The Cost of the Erection: Slash and Gayness

Meta
Title:	The Cost of the Erection: Slash and Gayness
Creator:	Executrix
Date(s):	September 2, 2003
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Fanfiction
External Links:	The Cost of the Erection: Slash and Gayness, Archived version
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The Cost of the Erection: Slash and Gayness is an essay by Executrix.

It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.

Part of the essay also was also posted at the author's LiveJournal as: Dangly Bits. According to the comments, it was posted here due to a snafu in posting at Fanfic Symposium, one that was soon corrected.

For additional context, see Timeline of Slash Meta and Slash Meta.

Excerpts

By and large, slash is not a realistic genre. It's really a version of the pastoral eclogue, where the frisky creatures that are innocently frolicking beneath the kindly shepherd's eye... ain't sheep. So no one should be surprised by the conventionality of stanza form, the re-occurrence of Homeric epithets, or depictions of characters whom the writer genuinely idolizes and/or identifies with.

I'm pretty sure that, although the proportion of lesbians and bisexual women is higher in the slash community than in the general community, it's still true that the majority of slashers are straight women. I don't think that a desire to use writing to understand The Other is contemptible--whether The Other is an alien race, your gay co-workers, your straight family members, or elements within your own personality. As cesperanza memorably phrased it, slash characters are "like men--only better."

Nevertheless, I have trouble with the often-repeated concern that male slash characters are unrealistic because they are sensitive and spend a lot of time talking about their feelings. In my experience, it doesn't take "years of therapy" (or hurt/comfort plots) to get men to open up and talk about themselves. It takes "general anesthesia" to shut them up.

Slash also an amateur genre, with no entry barriers at all. As a leftist, I applaud this. As a reader, sometimes not so much. In every fandom, there are writers whose talent and standards of craftsmanship are absolutely of professional standard. And then there's everybody else. I cheerfully confess that one of the reasons I write fanfic instead of profic is that I can get away with doing anything I want, and I can just decide that a story is finished when I'm tired of playing with it.

In a slash story with a contemporary setting, two male characters or two female characters who become sexually involved would need a high level of denial to avoid thinking of themselves as involved in a homosexual relationship. Quite often, they do manage that level--or their authors manage it for them. And in fact even real people can do it, often with tragic consequences.

However, to sidestep the essentialism/constructionism debate, there are also slash stories set in historical contexts or future worlds where some kinds of same-sex sexual expression are accepted, or favored, or disfavored but it's not considered a major issue. There may not be a homosexual identity for them to adopt, or a gay community for them to join. So I'd like to phrase this discussion in terms of SSSE (same-sex sexual expression) and SSEE (same-sex emotional expression). That copes with characters who have canonical past or present other-sex partners, or who have erotic response that they don't recognize as sexual or that they can't act out with their desired partner.

OK, a certain amount of slashing comes about simply because of an interest in adding a particular hot fudge to your favorite scoop of ice cream, but the real impulse is seeing things that, consciously or unconsciously, were put there by the writers, actors, and directors.

In one sense, any fanfic provides a resistant reading simply because of the removal of the fourth wall. In another sense, what draws a slasher to a particular fandom is credence in the romantic and/or sexual connection between some of the same-sex characters.

Until recently, there couldn't be canon gay characters. Even now, you can't always tell which canon characters are gay--even in RL, gay people do date members of the opposite sex; sometimes marry them; and sometimes the reason a marriage breaks up is that someone can no longer maintain the pretense of exclusive heterosexuality.

My original interest in slash was as a non-commercial, instant-response, woman-controlled body of erotica. This is not always what I've found, but I still think it's a worthwhile ideal. However, my own practice has changed, and I have a greater interest in Clean Slash--where SSSE and SSEE are part of the story, but in wider contexts, and where I cut away to the fireplace fairly early on in such sex scenes as do appear.

A lot of people say that they know that canon characters who have no canonical relationships are heterosexual because they're not faggy or dykey. See what I mean? They're looking at the gender performance, not the potential or lack of potential for SSSE. You can't engage in sex 24/7 (although God knows some people try) but you do have gender all the time, and more people get to see your gender performance because it is inherently more public.

Which is not to say that a person's intentions or beliefs about her/his own gender performance will necessarily be accepted at face value by others. One of my favorite things about my fandom (Blakes7) is that one of the main characters always feels compelled to walk Butch Realness. And always loses.

I also think that an important reason for the often-decried feminization of male slash characters is that a lot of people think gender polarity within a relationship is erotic. They aren't interested in a couple who are more or less equally masculine or equally feminine. So if they are drawn to a butch-femme aesthetic, and both the partners are of the same sex, somebody has to be the girl. A lot of people get much more squicked by the thought that a character they care about (especially one they MarySue) could be seen as, God forbid, acting like a girl, than that he's having sex with a man.

Fan Comments

matildabj:

I don't think it's "disrespectful" to slash action heroes, because from my perspective being attracted to one's own sex is neither better or worse than being attracted to the other. And I also think that even though florists contribute more to society than SWAT Teams, nevertheless SWAT Teams get a lot more respect. So I think it's important to check out the subtext in media products about soldiers, or space missions, or District Attorneys, or detectives, or...

What I don't get is the 'but there is no subtext, they were written as heterosexual characters' -type argument. Author's or even actor's intent matters not a jot when you're dealing with subtext (I love subtext). In an essay about the semiotics of drama, Martin Esslin says "...even an actor who has consciously planned every nuance of expression, may display unintended signifiers which may introduce elements of meaning into a performance that he never planned and of which he remains unaware... it must always be remembered that every performance, however brilliant and competent its originators, is bound to carry an aura of such unintended overtones..." (from The Field of Drama, emphasis mine). I guess this applies to gender performance also. And besides - when it comes to characters like Blake and Avon, we the audience aren't supposed to be passively looking at them and going "seems like a nice boy" - the way they interact is designed to provoke us a little. So there should be no surprise when we're provoked, or when the dialectical process doesn't necessarily flow in the direction the author/actor/TPTB intended that it should.

the same person can be a thug and a princess; it all depends on who's got the ball gown.

or through whose eyes we're looking at said thug/princess - or is that what you meant?! (the reference was lost on me I'm afraid!)

executrix:

Yes, yes! Thanks for the Esslin quote--it opens up whole areas of analysis I didn't think of.

About thugs and gowns: the documentary "Paris is Burning" is about drag balls, and what I found the most provocative is that there are categories that did not seem obvious to me, including "Executive Realness" (i.e., voguing about in a business suit and briefcase); the participants seem to be very willing to compete in several categories that might at first seem inconsistent.