Slashing the Romance Narrative

We, the women of the RSM, in an effort to form a really loose confederation of passionately uncommitted rational anarchists, accept no rules and no limits. We have no boundaries. We do not explain ourselves. We do not accept American Express . . . We reserve the right to slash anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Suze These lines are from the Manifesto of the Renegade Slash Militia (RSM), a group of slash writers and readers, and can be found on their Web page along with their fiction recommendations, a list of their members, and various sassy essays on fandom, listserv politics, and the writing process. Although not representative of slash Web pages, as the Militia includes no actual stories, this quotation does capture the playful transgression at the heart of the slash fan fiction community. The term slash fan fiction refers to stories, written by amateur authors (who are almost solely heterosexual women), that involve placing two television or film characters of the same gender, usually male, into noncanonical romantic relationships with each other. Although part of a long history of fan activities, slash offers its own particular challenge to normative constructions of gender and romance, as it allows women to construct narratives that subvert patriarchy by reappropriating those prototypical hero characters who usually reproduce women's position of social disempowerment. Whether these narratives actually can change the material conditions of women's lives, the fact remains that groups like the RSM are writing out a story that is radically different from standard romance traditions, and they are having a wonderful time in the process. Slash fan fiction and fan writing originated in science fiction fandom (from "fan" and "kingdom": the group of people involved in the fan activities surrounding a particular film, television series, or book and the texts that they produce) around the works of Isaac Asimov and Jules Verne (Verba 1). Fan writing or fan fiction is the practice of using characters from a professionally published text (a source product) in an original story. Fan fiction is written by amateur authors and was originally published only in fanzines (or zines, fan magazines) that were compilations of fan fiction, poems, articles, and fan art whose price was set only high enough to recoup printing costs. In the zine publishing system, an author submits his or her story to a zine editor, and that story will be published only if it follows the theme of the zine, meets the structural standards of the editor, and follows the aesthetic tradition that has been established by previously published zine stories (Bacon-Smith 7-44). During this zine publishing period, slash emerged from Star Trek fan fiction, although there is some speculation as to whether there may have been unpublished The Wild Wild West slash fan fiction even before Star Trek slash developed (Bright, Harmon, and Knight Smeg). Within Star Trek fan fiction, a tradition had been established wherein authors explored the deep friendship between Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock. These stories usually were labeled "hurt/comfort" because they involved one of the characters being physically or emotionally wounded and then receiving comfort from the other. These nonsexual friendship-based narratives are now called "smarm" to distinguish them from slash. Slash came about when authors began to use the hurt/ comfort narrative to make Kirk and Spock's relationship sexual. The term slash, therefore, comes from the "/" mark placed between the words Kirk and Spock (Kirk/Spock) at the beginning of a story to tell readers that it contains a sexual and romantic relationship between the two characters. As time went on, slash spread to other fandoms like Starsky and Hutch, Blake's 7, and The Professionals (Jenkins 288-306). "Slash" no longer referred only to Kirk/Spock, but to the more general "m/m" or "male/male" designation that could be used in any fandom. …