Slashing the Romance Narrative
Anne Kustritz
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/
Anne Kustritz has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and cultural studies from the University of Minnesota and is currently pursuing a
PhD in American culture at the University of Michigan. Sections of this article have been presented at the 2001 National Women’s
Studies Association Conference and the 2002 Popular Culture/American Culture Associations conference.
371Slashing the Romance Narrative  Anne Kustritz
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.
Until the early 1990s, slash remained tucked
away, a subculture within a subculture of Star
Trek and a selected few other fandoms, but as
personal Web pages and personal computers
became increasingly accessible and commonplace,
fan writing and slash fan fiction moved onto the
Internet. By the mid-1990s, all types of fan
writing had become, primarily but not exclusively,
Internet phenomena. This move from hardcopy
print publishing to Internet publishing had a
profound effect on fan fiction and fan communities.
First, it opened up publishing to a much
larger number of writers. Although zines had
always been nonprofit, they still could not be
published in excess of demand, and demand was
low because few people even knew of slash, let
alone requested it. On the Internet, an author was
able to publish as much material as she desired
either by creating her own Web page or by
submitting her work to an Internet fan fiction
archive. The number of readers increased as well.
It was suddenly possible for people to stumble
upon fan writing and slash fan fiction from the
privacy of their homes. Accessibility, combined
with much lower cost (the cost of an Internet
connection versus the cost of printing and
binding), made fan fiction reading a much more
desirable activity for a much wider audience than
it had been in previous years.
In addition, the number of fandoms and
pairings represented in fan fiction in general, but
especially in slash, increased dramatically.
Although a few other slash pairings, Starsky/
Hutch most prolifically, did emerge from the time
of slash’s inception until its rebirth over the
Internet, Kirk/Spock slash from Star Trek remained
heavily dominant as the most common
pairing, with a number of less common pairings in
short supply. Once on the Internet, slash pairings
sprang up in almost every science fiction, fantasy,
or police drama imaginable. Currently slash
pairings include, but are not limited to, Picard/
Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Blair
Sandburg/Jim Ellison from The Sentinel, Benton
Fraser/Ray Vecchio and Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
from Due South, Kim/Paris from Star
Trek: Voyager, Duncan MacLeod/Methos and
Methos/Richie from Highlander: The Series,
Skinner/Mulder and Krycek/Mulder from The
X-Files, Hercules/Iolaus and Ares/Joxer from
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena/Gabrielle
from Xena: Warrior Princess, Angel/Xander
from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Qui-Gon
Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi/Darth
Maul from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Jack
O’Neill/Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1,
Logan/Scott Summers and Charles Xavier/Eric
Lensher from The X-Men, Josh Lyman/Sam
Seaborn from The West Wing, Maximus/Commodus
from Gladiator, Tyr Anasazi/Dylan Hunt
from Andromeda, and Clark Kent/Lex Luther
from Smallville.
Given the huge amount of expansion and
production that took place when access to fan
fiction increased and cost decreased as publishing
shifted to the Internet, slash fan fiction seems to
be fulfilling a desire that is either extremely
extensive or cannot be fulfilled elsewhere.
What parts of our society leave us empty?
Which individuals are particularly satisfied by
slash fan fiction? Why are fan narratives written
at all?
In an essay entitled ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ Walter
Benjamin writes that there is nothing in the
present age that ‘‘benefits storytelling; almost
everything benefits information’’ (89). We are
overwhelmed by news, which constitutes the
absolute interpretation of events, leaving no room
for retelling or multiple accounts. The consensus
press provides the public with one definitive
version of an occurrence that assumes the
position of truth, leaving little space for personal
372 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 26, Number 3  September 2003
perspectives, extrapolation, and recapitulation. In
this model, the supposed objectivity represented
by news replaces the former importance of
individual reports of personal experiences. This
leaves individuals dependent upon the mass media
as their primary source of ‘‘truth,’’ and personal
narratives, oral traditions, and folk music traditions
are trivialized. As written by Benjamin,
people lose the ability to communicate their own
experiences, although it could be added that these
experiences are still communicated, but are
relegated to a position of relative frivolity (83).
In short, Benjamin argues that in the present era,
we are starved for personal storytelling, mysterious
events that have not been interpreted, and
magical acts that cannot be explained.
Given this set of circumstances within the
realm of actual occurrences, it may be argued that
the same attitudes are also present in our
interactions with the commodified ‘‘storytelling’’
provided by movies, television, and books. These
professionally published entertainment products
generally inspire two reactions: formal appreciation
and superficial enjoyment. A particular set of
entertainment products is selected by the cultural
elite—namely academics, professionals, and reviewers—as
‘‘art objects,’’ a status that raises them
above those entertainment products that remain
simple commodities intended for the vulgar
pleasures of the masses. These ‘‘art objects’’
receive ‘‘formal appreciation,’’ but they may be
studied and analyzed only by those professionals
who have an adequate educational background,
and it is generally understood that their analyses
and commentaries will be completely inaccessible
to the average individual who lacks a similar
educational background (Jenson 9-29).
The second reaction, superficial enjoyment, is
the prescribed, default viewing style associated
with entertainment products that do not receive
the special ‘‘art object’’ status. These products lack
the formal or structural elements that would make
them valuable in an academic setting. Instead,
they are relegated to serve as amusement and
distraction for common people. They are not to
be taken seriously, they are not to be adored, and
they are not to be critiqued. They are given little
or no cultural importance beyond their ability to
hypnotize a crowd. The distinction is clear: the
average individual is to passively accept both
news information and the narratives provided by
entertainment texts. As written by Michel De
Certeau, the book, at least, provided a reader with
physical margins in which he or she could write
his or her own interpretation of the text, but
television and film seem to be constructed even
more firmly toward a spectator who receives
messages but does not interact (31). Furthermore,
the act of writing is itself a profession in which
only a select group of people are allowed to
publish, and these are again chosen by a cultural
elite as artists or by publishing corporations as
hypnotists whose work will create a profit on the
open market. In sum, not only are most individuals
not allowed to express their own versions of
actual events, but they are also restricted from
sharing their dreams, fantasies, and desires.
Fan fiction may be interpreted as a direct
response to these problematic circumstances.
Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers, writes
that fan fiction can be understood as a return to
early communal storytelling practices. Jenkins
cites sagas and epics like the Camelot stories in
which tales pass orally from person to person,
necessarily encouraging not only continual recapitulation,
but also individual interpretation as the
story’s usefulness shifts from one region or time
to another. The minor changes that each storyteller
adds to these tales leave a mark of their
authorship on the narrative. These storytelling
practices can be understood as interactive, because
each individual may insert his or her own
experience and perspective, but also as communal,
wherein the sum of these minor alterations
represents the story of a community in which
each member has contributed to the corpus that
will be passed on either to the next generation or
to another geographical region.
Fan fiction, Jenkins suggests, works in a similar
way. Cultural entertainment products reflect the
dominant ideology of an era, and taken on their
own, they remain the product of an individual
interpretation. What occurs in fan rewrites is that
these products are not merely accepted, but rather
373Slashing the Romance Narrative  Anne Kustritz
analyzed with the same amount of care, appreciation,
and religiosity that is otherwise only
bestowed upon art objects. Fans discuss the
narratives and characters provided for them by
the mass media, and then alter those hegemonic
messages to reflect their own needs, experiences,
and desires. Peripheral characters like Uhura of
the original Star Trek may take center stage to
more accurately represent the lives of AfricanAmerican
women, or transgressive characters
who are ultimately punished, such as Tasha Yar
from Star Trek: The Next Generation, may escape
their eventual demise (Jenkins 152-84). Fan fiction
offers individuals lacking the necessary educational
background to enter the discussion or
production of art objects (and those who are
unable to write a narrative that easily enters the
realm of mass consumption) the chance to
critically interpret and rescript the hypnotic
entertainment objects that were meant to be a
part of their reproduction as patriarchal, capitalist
subjects; they may question the representations
around them and offer counter-representations
that reflect the material conditions of their own
lives.
In addition, those television series and films
most often modified by fan fiction authors are
those that incorporate the elements that Benjamin
particularly cites as absent from modern life,
namely unresolved mystery and magic. With
some exceptions, these films and television
programs generally fall under the fantasy and
science fiction genre and are often low-budget
productions. Fans are usually drawn to their
‘‘source products’’ (films, television series, and
books that are rescripted by fan fiction authors)
because they are fascinated by the concept behind
the program (immortality, vampires, space travel,
karma, aliens, mutations, deities), or taken in by
the characters who populate the screen world. It is
only as time goes on that they become what John
Fiske, author of Understanding Popular Culture,
would term ‘‘excessive readers’’—those who place
great importance on culturally insignificant texts.
At some point, fan writers come to the conclusion
that the concept and characters are not being fully
exploited by the source product, but unlike many
viewers who accept these deficiencies, fan writers
cling to the magic—the program’s potential—and
write out what they could have been if the
conditions of entertainment production were
radically different. Source products drawn upon
by fan writers are full of contradictions, inconsistencies,
and ambiguities. They present a fascinating
idea, but their potential is never realized
within the professionally published text. Movies,
television programs, and books intended for a
wide audience are marketed and constructed to
capture the attention of an audience with an
increasing attention deficit, but not long enough
to lose the interest of those who are easily drawn
to change the channel. Within these constraints, it
is difficult to imagine that any character could be
fully tested, or any concept fully explained. Fan
writers fill in gaps, replace hurried narratives, and
extrapolate beyond the bounds of the published
text.
Within slash fan fiction communities, these
activities usually involve filling in the motivations,
emotions, and personal histories of the main male
characters, or rescripting and replacing those
elements of the characters’ emotions and actions
that were provided in the source product. Jenkins
refers to fan fiction as ‘‘repairing the damage’’
done by the mass media. His comments are
directed toward the rewriting of female characters,
such as the assistant on Doctor Who, who
are provided with low responsibility roles within
the professionally published narrative. However,
his characterization of these fan narratives seems
particularly suited toward slash fiction narratives
as well. The characters used by slash writers are
usually a source product’s protagonists, or ‘‘heroes.’’
These characters reproduce numerous patriarchal
norms, including an understanding of
masculinity as unfeeling, unmoving, masterful,
and impenetrable. This can leave the characters
emotionless and inexpressive. Recent characters
that fit this model include Maximus from
Gladiator, Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars:
The Phantom Menace, and AD Walter Skinner
from The X-Files. In order to fill predetermined
masculine archetypes, these characters are brutally
limited, but they are given new life in fan
374 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 26, Number 3  September 2003
rewrites. In a story called ‘‘New Scars,’’ author
‘‘Melinda’’ explains why Gladiator’s Maximus is
so terribly constrained in the film by filling in a
painful event of Maximus’s childhood:
He could feel guilt and shame washing over
him in droves, knowing that he had let
powerful emotions take control, nearly
causing the death of another human being
needlessly. He vowed he would never allow
these emotions to cloud his judgment again.
(Melinda)
Thus the extremely withdrawn character we are
presented with in the film no longer represents an
image of masculine perfection, but rather becomes
a particular individual whose brooding is not a
sign of strength, but of fear and fracture. Fan
writers ‘‘repair the damage’’ done to these
characters at the hand of the writers and
producers of the source product by making them
into real people with personalities, faults, needs,
illogical desires, and weaknesses.
This process is reminiscent of John Fiske’s
theorization of ripped blue jeans and wrestling
spectatorship practices. He states that entertainment
products are designed around a class system
in which lower-class spectacles require interaction
and upper-class arts demand appreciation. The
tradition behind certain spectator practices of the
lower classes has always encouraged audience
participation and an associated constant display
and defense of clothing and gestures. Upper-class
entertainment consumption, on the other hand, is
incredibly fleeting, as spectatorship is encapsulated
in the production of attending and being
seen in attendance (Fiske 129-58). In this manner,
it is rare, if not unheard of, for someone to bring
back a tee-shirt from Paris with the words ‘‘Eat at
Le Grande Vifour,’’ or to observe an individual at
the opera vocally cheering on the villain during
the performance. However, it is commonplace to
hear screams of rapture during a rock concert and
to see half the female population of a junior high
school dressed in exactly the same clothes as
Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, or whichever
teenybopper idol is currently gracing the pop
stage.
Fan writing allies itself with this tradition of
fan involvement and the carrying of spectacle into
everyday life, but it goes further. These examples
encapsulate a type of completely worshipful
audience. They create a picture of an audience
that is entirely taken with the entertainment
products provided by corporations for frivolous
enjoyment. As disempowered members of society,
they seem to have bought wholesale into the
ideals of the very system that ensures their
subordinated social position, and because of their
heavy investment in these popular icons, they face
public ridicule (Jenson 9-29). William Shatner, the
actor who played the often-slashed Star Trek
character Captain Kirk, encapsulated society’s
general feelings toward these excessive spectatorship
practices in his now infamous Saturday
Night Live line and biography title ‘‘Get a Life!’’
(Jenkins 9-49; Shatner). Being a fan is clearly not
the type of life one is supposed to lead. Both the
news media and the entertainment industry would
have us think that we know exactly what fans are
like. They provide us with a very limited
interpretation by insisting on infantalizing, pathologizing,
or criminalizing fan activities. Fans scare
us because they are so unreasonably involved in
their source product that they can no longer
comprehend that the characters and settings they
love are not real, which leads them to live out
their lives in a fantasy world, or possibly to kill or
kidnap actors or actresses. Alternatively, fandom
is an activity shared by the very young or by
underdeveloped adults who are sorely lacking in
the social skills that would allow them to lead a
‘‘normal’’ life.
Thus fans are presented in the guise of
psychotic killers as in Misery, as children such as
Aguilera or Beatles fans, or as social misfits like
the technologically adept but socially clueless Star
Trek fans in the Trekkies documentary (Jenkins
9-49; Jenson 9-29; King; Nygard). Fans lead lives
in which trivial, mass produced commodities take
on meanings that are usually reserved for religious
relics, art objects, or workplace financial achievement,
and their representation shows that these
deviant behaviors are clearly poor substitutes for
the fact that they are inadequate individuals who
375Slashing the Romance Narrative  Anne Kustritz
cannot manage or prosper in the ‘‘real world.’’
Church leaders, academics, politicians, economists,
and William Shatner all stand firm against
fans’ devotion to pop ideals. Images of fans give
us an extreme against which we can measure our
own normativity, and they provide a glaringly
gauche example of inappropriate levels of commitment
to popular entertainment products. ‘‘Get
a Life!’’ implores that we are to love Shakespeare
and Puccini quietly, or love nothing at all.
There may be, however, alternative types of fan
activities besides wholesale adoration. Fiske continues
his analysis by characterizing torn or
altered blue jeans as the ‘‘excorporation of the
commodity into a subordinate subculture’’ (15).
When hippies in the 1960s and ‘‘punk’’ youth
groups of the 1980s tore, patched, and slit blue
jeans, they did it not to exalt and reproduce those
meanings that had already been associated with
jeans, but rather to create something new.
Excorporation refers to the appropriation of
commodities in order to make new, resistant
meanings. As jeans represent wholesome America,
or the rugged individualism of the American
West, their disfigurement and alteration questions
those meanings (1-22). Fan writing preys upon
characters who reproduce traditional masculinity,
traditional class and race hierarchies, and traditional
relational scripts and reconfigures them
into tales of communal societies, racial equality,
and sexual transgression.
This model applies particularly well in slash
fiction communities, which are made up almost
exclusively of overeducated but underemployed
heterosexual women who are oppressed not only
by patriarchy but by their employment status
(Adder). According to user polls, these women
overwhelmingly rate themselves as mostly to
totally heterosexual, between the ages of twenty
and forty, and in computer related fields or in
graduate school (Demona; Sockii). In one user
poll, almost ninety percent of respondents had a
completed a college degree (Sockii). They are not
children, they are not social misfits, and they are
not mentally ill. They are most often secretaries,
technical consultants, or students who are frustrated
by their lack of status in both the social
realm and on the job. Unlike the images of fans
propagated by the media, they do not simply love
the source products that reproduce their subordinated
social position; they are also highly
critical of them, and of the implications of the
rewrites provided by themselves and by others
within the fan community (Adder).
The men captured and rewritten by slashers are
changed in very particular ways. As described
previously, screen men are often wonderfully
suited to this endeavor because they are so poorly
filled out within the professionally published
narrative, but they are also suited to rescription
because they embody many of the things that are
wrong with the patriarchal system of traditional
romance. According to psychoanalytic film theorists
like Laura Mulvey and Steve Neale, the
original rhetorical purpose of heroes like Captain
Kirk from Star Trek, Qui-Gon Jinn from Star
Wars: The Phantom Menace, Hercules from
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Duncan
MacLeod from Highlander: The Series is to
represent an ideal masculine self that male
spectators can aspire to be. These characters win
the love of an uninteresting, mysterious, or exotic
but always helpless heroine by vanquishing the
enemy. They are in perpetual control of the
narrative, the camera, and the other characters. By
remaining dominant, impenetrable, and masterful,
they gain the admiration of other men—often
represented by the sidekick or ‘‘buddy’’—and the
devotion of women who often fight each other to
achieve the honor of becoming their possession.
However, even within this narrative, before fan
intervention, there are cracks in the hero’s armor.
‘‘Real men’’ are supposed to be self-sufficient,
emotionless, and independent, but one may note
the startlingly common presence of the sidekick
or ‘‘buddy,’’ a presence so pervasive that some
inside and outside of fandom have taken to calling
programs and films that fit this pattern ‘‘buddy
shows.’’ The ‘‘buddy’’ appears as a foil to the
hero’s philosophies and often acts as a partner in
police dramas like Starsky and Hutch, or as a
fellow warrior or soldier as in westerns, the Star
Trek series, and war films. Women in these
narratives come and go in order to reinforce the
376 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 26, Number 3  September 2003
male protagonists’ heterosexual identities and to
propel the plot, but they inevitably depart
through a heroic, sacrificial death, or as femme
fatales who ruthlessly use and then abandon the
protagonist. This leaves the wounded, bitter, and
grieving protagonist to be comforted by his
‘‘buddy,’’ who is always available, constantly
sympathetic, and may be the only person on the
planet allowed to see the hero cry. The result is
that women are for passion and ‘‘buddies’’ are for
compassion. While the heroes spend an inordinate
amount of time pursuing and wooing the woman
of the week, they share their feelings, dreams, and
the bulk of their time with their buddy. The most
intense relationships, therefore, are between men,
so while we do indeed see traditional heterosexuality
being played out in ‘‘buddy shows,’’ the
source products themselves provide the hooks
that fan writers lock onto and exploit in their
rewritings.
Slashers use this ‘‘buddy show’’ formula to
push the male protagonists’ relationship to its
perhaps inevitable conclusion by making the
characters’ close friendship into a romantic
relationship. In doing so, they tear down the
traditional formula of romance novels and films
that negotiate the submission of a heroine to a
hero by instead negotiating the complicated
power balance between two equally dominant,
independent, and masculine characters. This
friendship-based love narrative, along with an
equality-centered relationship dynamic, is the
overwhelming preoccupation of slash narratives.
Slashers often exaggerate the extent to which slash
characters seem drawn to talk about the power
dynamics within their relationship, demonstrated
in a series of stories that parodied the characters’
tendency to begin philosophical discussions about
their relationship during sex. Although this
tendency has received playful jabs within the
slash community, it is a pattern that has yet to
abate. In slash narratives, authors meticulously
create an equality relationship dynamic in which
characters are completely equal in everything
from decision making to love making, and from
patterns of dress to household chores to levels of
attractiveness and financial security. These patterns
are exemplified by the following quotation
from ‘‘The Only Constant’’ by ‘‘Isabeau,’’ wherein
the characters’ first sexual interaction is interrupted
by Qui-Gon telling his apprentice that
rank is not a part of their romantic relationship,
an exchange present in a great number of Star
Wars slash stories:
I pulled away slightly, dizzy from the
intensity of feeling. ‘‘Master-’’ I gasped; but
he put one finger lightly against my mouth,
silencing me.
‘‘No ‘Master’,’’ he said quietly. ‘‘Out there,’’
with a nod of his head towards the door, ‘‘I
am your Master; but in here, I am Qui-Gon.
No more, no less.’’ (Isabeau)
Slash stories transform the nature of sexual
intercourse that, in heterosexual fiction, is often
portrayed as a conquest or a devaluation of the
woman who ‘‘loses her flower’’ if she should
consent to be ‘‘taken.’’
He could see the absolute trust as Mac gave
himself up to him, put himself in Richie’s
control and something tore open in his soul.
No one had ever trusted him like this—
shown him their darkest secret, given him
the power to hurt them, willingly, even
gladly . . . it made this once repugnant act
one of love. (saraid)
This quotation from ‘‘the healing, too’’ by saraid
exemplifies the way in which sex is used as an
expression of trust in slash rather than an act of
domination. Instead of the promiscuous, ‘‘bad’’
girl who asks to be penetrated in heterosexual
fiction, slash men who ask to be penetrated are
characterized as self-aware, confident, and nurturing.
Their request is written as the ultimate gift
they may offer their partner, and it is a gift that is
neither expected nor demanded.
Though these narratives include graphic depictions
of sex, they also invert the common
structures of pornography. Pornography focuses
on sex for the sake of sex, or sex outside of
context (Heddy). What may be especially disturbing
is pornographic texts’ denial of the
emotional consequences of sex. Within slash
narratives, characters are drawn from films and
377Slashing the Romance Narrative  Anne Kustritz
television series that provide years of shared
history and emotional entanglement. Sex in a
slash narrative always occurs within some kind of
emotional context, but of particular interest is the
fact that sex always has direct and dramatic
emotional ramifications. ‘‘Keelywolfe’’ writes
about the aftermath of such an encounter in her
story, ‘‘Though Night Shall Fall’’:
And even though later I knew that I should
never have touched you, never fouled your
skin with the taint of my darkness, this was a
moment that I could not regret, ever, no
matter the pain it caused me later. I could
never regret the moment where I learned to
love you again. (Keelywolfe)
It is hard to place this type of introspection within
the pornography genre.
One effect of the friendship-based love formula,
rather than the more common courtship
formula, is that the characters are not forced to
compete for their desired partner’s love, which is
directly related to the fact that these characters are
a far cry from conventional ideas of the ‘‘perfect’’
partner. In Male Impersonators: Men Performing
Masculinity, Mark Simpson argues that male
bodybuilders are uniquely positioned to look at
each other and compare their bodies both to an
ideal body, like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger,
and to the bodies of other men around them.
Within our culture, gazing at another man’s body
is usually coded as homosexual; therefore, this
gaze must be used only as a vehicle for improving
the bodybuilder’s own body, channeling love
inwards toward his own image (narcissism) (21-
44). Simpson describes this system—that of
gazing at other men’s bodies—as a method of
comparison toward the attainment of an ideal
body unique to bodybuilders, but it sounds
remarkably similar to the life of many women
who have gazed upon anorexic supermodels in
magazines, and their friends in dressing rooms, as
part of a competition toward the thinnest, firmest,
body, the rounder bust, and the fullest lips.
Psychologists Parker, Nichter, Nichter, Vukovic,
Sims, and Ritenbough reported in an article
entitled ‘‘Body Image and Weight Concerns
Among African American and White Adolescent
Females: Differences that Make a Difference’’
that, especially for white girls, the definition of
beauty is one of a culturally approved ideal. In
their analysis, an individual’s attainment of beauty
was described by respondents as the attainment of
perfection, and anything shy of perfection was
equated with failure. Parker et al. use this finding
to explain differential anorexia rates found in
white and African-American populations, but the
findings also demonstrate the role of beauty ideals
in romantic fiction. As exemplified in films like
Disney’s animated Cinderella, the woman deserving
of love and happiness is the most beautiful
woman. As we all know, what is good is what is
beautiful (Brehm 65-72). A desired partner, girls
are told, can only be attained through the
alteration of one’s own body. Squeeze into a
smaller personality, tweeze your interests into an
acceptable shape and, of course, always remember
to smile; smile until it hurts, especially when it
hurts (Matlin 205–06, 210). Cinderella, Harlequin
Romances, fashion magazines, and helpful aunts
have assured us that the only way for a woman to
gain the regard of a desired partner is to be
perfect. If only you’d drop ten pounds, maybe
you could find someone who wouldn’t hit you.
Only beauty can make the heterosexual woman
deserving.
In slash, relationships are structured rather
differently. The characters’ attraction to each
other is primarily intellectual or spiritual, based
upon a long friendship. They are deserving not
because of their appearance, but because of their
character. Slash characters could not be described
as ‘‘perfect’’—rather the opposite, as authors
spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on
and developing their flaws. Emma Woodhouse
includes the following passage in her story, ‘‘The
Padawan’s Whore,’’ which includes some of the
common flaws attributed to Qui-Gon’s character
in slash:
We returned to our quarters together and
Obi-Wan stayed quite close beside me, ready
to assist his decrepit Master, I suppose. Well,
face it. I was old. At least, too old for a youth
of barely twenty. Too old, too big, and
378 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 26, Number 3  September 2003
definitely too male. I recognized a selfpity
attack coming on, and laughed at it
silently. My hair was going gray, my nose
had been broken more than once, oh
yes, I was altogether a thoroughly pathetic
case. (Woodhouse)
As a side note, this passage shows the way in
which homosexual desire becomes just another of
these ‘‘flaws.’’ Even in stories that deal directly
with a supposedly straight desired partner, gender
and sexual orientation are not portrayed as
particularly salient or determining factors, but
rather are cast in the same vein as a crooked nose
or an overly impulsive nature. As opposed to the
‘‘coming out’’ story or other romance narratives
that are structured around the gay community,
slash is not about being gay (or being straight). It
is about being in love. Despite anatomically
correct sex scenes between characters of the same
gender, slash remains gender-neutral by making
gender basically unimportant—or just as important
as hair length and finger thickness—in the
choice of a desired partner (and in a reader’s
choice of a desired self).
To return to the concept of flaws, the Duncan
MacLeod/Methos pairing (from ‘‘to pair’’: to put
two characters together as a romantic couple)
from Highlander: The Series is almost entirely
dominated by stories that deal with the acceptance
of one particular flaw. In the series,
MacLeod ends his friendship with Methos (a.k.a.
Adam Pierson) when he finds out that Methos
had done terrible things in the distant past
(Tynan). Without ever really talking through their
differences, the two are reconciled in the series by
one of MacLeod’s many girlfriends, who gets
Methos to help MacLeod with a problem that he
cannot solve on his own (Tordjmann). In slash
rewrites, however, the gradual reestablishment of
trust and acceptance between the two men is dealt
with in detail and, in particular, fan rewrites deal
with Methos’s feelings of betrayal when MacLeod
suddenly ends the friendship, an emotion that was
glossed over on the screen. Slash does not deal in
the careful presentation of one’s self in order to
show a desired partner an ideal image, but rather
in the revelation and acceptance of actual faults.
This brings to the surface an individual’s desire to
be recognized completely by another, to drop the
pretense of an image, and to be accepted as a total
human being, complete with imperfections and
infractions. The following quotation comes from
‘‘The Book of Lost Days’’ by ‘‘Tasselby’’ in which
she rewrites Methos and MacLeod’s interactions
as they slowly rebuild trust and intimacy after
MacLeod finds out the gruesome details of
Methos’s past. In this and several other stories
within this pairing, the game of chess that the
characters play represents the precarious and
painfully strategic negotiation they go through
to balance their relationship.
If it weren’t for the intensity of his eyes, the
care and confusion there, I might have to
check his pulse. I’d think the shock must
have killed him. I don’t want him to speak
and ruin it. As long as we sit here on
opposite sides of the game and just . . . share
the moment, I can, for once, not hide. No
masks, no deception. I can just . . . love him,
letting the feeling flow through me and over
my skin, sharp and alive and painful like that
first breath in stagnant lungs . . . cold air on
an exposed wound . . . It hurts, it heals . . . It
burns.
He swallows thickly, his eyes never leaving
my face. ‘‘It’s your move.’’
My relief is palpable, happiness rushing in to
soothe the places left flayed by anxiety.
Glancing briefly at the board, I lift my queen
in a sudden, sure move. ‘‘Checkmate . . . ’’
So I shed the last vestiges of Adam Pierson
and pull myself up to my full height and
breadth, nearly as big as him, and consciously
put away the last of my masks,
lowering my defenses, showing him me . . .
And he sees, his eyes full with the unrestricted
view of what he’d only glimpsed
before. All my age and loneliness, the love
and the fear and the sadness and joy . . . I
want him to have it. Not all of my secrets,
not yet, maybe not ever, but the core of me
. . . I want him to know. (Taselby)
Slash characters are far from perfect, but they
don’t have to be. They receive the love of their
desired partners not because of their physical and
379Slashing the Romance Narrative  Anne Kustritz
psychological resemblance to the airbrushed
Playboy (or Playgirl) centerfold, but because they
trust their partners enough to show them all the
hidden things and broken places. Slash characters
receive love because they share themselves and
their lives fully and without reservation.
These traditions within slash contrast sharply
with another tradition within fan writing, that of
the ‘‘Mary Sue’’ character. Mary Sue is a derogatory
name used by fans to refer to an original
female character (OFC) who is entirely too
extraordinarily perfect to be believable. She often
has thigh-length hair, violet eyes or eyes that
change color depending on her mood, and is so
incredibly beautiful that the hero (or heroes)
immediately falls completely in lust with her; he
cannot form complete sentences until the completion
of an incredibly flexible and fantastic NC-
17 scene, and maybe not even then. She enters the
story and not only absorbs all of the male
protagonists’ time and interest, but she drives
the plot as well. This usually entails the OFC
saving the world with skills that only she
possesses, and dying heroically in the process. In
other words, she’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s
courageous, and everyone is so in love with her
that grown men are reduced to puddles of goo as
soon as they are gifted with her presence.
Fan readers have accused the authors of Mary
Sue stories of writing idealized versions of
themselves in order to fantasize about sex with
the male protagonist. This in and of itself would
seem to be insufficient evidence for why Mary
Sue receives the kind of passionate lambasting
that many readers have provided (Adoratrice).
The point in question is, why doesn’t Mary Sue
work for everyone?
Mary Sue’s overwhelming perfection is a
reproduction of the romance system that is
already in place in our culture, namely that a
woman deserves the love of a desirable partner for
achieving a culturally predetermined ideal of
beauty. Mary Sue characters tell readers, the
majority of whom are female, that the attainment
of the desired partner is to be found only through
perfection. She highlights exactly how unattainable
the desired partner—or any desired partner—
is for an average woman. A woman who is a little
too plump, a little too plain, a little too loud, or a
little too flat can be forcefully pushed out of the
narrative when the male protagonist loves Mary
Sue for her absolute perfection. Mary Sue
represents and reproduces the worst aspects of
female competition for desirable heterosexual
relationship partners. Within this system wherein
perfection is a prerequisite for a fulfilling relationship,
‘‘average’’ women are assured that they will
never find a man willing to love them, that they
will never find a community of women who will
support them rather than compete with them, and
that they can never look upon another woman
and feel desire rather than despair or triumph.
Slash fan fiction, therefore, works as a rewrite
of both traditional romance narratives and of
other fan writing like the Mary Sue tradition.
Slash fan fiction is attractive to women who feel
oppressed by patriarchy because it provides a
glimpse into the attainment and preservation of a
relationship based upon mutual trust and egalitarian
values. Yet, a question inevitably arises. Do
these stories actually change anything? As written
by slash authors Tasha and Alyse, poaching on
conventions of the cartoon Pinky and the Brain,
‘‘‘Are you pondering what I’m pondering, Pinky?’
‘I think so, Brain. But how are two guys in a
shower going to help us take over the world?’’’ In
other words, what work is done by the texts, or
what work is being done by the authors through
the texts?
At the most basic level, there is a playful
transgression at the heart of fan writing activities,
especially in their Internet incarnation. As stated
previously, many of the women who write and
read slash work in computer-related fields or
work as office assistants, positions that give them
daily access to a computer (Adder). Consequently,
many slashers read, write, and discuss
slash fiction throughout the work day. Aided by
the Windows interface, these women have one
window on their desktop open to a spreadsheet or
word processing document, and another page
open to the Internet or their e-mail server.
Throughout the day, they toggle between these
windows, stealing the time away from a job that is
380 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 26, Number 3  September 2003
often dull and unfulfilling (Adder; Turkle 12-14,
172-74, 178-79, 188-89, 209).
Besides being an enjoyable but relatively safe
way of subverting one’s working conditions,
movement between computer windows lets
women be active participants on slash listservs.
In slash circles, this activity includes the posting
(from ‘‘to post’’: sending e-mail to the group) of
actual fan fiction, as well as the discussion of the
fiction that has been posted, discussion of
fandom, and discussion of list members’ personal
problems. The most popular lists have around six
hundred to one thousand members, and can
consist of as many as one hundred posts every
day (these lists are known as ‘‘high volume’’)
(Yahoo! Inc.). Although it is generally accepted
that the vast majority of a list’s members will
never post (these people are called ‘‘lurkers’’),
membership to a high volume list for those who
do post is a rigorous and time-consuming activity.
Informal list ‘‘rules’’ or etiquette (also known as
netiquette) require that individuals who post also
read all of the other posts, because it is considered
rude or simply tacky to bring up a topic that has
already been discussed. In addition, these list
members are constantly going through cycles of
self-parody, which necessitate a good working
knowledge of the list’s activities. The active list
member cannot, therefore, miss even one day’s
worth of posts if she wishes to remain an active
part of the community. In this manner, fan reading
and writing become a way of life.
Slash fan fiction communities parody their
own activities to themselves. Most of this selfparody
is based on the accidental and purposeful
homogeneity found in slash stories. Accidental
homogeneity is found in the formation of
‘‘fannon,’’ or fan cannon—those conventions that
are developed within fan communities but not
found in the source product. One example of
fannon is the formation of psychic links between
characters in the Star Wars universe, and spiritual
or psychic energy exchanges during sex for
Highlander characters. The source products for
these programs do not contain references to these
phenomena, but they have become commonplace
within fan fiction narratives. They were probably
adapted from the mind meld, an early slash staple
from the Kirk/Spock pairing and the original Star
Trek. These consistencies and regularities spring
up throughout fan writing communities, and new
members of a list often give themselves away as
newbies (a teasing or slightly derogatory term for
new list members or people new to fandom in
general) by assuming that some piece of fannon is
actually cannon (which refers to things that
happen in the professionally published source
product). Fannon can include anything from a
generalized phenomenon like psychic bonds to
very specific interpretive patterns such as a
particular emotion that the fan community agrees
a character was feeling during a specific scene.
Other types of fannon are merely stylistic and
include themes and plot devices common to a
particular pairing, such as the single-bed hotel
room in The X-Files, and alien aphrodisiacs and
bizarre undercover assignments in Star Wars.
The second type of homogeneity is purposeful
homogeneity, and this type of sameness comes
about as the result of a list challenge. A challenge
is a set of criteria that one list member posts to the
list. Everyone else then has a particular amount of
time to write a story that fits those criteria.
Challenges receive from two or three to hundreds
of responses, and occasionally ten or twenty
responses are posted to the list the same day that
a challenge is issued. One type of challenge is a
‘‘line challenge,’’ or ‘‘first line’’ challenge wherein
authors must complete a story that begins with or
otherwise incorporates the line provided by the
challenger. On the Master_Apprentice list for
Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan pairings from Star Wars: The
Phantom Menace, such challenges have included
‘‘I don’t want to die a virgin,’’ ‘‘No one will
believe that we’re lovers,’’ and ‘‘I’m a Jedi, not a
ofill in the blank4.’’ Other types of challenges
are thematic, and examples from the same list
have included ‘‘virgin sacrifice at dawn,’’ ‘‘the
accidental soul bond,’’ ‘‘sharing body heat,’’ and
‘‘pirate stories’’ (Padawan). Some challenges specify
words, objects, or unusual characters who
must appear in the story, such as the eggbeater
challenge on a The X-Files Mulder/Krycek list or
a Hercules list challenge in which feathers, love
381Slashing the Romance Narrative  Anne Kustritz
potion, and grapes all had to feature prominently
in the story. Finally, drabbles are challenges that
must be exactly one hundred words long.
After one reads around twenty pirate stories in
a single day, it becomes apparent that the purpose
of these stories is not to fulfill an eye patch fetish.
There comes a moment when even the most
dedicated fan of virgin sacrifices must tire of
basically the same story slightly tweaked by a
different author. Given the level of total and utter
boredom one might imagine upon encountering
the fiftieth response to the eggbeater challenge in
one’s mailbox, it may seem obvious that fan
readers will eventually stop reading these similar
stories. Yet, as discussed previously, fans have to
know the intricacies of everything posted to the
list in order to be an active member, and that
includes the thirty-fifth story in which Hercules
and Iolaus experiment with ostrich feathers.
Given these circumstances, it would seem that
active list members would despise challenges that
force them to slog through numerous stories with
practically identical content, but the truth is just
the opposite: lists thrive on challenges, and they
often bring out the most spirited discussions that
include even list members who usually lurk.
There must be something else going on here.
Perhaps list members are reading more than
slash fan fiction texts; perhaps even more profoundly,
they are reading the differences between
the texts.
Recall, for a moment, that slash fiction rewrites
stereotypical masculine ideals and reconfigures
the normative romance narrative. How, then, does
a narrative become normative and a masculinity
become archetypal? Entertainment products, religious
stories, ‘‘common sense’’ adages, and
educational texts all have a part in forming our
understanding of how the world works and how
the world ought to work. They explain to an
individual what society expects of him or her, and
provide a culture-specific script for expected and
appropriate behavior. What is a relationship
supposed to be like? From our cultural texts
emerge the values of patriarchy, values that have
certainly modified over time but that still support
the valuation of husbands’ careers over the careers
of their wives, that still accept as fact that women
ought to take care of home and children, that still
ask about the ill effects of maternal employment
on childhood development, and that still question
same-sex desire and sexually assertive women.
These values, rarely openly stated, are still
performative, and they leave women who give
up lucrative careers to relocate closer to their
husband’s new job, women who are never
promoted to upper management or even past
entry-level positions despite a college education,
and women who leave work and come home to
find a considerable amount of housework waiting
for them, frustrated, tired, and angry. This set of
norms, traditions, and proscriptions may seem
immeasurably vast. Made up of hundreds of
interwoven pieces, it may appear to be impossible
to slay.
Slash fiction texts and the practices of reading,
writing, and rewriting slash texts may be seen as a
practice from which a metatext emerges. From
between the texts and practices, from similarities,
differences, and ambiguities emerges something
that cannot be accounted for by any one text.
That which emerges, the metatext, is a story that
tells us how to live, and it is a story that breaks
strongly from normative traditions. Metatext
incorporates the corpus of written texts, but also
the practices of writing, rewriting, reading, and
living in community that surrounds slash fan
fiction publication. Metatext is thus constantly
being produced and then reproduced through the
process of story posting, discussion, critique,
parody, and rescription. It is at the level of
metatext that slash fan fiction may implicate the
culturally approved set of norms and values.
Interrogating the metatext that emerges from
slash fan fiction with the same question previously
put to dominant texts—‘‘What is a
relationship like?’’—one gets a radically different
output. Some of the pieces that present themselves
for consideration of this question are the equality
relationship dynamic and friendship-based love
narrative from the actual slash fiction texts, the
sharp critiques of Mary Sue stories from listserv
discussions, and the communal nature of online
slash fan fiction communities. The values that
382 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 26, Number 3  September 2003
emerge from the juxtaposition of these pieces are
egalitarian rather than patriarchal.
This process becomes particularly visible in the
case of challenges. There have to be numerous
responses, and each response is diligently read,
because the differences and similarities between
the individual texts form a metatext—that is, they
form a way of seeing and understanding the
world. Fan fiction exists because there is something
faulty about the archetypes and norms being
provided by socially approved texts. Fan stories
rewrite the approved allegories by recombining
cultural fragments and playing with the pieces
provided by the consensus press. Like a bricoleur,
the fan writer gathers sections and segments,
archetypes and themes, and then recombines them
to make something different. This is not a planned
attack, but a process of play and of trial-and-error
(Turkle 50-76). This is why fan fiction must be
communal; the work being done is difficult work.
No one pirate story gets it right, no individual
text truly ‘‘repairs the damage,’’ but as fan writers
work together, rewriting the source products and
rewriting each other’s reconfigurations, they
begin to write out a story that is worth having.
They begin to create a metatext that tells us how
to live in a relationship founded upon equality,
explaining how it begins, how it is sustained, and
how it ends. The metatext tells us how to live as a
community of women who support, critique, and
love each other. It’s difficult work because we’ve
never seen these things before, and just when it
seems that the answer has been written, it must be
rescripted yet again as our old patterns of thinking
and our old habits seep in once again. This is the
purpose of self-parody; it highlights the problems
and contradictions that still exist within the metatext
being created. What slowly emerges between
the texts is a different way of relating and
thinking. These communities are actively involved
in constructing a life that is truly worth living.
Slash fan fiction communities are not large
enough to actually take on all of the world’s social
ills, but the point remains that they can represent
a positive intervention in the lives of the women
who read and write slash on a daily basis. Women
who feel frustrated, despondent, or helpless may
actually effect change within their own perceptions
and behaviors. Not every woman can be a
movie producer, a professional author, songwriter,
or photographer, but through fan fiction, a much
broader population of women may make an active
intervention in the material conditions of their
own lives by constructing a story that lives on in
their reconstructed values, beliefs, and scripts.
In sum, although slash is part of a long history
of fan activities, it offers singular challenges 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.
By rewriting both the source product and
each other’s reconfigurations, women are able to
write out a radically different romance narrative
and an unconventional conceptualization of community,
gender, and relationships. As written by
one slash author, ‘‘So, much as I hate to admit it, I
owe a debt of gratitude to all of those critics who
hate m/m (slash). To everyone who falls into this
category, I raise my glass. And all of you readers
out there, please do the same. As long as there is
hate and fear and intolerance, we will be working,
in our own way, to end it.’’ Slash fiction is easy
to trivialize and disregard as the insignificant
practice of a few pathological individuals, but
in doing so, one may bypass an activity with
great potential. Perhaps it is not the potential to
change the world, but it is the potential to change
women’s lives, one individual, one story, and one
day at a time.
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