Graduate life

In this long overdue blog, just in time for Thursday’s Graduate Options Expo, I thought I should take the time to talk to you all about my research. The subject of my thesis, and area I intend to explore at PhD level, is slash fiction.

Slash fiction sexualises overtly non-sexual male bonding. It got its name from the convention of using the forward slash to mark the names of characters being paired, for example, Kirk/Spock for Star Trek, which is where the phenomenon is believed to have begun. Basically, during the 1970s women began penning stories of romantic male pairings in fanzines to protest a lack of any ongoing romantic arc in their favourite television series. This came at a time when female heroes were rarely seen in action-oriented narratives, and as such, became a way for women to envision an egalitarian romance.

Now I know what you’re thinking, if women longed for strong female characters, why didn’t they just create a strong woman in their fan fiction rather than making the men ‘go gay’? Truth is, they did. These stories became known as Mary Sue stories. However women much preferred to slash their male leads, first because they came, in the words of MIT media theorist Henry Jenkins, “ready-made”, and second, because they found that they could no sooner relate to these new super-independent-Scully-like-characters than they could to their Star-Trek-space-bimbos-of-the-week. But there are other reasons too, in their study of the subject Salmon and Symons discovered that women who enjoyed a traditional heterosexual romance could generally also enjoy a male/male romance, this led to the pair theorising that slash was a subgenre of romance. Further, many slash writers take the 'two is better than one' view, arguing that, why fantasise about one ‘ragged hero of unadulterated masculinity’ when you can get two.

Other ‘types’ of slash you might not know about include: Real Person Slash (which pairs real life heterosexual men in homosexual love). In the Supernatural fandom (one of the fandoms I am particularly interested in) these stories are called J2 (because they pair the real life actors Jared and Jensen). J2 is interesting to study because the characters, like Sam and Dean from the show, have a lot of ‘slash potential’ (they live together, car pool to work together each day and often joke about each other’s sexuality).

I am attracted to the topic for its interdisciplinary reach (into media, gender, cultural and literary studies) as well as its prospects for generating theory. There is a very real gap in knowledge waiting to be explored here. Stand by for more on these gaps and how I look to fill them as the year progresses.