slw_the_aca_fan

If slash fiction may be
described as a 'genre', then its only convention is that it describes
erotic encounters between television characters (or, more rarely, film
characters) of the same sex.

As in the early years of slash, the majority of slash writers
are heterosexual women 4 However, a significant minority of male
fans also write slash, and the male-to-female ratio vanes across
different fandoms; most Star Tiek slash is written by women, while
X-Files (1993-) slash tends to be more mixed Lesbian and bisexual
women dominate Xena Warrior Princess (1995-2001) slash, but
have much less presence in most other slash fandoms.

Scholarly studies of slash (most of which were published in the
early 1990s and drew upon research done several years earlier) have
tended to emphasize its romantic male/male manifestations 5 Usually
authored by heterosexual women, such stories subvert or overturn
conventional gender constructs as male bodies and male sexuality are
described in terms of profound emotional connection and sensual
surrender.

The incorporation/resistance paradigm rests upon an understanding
of the text as an inviolable and discrete semiotic surface, its
'preferred' or 'dominant' textual meanings are accepted, negotiated
or opposed by the reader By this rationale, slash fiction, which
contradicts the source text's preferred meaning of heterosexuahty,
must be the product of subversive or 'deviant' reading. But the
incorporation/resistance paradigm offers limited and clumsy models
that do not account for the deeper textual strategies of cult television,
for its engagements with the fantastic, its function as a species of
virtual reality, its emphasis upon the implicit, or its invitation to
immersive and interactive engagement

Repetition ensures that the broad syntagmatic movements of cult
series are inherently predictable, and this predictability is rendered
absolute by the universal fan practice of recording and repeatedly reviewing
episodes Paradoxically, the repetitive structures of cult
television series and the repetitive viewing practices of fans facilitate
the series' lack of closure. The repetition of the already-known
releases fans from the thrall of causality It directs their imaginations
towards the text's paradigmatic elements, inviting them to consider
what story events reveal about characters, how they contribute to and
interconnect with the metatextual backstory, what possibilities are
opened up for future storylines, and what other stones haunt the
hinterlands of the text

The appeal of these vast,
transmedia fictions lies precisely in their invitations to immersion and
interactivity; they are constructed, marketed, and used by fans not as
'texts' to be 'read' but as cosmologies to be entered, experienced and
imaginatively interacted with.

The fictional worlds of cult television are governed by fantastic
logics that mark their distance from the everyday Gods, ghosts and
monsters are tangible presences in these realms; intergalactic travel is
possible; cyborg entities exist; death is not necessarily final; the
universe is teeming with intelligent life. Unconstrained by the
pragmatics of realism, storylines are often speculative and focused
philosophical explorations of the outer reaches of the imagination,
proposing alternate selves, parallel universes, and metaphysical
paradoxes They accommodate those wondering, almost whimsical
questions that most of us ask ourselves from time to time who
might T be if I wasn't me7 What would it be like to be telepathic9
What might an alien look like, and what would it think of us7 How
would the present be different if a time-traveller altered something in
the past7 The aesthetic, intellectual and imaginative appeal of
fantastic genres is precisely that they are fantastic. Relieved of any
obligation to verisimilitude, they afford exploration of the purely
speculative

Detached from objective reality, the
visible spaces, actions and events of the televisual text have invisible
lateral resonance; they function metonymically, referring us to
spaces, actions and events beyond themselves, elsewhere in an
implied and hallucinatory realm of structured but unforecloseable
possibilities For fans, major characters function as points of entry
into the metaverse, as objects of fascination in their own right, and
as avatars, ethereal beings that are animated and psychically
inhabited by fans' projected imaginations Such characters are wholly
exotic

Like the worlds they inhabit, cult television characters are
incomplete and incompletable. Lacking referents, they exist as
hminal entities poised between tele-presence and absence.

Creative and interpretive fan practices are all concerned with this
latency, with reading through the surface semiotics of the diegesis
and beyond into the implied interior and exterior realities of the
characters and their world. Again, the linear trajectory of the
narrative is subordinated in favour of depth What is of primary
importance to fans is not how characters move along the narrative
but rather what narrative events can reveal about characters.

Cult television characters have structure; they are not blank ciphers. But they are ultimately unknowable others whose exotic appeal depends, in large part, on their immunity to the forces that structure ordinary reality.

Heterosexuahty is as much a matter of social practice as it is of sexual practice As social practice, it assumes a narrative form of its own, with plot points of courtship, marriage, domesticity, reproduction, child-rearing, provision for the family Heterosexuahty's narrative form is, arguably, the most embedded and pervasive foundational structure of ordinary reality. Intrinsic to it are powerful moral and social imperatives that urge economic
responsibility, domestic stability, the avoidance of risk, and the shrinking of horizons to the productive space of work and the reproductive space of home As social practice, heterosexuahty is antithetical to the exoticism and adventure that characterize the fictional worlds of cult television series If heterosexual relations between major characters go beyond the preliminary of courtship, this exterior narrative of social practice is invoked and both the cult fiction and its fans are unceremoniously returned to the structures,
realities and stresses of everyday life.

Cult television's imperatives are fantasy, adventure and the sustained virtuahty of an exotic fictional world - imperatives that make heterosexuality problematic because the narrativized social process it invokes threatens the cult fiction's anti-realism. Cult series therefore tend to truncate or problematize heterosexual relationships involving A and B characters (though C and D characters are usually free to marry, if they so wish)

The failures of heterosexual romances in cult television series similarly position the audience to find queer pleasures in cult genres and texts Because active heterosexuality must continually be reined in if it is not to effect a collapse of the exotic-fantastic into suburban domesticity, protagonists' primary relationships usually fall into one of two categories:

1. Primary relationships between a male and a female character, which signal a mutual sexual attraction that is never fully realized (Mulder and Scully, Picard and Crusher, Aeryn Sun and Cnchton) or which cannot progress beyond romance
(Buffy and Angel, Catherine and Vincent)

2. Primary relationships between characters of the same sex (Kirk and Spock, Hercules and Iolus, Xena and Gabnelle)

Successful primary relationships in cult television series, then, are either thwarted heterosexual relationships or same-sex pairings. Fans encounter a tension sexually interesting characters whose entanglement in heterosexual relationships threatens to invoke not just heterosexuality's passions but also its trajectory - a trajectory that leads straight back to a material and mundane world, the erasure of which is the very thing that makes the cult series compelling. The limitations imposed by the fantastic imperative upon heterosexuahty create a void that allows an implied homoeroticism to function as an alternative, and less damaging, possibility of the cult fiction's exotic
substance From this perspective, the exotic erotics of slash fiction look much less like instances of 'resistance' and much more like extensions of cult television's own contra-straight logics. Slash arises out of cult television's intrinsic requirement of distance from everyday reality, its related erasure of heterosexuality's social process, and its provision of perceptual depths that invite and tolerate diverse speculation about characters' 'hidden' thoughts and feelings

That slash fiction continues to be theorized as 'resistant' and - though it is rarely explicitly described as such - as 'deviant' is testament both to a notion of text/reader engagements as interpretive rather than interactive and to a continued refusal to acknowledge where and how queerness manifests itself. Like the queer readings of films discussed by Doty, slash fiction has been valorized as a rebellion against the text, a scavenging for textual crumbs that become the raw material for an alchemical creative reworking. But cult television series are already 'queer' in their constructions of fantastic virtual realities that must problematize heterosexuality and erase heterosexual process in order to maintain their integrity and distance from the everyday. It is the cult television series itself which
implicitly 'resists' the conventions of heterosexuality; the slash fiction stories wntten by some of its fans render explicit this implicit function and, more importantly, are a reflection of cult television's immersive and interactive logics.