So that kind of indicates that it’s about 2/1 LGBTQI to straight.

I’ll be curious to see if this trend continues but what it does prove is that slash fandom is definitely not all straight women

BONASI said: "these non-explicitly-canon het ’ships and explicitly-non-canon het ’ships are rendered invisible, not treated as anything special, even though they are just as trans-formative as slash ’ships that are not-explicitly-canon or explicitly-non-canon."

This clicks with several reactions I've had while following these discussions. Outsiders who know one thing about "slash" have it categorized as "Kirk/Spock, Men Doing It" (or, to really stress the novelty: "Girls making men do it.") People inquire about "slash" and we talk about "slash" back to them.

(The Survey!Fail babydocs failed hardest by assuming they knew what "slash" was. From their questions it was clear that they had only an odd and fragmented glimpse and that they were by no means Seeing the Elephant. Several people tried to correct and broaden their entry-level understanding, but the clue-giving process failed.)

I've been in fanfic communities less than ten years, and in a narrow range of fandoms. Have read more M/M slash than the average citizen, but/and some stories that have affected me longest and deepest are transgressive or transformative in other ways. They are about identity, relationships, human development — often by exploring the consequences of *something* being changed — as much as they are about sex and passion.

For example, there are reams of genderswitch fic — what happens when a character wakes up as a different gender? Or if the canonical character had grown up with a different gender? What if an alien machine transforms a character into a child? The implications can go on forever. Or there is the great mass of AU fic (alternate universe), where canon characters are transplanted to a different era or situation, yet each one remains true to a core of identity. And folks talk about how the accumulation of fic and meta in a fandom becomes a multidimensional set of alternate/simultaneous possibilities that broaden the community sense of the characters.

Bad source can prompt great fic [*cough* Stargate Atlantis *cough*]. SGA has more genderswitch, AU, wingfic, and gods-know-what-all tropes than random models would predict for a single fandom. (One tiny example: there is more than one excellent story in SGA where the category-killing M/M pair transform into penguins for the action of the fic.)

Farscape, OTOH, is an example of well-done source, where events and choices had accumulating impacts on characters and relationships in canon. FS was unusual in the number of strong female characters and in the passion and complexity of the canonical M/F ship. There's relatively little slash in FS fandom, and a lot of het. Fic doesn't have to be same-sex, non-canonical-pairing "slash" to push the characters beyond what broadcast TV could depict, dare, or squeeze in to the space available….

BONASI said: “these non-explicitly-canon het ’ships and explicitly-non-canon het ’ships are rendered invisible, not treated as anything special, even though they are just as trans-formative as slash ’ships that are not-explicitly-canon or explicitly-non-canon.”

This clicks with several reactions I’ve had while following these discussions. Outsiders who know one thing about “slash” have it categorized as “Kirk/Spock, Men Doing It” (or, to really stress the novelty: “Girls making men do it.”) People inquire about “slash” and we talk about “slash” back to them.

(The Survey!Fail babydocs failed hardest by assuming they knew what “slash” was. From their questions it was clear that they had only an odd and fragmented glimpse and that they were by no means Seeing the Elephant. Several people tried to correct and broaden their entry-level understanding, but the clue-giving process failed.)

I’ve been in fanfic communities less than ten years, and in a narrow range of fandoms. Have read more M/M slash than the average citizen, but/and some stories that have affected me longest and deepest are transgressive or transformative in other ways. They are about identity, relationships, human development — often by exploring the consequences of *something* being changed — as much as they are about sex and passion.

For example, there are reams of genderswitch fic — what happens when a character wakes up as a different gender? Or if the canonical character had grown up with a different gender? What if an alien machine transforms a character into a child? The implications can go on forever. Or there is the great mass of AU fic (alternate universe), where canon characters are transplanted to a different era or situation, yet each one remains true to a core of identity. And folks talk about how the accumulation of fic and meta in a fandom becomes a multidimensional set of alternate/simultaneous possibilities that broaden the community sense of the characters.

Bad source can prompt great fic [*cough* Stargate Atlantis *cough*]. SGA has more genderswitch, AU, wingfic, and gods-know-what-all tropes than random models would predict for a single fandom. (One tiny example: there is more than one excellent story in SGA where the category-killing M/M pair transform into penguins for the action of the fic.)

Farscape, OTOH, is an example of well-done source, where events and choices had accumulating impacts on characters and relationships in canon. FS was unusual in the number of strong female characters and in the passion and complexity of the canonical M/F ship. There’s relatively little slash in FS fandom, and a lot of het. Fic doesn’t have to be same-sex, non-canonical-pairing “slash” to push the characters beyond what broadcast TV could depict, dare, or squeeze in to the space available.

You know, it occurs to me that this makes for an interesting example of the slipperiness of language. You’re right that questions of gender have a great deal to do with thinking about what “slash” means — but at the same time, in fandom as it exists now, to the best of my knowledge gender plays no part at all in what “/” means. The “/” now denotes only a romantic or sexual relationship between the characters so linked. (Or among them, when there are more than two.)

So, for example, if you happened to follow the crack_van fic recs for The X-Files, you might well see stories labeled Mulder/Scully, stories labeled Mulder/Krycek, stories labeled Mulder/Scully/Krycek, and even stories labeled Mulder+Scully. Of these, though, only the Mulder/Krycek is clearly slash. The M/S/K might or might not be, depending on whether there’s a relationship between Mulder and Krycek, or it’s a threesome story (slash), or whether it’s a story where both the guys have some sort of relationship with Scully independent of each other (not slash). The Mulder/Scully uses the / mark to denote a sexual/romantic relationship, but it’s not slash. And finally, the Mulder+Scully doesn’t use the / mark at all, to indicate that both characters are important to the story, but they’re not romantically involved with each other in it.

So in a way, you can think of “slash” as a subset of “/” — at least you can if you’re doing a mathematical diagram. I’m not sure how this happened, though: whether fandom as a whole took up the /-mark convention from slash fandom, or whether it was always in use and slashers were just the ones who needed a name for what they were doing. For that, you’d need someone who’s been around longer than I have.

But it would be nice to think that maybe the terms are converging because society makes less of a point of mandatory gender roles than once it did. I’m not sure I’m that optimistic, but I’d like to be.

I’m going to push the analogy here, Bonasi, but as a bi-researcher, I have a very similar reaction to you to academic explanations and debates (our stories) that are straight. And there are incredibly constraints and pressures in academia to be straight – to go by your discipline’s canon, to publish in the approved way, and so forth. When I watch/read/look at/listen to a human story and every explanation is straight, I can’t believe it. It’s a lie.

My way of expressing that is somewhat similar to yours. About any human situation I say, “it’s all there,” and our job is for our explanations to try to match that polymorphous reality.

Similarly, there are different understandings and uses of terms and explanations in different research communities, even ones who agree about the need to challenge heteronormativity in our approach to sexuality, or to other topics like performance or to addiction (where Greg and I do most of our research). And then the default options people take with their approaches become important – sure, it’s nature/nurture, but really nurture is where the action is at (or vice versa). Nature/nurture is one of the main default options. Another is pure/applied. For Greg and myself, another would be mind/body. Almost everyone in academia builds “idea” explanations (a mind point), say, evolutionary psychologists and feminists arguing over sexuality by pointing to ideas about human nature and about social norms. They’ve defined reality rather than actually looking at it, where the actual characters and interactions become important.

I can tell that I need to put together a page about academic tropes! With a few changes, what I said above is captured so well by the Bi the Way trope:

Since being capable of being attracted to men and women is not the same thing as dating/sleeping with/married to both at the same time these bisexuals do not get sudden uncontrollable urges to sleep with someone of the opposite gender of their current lover any more than straight or gay people do with someone of the same. That is to say it’s not unheard of but that’s the human condition and thus not strictly limited to bisexuality (also known as “being a jerk.”)

Bi The Way is almost nonexistent in mainstream media (though almost a logical necessity in others) in part because a lot of both straight and gay people appear to believe that bisexuals are somehow ‘cheating’ by playing both sides of the field. All may be fair in love and war but there’s something about the idea of losing someone to the opposing team that makes the “betrayal” worse because that’s the one level where people who are exclusively straight or gay are either unwilling or unable to compete.

But most people have troubles with Bi the Way, whether in mainstream media or in mainstream academia. And that’s why the slash contrast definitely captured my attention. But since I use it as a contrast, I also don’t do justice to the complexity within the community, as you so rightly point out.

Thanks for pointing out Revolutionary Girl Utena. I’ll definitely explore it more. I’m watching a YouTube clip right now, and I’ll leave off with how it opens, where the point is that exploring the decision (the reality) through the show matters as much as the question:

“The princess vowed to become a prince herself one day. But was that really such a good idea?”

Youtube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4za_6-3b7LE