Slash Study Day 3
Dec. 10th, 2007 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughWho could resist? Behind cuts, for length,
SLASH 3: THE FINAL CUT
THE 3rd AND LAST DMU FANFICTION STUDY DAY
Clephan Building,
Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University,
Leicester, UK
Monday 25 February 2008
10.00 am – 6.00 pm
Plenary speakers: Sheenagh Pugh, Robin Anne Reid,
Mafalda Stasi, E.L. Dollard, and I.Q. Hunter
With Slash 3, De Montfort University once again offers a slash-friendly forum for discussion of the most exciting developments in fanfic.
The main focus of papers will be on slash fiction, a category of fan stories, almost exclusively by women, mostly about homoerotic affairs between male characters in popular films and TV series.
All readers, writers and academic researchers of fan fiction, as well as interested members of the public, are welcome to participate.
Please contact Ian Hunter at iqhunter@dmu.ac.uk to reserve a place. An attendance fee of £20 / £12 concessions, including lunch and coffees, will be payable on the day.
and
SLASH 3: THE FINAL CUT
Provisional programme
10.00: Introduction to Slash 3 (Clephan 3.01)
Ian Hunter (De Montfort University)
10.10 – 11.00: Panel 1: Romance (Clephan 3.01)
Chair: Ian Hunter
Rachel Ryder (Roehampton University):
‘One true pairing: considering slash as a form of romance fiction’
Sharon Wheeler (University of Gloucestershire):
‘From secret police to gay Utopia – how the slash writers subvert readers’ expectations’
10.10 – 11.00: Panel 2: True pairings (Clephan 3.07)
Chair: Malfada Stasi
Kellie Ann Aki Takenaka (independent scholar):
‘The law of master and servant: officers, batmen, and slash subtext in the context of World War I’
Vera Cuntz (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz):
‘The mentor and his disciple: on homoeroticism in the relationship between Harry Potter and Severus Snape’
11.00 – 11.30: Coffee (Clephan 3.08)
11.30 – 1.00: Plenary panel: Sex & race (Clephan 3.01)
Chair: Ian Hunter
Sheenagh Pugh (University of Glamorgan):
‘Man bits and woman bits: the discourse of sex in fanfic and litfic’
Robin Anne Reid (Texas A&M University-Commerce):
‘”Harshin ur squeez': racisms in LiveJournal fandoms’
1.00 – 2.00: Lunch (Clephan 3.08)
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 3: Fan art and vidding (Clephan 3.01)
Chair: Ian Hunter
Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College):
‘From Number One to First Lady: Trek's Carol Chapel and the development of fannish music video’
Veruska Sabucco (independent scholar):
‘Lost in translation: when the YAOI and slash worlds collide’
Barbara Bell (independent scholar):
Electric Edo: the search for pleasure in a floating world.
David Surman (University of Wales, Newport):
YouTube poop! The slash game moves to Web 2.0
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 4: Slashing the academy (Clephan 3.07)
Chair: Kathleen Bell
Dorothea Schuller (University of Goettingen):
‘”Something that had no name yet”: H.D.'s Queer revisionist poetics’
Gemma Bristow:
‘Saffic as a modernist fantasy: Richard Aldington's Myrrhine and Konallis’
Hanna Rochlitz (University of Kassel):
‘By everyone else’s standards, red’s camp’: one hundred years of slashing the canon’
3.30 – 4.00: Coffee (Clephan 3.08)
4.00 – 5.30: Plenary panel: Appropriations (Clephan 3.01)
Chair: Robin Reid
Mafalda Stasi (Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris):
‘Once upon a time, when the commons were enclosed’
E.L. Dollard (University of Chester):
‘Leave us alone, Henry Jenkins! Legitimising slash writers’ “textual poaching”’
I.Q. Hunter (De Montfort University):
‘Through a slash optic – or what my epic three-part journey through slash taught me about fandom, pornography and my own dumb ignorance’
5.30 – 6.00: (Clephan 3.01): Closing plenary discussion and plans for future events.
from which I note that I get to hear the Aldington talk (good!) but not the HD one, which is at the same time (rats!)
If you want the abstracts, they're
10.10 – 11.00: Panel 1: Romance (Clephan 3.01)
‘One true pairing: considering slash as a form of romance fiction’
Rachel Ryder (Roehampton University)
In this paper, I present some of the theories and research which will be written up into a chapter of my thesis, One True Pairing: Considering Slash as a form of Romance Fiction. I begin by running through the work done by previous academics (Radway, Crane, Snitow) on the genre romance. Romantic novels are read by millions of women worldwide; the publishing house of Mills and Boon boast 200 million books published per annum – an average of a book every 6.6 seconds. I aim to answer questions such as why women read romance fiction, what they gain from reading them, and their preferences for the content of these stories. I shall then move on to explore the differences and similarities between genre romance and Slash fiction (including Lamb and Veith’s work) incorporating the findings of a survey carried out last year (2007) in the London Slash community. I argue that although there are similarities between the two, Slash is not simply a homosexualised copy of the romantic novel; rather it is a creative and innovative phenomenon, capable of challenging the social mores that genre romance does so much to uphold.
‘From secret police to gay Utopia – how the slash writers subvert readers’ expectations’
Sharon Wheeler (University of Gloucestershire)
Those of us of a certain age (over 40!) remember The Professionals . . . a prime-time British cop show with macho leads, big guns, a girlfriend a week and the obligatory car chase. But who’d guess that Bodie and Doyle, our two ostensibly straight leads, are really gay and living in rural bliss in deepest Gloucestershire? Or so say the slashers. These are media fans – almost all women and mainly heterosexual but also bisexual and lesbian – and their passion is, as Henry Jenkins says, ‘poaching’ characters from TV shows and films and showing them engaged in a gay relationship. A particular favourite of many ‘Pros’ fans is the Larton Chronicles by Rhiannon, a series of five stories. This Alternative Universe (AU) series lifts the characters from their usual setting fighting terrorism on the mean streets of London and places them in another time and place – living as a couple on a farm in a remote Gloucestershire village. Doyle is a novelist and Bodie a soldier in the Irish army. I’ll be focussing on the issue of fanon v canon (what’s fandom folklore, as opposed to what actually appeared in the show) in the texts as well as how slash authors construct their own particular shorthand. I’ll also be examining how a seemingly gentle, humorous series in fact portrays a subversive gay Utopia.
10.10 – 11.00: Panel 2: True pairings (Clephan 3.07)
‘The law of master and servant: officers, batmen, and slash subtext in the context of World War I’
Kellie Ann Aki Takenaka (independent scholar)
World War I (1914-1918) was a formative event for a generation of young men, whose experiences were captured and reflected in contemporary fiction of the period. Both historical and literary examples demonstrate the strength of the intense emotional bonds that were forged between those men who fought, as a result of their wartime ordeals. In particular, the relationship between the English officer and his personal servant, or batman, was a curious combination of public duty and personal service. An artifact of both the military practices and class structures of a fading era, it would never truly be replicated again, swept away by changing cultural and economic trends. As depicted in the fiction of the period, however, the special closeness and intimacy engendered by this relationship has provided and continues to provide the ideal inspiration for slash interpretations of these texts. Using three specific sources, Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, PG Woodhouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels, and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, this paper will explore examples in which the officer and batman relationship is variously explicit, implied and metaphorical, and consider what impact its depiction has on the slash interpretations and fan fiction that it inspires.
‘The mentor and his disciple: on homoeroticism in the relationship between Harry Potter and Severus Snape’
Vera Cuntz (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz)
My presentation will focus on the reception of Joanne K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels by the slash fanfiction community. Aside from Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, Severus Snape and Harry make up the most popular pairing for the majority of female fanfiction writers in the Western hemisphere. With the publishing of the last book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, this hasn’t changed, although the true motifs of Snape’s behaviour have been revealed. In this regard, it will be interesting to analyse the specific relationship between the hero Harry Potter and his unfriendly teacher and sporadic antagonist Severus Snape throughout the series. There are many aspects in the original work itself which could tempt fans to impute an amorous connection between teacher and student and a highly charged sexual tension between both characters. By discussing the books as well as the movies, I will try to detect reasons for this, and I will show how Potter and Snape fit into a long tradition of homoeroticism between mentors and their disciples. In addition, I will try to formulate an archetypical pattern nearly every Harry/Severus fanfiction follows and illuminate the reasons behind this.
11.30 – 1.00: Plenary panel: Sex & race (Clephan 3.01)
‘Man bits and woman bits: the discourse of sex in fanfic and litfic’
Sheenagh Pugh (University of Glamorgan)
Modern (unlike ancient) writers who wanted to include sexual relations in the world they wrote about have always had a problem with terminology - what do you call parts and acts which by their nature are not much discussed in polite society? Those writers, both in fanfic and litfic, who do not simply choose to lock the bedroom door behind their characters and leave all to the imagination have always the problem of whether to use plain words or euphemisms, straight description or metaphor, in order to avoid causing the reader either embarrassment or hilarity. This talk will try to outline various approaches (if not solutions) to an ongoing problem on both sides of the litfic/fanfic divide.
‘”Harshin ur squeez': racisms in LiveJournal fandoms’
Robin Anne Reid (Texas A&M University-Commerce)
As Wendy Chun argues, in Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Internet Optics, the utopian marketing of the internet was grounded on an essentialist construction of race: commercials that promised "escape" from the problems (of race, of flesh, of gender, of age, of handicap) were spoken by people whose bodies were always already identified as marked by difference. Chun argues that what was being sold was not truly freedom from discrimination, but the chance to pass as an unmarked white male. The claim that marked bodies could not be 'seen' in a text-only environment was based on the same essentialist belief that difference is carried only by and on the body. The sociolinguist argument that culture is created and "embodied" in part through language can be seen in the rhetorics (written and visual) of race in recent debates that occurred in several online LiveJournal Fandoms during 2007. The topics included racial stereotypes in fan fiction, racial stereotypes in the canon texts, racist terminology and commentary that embodied histories and etymology not widely known, and, finally, ignorance of a minority culture's religious practices. In all cases, while a single event initiated major debate, widespread agreement exists that these events are simply the latest in on-going patterns of white privilege, including a range of racist behaviours that institutionalize marginalization and discrimination against fans of colour. Since little academic scholarship on fan culture or fan fiction deals with constructions of race, my project draws on work by fan scholars who have published, in personal and community journals, a range of texts (from personal to analytical) on racism and fandom.
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 3: Fan art and vidding (Clephan 3.01 )
‘From Number One to First Lady: Trek's Carol Chapel and the development of fannish music video’
Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College)
I would like to present part of my current work in progress, a paper called, "From Number One to First Lady: Trek's Carol Chapel and the Development of Fannish Music Video." In it, I argue that fannish vidding, a heavily female-dominated form of grassroots cinema that emerges out of the slash community, was developed partly to compensate for the excision of the female Number One from the text of Trek and her replacement as first officer by Mr. Spock, who was given many of her characteristics and who subsequently became a strong subject of female identification. In the context of a close reading of the Star Trek pilot, The Cage, I will discuss a number of early, vids from the 1970s and early 1980s) and show how they both compensate for the lack of a strong female subject position as well as reverse the traditional scopophilia of the cinema. Vids typically turn the gaze toward the male body of mainstream television and cinema, compelling the spectator to see what (and how) the vidder wishes them to see.
‘Lost in translation: when the YAOI and slash worlds collide’
Veruska Sabucco
Can slash be considered the Anglo-European counterpart to YAOI, or are the differences too great and ne'er the twain shall meet? The differences are at first sight daunting: YAOI originated in Japan in the 1970s as officially sanctioned homoerotic readings of media characters and real people. YAOI texts are not only written but also drawn (manga); they are published and openly sold at fan-run Comic Markets. The relationship with the official publishing industry is also vastly different: since the mid- 1970s, Japanese publishers launched homoerotic stories with original characters, known as Shounen ai or Boy's Love (BL). Despite their differences, the slash, YAOI and BL fandoms started to overlap in the early 1990s, generating large amounts of controversy and misunderstandings, but also slowly influencing each other in various and sometimes unexpected ways. his paper draws some preliminary conclusions on the socio-anthropological field study started by Druanne Pagliassotti in2005 to investigate English speaking BL fans, and expanded to include the Italian BL community by Simone Castagno and myself. Our findings focus above all on the different views about ‘going pro’ held by Anglo-European slash, YAOI and BL fans. BL fans see "going pro" as a less controversial and indeed natural outcome for them: the continued commercial success of BL creates the expectation that it's possible to publish homoerotic text by women for women. Our field findings are supported by the recent blooming of what is called OEL (Original English Language) BL: homoerotic manga with original characters, published by US or European based presses. Our findings focus above all on the overlapping areas between slash and YAOI/BL fandoms. In a world of media and cultural convergences, what is now YAOI and what is slash in the eye of the reader? Can slash and YAOI be charted by the media the fan-created text refers to, by the media the author chooses to use, by her culture and language? Are there some genre conventions that remained exclusive to one area?
‘Electric Edo: the search for pleasure in a floating world’
Barbara Bell (independent scholar)
A spymaster brings together an elite group of individuals for a dangerous mission, an exclusive club caters to the tastes of its members, a football club faces ruin if it is relegated to a minor league – into these structured environments are placed characters drawn from different fandoms. Following on from last year’s paper looking at fanart depictions of an OTP pairing in relation to the Japanese art movement, the Superflat, that draws on the Edo period for much of its understanding of the artistic process, this paper expands the argument to consider the settings for crossover AUs, that often locate RPF characters drawn from different fandoms within ‘known worlds’ that are also worlds ‘apart.’ Attitudes to Edo-period performers, lionised within their ‘proper’ settings, were shaped as much by the class system that deemed them worth one-seventh of a human being, as by the tastes of the audience and their own artistry. To what extent do the conditions under which these crossover AUs are shaped, mirror contemporary constructions of the relationship between performer and audience in ways that the inhabitants of Edo would readily understand?
‘YouTube poop! The slash game moves to Web 2.0’
David Surman (University of Wales, Newport)
The proliferation of media surrounding games culture simultaneously disseminates and intensifies of the primacy of the play experience. Play possibilities are retained in some of the second order of games culture paraphernalia; board games, action figures, card games. Film adaptations of videogame stories remove play from the mode of engagement, and offer cinematographic scope as an attenuated substitute. Television is perhaps the last vestige of the game text; serialisations based upon games produced externally, licensed but not monitored by the developers of the primary franchise. Such series’ are celebrated for their trash aesthetic and the liminal space they occupy outside mainstream games consumption. They are part of a collective memory of children’s television programming, but their poor production quality and obscurity have consigned them to a place in the archives. Such paucity however makes them perfect anomaly for the contemporary cult media connoisseur. This paper examines how aggressive and surreal re-editing of these classic game cartoons by contemporary ‘fans’ — in what have been tentatively titled YouTube ‘poops’ — create a new dynamic slash text which recuperates the playfulness lost in games movement to television and film. They also work against the grain of the sentiment of the original text: sonic has AIDS, Mario takes acid, and Princess Zelda has period pains.
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 4: Slashing the academy (Clephan 3.07)
‘”Something that had no name yet”: H.D.'s Queer revisionist poetics
Dorothea Schuller (University of Goettingen)
Contrary to the virulent anti-Romanticism of many of her male contemporaries (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot), the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) – like other modernist women writers – did not advocate the need to break with 'effeminate' late 19th century culture, but deliberately sought to integrate tropes and imagery of decadent art and writing into her own work precisely because of its associations (specifically in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials) with deviant sexuality. The recourse to fin de siècle icons like the Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale and the boy androgyne of Victorian Hellenism with its homoerotic connotations allowed her to figure lesbian and bisexual desire and to explore polysexual identities beyond the limiting dualisms set up by fellow modernists like D.H. Lawrence. This paper will present H.D.'s strategies of female-centered revisionist mythmaking whose palimpsest-like layering of texts in combination with a shift in perspective is suggestive of current forms of (slash) fanfiction. Focusing on the continuities between a 'feminine' tradition inherited from male 19th century writers and H.D.'s own reshapings of classical mythology and canonical Western literature, I will discuss her representations of non-normative images of femininity and sensuality and her ways of queering Modernism's masculine poetics to create a 'female space' in a male-dominated cultural movement.
‘Saffic as a modernist fantasy: Richard Aldington's Myrrhine and Konallis’
Gemma Bristow
My paper explores how a work of early modernism, one that would typically be assigned to the 'intertextuality' of 'high culture', shared the motivations and production methods of fan (re)writing. In 1914-1916, British poet Richard Aldington wrote a cycle of prose poems - ostensibly translations - spoken in the voices of two Greek women and charting a passionate love affair. The 'love poems of Myrrhine and Konallis' were reworkings of existing Hellenic and pseudo-Hellenic literature. They were not published commercially, but were included in a series of privately printed gift books produced by Aldington's circle during WW1. These books were exchanged among friends who shared the knowledge of their source canon. Most importantly, the poem cycle expressed a Greek fantasy life shared by Aldington and his wife, the poet H.D. The cycle exploited its Hellenic source texts to extend the permitted range of expression and subject matter. In particular, it used the Sapphic canon to create a wartime fantasy of escape – from conventional gender roles and social obligations – through the figures of its female lovers. This fantasy was both personal, reflecting Aldington's unconventional views on sex and H.D.'s bisexuality, and political, asserting the validity of love and experience outside the heterosexual monogamy, child-rearing and gendered war responses expected of middle-class Britain.
‘By everyone else’s standards, red’s camp’: one hundred years of slashing the canon’
Hanna Rochlitz (University of Kassel)
With the move from fanzines to the internet, Slash – so a veteran aca-fan lately informed me – has become “uninteresting” because it has “turned mainstream”, with texts increasingly reproducing heteronormative gender-role conventions. Bypassing the question of whether the very acts of writing and reading Slash do not already constitute a subversive practice, I maintain that those Slash texts which do present alternative visions of masculinity can, following Derecho and Woledge, be read as part of a tradition of interventions into, and subversions of, normative cultural discourses about (male) gender roles. Once again I shall investigate the parallels between fanfic writers’ techniques and gay male profic writers’ strategies, citing Doctor Who as a contemporary example, and analysing E.M. Forster’s “Ralph and Tony” (1902-03) to show how the text combines autobiographical elements with intertextual models (ranging from Jane Eyre to Wagner’s Ring) to bring about the realisation of a bisexual Intimatopia, in which stereotypical ideas about masculinity are exposed in caricature and subverted with the help of strikingly “feminine” solutions. In this context I shall also readdress the question of Slash and its relation to “gay literature”.
4.00 – 5.30: Plenary panel: Appropriations (Clephan 3.01)
‘Once upon a time, when the commons were enclosed’
Mafalda Stasi (Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris)
Traditional fairy tales begin with the formula "once upon a time" that conveys both a sense of remoteness and of exemplary, universal applicability. Likewise, the contemporary fairy tales of slash fiction begin with formulaic disclaimers, a "once upon a time" that reveals a deep ambivalence about the status of fan fiction. The overt metadiscourse about the value of fandom most often compares fandom to a gift economy. Opinions range from a naïve view of gifts as a completely altruistic gesture to a more anthropologically informed take, such as Rachel Sabotini's well-known essay (available at the Fandom Symposium). Sabotini draws on Marcel Mauss's work to draw attention to the reciprocal and binding nature of the (fannish) gift: exchanging gifts creates a network of obligations and expectations, and it contributes to social status. However, if we look at disclaimers closely, we find that the gift economy is only one of the paradigms at work in fandom. The proximal paradigm of the traditional/capitalistic economy and intellectual property system are by no means absent. Fan discourse, community and culture may and do have their own rules, but they do not exist in isolation: on the contrary, by its own nature, fan fiction is closely enmeshed with mainstream fictional discourse. It would be naïve to think that the expectation and power dynamics of fandom are not influenced by the cultural industry of late capitalism, especially when reading disclaimers along the lines of "these characters are not mine. I stole them. Please do not steal my story or I will get upset!" There is a deep ambivalence in fandom about what belongs to whom, and it comes out pithily in disclaimers, which simultaneously distance the fan artwork's creator from the capitalistic economy, and confirm the existing intellectual property system. The anti-enclosure riots of textual poachers reclaiming the Commons are counterbalanced by a simultaneous act of enclosure, whereby the fan author demarcates their own territory anew.
‘Leave us alone, Henry Jenkins! Legitimising slash writers’ “textual poaching”’
E.L. Dollard (University of Chester)
J.R.R Tolkien did not just draw upon medieval Arthurian legends and Nordic myths; Peter Jackson did not produce a direct translation of Tolkien’s text to the screen; The Lord of the Rings fan fiction does not just comment on and write back to The Lord of the Rings. What links Tolkien, Jackson and the fan fiction writers is the method which is variously called adaptation, plagiarism, homages, re-creations, spin offs, recycling, remakes, updates, pastiche, textual poaching or parody depending on the personal preference of the critic. There is a deliberate omission to the previous list; appropriation can be – and often is – used interchangeably with any or all of the previous terms and there are two reasons why to do so is important. The first is that adaptation, parody, plagiarism and textual poaching all appropriate the source text and the second is that the acknowledgment that the appropriative practices of Tolkien, Jackson and A.R.R.R Roberts’ parody novels The Soddit and The Sellamillion are the same practices used by fan fiction writers. The appellation ‘textual poaching’ which has connotations of clandestine theft also underlines the marginal status granted to the fan writer by the critical community. Slash in particular investigates the closed and sacred space of the male relationship – from sexually fluid Torchwood to the traditionally ‘macho’ Top Gear – but does the appropriation of such texts undermine or reaffirm this ideological construct?
All adds up to a grand day out....
SLASH 3: THE FINAL CUT
THE 3rd AND LAST DMU FANFICTION STUDY DAY
Clephan Building,
Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University,
Leicester, UK
Monday 25 February 2008
10.00 am – 6.00 pm
Plenary speakers: Sheenagh Pugh, Robin Anne Reid,
Mafalda Stasi, E.L. Dollard, and I.Q. Hunter
With Slash 3, De Montfort University once again offers a slash-friendly forum for discussion of the most exciting developments in fanfic.
The main focus of papers will be on slash fiction, a category of fan stories, almost exclusively by women, mostly about homoerotic affairs between male characters in popular films and TV series.
All readers, writers and academic researchers of fan fiction, as well as interested members of the public, are welcome to participate.
Please contact Ian Hunter at iqhunter@dmu.ac.uk to reserve a place. An attendance fee of £20 / £12 concessions, including lunch and coffees, will be payable on the day.
and
SLASH 3: THE FINAL CUT
Provisional programme
10.00: Introduction to Slash 3 (Clephan 3.01)
Ian Hunter (De Montfort University)
10.10 – 11.00: Panel 1: Romance (Clephan 3.01)
Chair: Ian Hunter
Rachel Ryder (Roehampton University):
‘One true pairing: considering slash as a form of romance fiction’
Sharon Wheeler (University of Gloucestershire):
‘From secret police to gay Utopia – how the slash writers subvert readers’ expectations’
10.10 – 11.00: Panel 2: True pairings (Clephan 3.07)
Chair: Malfada Stasi
Kellie Ann Aki Takenaka (independent scholar):
‘The law of master and servant: officers, batmen, and slash subtext in the context of World War I’
Vera Cuntz (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz):
‘The mentor and his disciple: on homoeroticism in the relationship between Harry Potter and Severus Snape’
11.00 – 11.30: Coffee (Clephan 3.08)
11.30 – 1.00: Plenary panel: Sex & race (Clephan 3.01)
Chair: Ian Hunter
Sheenagh Pugh (University of Glamorgan):
‘Man bits and woman bits: the discourse of sex in fanfic and litfic’
Robin Anne Reid (Texas A&M University-Commerce):
‘”Harshin ur squeez': racisms in LiveJournal fandoms’
1.00 – 2.00: Lunch (Clephan 3.08)
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 3: Fan art and vidding (Clephan 3.01)
Chair: Ian Hunter
Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College):
‘From Number One to First Lady: Trek's Carol Chapel and the development of fannish music video’
Veruska Sabucco (independent scholar):
‘Lost in translation: when the YAOI and slash worlds collide’
Barbara Bell (independent scholar):
Electric Edo: the search for pleasure in a floating world.
David Surman (University of Wales, Newport):
YouTube poop! The slash game moves to Web 2.0
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 4: Slashing the academy (Clephan 3.07)
Chair: Kathleen Bell
Dorothea Schuller (University of Goettingen):
‘”Something that had no name yet”: H.D.'s Queer revisionist poetics’
Gemma Bristow:
‘Saffic as a modernist fantasy: Richard Aldington's Myrrhine and Konallis’
Hanna Rochlitz (University of Kassel):
‘By everyone else’s standards, red’s camp’: one hundred years of slashing the canon’
3.30 – 4.00: Coffee (Clephan 3.08)
4.00 – 5.30: Plenary panel: Appropriations (Clephan 3.01)
Chair: Robin Reid
Mafalda Stasi (Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris):
‘Once upon a time, when the commons were enclosed’
E.L. Dollard (University of Chester):
‘Leave us alone, Henry Jenkins! Legitimising slash writers’ “textual poaching”’
I.Q. Hunter (De Montfort University):
‘Through a slash optic – or what my epic three-part journey through slash taught me about fandom, pornography and my own dumb ignorance’
5.30 – 6.00: (Clephan 3.01): Closing plenary discussion and plans for future events.
from which I note that I get to hear the Aldington talk (good!) but not the HD one, which is at the same time (rats!)
If you want the abstracts, they're
10.10 – 11.00: Panel 1: Romance (Clephan 3.01)
‘One true pairing: considering slash as a form of romance fiction’
Rachel Ryder (Roehampton University)
In this paper, I present some of the theories and research which will be written up into a chapter of my thesis, One True Pairing: Considering Slash as a form of Romance Fiction. I begin by running through the work done by previous academics (Radway, Crane, Snitow) on the genre romance. Romantic novels are read by millions of women worldwide; the publishing house of Mills and Boon boast 200 million books published per annum – an average of a book every 6.6 seconds. I aim to answer questions such as why women read romance fiction, what they gain from reading them, and their preferences for the content of these stories. I shall then move on to explore the differences and similarities between genre romance and Slash fiction (including Lamb and Veith’s work) incorporating the findings of a survey carried out last year (2007) in the London Slash community. I argue that although there are similarities between the two, Slash is not simply a homosexualised copy of the romantic novel; rather it is a creative and innovative phenomenon, capable of challenging the social mores that genre romance does so much to uphold.
‘From secret police to gay Utopia – how the slash writers subvert readers’ expectations’
Sharon Wheeler (University of Gloucestershire)
Those of us of a certain age (over 40!) remember The Professionals . . . a prime-time British cop show with macho leads, big guns, a girlfriend a week and the obligatory car chase. But who’d guess that Bodie and Doyle, our two ostensibly straight leads, are really gay and living in rural bliss in deepest Gloucestershire? Or so say the slashers. These are media fans – almost all women and mainly heterosexual but also bisexual and lesbian – and their passion is, as Henry Jenkins says, ‘poaching’ characters from TV shows and films and showing them engaged in a gay relationship. A particular favourite of many ‘Pros’ fans is the Larton Chronicles by Rhiannon, a series of five stories. This Alternative Universe (AU) series lifts the characters from their usual setting fighting terrorism on the mean streets of London and places them in another time and place – living as a couple on a farm in a remote Gloucestershire village. Doyle is a novelist and Bodie a soldier in the Irish army. I’ll be focussing on the issue of fanon v canon (what’s fandom folklore, as opposed to what actually appeared in the show) in the texts as well as how slash authors construct their own particular shorthand. I’ll also be examining how a seemingly gentle, humorous series in fact portrays a subversive gay Utopia.
10.10 – 11.00: Panel 2: True pairings (Clephan 3.07)
‘The law of master and servant: officers, batmen, and slash subtext in the context of World War I’
Kellie Ann Aki Takenaka (independent scholar)
World War I (1914-1918) was a formative event for a generation of young men, whose experiences were captured and reflected in contemporary fiction of the period. Both historical and literary examples demonstrate the strength of the intense emotional bonds that were forged between those men who fought, as a result of their wartime ordeals. In particular, the relationship between the English officer and his personal servant, or batman, was a curious combination of public duty and personal service. An artifact of both the military practices and class structures of a fading era, it would never truly be replicated again, swept away by changing cultural and economic trends. As depicted in the fiction of the period, however, the special closeness and intimacy engendered by this relationship has provided and continues to provide the ideal inspiration for slash interpretations of these texts. Using three specific sources, Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, PG Woodhouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels, and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, this paper will explore examples in which the officer and batman relationship is variously explicit, implied and metaphorical, and consider what impact its depiction has on the slash interpretations and fan fiction that it inspires.
‘The mentor and his disciple: on homoeroticism in the relationship between Harry Potter and Severus Snape’
Vera Cuntz (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz)
My presentation will focus on the reception of Joanne K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels by the slash fanfiction community. Aside from Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, Severus Snape and Harry make up the most popular pairing for the majority of female fanfiction writers in the Western hemisphere. With the publishing of the last book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, this hasn’t changed, although the true motifs of Snape’s behaviour have been revealed. In this regard, it will be interesting to analyse the specific relationship between the hero Harry Potter and his unfriendly teacher and sporadic antagonist Severus Snape throughout the series. There are many aspects in the original work itself which could tempt fans to impute an amorous connection between teacher and student and a highly charged sexual tension between both characters. By discussing the books as well as the movies, I will try to detect reasons for this, and I will show how Potter and Snape fit into a long tradition of homoeroticism between mentors and their disciples. In addition, I will try to formulate an archetypical pattern nearly every Harry/Severus fanfiction follows and illuminate the reasons behind this.
11.30 – 1.00: Plenary panel: Sex & race (Clephan 3.01)
‘Man bits and woman bits: the discourse of sex in fanfic and litfic’
Sheenagh Pugh (University of Glamorgan)
Modern (unlike ancient) writers who wanted to include sexual relations in the world they wrote about have always had a problem with terminology - what do you call parts and acts which by their nature are not much discussed in polite society? Those writers, both in fanfic and litfic, who do not simply choose to lock the bedroom door behind their characters and leave all to the imagination have always the problem of whether to use plain words or euphemisms, straight description or metaphor, in order to avoid causing the reader either embarrassment or hilarity. This talk will try to outline various approaches (if not solutions) to an ongoing problem on both sides of the litfic/fanfic divide.
‘”Harshin ur squeez': racisms in LiveJournal fandoms’
Robin Anne Reid (Texas A&M University-Commerce)
As Wendy Chun argues, in Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Internet Optics, the utopian marketing of the internet was grounded on an essentialist construction of race: commercials that promised "escape" from the problems (of race, of flesh, of gender, of age, of handicap) were spoken by people whose bodies were always already identified as marked by difference. Chun argues that what was being sold was not truly freedom from discrimination, but the chance to pass as an unmarked white male. The claim that marked bodies could not be 'seen' in a text-only environment was based on the same essentialist belief that difference is carried only by and on the body. The sociolinguist argument that culture is created and "embodied" in part through language can be seen in the rhetorics (written and visual) of race in recent debates that occurred in several online LiveJournal Fandoms during 2007. The topics included racial stereotypes in fan fiction, racial stereotypes in the canon texts, racist terminology and commentary that embodied histories and etymology not widely known, and, finally, ignorance of a minority culture's religious practices. In all cases, while a single event initiated major debate, widespread agreement exists that these events are simply the latest in on-going patterns of white privilege, including a range of racist behaviours that institutionalize marginalization and discrimination against fans of colour. Since little academic scholarship on fan culture or fan fiction deals with constructions of race, my project draws on work by fan scholars who have published, in personal and community journals, a range of texts (from personal to analytical) on racism and fandom.
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 3: Fan art and vidding (Clephan 3.01 )
‘From Number One to First Lady: Trek's Carol Chapel and the development of fannish music video’
Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College)
I would like to present part of my current work in progress, a paper called, "From Number One to First Lady: Trek's Carol Chapel and the Development of Fannish Music Video." In it, I argue that fannish vidding, a heavily female-dominated form of grassroots cinema that emerges out of the slash community, was developed partly to compensate for the excision of the female Number One from the text of Trek and her replacement as first officer by Mr. Spock, who was given many of her characteristics and who subsequently became a strong subject of female identification. In the context of a close reading of the Star Trek pilot, The Cage, I will discuss a number of early, vids from the 1970s and early 1980s) and show how they both compensate for the lack of a strong female subject position as well as reverse the traditional scopophilia of the cinema. Vids typically turn the gaze toward the male body of mainstream television and cinema, compelling the spectator to see what (and how) the vidder wishes them to see.
‘Lost in translation: when the YAOI and slash worlds collide’
Veruska Sabucco
Can slash be considered the Anglo-European counterpart to YAOI, or are the differences too great and ne'er the twain shall meet? The differences are at first sight daunting: YAOI originated in Japan in the 1970s as officially sanctioned homoerotic readings of media characters and real people. YAOI texts are not only written but also drawn (manga); they are published and openly sold at fan-run Comic Markets. The relationship with the official publishing industry is also vastly different: since the mid- 1970s, Japanese publishers launched homoerotic stories with original characters, known as Shounen ai or Boy's Love (BL). Despite their differences, the slash, YAOI and BL fandoms started to overlap in the early 1990s, generating large amounts of controversy and misunderstandings, but also slowly influencing each other in various and sometimes unexpected ways. his paper draws some preliminary conclusions on the socio-anthropological field study started by Druanne Pagliassotti in2005 to investigate English speaking BL fans, and expanded to include the Italian BL community by Simone Castagno and myself. Our findings focus above all on the different views about ‘going pro’ held by Anglo-European slash, YAOI and BL fans. BL fans see "going pro" as a less controversial and indeed natural outcome for them: the continued commercial success of BL creates the expectation that it's possible to publish homoerotic text by women for women. Our field findings are supported by the recent blooming of what is called OEL (Original English Language) BL: homoerotic manga with original characters, published by US or European based presses. Our findings focus above all on the overlapping areas between slash and YAOI/BL fandoms. In a world of media and cultural convergences, what is now YAOI and what is slash in the eye of the reader? Can slash and YAOI be charted by the media the fan-created text refers to, by the media the author chooses to use, by her culture and language? Are there some genre conventions that remained exclusive to one area?
‘Electric Edo: the search for pleasure in a floating world’
Barbara Bell (independent scholar)
A spymaster brings together an elite group of individuals for a dangerous mission, an exclusive club caters to the tastes of its members, a football club faces ruin if it is relegated to a minor league – into these structured environments are placed characters drawn from different fandoms. Following on from last year’s paper looking at fanart depictions of an OTP pairing in relation to the Japanese art movement, the Superflat, that draws on the Edo period for much of its understanding of the artistic process, this paper expands the argument to consider the settings for crossover AUs, that often locate RPF characters drawn from different fandoms within ‘known worlds’ that are also worlds ‘apart.’ Attitudes to Edo-period performers, lionised within their ‘proper’ settings, were shaped as much by the class system that deemed them worth one-seventh of a human being, as by the tastes of the audience and their own artistry. To what extent do the conditions under which these crossover AUs are shaped, mirror contemporary constructions of the relationship between performer and audience in ways that the inhabitants of Edo would readily understand?
‘YouTube poop! The slash game moves to Web 2.0’
David Surman (University of Wales, Newport)
The proliferation of media surrounding games culture simultaneously disseminates and intensifies of the primacy of the play experience. Play possibilities are retained in some of the second order of games culture paraphernalia; board games, action figures, card games. Film adaptations of videogame stories remove play from the mode of engagement, and offer cinematographic scope as an attenuated substitute. Television is perhaps the last vestige of the game text; serialisations based upon games produced externally, licensed but not monitored by the developers of the primary franchise. Such series’ are celebrated for their trash aesthetic and the liminal space they occupy outside mainstream games consumption. They are part of a collective memory of children’s television programming, but their poor production quality and obscurity have consigned them to a place in the archives. Such paucity however makes them perfect anomaly for the contemporary cult media connoisseur. This paper examines how aggressive and surreal re-editing of these classic game cartoons by contemporary ‘fans’ — in what have been tentatively titled YouTube ‘poops’ — create a new dynamic slash text which recuperates the playfulness lost in games movement to television and film. They also work against the grain of the sentiment of the original text: sonic has AIDS, Mario takes acid, and Princess Zelda has period pains.
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 4: Slashing the academy (Clephan 3.07)
‘”Something that had no name yet”: H.D.'s Queer revisionist poetics
Dorothea Schuller (University of Goettingen)
Contrary to the virulent anti-Romanticism of many of her male contemporaries (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot), the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) – like other modernist women writers – did not advocate the need to break with 'effeminate' late 19th century culture, but deliberately sought to integrate tropes and imagery of decadent art and writing into her own work precisely because of its associations (specifically in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials) with deviant sexuality. The recourse to fin de siècle icons like the Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale and the boy androgyne of Victorian Hellenism with its homoerotic connotations allowed her to figure lesbian and bisexual desire and to explore polysexual identities beyond the limiting dualisms set up by fellow modernists like D.H. Lawrence. This paper will present H.D.'s strategies of female-centered revisionist mythmaking whose palimpsest-like layering of texts in combination with a shift in perspective is suggestive of current forms of (slash) fanfiction. Focusing on the continuities between a 'feminine' tradition inherited from male 19th century writers and H.D.'s own reshapings of classical mythology and canonical Western literature, I will discuss her representations of non-normative images of femininity and sensuality and her ways of queering Modernism's masculine poetics to create a 'female space' in a male-dominated cultural movement.
‘Saffic as a modernist fantasy: Richard Aldington's Myrrhine and Konallis’
Gemma Bristow
My paper explores how a work of early modernism, one that would typically be assigned to the 'intertextuality' of 'high culture', shared the motivations and production methods of fan (re)writing. In 1914-1916, British poet Richard Aldington wrote a cycle of prose poems - ostensibly translations - spoken in the voices of two Greek women and charting a passionate love affair. The 'love poems of Myrrhine and Konallis' were reworkings of existing Hellenic and pseudo-Hellenic literature. They were not published commercially, but were included in a series of privately printed gift books produced by Aldington's circle during WW1. These books were exchanged among friends who shared the knowledge of their source canon. Most importantly, the poem cycle expressed a Greek fantasy life shared by Aldington and his wife, the poet H.D. The cycle exploited its Hellenic source texts to extend the permitted range of expression and subject matter. In particular, it used the Sapphic canon to create a wartime fantasy of escape – from conventional gender roles and social obligations – through the figures of its female lovers. This fantasy was both personal, reflecting Aldington's unconventional views on sex and H.D.'s bisexuality, and political, asserting the validity of love and experience outside the heterosexual monogamy, child-rearing and gendered war responses expected of middle-class Britain.
‘By everyone else’s standards, red’s camp’: one hundred years of slashing the canon’
Hanna Rochlitz (University of Kassel)
With the move from fanzines to the internet, Slash – so a veteran aca-fan lately informed me – has become “uninteresting” because it has “turned mainstream”, with texts increasingly reproducing heteronormative gender-role conventions. Bypassing the question of whether the very acts of writing and reading Slash do not already constitute a subversive practice, I maintain that those Slash texts which do present alternative visions of masculinity can, following Derecho and Woledge, be read as part of a tradition of interventions into, and subversions of, normative cultural discourses about (male) gender roles. Once again I shall investigate the parallels between fanfic writers’ techniques and gay male profic writers’ strategies, citing Doctor Who as a contemporary example, and analysing E.M. Forster’s “Ralph and Tony” (1902-03) to show how the text combines autobiographical elements with intertextual models (ranging from Jane Eyre to Wagner’s Ring) to bring about the realisation of a bisexual Intimatopia, in which stereotypical ideas about masculinity are exposed in caricature and subverted with the help of strikingly “feminine” solutions. In this context I shall also readdress the question of Slash and its relation to “gay literature”.
4.00 – 5.30: Plenary panel: Appropriations (Clephan 3.01)
‘Once upon a time, when the commons were enclosed’
Mafalda Stasi (Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris)
Traditional fairy tales begin with the formula "once upon a time" that conveys both a sense of remoteness and of exemplary, universal applicability. Likewise, the contemporary fairy tales of slash fiction begin with formulaic disclaimers, a "once upon a time" that reveals a deep ambivalence about the status of fan fiction. The overt metadiscourse about the value of fandom most often compares fandom to a gift economy. Opinions range from a naïve view of gifts as a completely altruistic gesture to a more anthropologically informed take, such as Rachel Sabotini's well-known essay (available at the Fandom Symposium). Sabotini draws on Marcel Mauss's work to draw attention to the reciprocal and binding nature of the (fannish) gift: exchanging gifts creates a network of obligations and expectations, and it contributes to social status. However, if we look at disclaimers closely, we find that the gift economy is only one of the paradigms at work in fandom. The proximal paradigm of the traditional/capitalistic economy and intellectual property system are by no means absent. Fan discourse, community and culture may and do have their own rules, but they do not exist in isolation: on the contrary, by its own nature, fan fiction is closely enmeshed with mainstream fictional discourse. It would be naïve to think that the expectation and power dynamics of fandom are not influenced by the cultural industry of late capitalism, especially when reading disclaimers along the lines of "these characters are not mine. I stole them. Please do not steal my story or I will get upset!" There is a deep ambivalence in fandom about what belongs to whom, and it comes out pithily in disclaimers, which simultaneously distance the fan artwork's creator from the capitalistic economy, and confirm the existing intellectual property system. The anti-enclosure riots of textual poachers reclaiming the Commons are counterbalanced by a simultaneous act of enclosure, whereby the fan author demarcates their own territory anew.
‘Leave us alone, Henry Jenkins! Legitimising slash writers’ “textual poaching”’
E.L. Dollard (University of Chester)
J.R.R Tolkien did not just draw upon medieval Arthurian legends and Nordic myths; Peter Jackson did not produce a direct translation of Tolkien’s text to the screen; The Lord of the Rings fan fiction does not just comment on and write back to The Lord of the Rings. What links Tolkien, Jackson and the fan fiction writers is the method which is variously called adaptation, plagiarism, homages, re-creations, spin offs, recycling, remakes, updates, pastiche, textual poaching or parody depending on the personal preference of the critic. There is a deliberate omission to the previous list; appropriation can be – and often is – used interchangeably with any or all of the previous terms and there are two reasons why to do so is important. The first is that adaptation, parody, plagiarism and textual poaching all appropriate the source text and the second is that the acknowledgment that the appropriative practices of Tolkien, Jackson and A.R.R.R Roberts’ parody novels The Soddit and The Sellamillion are the same practices used by fan fiction writers. The appellation ‘textual poaching’ which has connotations of clandestine theft also underlines the marginal status granted to the fan writer by the critical community. Slash in particular investigates the closed and sacred space of the male relationship – from sexually fluid Torchwood to the traditionally ‘macho’ Top Gear – but does the appropriation of such texts undermine or reaffirm this ideological construct?
All adds up to a grand day out....
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-10 02:19 pm (UTC)If I understood right, they're part of the same panel so will be one after the other?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-10 02:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-10 02:33 pm (UTC)Why is it the last one? I can understand the original organizer(s) thinking it's far too much work to repeat, but can't they pass it along to someone else?
However, it *does* look bad for a presenter to think that Jeeves' mouthpiece is Emma's cousin and not Wodehouse. The "fannish butterfly" author is Rachael and not Rachel Sabotini. I've never watched Trek, but I don't think "Carol Chapel" is the correct character name.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-10 04:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-10 04:58 pm (UTC)