The Fan Fiction Studies Reader

6. The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters

6 TheSexLivesof CultTelevisionCharacters Sara Gwenllian Jones Two scenes from slash fiction: Mulder gasped to see Krycek suddenly in front of him. “Alex?” he asked in near disbelief. In answer Krycek braced himself on his arm, leaned over and kissed Mulder full on the mouth. The kiss was tender and desperate with loneliness that went soul-deep. When they finally broke apart to gasp for air, they looked into each other’s eyes and let the song speak for them.1 . . . The sight of Gabrielle kneeling before her was too close to her nightmarish thoughts. Xena pictured herself closing the distance between them. She watched, mesmerized, as her left hand reached down, wrapping itself in the young woman’s hair as her body lowered itself onto the startled girl. Her mouth quickly descended onto Gabrielle’s as her left hand firmly held the bard’s head in check. Xena’s free hand began to roam over the bard’s body, quickly finding its way under the girl’s skirt and straight to its goal.2 The erotic speculations of contemporary slash fiction authors extend in many directions. The sexual encounters described in slash stories may be tender, fiercely passionate, casual, masturbatory, voyeuristic, orgiastic, sadomasochistic or non-consensual. Almost every imaginable seduction scenario, narrative context, emotional import and sexual practice is somewhere described in slash fiction. Stories may be plotless pornographic tableaux, sexually explicit romances, comedies, tragedies or action adventures. If slash fiction may be described as a “genre,” then its only convention is that it describes erotic Sara Gwenllian Jones 117 encounters between television characters (or, more rarely, film characters) of the same sex. Slash fiction takes its name from the punctuating “slash” in the “Kirk/ Spock” or “K/S” erotic fan fiction that appeared in the wake of the original Star Trek series (1966–1969). Slash emerged, Constance Penley suggests, from “regular” fandom, and seems to have arisen “spontaneously in various places beginning in the early to mid-seventies.”3 Until the early 1990s, it was published in print fanzines that were sold by mail order and at fan conventions; their circulation was, as this suggests, very small. But by the mid 1990s slash had moved onto the web along with much of the rest of fandom, a shift that increased both its visibility and accessibility. As fandom itself has become a mainstream activity online, with hundreds of thousands of participants, so too have the numbers of slash fiction authors and readers greatly increased. Tens of thousands of slash stories are archived on dedicated websites, they can be read online, printed out or, increasingly, are archived pre-formatted for downloading to palmtops. As in the early years of slash, the majority of slash writers are heterosexual women.4 However, a significant minority of male fans also write slash, and the male-to-female ratio varies across different fandoms; most Star Trek slash is written by women, while X-Files (1993–[2002]) slash tends to be more mixed. Lesbian and bisexual women dominate Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) slash, but have much less presence in most other slash fandoms. Scholarly studies of slash (most of which were published in the early 1990s and drew upon research done several years earlier) have tended to emphasize its romantic male/male manifestations.5 Usually authored by heterosexual women, such stories subvert or overturn conventional gender constructs as male bodies and male sexuality are described in terms of profound emotional connection and sensual surrender. Krycek looks into Mulder’s eyes and remarks “their changing seas of green darkened with despair”;6 Kirk “moans softly” under Spock’s caress.7 Compared with the romance novels whose style such stories emulate, these are unusual formulations. They play with the conventions of romantic love, cast men in the subordinate, yearning roles usually reserved for women, extend the logic of romance into extremes of abjection and domination, move from metaphors of desire to explicit descriptions of its fulfilment. It is no surprise, then, that studies of television fan cultures have often proposed slash fiction as a radical instance of resistant reading, one that counters the marginalization of female characters in much early cult 118 chapter 6 television by appropriating the bodies of men and reworking masculinity and male sexuality. Slash, argues Constance Penley in her study of Star Trek–inspired erotic fan writing, is a “guerrilla erotics”8 and a “project of retooling masculinity itself.”9 Henry...