“Fan Fiction and Genderfuck” OR “Why I was never a fan of Slash Fiction”

Now I wouldn’t call myself an internet troll, but I wouldn’t call myself a n00b either. I’ve been around the net and I’ve seen most of the sights and sites of interest. I even bought a cell phone that lets me surf. My last cell phone bill registered 31+ megabytes, keep in mind that I can’t download files like mp3s or pr0n. That 31+ megabytes are all jpeg and text. Needless to say, I like the internet.

I’ve seen fan fiction and slash fiction before taking Cultures of Sampling, and I’ve even read a few pieces. For the most part I find the writing is satisfactory and the plots questionable. Worse though are the tired, played-out notions of homoerotic sub-textual readings of male protagonists in, as the scene calls them, “precedent” texts. I’m tired of seeing that dim light bulb go off above some peoples’ heads when they think they see that such and such are or could possibly be seen as gay. It was funny when I was a teen, but it just looks and feels like something bordering on homophobia without that harsh edged hatred.

Noy Thrupkaew writes, “Writing male characters as lovers allows a richer sense of possibility than duplicating the well-worn boy/girl romances coughed up by most TV shows.” Nah, I don’t see it that way. I do agree with the statement that the boy/girl romances presented in most dramas aimed at the early-teen to late-twenties demographic are played out, in fact just last week I was musing about how I was becoming extremely irritated at one of my favorite shows, Smallville. I’m tired of the dynamics of Lana Lang and Clark Kent’s relationship. She’s always crying, he’s always asking for forgiveness. Why can’t he just say, “You’re crying? Why are you crying? There’s no crying here, if you want to cry, crying happens across the street.” And why can’t Lana just say, “Clark, look. You’re hiding shit from me, I know it. I don’t fucking appreciate it, dawg. Either you tell me what’s up or I’m going to bone Lex. Bald men are sexier anyway.” Why don’t slash fiction writers write this instead of writing clichéd passages of homosexual love?

I realize that Thrupkaew does not speak for the whole of the slash/fan fiction community, but she does set up an opening to share her understanding of slash/fan fiction by posing the question, “Why do slash writers, who are predominantly straight women writing for other women, create fiction that focuses on male/male romantic relationships?” and responding with “Although theories abound—male relationships are truly egalitarian, women characters are too boring to write about—slash has become so diverse that it easily thwarts anyone trying to find one generalizing principle.” The idea that male relationships are “truly egalitarian” and the idea that “women characters are too boring to write about” is problematic for me. It’s problematic in that while the source material might suggest more depth for male characters in most instances, why is it then that these female slash/fan fiction writers allow this secondary status of female character to exist ignored and untouched? Why are they more inclined to write about homosexual relationships rather than writing re-writes of female characters? Is it a way to subvert the paradigms set up by the creators and writers of the television shows and books that are presented to the slash/fan fiction writers? Isn’t that offensive? If I were gay I think that would offend me in that my sexual alignment becomes the punch line of a joke. Also, gay guys are not just women with penises that know how to dress and whose homes are nicely decorated. It’s much more complicated than that. Not that I get it, that fact that I don’t shows me that it’s more complicated. Whatever.

Going over the stuff I highlighted in Thrupkaew I don’t know if I’m actually getting pissed or if I’m just irritated by the little dog yapping at my door. No. Wait. I’m actually getting pissed. When Thrukaew writes, “Much of early slash follows this ‘first-time love’ schema, in which two men who have always identified as straight fall in love with each other. Why would slash writers dwell on such a theme? A lot of the good first-time pieces read like rapturous coming-of-age stories, with equal parts lust and self-discovery—a first time, too, perhaps, for many of the writers, who, being women, have likely never had boy-on-boy sex.” that really gets my goat. It’s like voice appropriation of the native peoples that you see in all of those black and white westerns. It’s exactly the same thing! “Being women, having likely never had boy-on-boy sex” if you change some nouns can read “Being European, having likely never experienced Native Indigenous People’s way of life” But yet these women appropriate the voices of gay men and boil down their life experiences and first sexual encounters to a formula: “fevered words that can barely mask the slowly creeping awareness, the flush across the face at the other’s nearness. Stammered confession, blissful reciprocation, ecstatic consummation! A delicious formula.” That pisses me off. I’m sure this is not how all gay men come to the realization or how their “first time” plays out. Granted, these were examples of early slash, but at the same time that’s still ass.

Further down in the article I started to cool down a bit, only to be engulfed in pre-spontaneous-combustion-like anger when I read, “Penley argues that female slash authors focus on male/male relationships because they’re the most egalitarian. Basing her theories on Kirk/Spock (K/S) slash, Penley critiques the flat characterization of female TV characters and the limitations of what TV and media culture depict as male/female relationships. But in real life, she also argues, women’s bodies are too often layered with negative meanings—and therefore become the site for political, social, and moral struggle. K/S slash is a rejection of those problematic bodies and of TV’s flat female characters, serving instead as a subversive rewriting of the script in which lovers can share love and work and still be equal.” That’s bullshit though, it does nothing to subvert the male/female relationships, in fact it ignores the problems of the flat portrayal of male/female relationships given us by television all together. Why don’t slash writers write female characters that actually subvert rather than omitting female/male love all together? Is it too hard? Is it so much easier to just make Kirk and Spock gay? That’s a cop-out in my books.

Thrupkaew while starting to write her own piece of slash comes to the realization of why women write man-on-man slash. I’ll provide parenthetical directory-style commentary for this quote: “The relationships between male characters allow a writer to strike a harmonious balance between working within the framework of a show and spinning a tale of her own imagination. [I can’t understand how it might more difficult to rewrite a female and male character, as well as their relationships, as opposed to making two male characters homosexual. Subverting the gender/sexuality norms is one thing, but for straight women to write about gay male relationships seems problematic and fraught with opportunities for stereotypical portrayals of gay relationships. Also, this ease at which male heterosexual characters can be transformed into gay lovers is revelatory of how simplistic some slash writer’s views of what it means to be gay is.] The best slash I’ve read captures the rhythm of the characters’ speech, probes their psychology, and shows a mastery of complicated plots, all while taking the characters in new directions. [Yes, that would be a feat to emulate another persons creations.] And although a similar sense of possibility could await a writer delving into unexpected male/female pairings (Scully and Skinner, for instance) or trysts between two female characters (say, Buffy and Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), male/male pairings add an extra dimension—the opportunity to recraft masculinity itself. [Masculinity can be recrafted without changing sexual affinity. Assuming otherwise makes you an asshole.] And for women—straight or queer—who write slash fiction, this certainly seems to add an extra-enticing challenge, a sense of going where no woman has gone before. [An extra-enticing challenge for me would be to work within the dynamics of a heterosexual relationship, rather than tossing it all in the garbage and erasing heterosexuality all together.]”

I could go on an on about slash and how it seems to be so cyclical in the reasons for why people write slash, but in the end I would just be saying the same thing over and over. This is what I have to say about slash: While the writers of slash say that they are subverting gender norms and subverting the TV portrayals of false and/or played out male/female relationships, the fact that these slash writers base their writing on these TV shows limits them to degrees that are beyond the reach of the subversive powers they are attempting to harness. By sticking to what they called “precedence” they can’t fully subvert what TV puts out there. By merely making male protagonists homosexual they are merely providing self-gratifying titillation, rather than the subversion they taut as being their reason for writing slash fiction in the first place.