Writing with Impunity in a Space of Their Own: On Cultural Appropriation, Imaginative Play, and a New Ethics of Slash in Harry Potter Fan Fiction (original) (raw)
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In recent years, slash fanfiction has become a place for trans and non-binary inclusivity in romance narratives. Slash creates a safe space for queer and non-binary fans to express their sexuality and gender identity, thus encouraging the normalization of non-heteronormative people and lifestyles. The first chapter of this thesis, dedicated to the slash fanfiction author, examines the interwoven relationships between the fan, the piece of media (or, canon), and contemporary social outcries for LGBTQ+ inclusivity in romance narratives. Combining both Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and Kristina Busse’s Framing Fan Fiction, I define the fluid relationship between author and reader, and who actually has authority over the text at hand. The second chapter analyzes what these fan authors are writing and how they have methodically created worlds that not only show trans and non-binary characters, but normalize their lives, bodies, and relationships. Through the fan-generated genre k...
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To me, slash is about cracks and crevices in a text, a yearning void in both the text and the reader. So space is a vacuum-something that isn't there but could be. But in the larger terms of community, culture, politics, space is less about vacuum and more about potential.The slash space, to me, is remarkable in its fecundity. It is space that is never filled, potential that never runs out. No matter how many stories, how many writers, there's always more space. Slash as space, space as both yearning void and infinite potential. (Julad 2003) o date, work on women, queerness, and online communities has mainly focused on lesbian and queer-identified women's use of online space in the service of identity and sexuality narratives played out in the physical world. 1 In this project, we expand the scope of such inquiries to include ways in which particular online spaces, cultures, and practices can queer women (and other gendered subjects) in ways not accounted for by most identity narratives. We are interested in the interactions between women which structure online media fandom, specifically the exchange of sexually explicit slash stories which depict relationships between male characters and actors from films, books, and television shows. In the virtual spaces we invoke in this paper, such shared sex-
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The popularity of slash fiction, a productive strand of fan fiction in which same-sex television or film characters are subversively made into queer subjects, has grown in recent years. The practice of queer readings, which is about repositioning texts outside the borders of heteronormativity, very much resembles some of the basic premises of queer theory, the post-structural theory that contests strict categorical views on gender and sexuality. Unfortunately, slash fiction as well as audience reception practices do not appear to be high on the agenda of queer film theorists. This article argues that queersensitive audiences cannot be ignored in research on queer representations and reception in media studies. Moreover, the authors argue for a multidisciplinary approach that includes queer theory frameworks and insights from audience and reception studies as demonstrated by queer readings of non-queer-coded texts such as slash fiction.
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In Text, John Mowitt writes that textuality can be understood “in terms of the interplay between what takes place within a cultural production... and what, as yet, has no place within the social”. In this paper I will be trying to tease out the complicated topography produced by this interplay between what takes place and what has no place, in its specific relation to the utopic and queer spaces produced by slash fan fiction. I argue that Mowitt’s understanding of the text allows us to interrogate and to reframe the relationship between textuality and historical/social context (often metaphorized as ‘situatedness’, fixity, location). In this way we will be able to read the utopics of slash, not as the ‘no-place’ of a desire free from the constraints of the social, but as a model for politically and ethically responsible textuality.