Gender, Cyberspace, Slash

[featherxquill]

Well, it is done. My final essay for Cultural Studies. I finished it about forty-five minutes before I handed in, about half an hour before the deadline *sweatdrop*. It is slightly (ha!) under the word limit, but by the time I finished, I didn't really care. I'm happy enough with it, though I'm sure if I had started writing earlier (and hadn't procrastinated so much to begin with) I might have been happier, and not so stressed by the clock ticking away.

Anyway, without further blabbering on, here it is. In response to the question: “Space is a construction and material manifestation of social relations that reveals cultural assumptions and practices” (Chris Barker, 2003: 353). Critically discuss with reference to at least one of the following: class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, race/ethnicity, the body.

 

And he is hard, so fucking hard; it aches and throbs inside his trousers and he wants to reach down to soothe himself but he dares not let go. It's always been the same; his fear that Lucius will decide he is not good enough, that Lucius will open his eyes and see that he is ugly and scrawny and unloved - still. So he latches on and refuses to let go because if he can just have a taste of such beauty then maybe he will be all right. It was like this every single time. Only now, Lucius is in a cell in Azkaban and he is free, he is the one who has all the options; he is the one who is leaving Lucius behind this time.

And still, he clings.

 

– from ‘Vert De Grice’, Anice and Mosh (2005)

 

 

Space is never neutral. Cyberspace can be referred to as a “conceptual ‘spaceless place’” (Ogden 1994, p.715) somewhat divorced from physical, geographical space. At first glance, cyberspace appears to be a place where cultural concepts like class, gender, sexuality, race, disability and the body do not apply, as the values attached to them are seemingly so varying and different depending on ones location in geographical space. Online communities, however, places founded upon shared interest rather than geographical location (Dodge & Kitchin 2001, p.16), are assigning their own meanings to these concepts. This essay will explore how authors and readers of slash fanfiction in the online Harry Potter fandom are questioning cultural assumptions and practices, defining and redefining traditional notions of gender, sexuality and identity within their online space.

 

While cyberspace exists as something physically and conceptually different to geographical space, it is not divorced from it entirely. Geographic, ‘real’ space, understood in a cultural context, is “symbolic and power-saturated” (Barker, 2004, p.187) and very gendered. Assignment of genders to places like ‘work’ (male) and ‘home’ (female) both reflect and construct dichotomous notions of gender. Cyberspace is not a utopian “alternate to geographic space, as it is within this space that we bodily reside” (Dodge & Kitchin, p.17). Individuals who participate in online communities have sought out a place where people of like-mind dwell, not just people who coincidently or otherwise, share the same geographic location. Cyberspace problematises humanist notions of gender and gender difference by providing a space where an individual may construct for themselves a linguistic identity, free from those that others would assign to them on the basis of assumptions about their body. The online slash community is predominately made up of people who identify themselves as heterosexual females. In an online survey conducted in 2003 (Rushlight75) 97.4% of slash readers and writers surveyed identified themselves as female, and, on a scale of 0-6 (where 0 is completely heterosexual and 6 is completely homosexual), an average of 1.82 was recorded in regards to ‘real life’ sexual preference. Henry Jenkins believes that “slash is not so much a genre about sex as it is about the limitations of traditional masculinity and about reconfiguring male identity” (1992, p.19). The idea that people who identify through a dichotomous gender system as ‘women’ are re-interpreting and redefining masculinity through homoerotic fiction challenges not only traditional notions of gender being inherent in biology, but also what is traditionally considered good and bad sex.

 

The term ‘slash’ refers to male homosexual relationships and is derived from the fan writing tradition of placing a stroke between the names of homosexual partners (Severus/Lucius, also lovingly referred to as ‘Snucius’). Slash fanfiction did exist before the internet. It originated in the 1970s as a genre of fiction in the Star Trek fandom and was published in print magazines of fan writing known as ‘zines’ (Jenkins, 1992). Such writing, though, did not disrupt the traditional “mass medium model of one-to-many broadcast, the separation of producer and consumer” (Dodge & Kitchin, p.20). The Net, as a spaceless place where communication over vast distances is virtually instantaneous, breaks down the barrier of mass communication, allowing instant feedback on fanfiction. It offers a chance for fans to breach traditional space barriers and form online relationships based on their shared interests. While Star Trek slash published in zines was met with “considerable resistance from fans who felt such writing was an improper use of program materials and violated the original characterisations” and “questioned the masculinity of the protagonists and challenged their heroic stature” (Jenkins, p.187-188), it has become somewhat of a favourite in the Harry Potter fandom (though, there are, of course, fans who still dislike it). In discussing why she likes slash, a fandom writer discusses the re-working of masculinity:

 

I don’t mean to re-write masculinity as such, nor do I mean to entirely re-write it in my fics. But in my fics, I’m free to create “ideal” characters and an “ideal” relationship - and part of the definition of my “ideal” is apparently that there should be more of an emphasis on female qualities…You could argue that a woman doesn’t need to write slash for that, it would suffice to just generally write male characters in the way we want them to be, in het fics and even gen fics.Why not write about a man being wonderfully understanding and sensitive and intuitive in a het relationship? Isn’t it a shame that this would obviously look so implausible, so unrealistic, that we have to resort to slash to make it work? Well, it’s not entirely unrealistic (these guys exist, thank God!). But still, after two or three thousand years of Western culture and civilisation, any depiction of a m/f relationship comes with so much cultural “baggage”, so many prefabricated role models and behavioural patterns, so many deeply ingrained biological and social codes that it’s really hard to free yourself from that and redefine the roles, because you’re not in a social vacuum. Slash, on the other hand, offers a wonderfully clean slate. (Dark Twin, 2004)

 

 Slash can therefore be seen as a way to attempt to escape the cultural constructions of gender related power in relationships.

 

According to a cultural studies understanding of gender as socially constructed, a person’s actions are always already regulated by gender as it is constructed for them by society. When studying fiction and fan culture, one must take into account that reading is a gendered practice. Harry Potter can be seen as a traditionally masculine genre – a male protagonist, an action based plot. According to Jenkins, girls are invited to be interested in masculine genres, and learn “how to find their own pleasures in stories that reflect the tastes and interests of others, hoe to shift attention away from the narrative centre and onto the periphery, how to reclaim their own interests from the margin and thus how to engage more freely in speculations that push aside the author’s voice in favour of their own” (page 114). Fanfiction, then, can be seen as an interpretation of the characters in a canon text “reworked to provide a closer fit to these women’s desires; they are not narratives naturally open to female appropriation, though they can be made into women’s narratives.” Slash, then, could be seen as a way to turn the values of a male-centred narrative inside out by replacing both the protagonist and ‘love interest’ with homosexual men. If what women are doing is on some level identifying with characters in the text and identifying with those presented as male rather than female, taking those characters into cyberspace and writing about them, they are in effect defying cultural assumptions of gender in geographical space and constructing themselves as male in a fictional space.

 

To ask any ‘slasher’ what it is they love about their chosen genre, in the simplest terms, is to receive a reply something along the lines of ‘Because it’s HOT’. According to Jenkins, “both fan and academic writers characterise slash as a projection of female sexual desires and experiences onto the male bodies of the characters” (Jenkins, p.191).  While this is often the case, there are also deeper cultural reasons. Joanna Russ believes slash to be a response to female desires for “a sexual relationship that does not require their abandoning freedom, adventure, and first class humanity” (1985, p.96) This is echoed by slash writers:

 

"It's just that at some point in m/f, you have to deal with either (1) how the relationship defies traditional m/f roles, or (2) how the characters deal with the conflict inherent to those roles. Sometimes I just get tired, you know?” I so feel your pain, sister. The way I see it, this problem really is two-fold, too – it’s not so much that we want to protest but can’t, but also that we’re supposed to protest but don’t always want to.  It’s not that we all live so firmly inside the traditional m/f gender roles that we can break out of them only in fiction…The problem is rather that we, as modern women, are always supposed to deal with these traditions actively, to say where we stand in relation to them, be it in protest or in agreement - and preferably in protest. It’s not only the traditional, conservative powers in our cultures that have their expectations of us – it’s also the progressive powers. (Dark Twin, 2004)

 

Writing slash can be seen here as a way to bypass and subvert traditional notions of gender. Fandoms in cyberspace offer places where women can take on roles that are traditionally regarded as masculine. They offer an attractive place where it seems possible to discard their own genders (with all of their historic associations) and express themselves in masculine ways, without fear of ‘real life’ social repercussions. This can be further illustrated by one fan’s explanation of the appeal of darkfic, to her:

 

We're expressing through fic emotions that are blocked in real life…The frustrated feelings in my life centers around rage and pain. As a woman, I often feel like I'm not permitted to express negative feelings other than sorrow. Through darkfic, I get to let all those nastyuglies out for a little while. And when I'm through reading/writing, I can go back to be the nice, sweet girl everyone expects me to be….So far, I've shown that readers of "ideal" fic and darkfic have similar motives, but I still haven't answered the "why slash?" for the darkficcers. Well, it goes back to the reasons why I read darkfic in the first place: Western culture frowns upon women expressing anger, sadism, aggression, etc. Like it or not, I've been raised in the Western world, so I've internalized a lot of this. So in my mind, anger and aggression is associated with men, so the characters in the stories I read/write are men. By reading/writing a story in which the aggressor is the POV character, I get to vent my more violent fantasies. (Seraphtrevs, 2005)

 

In this way, female slash writers are rebelling against the cultural assumptions and practices made manifest by physical space. They are deconstructing both the biologically determined humanist notions of gender as well as the humanist notion of the self. By constructing different versions of themselves in cyberspace than those they present to people in their ‘real life’ geographical space, they are providing an example of the many-layered nature of human self, not just the reflection of a core ‘essence’, as believed by humanists.

 

In conclusion, cyberspace, as a “conceptual ‘spaceless place’” (Ogden, p.715), provides an opportunity for users to partly or temporarily remove themselves from the geographical space they inhabit, allowing them to bypass, challenge or subvert the cultural assumptions and practices that govern their physical existence. By existing in online fandoms as readers and writers of slash fanfiction, many women are able to explore ideas of gender, sexuality and identity in ways that they are not able to in the geographical, ‘real’ world. Cyberspace provides a place to explore feelings, thoughts and ideas that would often be considered inappropriate by way of gender in geographical space. This duality of existence challenges the humanist ideas of human identity, showing humans as complex, many faceted beings that are not simply outward expressions of some ‘inner essence’. It can be argued, then, that no space is neutral, that cultural assumptions about class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, race/ethnicity and the body govern all social existences and interactions, and call for individuals to reinvent themselves constantly in varying degrees of acceptance or opposition to the special assumptions of any given location in space and time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

List of Works Cited

 

Anice and Mosh, 2005. Vert de Grice. Retrieved June 20, 2005 from http://www.livejournal.com/users/moshes/38472.html

 

Barker, Chris 2004. The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, Sage, London.

 

Dark Twin, 2004. Why I like slash. Tough question, plain answers. Retrieved June 14, 2005 from http://www.livejournal.com/users/the_dark_twin/2361.html

 

Dodge M & Kitchin R 2001, Mapping Cyberspace, Routlegde, New York & London.

 

Jenkins, Henry, 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, Routledge, New York & London.

 

Ogden, M, 1994. ‘Politics in a Parallel Universe: Is There a Future For Cyberdemocracy?’ Futures, 26 (7)

 

Rushlight75, 2003. Slash Demographics Survey. Retrieved June 13, 2005 from http://slashcity.org/rushlight/slashsurvey.html

 

Russ, Joanna, 1985. Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts: Feminist Essays. Trumansberg, New York: Crossing.

 

Seraphtrevs, 2005. What's a nice girl like you doing in a fic like this? Retrieved June 13, 2005 from http://www.livejournal.com/users/seraphtrevs/2692.html

 

Comments

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Freaking good essay. Yeah, that's definitly why I read slash, and it's nice to see someone explaining it so well.

[featherxquill.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm glad you found it interesting!

[secondsilk.livejournal.com]

Hi. I just found this in my memories, and I kind of remember reading it, but maybe it did make much sense then. I've read more cultural studies since then, and it's kind of coming together in my head now.
Thanks muchly. It's a great essay.