‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: online slash fiction as a site for activism and change

Lucy Neville

doi:10.1080/0966369x.2017.1420633

Abstract

This article draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n = 429) that examines how women who write and read male/male erotica feel their involvement with the genre has affected their views on gender and sexuality and their political engagement with gay rights issues. Previous work has looked at how online slashfic communities might provide a safe space for exploring gender performance and sexuality, while other researchers have observed a tension between those who identify as queer themselves and those who only ‘play at queerness’ exclusively within the online environment. However, much of this work has examined the theoretical positioning of such forums as transgressive and/or political. Far fewer pieces have attempted to engage with the women who frequent such sites to ask them about whether their involvement in these online spaces has affected their attitudes and behaviours. This study looks not only at the ways in which online m/m fandoms can act as a safe space for women to explore their sexualities and gender identities, but whether and how these insights connect to women’s real-world lives. Data presented here shows a strong consensus among participants that involvement with explicit slash communities has had a positive effect on their lives, as well as contributing to beneficial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and practices with regards to LGBTQ+ issues. Overall, slash is seen as a medium which can create better allies, encourage cross-identification, and bring about positive personal changes. To this extent, I argue that explicit online slash sites can act as heterotopias.

Highlights

‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: Online slash fiction as a site for activism and change
Are m/m online fandoms ‘self-contained space[s] where queerness is played out in lieu of any potential effects in real lives?’ (Busse 2006, 210). Do they have the ability to have real world political and social impact? By drawing on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n=429) conducted with women who read and write m/m erotic slash fiction, this paper aims to provide a response to these questions and address some of the existing gaps in the field
13% of the women who took part in this research felt that their involvement with m/m erotic writing had not impacted on their awareness of issues around gender and sexuality (13% weren’t sure, and 74% felt it had an effect)

Summary

Introduction

‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: Online slash fiction as a site for activism and change. As Jacobs (2011, 186) notes, ‘digital media networks have allowed women and queer groups to develop and distribute their own types of sexually explicit media and to create niche industries’, providing a medium for non-traditional SEM consumer groups to define their sexual selves To this extent, the internet provides a place for marginalised and historically excluded identities to have their sexualities represented, leading Lackner, Lucas, and Reid (2006, 196) to characterise digital ‘pornospheres’ as spaces which constitute ‘a postmodern geography, a queer time and space’. Paasonen (2010, 139) agrees that these sorts of texts can certainly be classified as pornographic, describing the tendency to understand pornography purely in terms of the visual as problematic, considering ‘the history of pornography has largely been one concerning the written word’ To this extent explicit online slash texts can be viewed as a form of pornography for women. Others have regarded slash communities as a type of heterotopia, which Foucault (1986, 24) describes as ‘real places... which are something like counter-sites, a kind of collectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites which can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. Rambukkana (2007, 73)

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