Introducing The Slash: A Diary of Divided Attention
What do Captain Kirk, Jacques Derrida, and gay teens have in common?
This is the introductory post to The Slash. Subscribe for full-length essays on romance, fan fiction, and queer theory, and what they can teach us about pleasure and ourselves.
It’s funny to me—and completely apropos—that the history of one of the most vibrant queer archives on the internet originates in a distinction in typography. When fan fiction, the practice of borrowing characters from other media to write your own stories, became a popular practice in the 1970s, the pairing du jour was James Kirk and Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek TV series. When analogue fic writers catalogued their writing with an ampersand, Kirk & Spock, they made it clear: the captain and the Vulcan are just friends. But a slash? Kirk/Spock? Something exciting is about to happen.
Since then, the word “slash” has designated many forms of same-sex fic pairing. In 2021, it appears prosaically as the notation used to describe your primary romantic relationship: are you writing m/m, where two men fall in love, or m/f (also called, with fond dismissal, “het,”) or f/f, or, even better, m/m/f?
I chose the slash as the namesake for this newsletter because I want to write about gay fan fiction, yes, but the slash has had a long life in academic discourse too. Jacques Derrida highlighted the slash in one of the foundational texts of poststructuralism, On Grammatology (1967), where the mark is used to designate supposed binary opposites: light/dark, presence/absence, written/oral, masculine/feminine. The project of poststructuralism is to get into the nitty gritty of that slash, and ultimately to problematize it. (My rudimentary knowledge of poststructuralism often leads me to define it with a lazy joke for precisely no one: “nothing is the opposite of anything else”.) All this is to say, Derrida knew something that the horny sci-fi fans of the 1970s knew too: when you try to draw a stark line between two ideas, or two people? That’s when things get good.
This newsletter takes up the idea that the slash is where things get good: that putting two seemingly opposed things into conversation (making them kiss, or making them fake-date over the holidays in a scenic locale, as fan fic writers are wont to do), is an essentially meaningful practice, and an essentially queer one. My primary daytime interests are in feminist and queer theory and literature, and my primary nighttime interests are fan fiction, fan culture, and romance novels, so I guess you could say this newsletter goes day to night or day/night in a flash. I want to share with you brilliant, heart-wrenching gay romance stories written for free by young people on the internet; I want to show you the orc-love fantasies dreamed up by moms making bank on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. I want to tell you what I, as an unathletic academic lesbian, find so irresistible about gay hockey romance novels (well, when I figure it out, I’ll let you know). You don’t need a deep knowledge of online romantic media to find these subcultures fascinating, at least for a passing visit. Nor do you need a PhD in gender studies to understand that these worlds are huge sources of queer fantasy, pleasure, even world-making.
Sometimes the media I want to talk about is eminently mockable, and there’s pleasure in that, too. One recently published romance novel is entitled Santa Claus is Going to Town on Me, and let me tell you it… commits to that premise. Or there’s the ultimate encapsulation of my erotica/academic investments, this live journal post from 2012 that imagines philosophers Derrida and Foucault in a torrid embrace. But I want to laugh with these writers, not laugh at them. Even at their most indulgent, unsubtle, and unintentionally funny, they are admirably committed to putting their desires down into sentences, and well. That’s just the thing, isn’t it? Maybe it’s cruel optimism, maybe it’s Maybelline. But it’s really fun.
If you’d like to subscribe to this newsletter, expect essays on the intersection between fat positivity and monsterfucking romance (out this week), fan fiction’s complicated relationship to gay shame, and slash’s Woman Problem (feat. Andrea Long Chu and the omegaverse). I’m hoping to put out an essay every month, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
With enthusiasm/trepidation,
Ana
Right now I’m reading:
· mia_ugly’s heartstopping fic Slow Show (…for the third time)
· Roan Parrish’s Middle of Somewhere Series
· Chang-Rae Lee’s My Year Abroad
NB: Regretfully, I am going to link to romance novels on Amazon, simply because many of them are available for very cheap or free through Kindle Unlimited, making them far less cost prohibitive for many people. Sadly, Amazon is the central hub of independent romance publishing. Viva la revolution, etc.