though we often use the shorthand “pairing”, ships – much like their real-life counterparts – aren’t limited to two characters. Nor are they bound by the stated sexual and romantic preferences of those characters in the source material. Shipping runs the full gamut of human interaction, from gentle flirtation to full-on explicit sexual acts, and in practice, it’s what the shipper makes of it. Maybe it’s a desire to see characters kiss onscreen, or maybe it’s a desire to put that kiss down on the page yourself, in fanart or fanfiction. Shipping is as straightforward as rooting for Ross and Rachel to get together; it’s as complex as reading between the lines in Victorian literature, searching for the queer subtext and desire coded in that language.)

That slash dialogue we’ve seen in the media in recent years – one that’s part mockery, part confusion, part revulsion, underscored above all by anxiety – hasn’t gone away. Talk show hosts still offer up fanart for actors to gawk at, and comments sections are still full of angry people disparaging slash fans for “making everyone gay”.... But somehow along the way, slash has become something for news outlets to bank on. This is partly the result of huge strides in the culture in a relatively short space of time. The Force Awakens, with its multi-racial, female-led cast, has been at the epicentre of a new skirmish in the culture war in the past month. Its fictional universe still has an abysmally poor record with explicit queer representation – but why shouldn’t we talk about what’s implicit?

But for a lot of people, shipping and transformative works like fanfiction and fanart aren’t about seeing your desires reflected back in the source material – it’s about making them your own. The best thing I read on the subject in the past few months was in the wake of the Captain America backlash, in response to a frustrating article that encapsulated this confusion over shipping, and what that desire means. “We never expect our ships to become canon,” Charlotte Geater’s response begins, speaking from the place that I and many other fans occupy, in which slash fanfiction is a way to wrest control of a media narrative, fracture it, and rebuild it in the image of our desire. We actively resist any validation from creators of the source material, because a ship is ours, and ours alone. There is a power in the gaps in the story, particularly the emotional and romantic ones, and in filling them in yourself.

But perhaps most importantly, it means nothing for the ship itself: ships are fictional, and rest in the hands of the shipper, and sail on no matter what creators do or say, even when half your pairing gets married to someone else, or is tragically killed (and then the other half gets tragically killed as well – yes, I am speaking from personal experience and no, I am not over it close to a decade later). The joy of shipping is that it’s an act that rests in the hands of fandom, or the individual fan. But despite all the misunderstandings I’ve seen in the past month, it’s undeniable that the changing perceptions of slash – and what we’re seeing, one might even argue, is the mainstreaming of slash – is an incredible thing: we are working towards a place where the full spectrum of human desire and expression is validated.

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