Slash fiction is a genre of
fan fictionFan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
that focuses on the depiction of romantic or sexual relationships between characters of the same sex. While the term was originally restricted to stories in which male media characters were involved in an explicit adult relationship as a primary plot element, it is now often used to refer to any fan story containing a pairing between same-sex characters, although many fans distinguish the female-focused variety as a separate genre commonly referred to as
femslashFemslash is a subgenre of slash fan fiction which focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between female fictional characters. Typically, characters featured in femslash are heterosexual in the canon universe; however, similar fan fiction about lesbian characters are commonly labeled as...
. The characters are usually not engaged in such relationships in their respective fictional universes. The majority of slash fiction writers are believed to be heterosexual females.
History
It is commonly believed that current slash fanfiction originated within the
Star Trek: The Original SeriesStar Trek is a science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry that aired from September 8, 1966 to September 2, 1969. Though the original series was titled simply Star Trek, it has acquired the retronym Star Trek: The Original Series to distinguish it from the spinoffs that...
fan fictionFan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
fandomFandom is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest...
, with "
Kirk/SpockKirk/Spock, also commonly referred to as "K/S" and referring to James T. Kirk and Spock from Star Trek, is a pairing popular in slash fiction, possibly the first slash pairing. Early on, a few fan writers started speculating about the possibility of a sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock,...
" stories – generally authored by female fans of the series – first appearing in the late 1970s.
The name arises from the use of the slash symbol
(/)The American English slash is a punctuation mark. It is variously termed stroke , slash, virgule, diagonal, forward slash, right-leaning stroke, oblique dash, slant, separatrix, scratch comma, slaok, over, slak, or whack...
in mentions in the late '70s of K/S (meaning stories where Kirk and Spock had a romantic (and often sexual) relationship) as compared to the
ampersand (&)An ampersand , also commonly called an and sign, is a logogram representing the conjunction "and".The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for "and"...
conventionally used for K&S or Kirk and Spock
friendship fiction. For a time both
slash and
K/S (for "Kirk/Spock") were used interchangeably. Slash later spread to other fandoms, first
Starsky and HutchStarsky and Hutch is a 1970s US television series that consisted of a 90-minute pilot movie and 92 episodes of 60 minutes each; created by William Blinn, produced by Spelling-Goldberg Productions, and broadcast between April 30 1975 and May 15 1979 on the ABC network; distributed by...
,
Blake's 7Blake's 7 is a British science fiction television series produced by the BBC for its BBC1 channel. Created by Terry Nation, a prolific television writer best known for creating the popular Dalek monsters for the television series Doctor Who, it ran for four series between 1978 and 1981...
, and
The ProfessionalsThe Professionals is a British crime-action television drama series produced by Avengers Mk1 Productions and London Weekend Television that aired on the ITV network from 1977 to 1983. In all, 57 episodes were produced, filmed between 1977 and 1982. It starred Martin Shaw, Lewis Collins and Gordon...
, then many others, eventually creating a fandom based around 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
foilsA foil is a person that contrasts with another character in order to highlight various features of the main character's personality: to throw the character of the protagonist into sharper relief...
was that of
BlakeRoj Blake is a fictional character from the British science fiction television series Blake's 7, played by Gareth Thomas.A native of Earth, Roj Blake was a leading voice against the corrupt, oppressive Terran Federation approximately four years before the series began...
/
AvonKerr Avon is a fictional character from the British science fiction television series Blake's 7, played by Paul Darrow. Initially one of a character ensemble, he increasingly became a lead character.-Fictional Biography:...
from
Blake's 7Blake's 7 is a British science fiction television series produced by the BBC for its BBC1 channel. Created by Terry Nation, a prolific television writer best known for creating the popular Dalek monsters for the television series Doctor Who, it ran for four series between 1978 and 1981...
.
The first K/S stories were not immediately accepted by all Trek fans. Later, authors such as
Joanna RussJoanna Russ , born to teachers Evarett I. and Bertha Zinner Russis, is an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism and is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire...
studied and reviewed the phenomenon in essays and gave the genre more academic clout. From there, increasing tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality and 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 remained an important slash fiction fandom, while new slash fandoms grew around other television shows, movies, and books with sci-fi or action adventure roots.
Slash sources
From its earliest days, slash fiction has been particularly inspired by popular
speculative fictionSpeculative fiction is a fiction genre speculating about worlds that are unlike the real world in various important ways. In these contexts, it generally overlaps one or more of the following: science fiction, fantasy fiction, horror fiction, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and...
franchises,, possibly because well-developed female characters may be lacking in speculative fiction, or because the speculative elements allow greater freedom to reinterpret canon characters. Many large fandoms, such as Starsky and Hutch, and The Professionals, are based in non-speculative sources.
Slash fiction follows popular media, and new stories are constantly produced. There is some correlation between the popularity and activity within each fandom and that of the source of the material. Slash fiction readers and writers tend to adhere closely to the canonical source of their fiction, and create a
fandomFandom is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest...
for that particular source. However, some participants follow the slash content created by a certain
fandomFandom is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest...
without being fans of the original source material itself.
Slash finds the Internet
Until the internet became accessible to the general public in the early 1990s, slash was hard to find, published only in fan-edited non-profit
fanzineA fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest...
s (often called only "zines"), usually priced just high enough to recoup printing costs, sold via adzines or at conventions. With the advent of the internet, the slash fiction community of fans and writers created mailing lists (which gradually took the place of
apasApas are oblong-shaped biscuits that are topped with sugar. Apas biscuits are a part of Filipino cuisine. Apas biscuits are advertised on many local tv stations using the lovable character ED. Ed is known for his brilliant yellow trousers, iconic glasses and sense of humor only rivalled by...
, and websites such as fanfiction.net, (which gradually started taking the place of zines). As slash publishing gradually moved to the internet, the field became open to more writers, and a greater quantity of material was published.
The internet allowed slash authors more freedom: stories could include branching storylines, links, collages, songmixes included and other innovations. The internet increased slash visibility, and the number of readers, who were now able to access the stories from their own home at a much lower cost (the price of zines vs. the price of internet connections). The number of
fandomFandom is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest...
s represented increased dramatically, especially those devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and police dramas. The internet also increased the level of interaction – making it easier for fans to comment on stories, give episode reviews, and
discussMeta- , is a prefix used in English to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter....
and comment on trends in slash fandom itself. Websites and fanzines dedicated to fandoms such as
X-Files 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 studiesCultural studies is an academic field which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies...
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 slash fiction. Slashers have been configured as fans who resisted culture. Some studies - for example by Italian anthropologist Mirna Ciconi - focus on textual analysis of slash fiction itself.
Slash fiction was often ignored by
queer theoristsQueer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of gay and lesbian studies and feminist studies. It is a kind of hermeneutics devoted to queer readings of texts...
. However, slash fiction has been described as important to the
LGBTLGBT is an initialism referring collectively to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. In use since the 1990s, the term “LGBT” is an adaptation of the initialism “LGB” which itself started replacing the phrase “gay community” which many within LGBT communities felt did not represent...
community and the formation of queer identities, as it represents a resistance to the expectation of compulsory heterosexuality, but has also been noted as being unrepresentative of the gay community, being more a medium to express feminist frustration with popular and speculative fiction.
Definition and ambiguity
Of the diverse and often segregated slash fandoms, each fandom has its own rules of style and etiquette, and each comes with its own history, favorite stories, and authors.
Slash cannot be commercially distributed due to copyright, and up until the 1990s was either undistributed or published in
zineA fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest...
s.
The term
slash fiction has several noted ambiguities within it. Due to the lack of canonical homosexual relationships in source media, some came to see slash fiction as being exclusively outside of canon. These people held that the term 'slash fiction' only applies when the relationship being written about is
not part of the source's canon, and that fan fiction about
canonicalA canon, in terms of a fictional universe, is a body of material that is considered to be "genuine" or "official", that can be directly referenced as, or as if it were, material produced by the original author or creator of a series...
same-sex relationships is hence not slash. The recent appearance of openly gay and bisexual characters on screen, such as
WillowWillow Rosenberg is a fictional character created by Joss Whedon for the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was portrayed by Alyson Hannigan, who also played the character in three episodes of the show's spin-off, Angel and the pilot for Buffy the Animated Series .Willow is the...
and
TaraTara Maclay is a fictional character created by Joss Whedon for the cult television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, portrayed by Amber Benson. Tara is introduced in the fourth season as a romantic interest for one of the show's leads, Willow and is a recurring character in the show until the...
in the television series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the characters of
Queer as FolkQueer as Folk is a 1999 British television series that chronicles the lives of three gay men living in Manchester's gay village around Canal Street. Both Queer as Folk and Queer as Folk 2 were written by Russell T Davies, who was also responsible for a later gay-related drama, Bob and Rose, and the...
,
Jack HarknessCaptain Jack Harkness is a fictional character played by John Barrowman in Doctor Who and its spin-off series, Torchwood. He first appears in the 2005 Doctor Who episode "The Empty Child" and reappears in the remaining episodes of the 2005 series as a companion of the ninth incarnation of the...
in
Doctor WhoDoctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a mysterious alien time-traveller known as "the Doctor" who travels in his space and time-ship, the TARDIS, which normally appears from the exterior to be a blue 1950s police box...
and
TorchwoodTorchwood is a British science fiction television programme, created by Russell T Davies. It deals with the machinations and activities of the Cardiff branch of the fictional Torchwood Institute, who deal mainly with incidents involving extraterrestrials...
, has added much to this discussion. However, abiding by this definition leaves such stories without a convenient label, so this distinction has not been widely adopted.
Slash authors also write slash fiction which contains
transgenderTransgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to diverge from the normative gender roles....
themes and transgender/transsexual or intersex characters. As a result, the exact definition of the term within this respect has often been hotly debated within various slash fandoms. The strictest definition holds that only stories about relationships between two male partners ('M/M') are 'slash fiction', which has led to the evolution of the term
femslashFemslash is a subgenre of slash fan fiction which focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between female fictional characters. Typically, characters featured in femslash are heterosexual in the canon universe; however, similar fan fiction about lesbian characters are commonly labeled as...
. Slash-like fiction is also written in various Japanese
animeis animation originating in Japan. The world outside Japan regards anime as "Japanese animation". Anime originated about 1917.Anime, like manga , has a large audience in Japan and high recognition throughout the world...
or
mangaManga consist of comics and print cartoons , in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 20th century...
fandoms, but is referred to as shounen-ai or
yaoi[In careful Japanese enunciation, all three vowels are pronounced separately, for a three-mora word, .] is a popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by female authors...
for relationships between male characters, and shoujo-ai or yuri between female characters respectively.
Due to 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 describes heterosexual or homosexual relationships. It has also caused concern for slash writers who believe that while it can be erotic, slash is not by definition so, and that defining erotic fic alone as slash takes the word away from all-ages-suitable homo-romantic fan fiction. This may cause confusion when the quite unambiguous words 'erotica', 'adult', and 'porn' already exist along with fan-fiction terms such as 'lemon'. 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 slash, het (works focusing primarily on heterosexual relationships) and gen (works which do not include a romantic focus).
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.
Slash and the original media sources
For many people, slash is a controversial subject. In addition to the legal issues associated with traditional fan fiction, some people believe that it tarnishes established media characters to portray them in a way which was never illustrated canonically. But official disapproval of slash, specifically, is hard to find. As early as 1981, LucasFilms has issued legal notices to fans who wrote sexually-explicit stories). J. K. Rowling/Warner Brothers has sent cease and desist letters referencing "sexually explicit" writings on the web, (
Example cease and desist letters at Chilling Effects, and
Anne RiceAnne Rice is a best-selling American author of gothic and religious-themed books from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was married to poet and painter Stan Rice for 41 years until his death from cancer in 2002...
is notorious for attempts to stop production of any type of fanfiction based on her
Vampire Chronicles characters. Note that none of these specifically referenced slash fiction.
Some media creators seem down-right slash friendly. In the Angel DVD commentary for "
A Hole in the World"A Hole in the World" is episode 15 of season 5 in the television show Angel. Written and directed by series creator Joss Whedon, it was originally broadcast on 25 February, 2004 on the WB television network. In this episode, Fred is infected by the spirit of Illyria, an ancient demon who existed...
", Joss Whedon, the creator of Angel said, "Spike and Angel...they were hanging out for years and years and years. They were all kinds of deviant. Are people thinking they never...? Come on, people! They're open-minded guys!" as well as Spike saying "Angel and me have never been intimate. Except that one..." to Illyria in the episode "Power Play." Some people say they see similar evidence of such relationships in other shows such as
SmallvilleSmallville is an American television series developed by writers/producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, based on the DC Comics character Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The television series was initially broadcast by The WB, premiering on October 16, 2001...
,
Due SouthDue South is a Canadian television police comedy-drama from the 1990s. It was created by Paul Haggis and produced by Alliance Communications. The show first aired in 1994, and ran until 1999. It followed the adventures of fictional Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Constable Benton Fraser and...
and
SupernaturalSupernatural is an American drama/horror television series starring Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester and Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester, brothers who hunt demons and other figures of the paranormal. The series, which is filmed in Vancouver, BC, debuted on September 13, 2005 on The WB, and is now...
.
In the episode
The Monster At The End Of This Book of the TV show
SupernaturalSupernatural is an American drama/horror television series starring Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester and Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester, brothers who hunt demons and other figures of the paranormal. The series, which is filmed in Vancouver, BC, debuted on September 13, 2005 on The WB, and is now...
, the main characters encounter fictional representations of themselves in series of books. They find the on-line fandom, and comment about their activities including the writing of slash fanfiction. This is often referred to by fans of Supernatural as Wincest, based on the characters' surname (Winchester) and the fact that they are brothers (incest).
Demographics
According to what little demographic information is available, most of slash fandom is made up of heterosexual women with a college degree, though it also includes bisexual men and women, heterosexual and homosexual men, lesbians and transgender fans.
Terminology
Slash fiction has created and appropriated words to describe peculiarities found within the fandom. "Gayfic" is sometimes used to refer to stories focusing on gay male relationships, and "femslash" or "f/f" used to indicate that a work features female characters in slash relationships.
Slash fiction, like other fan fiction, sometimes borrows the
MPAA film rating systemThe Motion Picture Association of America's film-rating system is used in the U.S. and its territories to rate a film's thematic and content suitability for certain audiences...
to indicate the amount of sexual content in the story.Not all slash fiction has explicit sexual content – the interaction between two characters can be as innocent as holding hands or a chaste kiss, or even contain nothing but unfulfilled yearning; stories may be labeled "UST" for "unresolved sexual tension". Some sites require all stories to be rated and have warnings attached, often by using a
beta readerA beta reader is a person who reads a written work, generally fiction, with what has been described as "a critical eye, with the aim of improving grammar, spelling, characterization, and general style of a story prior to its release to the general public."The author or writer, who can be referred...
.
The term
no lemon is sometimes used to indicate fanfiction stories without sexual content. Anything with explicit content may be labeled "lemon". The term
lemon arose from the
animeis animation originating in Japan. The world outside Japan regards anime as "Japanese animation". Anime originated about 1917.Anime, like manga , has a large audience in Japan and high recognition throughout the world...
/
yaoi[In careful Japanese enunciation, all three vowels are pronounced separately, for a three-mora word, .] is a popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by female authors...
fandoms.
Lemon refers to a
hentai is a Japanese word that, in the West, is used when referring to sexually explicit or pornographic comics and animation, particularly those of Japanese origin such as anime, manga and computer games . In Japan it can be used to mean "metamorphosis" or "abnormality"...
anime series,
Cream Lemonis an H anime series with some in-depth storylines and classic artwork. The first Cream Lemon OVA was released in 1984, though Cream Lemon was not the first hentai OVA...
. Another term,
squick, most often used as a warning to refer to a reader's possible negative reaction to scenes in the text (often sexual) that some might find offensive or distressing. This may include
incestIncest is any sexual activity between close relatives irrespective of the ages of the participants and irrespective of their consent, that is illegal or socially taboo. The type of sexual activity and the nature of the relationship between persons that constitutes a breach of law or social taboo...
,
BDSMBDSM is a compound acronym derived from the terms bondage and discipline , dominance and submission , sadism and masochism ....
,
rapeRape, also referred to as sexual assault, is an assault by a person involving sexual intercourse with or without sexual penetration of another person without that person's consent....
, "MPreg" (
male pregnancyMale pregnancy refers to the incubation of one or more embryos or fetuses by the male of any species. Almost all pregnancies in the animal kingdom are carried by female organisms...
), gender swapping, and
tortureTorture, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, is:In addition to state-sponsored torture, individuals or groups may be motivated to inflict torture on others for similar reasons to those of a state; however, the motive for torture can also be for the sadistic gratification of...
. The term originated in the
Usenet newsgroupA usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
alt.sex.bondagealt.sex.bondage was a Usenet newsgroup that was originally created as part of the alt.sex hierarchy, and rapidly attracted people interested in alternate sexuality, becoming the centre of an online BDSM community.-History:...
in 1991. Squicks are often listed as a warning in the header of a fanfiction story.
The term "slasher" is used for someone who creates slash fiction, and the term "slashy" is used to mean "homoerotic". "Slashy moments" are those events in the canon storyline which slashers interpret as homoerotic, which inform the slashers' depiction of the characters in slash fiction.
Femslash
Femslash is a subgenre of slash fiction which focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between female fictional characters. Typically, characters featured in femslash are heterosexual in the canon universe; however, similar fan fiction about lesbian characters are commonly labeled as femslash for convenience. The term is generally applied only to fanworks based on Western
fandomFandom is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest...
s; the nearest anime/manga equivalents are more often called yuri and shōjo-ai fanfiction. Femslash is also known as "f/f slash", "femmeslash", and "saffic", the last term being a portmanteau of
SapphicSapphic can refer to:* Related to Sappho, a 7th century BC poetess** Sapphic stanza, a four line poetic form* Sapphic love, related to female homosexuality...
and fiction.
There is less femslash than there is slash based on male couples - it has been suggested that heterosexual female slash authors generally do not write femslash, and that it is rare to find a fandom with two sufficiently engaging female characters. Janeway/Seven is the main Star Trek femslash pairing, as only they have "an on-screen relationship fraught with deep emotional connection and conflict". Although it is debated whether fanfiction about
canonA canon, in terms of a fictional universe, is a body of material that is considered to be "genuine" or "official", that can be directly referenced as, or as if it were, material produced by the original author or creator of a series...
lesbians such as
WillowWillow Rosenberg is a fictional character created by Joss Whedon for the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was portrayed by Alyson Hannigan, who also played the character in three episodes of the show's spin-off, Angel and the pilot for Buffy the Animated Series .Willow is the...
and
TaraTara Maclay is a fictional character created by Joss Whedon for the cult television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, portrayed by Amber Benson. Tara is introduced in the fourth season as a romantic interest for one of the show's leads, Willow and is a recurring character in the show until the...
of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer counts as "slash", their relationship storylines are more coy than heterosexual ones, which entices Willow/Tara femslash authors to fill in the gaps in the known relationship storyline. It is "relatively recently" that male writers have begun writing femslash.
Chanslash
Chanslash is the controversial portrayal of underage characters in sexual situations in slash fiction. The prefix
chanJapanese uses a broad array of honorific suffixes for addressing or referring to people. These honorifics are gender-neutral and can be attached to first names as well as surnames....
most likely comes from the Japanese name suffix used as a term of endearment toward children or women. It may be a nod towards
yaoi[In careful Japanese enunciation, all three vowels are pronounced separately, for a three-mora word, .] is a popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by female authors...
fandoms, in which underage pairings are more commonplace. Owners of the intellectual property rights to characters in this type of slash are often unhappy with chanslash because of the potential legal ramifications and concern over negatively affecting the popularity of the character. Some studios owning the rights to slashed characters have issued
cease and desistA cease and desist is an order or request to halt an activity, or else face legal action. The recipient of the cease-and-desist may be an individual or an organization....
orders in the past as a result of this type of slash. Chanslash is also called
shotacon, sometimes shortened to , is a Japanese slang portmanteau of the phrase and describes an attraction to young boys, or an individual with such an attraction. Outside Japan, the term is used less often with this meaning. It refers to a genre of manga and anime wherein pre-pubescent or pubescent...
(abbreviated as "shouta" or "shota") when dealing with anime fanfiction.
Real person slash
Real person slash (RPS), also a subgenre of
real person fictionReal Person Fiction is a type of fan fiction featuring celebrities or other real people. In the past, terms such as actorfic were used to distinguish such stories from those based on fictional characters from movies or television series....
, involves taking a celebrity's public image and creating slash stories with them. Real person slash gained popularity with the 1990s rise of boy bands in the pop music industry. Though increasingly common, RPS is "a potential squick" to many slash readers. These journals often include disclaimers that explain their true (fictional) nature, and that authors are participants in role-playing games where they take on the persona of a celebrity. Henry Jenkins says that RPS may be "troubling" to the old guard of slash. Fans of real person slash state that the personas presented by the common figures of RPS such as boy bands, celebrities, athletes and pro wrestlers are "largely manufactured" for the pleasure of female fans, "so why not just run with them?"
Slash art
In addition to fiction, fans also create
artworkThe visual arts are art forms that focus on the creation of works which are primarily visual in nature, such as traditional plastic arts , modern visual arts , and design and crafts...
depicting media characters in same-sex relationship contexts. Initially, slash art was mostly used in covers and interior pages of fanzines, and sold to other fans at media and slash conventions. In recent years, more slash artwork has used widespread availability of imaging software, like
Adobe PhotoshopAdobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation software, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems...
, to manipulate photographs of their subjects to produce romantic or erotic images (often referred to as
manips) which imply a homosexual relationship, either as static pictures or animated GIFs. When the manipulated photos depict real people instead of media characters, the creation of these images can be as contentious as RPS, and for many of the same reasons.
Slash vidding
Vidding has existed in media fandom since the 1980s, and slash vidding is still a popular movement within vidding. Slash vidders take clips of characters (ones generally not written as gay, or in a relationship together), and though juxtaposition, song choice and other techniques, create the slash relationship on screen. Vidding used to be very guarded within the slash community, among other reasons because the songs used in vids are copyrighted. When vidders started putting their vids online, their sites were routinely password protected, etc.
Today, there are thousands of vids, and vid-like projects, available on YouTube and other video sites. Many of these vids are made by slash (and gen) fans, but enormous numbers of them are made by people who have never heard of media fandom. The previous secrecy of vidding fans has come to seem unnecessary, but there is still a community ethos of not freely giving out a vidder's URL.
See also
- Erotic fantasy
- Fan fiction
Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
- Girlfags and guydykes
Girlfag and guydyke are terms that developed in queer and pomosexual subcultures. Girlfag refers to a biologically female individual who feels a strong romantic or erotic attraction towards gay males or male bisexuals or their milieu...
- Glossary of fan fiction terms
- Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction
Further reading
- Cicioni, Mirna (1998). "Male Pair Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing." In C. Harris & A. Alexander (Eds.) Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity. Cresskil, New Jersey: Hampton.
- Penley, Constance (1997). NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. New York: Verso. ISBN 0-86091-617-0.
- Penley, Constance (1992). "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture." In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies. Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992. ISBN 0-415-90345-9.
- Bacon-Smith, Camile (1991). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-1379-3.
- Jenkins, Henry
Henry Jenkins III is an American media scholar, currently Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program with William Uricchio...
(1992). Textual Poachers. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90572-9.
- Slash Fiction/Fanfiction - The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments
- Slash Friction
- Is Slash an Alternative Medium?
- Gay Bible stories suprise [sic] but don't worry community
- Sonia K. Katyal, 'Performance, property, and the slashing of gender in fan fiction,' in American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, vol. 14, no. 3 (2006):461–518
- Further information on slash fiction and culture can be found at Fanlore, the wiki of the gen, adult/het and slash media fandom communities.