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release the krakon!
So here's my term paper for WMST 3100, Intro to Gay & Lesbian Studies. I know how fandom is, so I'm resigned to the fact that you will now commence writing in your lj's about how unutterably wrong I have gotten it all.
Anyway, many, many thanks to my twelve research subjects; you went above and beyond the call of duty, and it was hard not to make the paper just quote after quote of all the interesting and clever things you said. Enjoy reading for your quotes *g*
Also, okay, look! I'M SORRY for the "erotica" thing! It's an academic paper, okay, I thought it sounded academic. Far be it from me to diss anybody's porn. I like porn! I love porn! Girls like porn! Jiminy cricket, people. *g*
What If I Were Free?:
Queer Meanings and Identities for Women in Speculative Fiction Fandom
Speculative fiction as genre has always had a contradictory relationship with sexual orientation, at times embracing both liberation and conservatism. At its best, SF challenges its readers' experiences and assumptions by suggesting that all experiences ultimately depend on context; SF fans are attracted to the genre because of its exoticism and otherness, and they internalize the idea that these characters have different lives than their readers do because they are quite literally in a different world where the rules are different. SF fans talk about their genre as based on the question "What If?" But by saying that every story begins with a big What If, the necessary corollary is that if something changes in the world, there are repercussions that are felt down to the level of the individual lives and events that fiction covers.
Potentially, then, SF is a conceptual vehicle by which people can begin to imagine social changes that would have real impact on their lives. Hollinger calls this process "denormalization" (Hollinger 197-198), meaning that what at one time may have seemed to be natural law, so normalized by a reader's environment as to be inevitable, can become, through the process of examination that speculative fiction employs, a subject for inquiry and even challenge. Hollinger says that, "Science fiction would seem to be ideally suited, as a narrative mode, to the construction of imaginative challenges to the smoothly oiled technologies of heteronormativity."
Many of my research participants also experienced SF as a narrative device that can liberate the reader from the rigidly defined view of sexual orientation that dominates current social conversation in the public arena. Speaking particularly of her experiences with DC Comics, she says, "It would be equally *wrong* to me to write the vast majority of these characters as either totally straight, totally gay, or totally bisexual. There's a certain fluidity.... It *does* seem to work/feel/*read* better in SF/F contexts, where canon often demands the audience step out of the normative definitions of human relationships in *some* way, shape, or form." Another discussed her early reading of a fantasy writer well known for including non-heterosexual characters in her work, saying that she dates her experiences with queer texts, "from the time I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Heritage of Hastur at age 13 and figured out that all "homosexuality" meant was 'oh, these two guys/girls love each other (or just find each other really attractive), of *course* they want to have sex'--as opposed to being, you know, some totally other activity that no one would really explain to me."
In his article, "Homosexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy," James Riemer also notes that the strategy adopted by most SF writers who choose to write non-heterosexual elements into their work is to change the social rules of their fictional world to loosen or erase the social stigma that modern culture applies to sexuality that does not conform to a heterosexual norm (Riemer 146). He views this strategy as equalizing, placing the homosexual and heterosexual characters on an equal footing, with their sexual selves being relevant to their stories but not the central feature, in contrast to "mainstream homosexual novels," whose focus is the characters' sexuality as such (Riemer 160). This is an idea that will recur throughout this paper, because it recurred many times in the responses from my research participants, who also overwhelmingly seem to feel most comfortable with the presentation of queer material within texts as strictly personal matters for the characters having to do with their specific situations and relationships as opposed to any "identity" that other readers might choose to impose on them. When they describe their own sexual sense of self, they tend in the same direction: even those who have been extremely active in LGBT rights activism or have a background in LGBT studies (many of the participants) and who consider themselves "out" at almost every level of their lives (nearly all of them) resist any taint of essentialism. They tend to view their sexual responses as personal and individual matters, and only the intolerance and condemnation of outsiders as "political" issues requiring solidarity and collective response.
A few texts were mentioned as formative or significant in terms of dealing overtly with queer issues, and often those texts were viewed ambivalently. One participant said, "I remember the first time I read Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", and how it seemed to really *get* the polyamorous and bisexual nature of humanity as I understood it at the time, while simultaneously being so utterly sexist and homophobic." Several mentioned Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness as a queer SF text. That particular reading of the book is potentially problematic; as much as the fluidity of desire is a feature of that book, the more dominant feature is the aliens' physical fluidity as they literally change their sex. That queer readers can identify with LeGuin's characters while being so separated from their experience of sex and sexuality by biological necessity is a tribute to SF readers' ability to gain deep insight out of metaphor, but it is still not a book that overtly challenges heteronormativity for a fixed-sex species such as humans.
Another recurring writer, along with LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, was Mercedes Lackey, a prolific fantasy writer who has written about a number of self-identified gay male characters. Janice Crosby, in her survey of fantasy fiction's relationship to the women's spirituality community, also devotes significant attention to Mercedes Lackey, particularly to an early series of books and short stories featuring an intimate, though non-sexual, relationship between two female characters. "The bond between [Tarma and Kethry]," Crosby writes, "which is one of both sisterhood and a type of marriage, could be considered 'lesbian' in the broadest sense of 'woman focused'" (Crosby 79), and also suggests that the privileged nature of Tarma and Kethry's "alternative family" within the text is one that "supports single mothers and lesbian couples in their contemporary struggle for acceptance as family" (Crosby 75-76). At the same time, of course, their relationship is not a sexual one within Lackey's text, and in fact an essay by Lackey that prefaces a later collection of Tarma and Kethry stories specifically claims that she wrote Kethry as heterosexual and Tarma as asexual as a method of resistance to what she perceived as a glut of swords-and-sorcery fiction at the time (the first story in the series was published in 1988) with lesbian protagonists. None of my research participants seem to remember this abundance of lesbian swords-and-sorcery, but whatever Lackey encountered that made her feel that heterosexual women were under-represented in the genre, it adds a problematic element to queer readings of Tarma and Kethry.
The same problems of intent and audience reception would recur a decade later on television through Xena and Gabrielle, also inspired by the swords-and-sorcery tradition and also positioned as a mated pair though not sexually involved within the text. The television show Xena: Warrior Princess has engendered much more discussion in terms of its sexual politics than the novels of Mercedes Lackey, and the variety of interpretations of the Xena/Gabrielle relationship is no doubt one of the keys to the show's broad appeal and success. At the same time that it is championed for its "openness" to multiple readings, however, the fact that Xena and Gabrielle's relationship was never explicitly endorsed by the text as a sexual relationship, the ultimate result is that avowed homophobes could watch the same show that as a lesbian viewer without being drawn in to any analysis whatsoever of the basic homophobic assumptions about female friendships; many viewers bitterly resisted interpretations of Xena and Gabrielle that they felt "tarnished" or "slandered" the characters by labeling them as queer, and the show's silence on the matter in a sense colluded with these viewers by capitalizing on a large lesbian fan base in order to produce a text wherein the characters were carefully kept at least theoretically attractive to and, more importantly, available to men (Helford, 138-142). While clearly an outstanding marketing strategy, Xena: Warrior Princess' value as an example of a queer text is reduced substantially by the approach.
So although SF is theoretically open to radical restructurings of sexual norms, relatively few widely popular and accessible SF texts actually are clearly and unambiguously about queer subjects, adopting instead the strategy of reducing characters' sexual identity to one incidental facet of their lives (the strategy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels or Babylon 5's handling of Susan Ivanova), or of propagating a kind of quasi-queerness that mirrors real non-heterosexual experience partially but not entirely (by completely sexualizing it, such as Heinlein does, or completely de-sexualizing it, as with the Tarma and Kethry stories or Xena). Ironically, one of the worst offenders has been Star Trek, the franchise whose depth of world-building and vibrance of fan culture has made it the foundation on which SF media fandom was built (Bacon-Smith, 11). Star Trek's thirty-year-long resistance to the mere idea of incorporating a recurring queer character into the universe has been a constant thorn in the side of many of its fans, for whom the Trek slogan "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination" has been a fandom ethical precept from the beginning. Referring to one particular Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where a female main character separated from her alien lover because it had adopted a new body -- female, not male like the previous body -- one research participant gave the succinct summation, "Stupid writing completely inconsistent with the rest of the canon Trekiverse ... I expect an enlightened futuristic society to be evenly enlightened."
SF fandom itself is distinct from and has co-evolved with the SF genre; the first science fiction convention was held in 1936 (Bacon-Smith 9), and from that point on, the history of the genre and the history of the fandom have been unique and fruitful. "Fandom" is itself a broad term with multiple meanings; it can refer to the fan community surrounding SF or other genres of fiction (mysteries and romances both have fandoms), or surrounding a medium rather than a genre, such as comics fandom, anime fandom, or "media" fandom ("media" in this sense generally being used to refer specifically to television). Further subsets exist, each of which adopts the term "fandom" for itself, so that individual texts have fandoms (Harry Potter fandom or Stargate: SG-1 fandom), specific activities of fans have fandoms (costuming fandom or vidding fandom, which produces music videos out of media footage), and even subgenres of fanfiction have fandoms (I will particularly address slash fandom later in this paper).
It is crucial to understand that "fan" in this context does not mean simply someone who enjoys a particular genre. Fandom is a concretely understood experience, and though outsiders primarily identify fans as obsessive receivers and collectors of trivia (memorably mocked in a famous William Shatner Saturday Night Live sketch or by The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy), fans view themselves as characterized primarily by their interaction with their source materials. In the foundational academic work on fandom (focused on media fandom, which incorporates and widely overlaps with SF fandom), Henry Jenkins defines fans as "readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests, as spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture. ... Their activities pose important questions about the ability of media producers to constrain the creation and circulation of meaning. Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media" (Jenkins 24).
Those people who come to fandom from groups which are significantly disenfranchised from mass culture -- including feminists and queer women -- are therefore not only responding to the texts but to the experience of fandom itself as an outlet for their needs and interests. SF may contain the conceptual building blocks for dissent from the sexual status quo, but fandom is where people are actually engaged in the work of examining, refining, and claiming those concepts. Where some of my research participants were brought into fandom by discovering other people who shared an active and energetic love of the same texts that they did, others were brought in by fandom itself and developed the interest in the texts that was required to survive and thrive as a fan. One respondent detailed her childhood experiences of SF, but consciously separated them from her "fan" life, saying, "For me, being fannish is all about being part of that community. "Feral fan" is something of a contradiction. I definitely had all of the usual markers -- obsessive rereading/watching of canon material, textual analysis, fanfiction writing, mary sueism -- but none of it counted until it was shared." Another went even further, claiming never to have been "a fan of anything but fandom" and saying that "I don't even KNOW the canon for
most of the fandoms I read in. I'm a fan of fandom, the writing, the community, the occasional absurdity, and the porn."
Fandom in this sense, as a community of people with a shared history, habits, interests, and beliefs about their relationship with their source texts, bears a great deal of similarity to other conceptual and practical models that come out of feminist and lesbian experience. In her history of lesbian writing, Bonnie Zimmerman defines the lesbian community as "a space, or a group of people, or even a concept, within which the individual lesbian feels herself welcome and at home. ... It may be realized in a bar, a political group, a music festival, or a family," (Zimmerman, 121), and fandom is one other space -- or group of people, or concept, as the definition of fandom encompasses all three of those things -- where outsiders to mainstream culture can locate themselves comfortably. Zimmerman also deals with the relationship between producers and consumers of art, quoting a 1974 statement originally published in off our backs by a group calling itself the Collective Lesbian International Terrors, which says, "We are also training ourselves to respond [to oppression] in writing, to make up for the present lack of Lesbian literature and writing. This is a beginning step in demolishing the 'creative artist' or 'writer' mystique that separates and inhibits us, giving some the role of active 'star' while the rest remain the passive audience." The desire of the lesbian feminist community to be actively engaged with media and text closely mirrors the pride fans take in the products of their own creative interactions with text. Zimmerman says that, "The breaking of the long silence of lesbian speech has led to a flood of intense, immediate, intimate, and sometimes awkward written expression" (Zimmerman, 19). No one familiar with fanfiction can fail to recognize how applicable those adjectives are to the work that fans so often produce for one another.
Women's role in the fan community is the subject, directly or indirectly, of much of the study of fandom that comes out of the fields of ethnology and cultural studies. Camille Bacon-Smith's 1992 survey of fan culture specifically treats the female-driven aspects of the culture; she begins her book by describing her desire to "jump up and down and scream, 'Look what I found! A conceptual space where women can come together and create -- to investigate new forms for their art and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men have placed on women's public behavior! Not a place or a time, but a state of being -- of giving each other permission'" (Bacon-Smith, 3). What she is describing is exactly what Nina Auerbach describes in Communities of Women as "a furtive, unofficial, often underground entity...defined by the complex, shifting, often contradictory attitudes it evokes. Each community defines itself as a 'distinct existence,' flourishing outside familiar categories and calling for a plurality of perspectives and judgements" (Auerbach, 11). The difference is that Auerbach is discussing communities that exist only in fiction, and the fandom that Bacon-Smith studied exists in the real world. Even overviews of fandom that do not intentionally focus on the role of women, such as Jenkins's, has to engage with the degree to which fandom is shaped by women, which Jenkins does by positioning himself as both an insider and an outsider to fandom, "a male fan within a predominantly female fan culture" (Jenkins, 6).
Both Jenkins's and Bacon-Smith's studies focus on media fandom, which is intimately linked to though not identical with SF fandom. SF fandom is admittedly much more male-dominated, although not as male-dominated as the stereotype implies, and the erasure of women's experience of SF fandom from a cultural studies perspective mirrors the related erasure of the fan experience in general from the history of the SF genre. "Unlike its media counterpart," Merrick says, "studies of literary SF have neglected the processes of production and reception of the text, a rather surprising omission for a genre which has been so closely associated with and even shaped by its unique group of fans. Despite the importance of fans to the SF community, their influence and even presence is at best marginal in most critical accounts, even though the experiences of female and feminist fans have been an integral part of the development of feminist SF" (Merrick, 49-50). Although "the significance of the genre lies in its extratextual dimensions, such as fan readings, zines, cons, and the close interaction between publishers, editors, authors, and audience that epitomizes the 'SF community,'" the need for cultural histories of women's experiences in SF fandom, as opposed to the history of women SF writers and feminist SF texts, is still largely unfulfilled (Merrick, 58-59), which is why the work of academics like Jenkins and Bacon-Smith, among others, in creating an ethnology of media fandom is such an important resource for SF fans. The fact that many fans use "fandom" to refer to these two loci of fan activity more or less interchangeably, making no significant distinction between their role as media fans and SF fans, also means that studies of women's fan use of media culture are invaluable in approaching the topic of women's fan use of SF texts.
Although many aspects of fan culture and behavior have nothing in particular to do with sexuality of any kind, and in those arenas the queer fan may not feel that her experience is especially distinctive, in the circles and conceptual spaces where sex and romance are primary concerns, the relationship between one's queer perspective and one's fan perspective becomes incredibly rich and complex. Those spaces have always been accessible and visible within fandom; one of the most significant dimensions of the source material that female fans have traditionally worked to open up is the romantic and sexual dimension of the characters' lives which are often de-emphasized in commercial, mainstream texts. A relatively recent fannish term for this perspective is "shipping," a term adopted out of X-Files fandom, where it referred specifically to "relationshippers," or fans who focused their energy on the sexual dynamics between Mulder and Scully, but the activity predates the term significantly. When the "ship" involved is a queer relationship, fandom has not only a unique term for that perspective, but an entire community, even a sub-fandom organized around it: slash fandom.
Like shippers, slashers adopted their name out of a specific context -- Star Trek fandom, where the abbreviation K/S was used to signal that a piece of fanfiction "slashed" Kirk and Spock, redefining their relationship as romantic and/or sexual in nature. What seemed like a bizarre event to many people -- women investing their time and their creative and emotional energy in queered readings of two male characters -- proved sensational enough that it generated a fair amount of critical interest both inside and outside the fandom. Slash generally takes up at least a chapter all to itself in any book on fan culture, and has been generating essays since at least 1985, when an article by feminist SF writer and fan Joanna Russ, entitled "Another Addict Raves About K/S," exposed the insular and secretive world of Star Trek slash fandom to the attention of outsiders, somewhat to the chagrin of the slashers themselves. At that point in time, the assumption was that if such scandalous fan activity was known of by non-slashers, there would be some sort of repercussion, some reprisal by the larger fandom or even by Star Trek's producers. (In fact, it was not a completely unrealistic fear; as slash became more visible, there was resistance to it, although slash fandom as it exists today is so incredibly large and vibrant that complaints about slash are routinely ignored -- it is literally too big and too influential to put a stop to, even if a small minority of particularly conservative fans would like to do so.) The spring 2003 issue of Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture contained an article called "Fan/tastic Voyage: A Journey Into the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction," by Nay Thrupkaew, one of the more recent and higher-profile attempts to address the subject.
For most of my research participants, the point at which their sexual identity intersected with their fan activity was in slash. Traditionally, critical interpretation of slash has avoided making close connections between homosexuality and slash, preferring to view it as an essentially heterosexual function, since it normally consists of women fantasizing sexually about men; many slashers would no more see themselves as operating in a queer space than a heterosexual man might while watching all-female pornography. Two early observers of slash who had an impact on later critical studies were Diana Veith and Patricia Frazer Lamb, who went to some pains in their study to deny that connection, saying that, "These novels, stories, and poems are not about sex or gender; they are certainly not about male homosexuality as such" (Veith & Lamb, 254), and perhaps even more confusingly, "K/S narratives are about two loving equals; within their relationship neither is 'masculine' while the other is 'feminine,' stronger or weaker, 'husband' or 'wife.' These stories are not about two gay males and should not be categorized as examples of homosexual literature -- either male or female" (Veith & Lamb, 252-253). This has been one popular means of viewing slash fandom, conceptualizing it as a straight women's activity that allows women to imagine idealized relationships free of gender and power baggage that fans otherwise bring to heterosexual couples in the text. The cliche has been that within slash the characters are not gay, they are merely in love with each other; one of my research participants said, "Certainly I've never been a fan of WNGWJLEO -- hate it actually," in complete confidence that anyone who knows slash will be able to read that as an acronym for We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other. Jenkins quotes a fan in his book who wryly renames the convention, "I'm not gay, I just like to suck Spock's cock" (Jenkins, 220). That reading of the characters as firmly divided from any issue of sexual identity is a standard trope of fandom, something slash fans are so familiar with as to make it a cliche.
Slash fans who are also queer, of course, seem less likely to accept that understanding of the characters, and many of my research participants disavowed it, either in passing or quite strenuously, although at the same time some of them had some discomfort with using slash for "political" purposes, rather than as a genre whose primary duty was to serve fans' sexual and emotional interests. The "We're not gay" understanding of slash is less common in fandom now than it was fifteen years ago when a great deal of the foundational studies of fandom were being done; it tends to be considered passe by heterosexual as well as queer audiences. There has been an influence from the ideology of "queerness" itself, whereby fans are much more willing than before to subsume anything sexually non-normative under the generic umbrella of "queer," rather than to insist on dogmatic distinctions between slash as "examples of homosexual literature" or not. At the same time, although the concepts of "queer" or even of "homosexual" held at best a highly marginalized place in the history of slash, the connection is clearly there, both in the obvious manner, and in the underlying ideology of slash itself. Russ defined the central question of slash as by saying, "The 'What If' behind K/S is: What If I Were Free?" (Veith & Lamb, 254). Although for Russ the issue was gender and "freedom" means freedom from culturally imposed expectations that define lovers as holding different roles within their relationship based on maleness and femaleness (Kirk and Spock, being not-women, can share power within their relationship free of the pressures women face to abrogate their own power within relationships), what her insight contains is the seeds of modern slash fandom's more overtly and proudly queer sensibility. "What If I Were Free?" could just as much mean freedom from compulsory heterosexuality and the erasure of the reality of sexual desire outside of heterosexual relationships, and for many slash fans now, it does mean exactly that.
More significant, possibly, than the relative queerness of the art and fiction that slash fandom produces is the increasing queer perspective of the community itself. While after eight years of research in the 1980's, Bacon-Smith can say in her demographic data that, "my sole lesbian informant ... says that she has met only seven other lesbian women in fandom. I have seen only one fanzine, regularly published out of the U.K., which openly caters to a predominantly gay audience, and this is the only place where I have ever seen stories or poetry depicting lesbian relationships written by women in media fandom. I have never heard the sexual orientation of a fan discussed in either a positive or negative way in relation to a fan's writing or choice of reading material, nor have I ever seen it as an issue in the social interactions of the group" (Bacon-Smith, 321). One of my older research participants, who was participating in fandom during that time period, says, "First wave, when I was using fandom as a way to explore my own sexuality, I was very aware of the trope that slash fans were all straight women, and often accepted that as fact (whether it was or not, and I think there is reason to question that)."
The majority of research participants, however, entered the fandom years after Bacon-Smith's data was collected, many of them through the Internet, which has changed the character of fandom in ways that have yet to be fully examined. This younger generation has largely come to slash fandom already either queer-identified or sensitive to queer issues, and their experience of the slash community is the polar opposite of Bacon-Smith's description of a group of women, almost uniformly heterosexual, for whom sexual orientation is "never discussed" and "never seen as an issue."
One participant says, "I'm more out in fandom just because fandom is a sexualized space for me; my interaction here and my discussions and friendships revolve around a sort of shared platonic sexuality that makes all sexual things, including orientation, fair topics of conversation." Another says, "I feel pretty comfortable as a queer fan. I think it helps that I've been in "younger", "hipper" fandoms where being bi is chic -- even though I'm [lesbian,] not bi, it breaks up the heterosexual monotony." One succinctly says, "In fandom I assume everyone's queer unless they tell me differently, and I assume everyone's assuming the same thing about me." Almost all of them say that the environment of "their corner of fandom" is both sex-positive and queer-positive, a place where few limits are placed on whatever desires fans choose to claim, with social distinction being drawn not between hetero- and homosexual, but between fans who are comfortable with a wide range of sexual realities and those who are limited in what they can accept. One respondent says, "One of my favourite aspects of slash fandom is that it is straight chicks talking about sex. It seems immensely significant to me because the straight chicks I grew up with professed not to like sex or penises. Hanging out with porn-obsessed women suits me! I've never felt uncomfortable in media and slash fandom but then I don't hang out with anti-slash weirdos." Whereas heterosexual slash fans have traditionally understood the pairing of beloved characters to be the raison d'etre of slash fandom, fans with a queer identity seem more likely to conceptualize slash fandom as an arena for discussing sex and sexuality -- sometimes in terms of their philosophies about heteronormativity and queer theory, sometimes only for erotic purposes, often both at the same time.
The role that slash fills in expressing women's sexual fantasies is a particular issue for slash fans. Not one but three of my respondents specifically upbraided me for my use of the word "erotica" in the questions I gave them; their term of preference is "porn." One said, "Erotica is a pissant term used by people who don't want to be associated with porn," and another saw a veiled sexism in my use of the term in a question about female/female slash and its absence in a similar question about male/male slash. She said, "What, because they're girls it can't be porn {g}? Sorry, this is just one of those issues which annoys me.... it's like one of those, 'women don't sweat, they perspire/glow/whatever' statements, and I'm always just like, please, girls can fuck too." At the same time that many of my research participants expressly object to treatments within slash fandom of women that overemphasize their alleged relational and caring nature at the expense of being portrayed as "real women feeling real and urgent desire," they also adhere to traditional female sexual values in other ways by expressing a strong preference for pornography that is "in character," that is true to the personalities of the characters and their textual relationship with one another. What they want is "hot sex with strong characterization" or "strong, recognizable characterization, an interesting and tension-fraught relationship, and hot sex."
All of my research participants expressed an interest in and involvement with both male/male and female/female subjects within slash fandom, including the women who identified themselves strictly as lesbian. Traditional interpretations of slash have often advanced the idea that women in general are attracted to slash because it allows them to identify with and interact with male characters who are more dynamic and interesting than the female characters in source texts, and although all of my respondents had a long list of female characters in SF that they have great attachments toward, many of them also echoed this sense, particularly in childhood and adolescence, of being drawn to male characters by default, due to the relative weakness of available female characters. One said, "As a child, I think I imprinted on male characters because they were closest to being three-dimensional - most females (books and television/movies) seemed flat and boring, there to be rescued or be eye candy. This has stuck with me; I still tend to relate to male characters primarily," a sentiment which another phrased more succinctly as, "I identified strongly with boys in literature, as girl characters were crap." Other respondents, however, employed typically fan strategies of extracting positive meaning out of texts that may not inherently be positive or empowering; one Dr. Who fan said, "I had a pash for most of the Doctor's sidekicks particularly Sarah Jane Smith, Leila, first Romana and Ace. I was fairly devastated when the show was cancelled and there was no more Ace. While all these women were sidekicks and some of them spent more time screaming than anything else they were still out there, out in the universe having a life far away from mine." Most mentioned a number of recent female characters and female-centered texts; almost every reference to Xena or to Buffy the Vampire Slayer was prefaced with an "of course"; it was simply understood that I would recognize why a queer woman would single out those texts as objects of fascination. Though they did not have identical responses to those texts (some spoke fondly of "Xena and Gabs' true and immortal love," while one expressed discomfort at a fandom perception of Xena and Gabrielle that she felt was "too lesbian" and "not queer enough" -- some focused on Buffy's use of out queer characters and some on its metaphorical use of vampirism, magic, and the role of the outsider to speak to queer experiences; many identified the recurring character of Faith, semi-heroic and semi-villainous with an ambiguous sexuality, as pivotal for their perceptions of where queer women could fit in on television), there was a collective understanding from within slash fandom that these texts -- both shows that have been canceled some years ago -- have continuing relevance and meaning to queer audiences. One called Buffy the Vampire Slayer "very much a text about sexuality, about gender issues. Vampirism as queer, blurred sexual lines, unconventional sexual practices--the show was practically a primer on queer issues."
One idea that recurred when queer women spoke about their feelings about male/male and female/female slash -- an issue I had never seen addressed in formal criticism about slash fandom -- is that my respondents tended to view themselves as consuming and producing more male/male slash at least partially because their standards were so much higher for female/female slash. After discussing male/male slash and then turning to female/female, one said, "To some degree my answers here are close to those above (re m/m) although I suspect I might be a little more critical of [f/f] stories that don't feel realistic - even though I know they're fantasy, I also know they reflect familiar lives/lifestyles, and I want some recognition of that reality." Another said, "I am much more concerned with whether F/F stories deal with sexuality in a realistic way. It feels more personal. I think that's why I haven't written F/F up until now--it feels much more revealing to me as a person and a queer woman." The issue of realism, although not entirely absent in discussions of m/m slash, was almost a constant as queer women discussed their feelings about women's sexual relationships in fanfiction: "I think it's more important with f/f than with m/m that the sexuality be realistic," "I'm more inclined to study the SF/F setting and its effects when reading f/f slash, because it's more important to me that f/f be realistic," and "I do like F/F erotica, but I’m very fussy about it. Unrealistic M/M sex might not bother me, but unrealistic F/F is guaranteed to put me off" were all representative comments; other respondents mentioned being sometimes blase about "out-of-character" male/male slash if it at least served as passable porn, but expressed frustration and even a sense of betrayal when it came to female/female slash that didn't seem to leave room for their insights into what female sexuality was "really" like. Their need to identify with female characters in slash may be much more pronounced than their need to do so with male characters, meaning that they sometimes find female/female slash less satisfying, or at least less forgivable in its flaws.
In general the fans who participated in my research felt that they approached SF and SF fandom somewhat differently than heterosexual fans would, although they tended to stay vague as to how, uncomfortable with the idea of trying to describe or interpret the experiences of the "typical" heterosexual fan. Many of them found SF a genre that is comfortable for exploring sexuality issues, and all of them have found within SF fandom a community that is overwhelmingly affirming of their experiences and actively interested in their perspective. One person drew a specific parallel between her desires as a fan to have relationships with other fans and her desires as a lesbian to have a relationship with the LGBT community, describing the discovery of both the fan and LGBT communities as, "more a feeling of *recognition* than *revelation*. As with fandom (or, perhaps more accurately, fandom was also like this), the discovery of a community of people made me want to join in." Many of them spoke interchangeably from a reader's and writer's perspective, a common type of bi-location in fandom, where fans are assumed to be both consumers of texts and producers of other types of texts, whether those be specifically artistic or commentary on the meaning of the source material, and at the times when they spoke as writers, they evidenced a particular enthusiasm for the SF genre as a means of opening up alternative perspectives on queer issues. One said, "I think fantasy and sf provides a medium, especially for "queer" writers / readers to find a sort of "sexual utopia". It's a way to show what our world COULD be like, if only people would be open-minded enough to accept people for who they are," while many spoke fondly of particular fictional universes where they can write without binding the characters into dominant modes of modern thought on the meaning of sexual behavior and identity; one put a joking twist on the subject by saying, "SF/F can be used as a cheap way to get [characters] together - just put Spock into ponn farr [Vulcan mating frenzy] and Bob's your uncle - but it can also be an incredibly rich source of world-building ideas."
Possibly over and beyond any other response to fandom, however, queer women are empowered by the contact they have with other women in a setting where owning and interpreting female visions of sexual possibility is not only not restricted by taboo, but actively encouraged. Many of the respondents had a supportive circle of queer- and queer-positive friends outside of fandom, and many of them were also quick to remind me that many of their most supportive and understanding friends within fandom were heterosexual women. But nearly all of them still identified their experiences in fandom as queer experiences in fandom; fandom for them has been, among other things, an ongoing conversation with a particular relevance to their developing sense of sexual identity and understanding of what sexuality means. I imagine that all of them would somehow see themselves in the words of one fan, who says that, "The first gay people I ever met, I met through fandom (Rocky Horror), and it was in that community that I first began to feel that it was okay to be whatever I was: a big ol' geek with a voracious and queer sexual appetite. That feeling of validation has continued in media fandom, where I am not only okay, I am not even the biggest freak on the block anymore. The community of brilliant and open-minded women is the thing that keeps me in fandom whether I'm into a show or not. I have made real friends here, and I have been able to share myself wholly without fear of being attacked, shamed or misunderstood. ... And I've met plenty of queer heroes in fandom, women who are out and proud, women who are kinky and proud, women who are voracious and proud, women who are straight but not narrow. I feel that we are all part of the same whole."
Bibliography
Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, 1978.
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom & the Creation of Popular
Myth, 1992.
Crosby, Janice C. Cauldron of Changes: Feminist Spirituality in Fantastic Fiction, 2000.
Helford, Elyse Rae. “Feminism, Queer Studies, and the Sexual Politics of Xena: Warrior
Princess.” Fantasy Girls: Gender & the New Universe of Science Fiction & Fantasy
Television, ed. Elyse Rae Helford, 2000.
Hollinger, Veronica. “(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the
Defamiliarization of Gender.” Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices &
Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, ed. Marleen Barr, 2000.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, 1992.
Lamb, Patricia Frazer & Diana L. Veith. “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines.”
Erotic Universe: Sexuality & Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo, 1986.
Merrick, Helen. “The Readers Feminism Doesn’t See: Feminist Fans, Critics, and Science
Fiction.” Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture & Its Audience, ed. Deborah Cartwell,
1997.
Riemer, James D. “Homosexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy.” Erotic Universe: Sexuality
& Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo, 1986.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989, 1990.
Anyway, many, many thanks to my twelve research subjects; you went above and beyond the call of duty, and it was hard not to make the paper just quote after quote of all the interesting and clever things you said. Enjoy reading for your quotes *g*
Also, okay, look! I'M SORRY for the "erotica" thing! It's an academic paper, okay, I thought it sounded academic. Far be it from me to diss anybody's porn. I like porn! I love porn! Girls like porn! Jiminy cricket, people. *g*
What If I Were Free?:
Queer Meanings and Identities for Women in Speculative Fiction Fandom
Speculative fiction as genre has always had a contradictory relationship with sexual orientation, at times embracing both liberation and conservatism. At its best, SF challenges its readers' experiences and assumptions by suggesting that all experiences ultimately depend on context; SF fans are attracted to the genre because of its exoticism and otherness, and they internalize the idea that these characters have different lives than their readers do because they are quite literally in a different world where the rules are different. SF fans talk about their genre as based on the question "What If?" But by saying that every story begins with a big What If, the necessary corollary is that if something changes in the world, there are repercussions that are felt down to the level of the individual lives and events that fiction covers.
Potentially, then, SF is a conceptual vehicle by which people can begin to imagine social changes that would have real impact on their lives. Hollinger calls this process "denormalization" (Hollinger 197-198), meaning that what at one time may have seemed to be natural law, so normalized by a reader's environment as to be inevitable, can become, through the process of examination that speculative fiction employs, a subject for inquiry and even challenge. Hollinger says that, "Science fiction would seem to be ideally suited, as a narrative mode, to the construction of imaginative challenges to the smoothly oiled technologies of heteronormativity."
Many of my research participants also experienced SF as a narrative device that can liberate the reader from the rigidly defined view of sexual orientation that dominates current social conversation in the public arena. Speaking particularly of her experiences with DC Comics, she says, "It would be equally *wrong* to me to write the vast majority of these characters as either totally straight, totally gay, or totally bisexual. There's a certain fluidity.... It *does* seem to work/feel/*read* better in SF/F contexts, where canon often demands the audience step out of the normative definitions of human relationships in *some* way, shape, or form." Another discussed her early reading of a fantasy writer well known for including non-heterosexual characters in her work, saying that she dates her experiences with queer texts, "from the time I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Heritage of Hastur at age 13 and figured out that all "homosexuality" meant was 'oh, these two guys/girls love each other (or just find each other really attractive), of *course* they want to have sex'--as opposed to being, you know, some totally other activity that no one would really explain to me."
In his article, "Homosexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy," James Riemer also notes that the strategy adopted by most SF writers who choose to write non-heterosexual elements into their work is to change the social rules of their fictional world to loosen or erase the social stigma that modern culture applies to sexuality that does not conform to a heterosexual norm (Riemer 146). He views this strategy as equalizing, placing the homosexual and heterosexual characters on an equal footing, with their sexual selves being relevant to their stories but not the central feature, in contrast to "mainstream homosexual novels," whose focus is the characters' sexuality as such (Riemer 160). This is an idea that will recur throughout this paper, because it recurred many times in the responses from my research participants, who also overwhelmingly seem to feel most comfortable with the presentation of queer material within texts as strictly personal matters for the characters having to do with their specific situations and relationships as opposed to any "identity" that other readers might choose to impose on them. When they describe their own sexual sense of self, they tend in the same direction: even those who have been extremely active in LGBT rights activism or have a background in LGBT studies (many of the participants) and who consider themselves "out" at almost every level of their lives (nearly all of them) resist any taint of essentialism. They tend to view their sexual responses as personal and individual matters, and only the intolerance and condemnation of outsiders as "political" issues requiring solidarity and collective response.
A few texts were mentioned as formative or significant in terms of dealing overtly with queer issues, and often those texts were viewed ambivalently. One participant said, "I remember the first time I read Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", and how it seemed to really *get* the polyamorous and bisexual nature of humanity as I understood it at the time, while simultaneously being so utterly sexist and homophobic." Several mentioned Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness as a queer SF text. That particular reading of the book is potentially problematic; as much as the fluidity of desire is a feature of that book, the more dominant feature is the aliens' physical fluidity as they literally change their sex. That queer readers can identify with LeGuin's characters while being so separated from their experience of sex and sexuality by biological necessity is a tribute to SF readers' ability to gain deep insight out of metaphor, but it is still not a book that overtly challenges heteronormativity for a fixed-sex species such as humans.
Another recurring writer, along with LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, was Mercedes Lackey, a prolific fantasy writer who has written about a number of self-identified gay male characters. Janice Crosby, in her survey of fantasy fiction's relationship to the women's spirituality community, also devotes significant attention to Mercedes Lackey, particularly to an early series of books and short stories featuring an intimate, though non-sexual, relationship between two female characters. "The bond between [Tarma and Kethry]," Crosby writes, "which is one of both sisterhood and a type of marriage, could be considered 'lesbian' in the broadest sense of 'woman focused'" (Crosby 79), and also suggests that the privileged nature of Tarma and Kethry's "alternative family" within the text is one that "supports single mothers and lesbian couples in their contemporary struggle for acceptance as family" (Crosby 75-76). At the same time, of course, their relationship is not a sexual one within Lackey's text, and in fact an essay by Lackey that prefaces a later collection of Tarma and Kethry stories specifically claims that she wrote Kethry as heterosexual and Tarma as asexual as a method of resistance to what she perceived as a glut of swords-and-sorcery fiction at the time (the first story in the series was published in 1988) with lesbian protagonists. None of my research participants seem to remember this abundance of lesbian swords-and-sorcery, but whatever Lackey encountered that made her feel that heterosexual women were under-represented in the genre, it adds a problematic element to queer readings of Tarma and Kethry.
The same problems of intent and audience reception would recur a decade later on television through Xena and Gabrielle, also inspired by the swords-and-sorcery tradition and also positioned as a mated pair though not sexually involved within the text. The television show Xena: Warrior Princess has engendered much more discussion in terms of its sexual politics than the novels of Mercedes Lackey, and the variety of interpretations of the Xena/Gabrielle relationship is no doubt one of the keys to the show's broad appeal and success. At the same time that it is championed for its "openness" to multiple readings, however, the fact that Xena and Gabrielle's relationship was never explicitly endorsed by the text as a sexual relationship, the ultimate result is that avowed homophobes could watch the same show that as a lesbian viewer without being drawn in to any analysis whatsoever of the basic homophobic assumptions about female friendships; many viewers bitterly resisted interpretations of Xena and Gabrielle that they felt "tarnished" or "slandered" the characters by labeling them as queer, and the show's silence on the matter in a sense colluded with these viewers by capitalizing on a large lesbian fan base in order to produce a text wherein the characters were carefully kept at least theoretically attractive to and, more importantly, available to men (Helford, 138-142). While clearly an outstanding marketing strategy, Xena: Warrior Princess' value as an example of a queer text is reduced substantially by the approach.
So although SF is theoretically open to radical restructurings of sexual norms, relatively few widely popular and accessible SF texts actually are clearly and unambiguously about queer subjects, adopting instead the strategy of reducing characters' sexual identity to one incidental facet of their lives (the strategy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels or Babylon 5's handling of Susan Ivanova), or of propagating a kind of quasi-queerness that mirrors real non-heterosexual experience partially but not entirely (by completely sexualizing it, such as Heinlein does, or completely de-sexualizing it, as with the Tarma and Kethry stories or Xena). Ironically, one of the worst offenders has been Star Trek, the franchise whose depth of world-building and vibrance of fan culture has made it the foundation on which SF media fandom was built (Bacon-Smith, 11). Star Trek's thirty-year-long resistance to the mere idea of incorporating a recurring queer character into the universe has been a constant thorn in the side of many of its fans, for whom the Trek slogan "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination" has been a fandom ethical precept from the beginning. Referring to one particular Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where a female main character separated from her alien lover because it had adopted a new body -- female, not male like the previous body -- one research participant gave the succinct summation, "Stupid writing completely inconsistent with the rest of the canon Trekiverse ... I expect an enlightened futuristic society to be evenly enlightened."
SF fandom itself is distinct from and has co-evolved with the SF genre; the first science fiction convention was held in 1936 (Bacon-Smith 9), and from that point on, the history of the genre and the history of the fandom have been unique and fruitful. "Fandom" is itself a broad term with multiple meanings; it can refer to the fan community surrounding SF or other genres of fiction (mysteries and romances both have fandoms), or surrounding a medium rather than a genre, such as comics fandom, anime fandom, or "media" fandom ("media" in this sense generally being used to refer specifically to television). Further subsets exist, each of which adopts the term "fandom" for itself, so that individual texts have fandoms (Harry Potter fandom or Stargate: SG-1 fandom), specific activities of fans have fandoms (costuming fandom or vidding fandom, which produces music videos out of media footage), and even subgenres of fanfiction have fandoms (I will particularly address slash fandom later in this paper).
It is crucial to understand that "fan" in this context does not mean simply someone who enjoys a particular genre. Fandom is a concretely understood experience, and though outsiders primarily identify fans as obsessive receivers and collectors of trivia (memorably mocked in a famous William Shatner Saturday Night Live sketch or by The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy), fans view themselves as characterized primarily by their interaction with their source materials. In the foundational academic work on fandom (focused on media fandom, which incorporates and widely overlaps with SF fandom), Henry Jenkins defines fans as "readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests, as spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture. ... Their activities pose important questions about the ability of media producers to constrain the creation and circulation of meaning. Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media" (Jenkins 24).
Those people who come to fandom from groups which are significantly disenfranchised from mass culture -- including feminists and queer women -- are therefore not only responding to the texts but to the experience of fandom itself as an outlet for their needs and interests. SF may contain the conceptual building blocks for dissent from the sexual status quo, but fandom is where people are actually engaged in the work of examining, refining, and claiming those concepts. Where some of my research participants were brought into fandom by discovering other people who shared an active and energetic love of the same texts that they did, others were brought in by fandom itself and developed the interest in the texts that was required to survive and thrive as a fan. One respondent detailed her childhood experiences of SF, but consciously separated them from her "fan" life, saying, "For me, being fannish is all about being part of that community. "Feral fan" is something of a contradiction. I definitely had all of the usual markers -- obsessive rereading/watching of canon material, textual analysis, fanfiction writing, mary sueism -- but none of it counted until it was shared." Another went even further, claiming never to have been "a fan of anything but fandom" and saying that "I don't even KNOW the canon for
most of the fandoms I read in. I'm a fan of fandom, the writing, the community, the occasional absurdity, and the porn."
Fandom in this sense, as a community of people with a shared history, habits, interests, and beliefs about their relationship with their source texts, bears a great deal of similarity to other conceptual and practical models that come out of feminist and lesbian experience. In her history of lesbian writing, Bonnie Zimmerman defines the lesbian community as "a space, or a group of people, or even a concept, within which the individual lesbian feels herself welcome and at home. ... It may be realized in a bar, a political group, a music festival, or a family," (Zimmerman, 121), and fandom is one other space -- or group of people, or concept, as the definition of fandom encompasses all three of those things -- where outsiders to mainstream culture can locate themselves comfortably. Zimmerman also deals with the relationship between producers and consumers of art, quoting a 1974 statement originally published in off our backs by a group calling itself the Collective Lesbian International Terrors, which says, "We are also training ourselves to respond [to oppression] in writing, to make up for the present lack of Lesbian literature and writing. This is a beginning step in demolishing the 'creative artist' or 'writer' mystique that separates and inhibits us, giving some the role of active 'star' while the rest remain the passive audience." The desire of the lesbian feminist community to be actively engaged with media and text closely mirrors the pride fans take in the products of their own creative interactions with text. Zimmerman says that, "The breaking of the long silence of lesbian speech has led to a flood of intense, immediate, intimate, and sometimes awkward written expression" (Zimmerman, 19). No one familiar with fanfiction can fail to recognize how applicable those adjectives are to the work that fans so often produce for one another.
Women's role in the fan community is the subject, directly or indirectly, of much of the study of fandom that comes out of the fields of ethnology and cultural studies. Camille Bacon-Smith's 1992 survey of fan culture specifically treats the female-driven aspects of the culture; she begins her book by describing her desire to "jump up and down and scream, 'Look what I found! A conceptual space where women can come together and create -- to investigate new forms for their art and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men have placed on women's public behavior! Not a place or a time, but a state of being -- of giving each other permission'" (Bacon-Smith, 3). What she is describing is exactly what Nina Auerbach describes in Communities of Women as "a furtive, unofficial, often underground entity...defined by the complex, shifting, often contradictory attitudes it evokes. Each community defines itself as a 'distinct existence,' flourishing outside familiar categories and calling for a plurality of perspectives and judgements" (Auerbach, 11). The difference is that Auerbach is discussing communities that exist only in fiction, and the fandom that Bacon-Smith studied exists in the real world. Even overviews of fandom that do not intentionally focus on the role of women, such as Jenkins's, has to engage with the degree to which fandom is shaped by women, which Jenkins does by positioning himself as both an insider and an outsider to fandom, "a male fan within a predominantly female fan culture" (Jenkins, 6).
Both Jenkins's and Bacon-Smith's studies focus on media fandom, which is intimately linked to though not identical with SF fandom. SF fandom is admittedly much more male-dominated, although not as male-dominated as the stereotype implies, and the erasure of women's experience of SF fandom from a cultural studies perspective mirrors the related erasure of the fan experience in general from the history of the SF genre. "Unlike its media counterpart," Merrick says, "studies of literary SF have neglected the processes of production and reception of the text, a rather surprising omission for a genre which has been so closely associated with and even shaped by its unique group of fans. Despite the importance of fans to the SF community, their influence and even presence is at best marginal in most critical accounts, even though the experiences of female and feminist fans have been an integral part of the development of feminist SF" (Merrick, 49-50). Although "the significance of the genre lies in its extratextual dimensions, such as fan readings, zines, cons, and the close interaction between publishers, editors, authors, and audience that epitomizes the 'SF community,'" the need for cultural histories of women's experiences in SF fandom, as opposed to the history of women SF writers and feminist SF texts, is still largely unfulfilled (Merrick, 58-59), which is why the work of academics like Jenkins and Bacon-Smith, among others, in creating an ethnology of media fandom is such an important resource for SF fans. The fact that many fans use "fandom" to refer to these two loci of fan activity more or less interchangeably, making no significant distinction between their role as media fans and SF fans, also means that studies of women's fan use of media culture are invaluable in approaching the topic of women's fan use of SF texts.
Although many aspects of fan culture and behavior have nothing in particular to do with sexuality of any kind, and in those arenas the queer fan may not feel that her experience is especially distinctive, in the circles and conceptual spaces where sex and romance are primary concerns, the relationship between one's queer perspective and one's fan perspective becomes incredibly rich and complex. Those spaces have always been accessible and visible within fandom; one of the most significant dimensions of the source material that female fans have traditionally worked to open up is the romantic and sexual dimension of the characters' lives which are often de-emphasized in commercial, mainstream texts. A relatively recent fannish term for this perspective is "shipping," a term adopted out of X-Files fandom, where it referred specifically to "relationshippers," or fans who focused their energy on the sexual dynamics between Mulder and Scully, but the activity predates the term significantly. When the "ship" involved is a queer relationship, fandom has not only a unique term for that perspective, but an entire community, even a sub-fandom organized around it: slash fandom.
Like shippers, slashers adopted their name out of a specific context -- Star Trek fandom, where the abbreviation K/S was used to signal that a piece of fanfiction "slashed" Kirk and Spock, redefining their relationship as romantic and/or sexual in nature. What seemed like a bizarre event to many people -- women investing their time and their creative and emotional energy in queered readings of two male characters -- proved sensational enough that it generated a fair amount of critical interest both inside and outside the fandom. Slash generally takes up at least a chapter all to itself in any book on fan culture, and has been generating essays since at least 1985, when an article by feminist SF writer and fan Joanna Russ, entitled "Another Addict Raves About K/S," exposed the insular and secretive world of Star Trek slash fandom to the attention of outsiders, somewhat to the chagrin of the slashers themselves. At that point in time, the assumption was that if such scandalous fan activity was known of by non-slashers, there would be some sort of repercussion, some reprisal by the larger fandom or even by Star Trek's producers. (In fact, it was not a completely unrealistic fear; as slash became more visible, there was resistance to it, although slash fandom as it exists today is so incredibly large and vibrant that complaints about slash are routinely ignored -- it is literally too big and too influential to put a stop to, even if a small minority of particularly conservative fans would like to do so.) The spring 2003 issue of Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture contained an article called "Fan/tastic Voyage: A Journey Into the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction," by Nay Thrupkaew, one of the more recent and higher-profile attempts to address the subject.
For most of my research participants, the point at which their sexual identity intersected with their fan activity was in slash. Traditionally, critical interpretation of slash has avoided making close connections between homosexuality and slash, preferring to view it as an essentially heterosexual function, since it normally consists of women fantasizing sexually about men; many slashers would no more see themselves as operating in a queer space than a heterosexual man might while watching all-female pornography. Two early observers of slash who had an impact on later critical studies were Diana Veith and Patricia Frazer Lamb, who went to some pains in their study to deny that connection, saying that, "These novels, stories, and poems are not about sex or gender; they are certainly not about male homosexuality as such" (Veith & Lamb, 254), and perhaps even more confusingly, "K/S narratives are about two loving equals; within their relationship neither is 'masculine' while the other is 'feminine,' stronger or weaker, 'husband' or 'wife.' These stories are not about two gay males and should not be categorized as examples of homosexual literature -- either male or female" (Veith & Lamb, 252-253). This has been one popular means of viewing slash fandom, conceptualizing it as a straight women's activity that allows women to imagine idealized relationships free of gender and power baggage that fans otherwise bring to heterosexual couples in the text. The cliche has been that within slash the characters are not gay, they are merely in love with each other; one of my research participants said, "Certainly I've never been a fan of WNGWJLEO -- hate it actually," in complete confidence that anyone who knows slash will be able to read that as an acronym for We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other. Jenkins quotes a fan in his book who wryly renames the convention, "I'm not gay, I just like to suck Spock's cock" (Jenkins, 220). That reading of the characters as firmly divided from any issue of sexual identity is a standard trope of fandom, something slash fans are so familiar with as to make it a cliche.
Slash fans who are also queer, of course, seem less likely to accept that understanding of the characters, and many of my research participants disavowed it, either in passing or quite strenuously, although at the same time some of them had some discomfort with using slash for "political" purposes, rather than as a genre whose primary duty was to serve fans' sexual and emotional interests. The "We're not gay" understanding of slash is less common in fandom now than it was fifteen years ago when a great deal of the foundational studies of fandom were being done; it tends to be considered passe by heterosexual as well as queer audiences. There has been an influence from the ideology of "queerness" itself, whereby fans are much more willing than before to subsume anything sexually non-normative under the generic umbrella of "queer," rather than to insist on dogmatic distinctions between slash as "examples of homosexual literature" or not. At the same time, although the concepts of "queer" or even of "homosexual" held at best a highly marginalized place in the history of slash, the connection is clearly there, both in the obvious manner, and in the underlying ideology of slash itself. Russ defined the central question of slash as by saying, "The 'What If' behind K/S is: What If I Were Free?" (Veith & Lamb, 254). Although for Russ the issue was gender and "freedom" means freedom from culturally imposed expectations that define lovers as holding different roles within their relationship based on maleness and femaleness (Kirk and Spock, being not-women, can share power within their relationship free of the pressures women face to abrogate their own power within relationships), what her insight contains is the seeds of modern slash fandom's more overtly and proudly queer sensibility. "What If I Were Free?" could just as much mean freedom from compulsory heterosexuality and the erasure of the reality of sexual desire outside of heterosexual relationships, and for many slash fans now, it does mean exactly that.
More significant, possibly, than the relative queerness of the art and fiction that slash fandom produces is the increasing queer perspective of the community itself. While after eight years of research in the 1980's, Bacon-Smith can say in her demographic data that, "my sole lesbian informant ... says that she has met only seven other lesbian women in fandom. I have seen only one fanzine, regularly published out of the U.K., which openly caters to a predominantly gay audience, and this is the only place where I have ever seen stories or poetry depicting lesbian relationships written by women in media fandom. I have never heard the sexual orientation of a fan discussed in either a positive or negative way in relation to a fan's writing or choice of reading material, nor have I ever seen it as an issue in the social interactions of the group" (Bacon-Smith, 321). One of my older research participants, who was participating in fandom during that time period, says, "First wave, when I was using fandom as a way to explore my own sexuality, I was very aware of the trope that slash fans were all straight women, and often accepted that as fact (whether it was or not, and I think there is reason to question that)."
The majority of research participants, however, entered the fandom years after Bacon-Smith's data was collected, many of them through the Internet, which has changed the character of fandom in ways that have yet to be fully examined. This younger generation has largely come to slash fandom already either queer-identified or sensitive to queer issues, and their experience of the slash community is the polar opposite of Bacon-Smith's description of a group of women, almost uniformly heterosexual, for whom sexual orientation is "never discussed" and "never seen as an issue."
One participant says, "I'm more out in fandom just because fandom is a sexualized space for me; my interaction here and my discussions and friendships revolve around a sort of shared platonic sexuality that makes all sexual things, including orientation, fair topics of conversation." Another says, "I feel pretty comfortable as a queer fan. I think it helps that I've been in "younger", "hipper" fandoms where being bi is chic -- even though I'm [lesbian,] not bi, it breaks up the heterosexual monotony." One succinctly says, "In fandom I assume everyone's queer unless they tell me differently, and I assume everyone's assuming the same thing about me." Almost all of them say that the environment of "their corner of fandom" is both sex-positive and queer-positive, a place where few limits are placed on whatever desires fans choose to claim, with social distinction being drawn not between hetero- and homosexual, but between fans who are comfortable with a wide range of sexual realities and those who are limited in what they can accept. One respondent says, "One of my favourite aspects of slash fandom is that it is straight chicks talking about sex. It seems immensely significant to me because the straight chicks I grew up with professed not to like sex or penises. Hanging out with porn-obsessed women suits me! I've never felt uncomfortable in media and slash fandom but then I don't hang out with anti-slash weirdos." Whereas heterosexual slash fans have traditionally understood the pairing of beloved characters to be the raison d'etre of slash fandom, fans with a queer identity seem more likely to conceptualize slash fandom as an arena for discussing sex and sexuality -- sometimes in terms of their philosophies about heteronormativity and queer theory, sometimes only for erotic purposes, often both at the same time.
The role that slash fills in expressing women's sexual fantasies is a particular issue for slash fans. Not one but three of my respondents specifically upbraided me for my use of the word "erotica" in the questions I gave them; their term of preference is "porn." One said, "Erotica is a pissant term used by people who don't want to be associated with porn," and another saw a veiled sexism in my use of the term in a question about female/female slash and its absence in a similar question about male/male slash. She said, "What, because they're girls it can't be porn {g}? Sorry, this is just one of those issues which annoys me.... it's like one of those, 'women don't sweat, they perspire/glow/whatever' statements, and I'm always just like, please, girls can fuck too." At the same time that many of my research participants expressly object to treatments within slash fandom of women that overemphasize their alleged relational and caring nature at the expense of being portrayed as "real women feeling real and urgent desire," they also adhere to traditional female sexual values in other ways by expressing a strong preference for pornography that is "in character," that is true to the personalities of the characters and their textual relationship with one another. What they want is "hot sex with strong characterization" or "strong, recognizable characterization, an interesting and tension-fraught relationship, and hot sex."
All of my research participants expressed an interest in and involvement with both male/male and female/female subjects within slash fandom, including the women who identified themselves strictly as lesbian. Traditional interpretations of slash have often advanced the idea that women in general are attracted to slash because it allows them to identify with and interact with male characters who are more dynamic and interesting than the female characters in source texts, and although all of my respondents had a long list of female characters in SF that they have great attachments toward, many of them also echoed this sense, particularly in childhood and adolescence, of being drawn to male characters by default, due to the relative weakness of available female characters. One said, "As a child, I think I imprinted on male characters because they were closest to being three-dimensional - most females (books and television/movies) seemed flat and boring, there to be rescued or be eye candy. This has stuck with me; I still tend to relate to male characters primarily," a sentiment which another phrased more succinctly as, "I identified strongly with boys in literature, as girl characters were crap." Other respondents, however, employed typically fan strategies of extracting positive meaning out of texts that may not inherently be positive or empowering; one Dr. Who fan said, "I had a pash for most of the Doctor's sidekicks particularly Sarah Jane Smith, Leila, first Romana and Ace. I was fairly devastated when the show was cancelled and there was no more Ace. While all these women were sidekicks and some of them spent more time screaming than anything else they were still out there, out in the universe having a life far away from mine." Most mentioned a number of recent female characters and female-centered texts; almost every reference to Xena or to Buffy the Vampire Slayer was prefaced with an "of course"; it was simply understood that I would recognize why a queer woman would single out those texts as objects of fascination. Though they did not have identical responses to those texts (some spoke fondly of "Xena and Gabs' true and immortal love," while one expressed discomfort at a fandom perception of Xena and Gabrielle that she felt was "too lesbian" and "not queer enough" -- some focused on Buffy's use of out queer characters and some on its metaphorical use of vampirism, magic, and the role of the outsider to speak to queer experiences; many identified the recurring character of Faith, semi-heroic and semi-villainous with an ambiguous sexuality, as pivotal for their perceptions of where queer women could fit in on television), there was a collective understanding from within slash fandom that these texts -- both shows that have been canceled some years ago -- have continuing relevance and meaning to queer audiences. One called Buffy the Vampire Slayer "very much a text about sexuality, about gender issues. Vampirism as queer, blurred sexual lines, unconventional sexual practices--the show was practically a primer on queer issues."
One idea that recurred when queer women spoke about their feelings about male/male and female/female slash -- an issue I had never seen addressed in formal criticism about slash fandom -- is that my respondents tended to view themselves as consuming and producing more male/male slash at least partially because their standards were so much higher for female/female slash. After discussing male/male slash and then turning to female/female, one said, "To some degree my answers here are close to those above (re m/m) although I suspect I might be a little more critical of [f/f] stories that don't feel realistic - even though I know they're fantasy, I also know they reflect familiar lives/lifestyles, and I want some recognition of that reality." Another said, "I am much more concerned with whether F/F stories deal with sexuality in a realistic way. It feels more personal. I think that's why I haven't written F/F up until now--it feels much more revealing to me as a person and a queer woman." The issue of realism, although not entirely absent in discussions of m/m slash, was almost a constant as queer women discussed their feelings about women's sexual relationships in fanfiction: "I think it's more important with f/f than with m/m that the sexuality be realistic," "I'm more inclined to study the SF/F setting and its effects when reading f/f slash, because it's more important to me that f/f be realistic," and "I do like F/F erotica, but I’m very fussy about it. Unrealistic M/M sex might not bother me, but unrealistic F/F is guaranteed to put me off" were all representative comments; other respondents mentioned being sometimes blase about "out-of-character" male/male slash if it at least served as passable porn, but expressed frustration and even a sense of betrayal when it came to female/female slash that didn't seem to leave room for their insights into what female sexuality was "really" like. Their need to identify with female characters in slash may be much more pronounced than their need to do so with male characters, meaning that they sometimes find female/female slash less satisfying, or at least less forgivable in its flaws.
In general the fans who participated in my research felt that they approached SF and SF fandom somewhat differently than heterosexual fans would, although they tended to stay vague as to how, uncomfortable with the idea of trying to describe or interpret the experiences of the "typical" heterosexual fan. Many of them found SF a genre that is comfortable for exploring sexuality issues, and all of them have found within SF fandom a community that is overwhelmingly affirming of their experiences and actively interested in their perspective. One person drew a specific parallel between her desires as a fan to have relationships with other fans and her desires as a lesbian to have a relationship with the LGBT community, describing the discovery of both the fan and LGBT communities as, "more a feeling of *recognition* than *revelation*. As with fandom (or, perhaps more accurately, fandom was also like this), the discovery of a community of people made me want to join in." Many of them spoke interchangeably from a reader's and writer's perspective, a common type of bi-location in fandom, where fans are assumed to be both consumers of texts and producers of other types of texts, whether those be specifically artistic or commentary on the meaning of the source material, and at the times when they spoke as writers, they evidenced a particular enthusiasm for the SF genre as a means of opening up alternative perspectives on queer issues. One said, "I think fantasy and sf provides a medium, especially for "queer" writers / readers to find a sort of "sexual utopia". It's a way to show what our world COULD be like, if only people would be open-minded enough to accept people for who they are," while many spoke fondly of particular fictional universes where they can write without binding the characters into dominant modes of modern thought on the meaning of sexual behavior and identity; one put a joking twist on the subject by saying, "SF/F can be used as a cheap way to get [characters] together - just put Spock into ponn farr [Vulcan mating frenzy] and Bob's your uncle - but it can also be an incredibly rich source of world-building ideas."
Possibly over and beyond any other response to fandom, however, queer women are empowered by the contact they have with other women in a setting where owning and interpreting female visions of sexual possibility is not only not restricted by taboo, but actively encouraged. Many of the respondents had a supportive circle of queer- and queer-positive friends outside of fandom, and many of them were also quick to remind me that many of their most supportive and understanding friends within fandom were heterosexual women. But nearly all of them still identified their experiences in fandom as queer experiences in fandom; fandom for them has been, among other things, an ongoing conversation with a particular relevance to their developing sense of sexual identity and understanding of what sexuality means. I imagine that all of them would somehow see themselves in the words of one fan, who says that, "The first gay people I ever met, I met through fandom (Rocky Horror), and it was in that community that I first began to feel that it was okay to be whatever I was: a big ol' geek with a voracious and queer sexual appetite. That feeling of validation has continued in media fandom, where I am not only okay, I am not even the biggest freak on the block anymore. The community of brilliant and open-minded women is the thing that keeps me in fandom whether I'm into a show or not. I have made real friends here, and I have been able to share myself wholly without fear of being attacked, shamed or misunderstood. ... And I've met plenty of queer heroes in fandom, women who are out and proud, women who are kinky and proud, women who are voracious and proud, women who are straight but not narrow. I feel that we are all part of the same whole."
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i like the chesspiece idea and for me (as a straight girl :-) the interesting thing is that all of us are exploring queer parts of ourselves and anti-heteronormative ideas and fantasies. Which doesn't mean that it is exactly the same. Zvi wrote a great post arguing that we straight women all talk about queerness and are all touchy feely yet she's getting no sex :-) Seriously, though, there definitely *are* differences in personal investment and such, in living and acting out one's queerness, just like the term queer of course for all its wonderful plurality is always in danger of being overly generalizing and thus lose any effectiveness whatsoever.
But then any two queer women will probably approach and "use" slash in different ways as well, so I don't think that actually destroys the theory at heart.
now, of course, i need to find out why mary thinks it's rubbish!!! :-)