Productive (cyber) public space: Slash fan fiction's multiple imaginary.

Abstract

My dissertation examines the social, identitarian, textual, and spatial significance of slash fan fiction, a somewhat shifting designation for a type of amateur writing largely produced and circulated by women, which involves placing previously published same sexed characters, usually male, into non-canonical romantic and/or erotic relationships with each other. Using an interdisciplinary blend of ethnographic observation, textual analysis, and cultural studies theory, I argue that on-line slash communities create an alternate public space providing opportunities for encounters with a wide range of complex sexual, relational, and political practices, thereby adding to readers' tools for experiencing and thinking about pleasure and ways of living. Chapter 1 considers slash's identitarian aspects, arguing that some slash writers and readers use their involvement to construct counter-cultural, queer self-concepts with real-life components, while others enrich their ability to think through the impact of heteronormativity by living in a largely female community which normalizes a benign range of sexualities. Chapter 2 deals with slash texts, arguing that the content of slash stories advocates no single aesthetic or ideology, but instead produces a multiple narrative space which broadens the field of acceptable sexual possibility by upsetting systems of coercion that police what can and cannot be said and known in public. Chapter 3 juxtaposes five (or six) distinct sexual aesthetics to suggest the constant proliferation of sexual fantasies and subject positions available under the umbrella term slash, while also gesturing toward the unique storytelling made possible by the use of two same-sexed bodies which carry equivalent biological signifiers. Rather than a scene of complete freedom, chapter 4 takes internet-based fan fiction as a case study of the ways that copyright and obscenity law, as well as the professional publishing industry, shape and constrain the kinds of storytelling and mythology available in public. Thus, I argue in chapter 5 that by creating a public forum which puts numerous textual, virtual, and embodied performances of sex, gender, and social life into dialogue, slash creates a location for unpredictable collisions between people, ideas, and pleasures, thereby establishing common space for the construction of new imaginaries.