Slash fiction
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex. While the term "slash" originally referred only to stories in which male characters are involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element, it is now also used to refer to any fan story containing a romantic pairing between same-sex characters. Many fans distinguish slash with female characters as a separate genre, commonly referred to as femslash.
These fan-written stories are not often accepted in a work's canon, and the characters are usually not engaged in such relationships in their respective fictional universes.
History
It is commonly believed that slash fan fiction originated during the late 1960s, within the Star Trek: The Original Series fan fiction fandom, starting with "Kirk/Spock" stories generally authored by female fans of the series and distributed privately among friends.The name arises from the use of the slash symbol in mentions in the late '70s of K/S, as compared to the ampersand conventionally used for K&S or Kirk and Spock friendship fiction. For a time, both slash and K/S were used interchangeably. Slash later spread to other fan groups, first Starsky and Hutch, Blake's 7, and The Professionals, then many others, eventually creating a fandom based on the concept of slash. Many early slash stories were based on a pairing of two close friends, a "hero dyad", or "One True Pairing", such as Kirk/Spock or Starsky/Hutch; conversely, a classic pairing between foils was that of Blake/Avon from Blake's 7.
The first K/S stories were not immediately accepted by all Star Trek fans. Later, authors such as Joanna Russ studied and reviewed the phenomenon in essays and gave the genre some academic respectability. Greater subsequent tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality and increased frustration with the portrayal of gay relationships in mainstream media fed a growing desire in authors to explore the subjects on their own terms, using established media characters. Star Trek slash fiction remained important to fans, while new slash fiction grew up around other television shows, movies, and books with sci-fi or action-adventure roots.
Early slash fans in England feared that they would be arrested, because slash violated the obscenity laws there at the time.
Slash sources
From its earliest days, slash fiction has been particularly inspired by popular speculative fiction franchises, possibly because speculative fiction may lack well-developed female characters or because the speculative elements allow greater freedom to reinterpret canonical characters. However, other large bodies of slash fiction, such as Starsky and Hutch or The Professionals, are based on non-speculative sources.Slash fiction follows popular media, and new stories are constantly produced. There is some correlation between the popularity and activity of each variety of slash fiction and those of the source of the material. Some slash fiction readers and writers tend to adhere closely to the canonical source of their fiction, while other participants may follow the slash content without being fans of the original source material itself.
Slash on the Internet
Until the Internet became accessible to the general public in the early 1990s, slash was hard to find. It was published only in fan-edited non-profit fanzines, which were usually priced just high enough to recoup printing costs, and were sold via adzines or at conventions. With the advent of the Internet, slash fiction writers created mailing lists which gradually took the place of amateur press associations, and websites such as FanFiction.Net.Forum boards and message boards were active during the first half of the first decade of the millennium, and sites such as Angelfire, GeoCities, and ProBoards were quite successful. Other venues in which slash was, and still is, published are Facebook and private groups. Much later came Archive of Our Own. As slash publishing gradually moved to the Internet, the field opened to more writers, and a greater quantity of material was published.
The Internet allowed slash authors more freedom than print: stories could include branching story lines, links, collages, song mixes, and other innovations. The Internet increased slash visibility and the number of readers, as readers were now able to access the stories from their own home at a much lower cost, since zines cost more than an Internet connection. The number of fandoms represented increased dramatically, especially those devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and police dramas. The Internet also increased the level of reader interaction, making it easier for fans to comment on stories, give episode reviews, and discuss comment on trends in slash fandom itself. Websites and fanzines dedicated to fans of The X-Files, Stargate, Harry Potter, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer became common, with tens of thousands of slash stories available.
Critical and queer attention
Slash fiction has received more academic attention than other genres of fan fiction. Slash fiction was the subject of several notable academic studies in the early 1990s, as part of the cultural studies movement within the humanities: most of these, as is characteristic of cultural studies, approach slash fiction from an ethnographic perspective and talk primarily about the writers of slash fiction and the communities that form around it. Slashers have been configured as fans who resisted culture. Some studies – for example by Italian anthropologist Mirna Ciconi – focus on the textual analysis of slash fiction itself.Slash fiction was often ignored by queer theorists. However, slash fiction has been described as important to the LGBTQ community and to the formation of queer identities, as it represents a resistance to the expectation of heterosexuality. In a society in which heterosexuality is the norm and homosexuality is highly stigmatized, an online forum is sometimes the only space where young members of the LGBTQ community can be out. Young members of the community go through a time in which they are still exploring their identity, labels, and pronouns. By writing slash fiction, queer youth can use their favorite characters and stories in order to create scenarios that allow them to explore their feelings, thoughts, and selves. Slash fiction, in this sense, offers queer youth a low-risk chance to explore who they are. They can stay anonymous while creating a world in which they can express themselves creatively and freely. However, slash fiction has also been criticized as being unrepresentative of the gay community as a whole, and as being used as a medium to express feminist frustration with popular and speculative fiction.
The predominant demographic among slash fiction readers is female, the majority of whom identify as other than heterosexual. Science fiction writer Joanna Russ, author of How to Suppress Women's Writing, is one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously. In her essay "Pornography by Women for Women, with Love," Russ argues that, in regard to the Kirk/Spock relationship, slash fiction combines both masculine and feminine traits of emotional vulnerability. Such an equal relationship, she contends, negates the power imbalance typically seen in regular fan fiction.
Definition and ambiguity
Slash fiction fandoms tend to be diverse and segregated, and each has its own rules of style, etiquette, history, and favorite stories and authors.Slash cannot be commercially distributed due to copyright laws, and, until the 1990s, it was either undistributed or published in zines. Today, slash fiction is most commonly published on Tumblr, LiveJournal accounts and other websites online, such as Archive of Our Own. Legal scholars promoting copyright reform sometimes use slash fiction as an example of semiotic democracy.
The term slash fiction contains several ambiguities. Due to the lack of canonical homosexual relationships in source media at the time that slash fiction began to emerge, some came to see slash fiction stories as being exclusively outside their respective canons and held that the term "slash fiction" applies only when the characters' same-sex romantic or erotic relationship about which an author writes is not part of the source's canon and that fan fiction about canonical same-sex relationships is therefore not slash. The recent appearance on screen of openly gay and bisexual characters, such as Willow and Tara in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the characters of Queer as Folk, Jack Harkness in Doctor Who, and numerous characters in Torchwood, has occasioned much additional discussion of this problem. Abiding by the aforementioned definition leaves such stories without a convenient label, so this distinction has not been widely adopted.
Some slash authors also write slash fiction which contains transgender themes and transgender/transsexual or intersex characters. As a result, the exact definition of the term has often been hotly debated within various slash fandoms. The strictest definition holds that only stories about relationships between two male partners constitute 'slash fiction', which has led to the evolution of the term femslash. Slash-like fiction is also written in various Japanese anime or manga fandoms but is commonly referred to as shōnen-ai or yaoi for relationships between male characters, and shōjo-ai or yuri between female characters, respectively.
Due to the increasing popularity and prevalence of slash on the Internet in recent years, some use slash as a generic term for any erotic fan fiction, whether it depicts heterosexual or homosexual relationships. This has caused concern for other slash writers, who believe that, while it can be erotic, slash is not, by definition, so, and that defining all erotic fiction as slash makes such fiction unsuitable for potential underage readers of homoromantic fan fiction. In addition, a number of journalists writing about the fan fiction phenomenon in general seem to believe that all fan fiction is slash, or at least erotic in character. Such definitions fail to distinguish between erotic and romantic slash, and between slash, het and gen.
The slash mark itself, when put between character's names, has come to mean a shorthand label for a romantic relationship, regardless of whether the pairing is heterosexual or homosexual, romantic or erotic.