Journal of

Communication Inquiry
Volume 32 Number 4
October 2008 335-347

Slashing the Fiction © 2008 Sage Publications

10.1177/0196859908321508
http://jci.sagepub.com
of Queer Theory hosted at
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Slash Fiction, Queer Reading, and
Transgressing the Boundaries of Screen Studies,
Representations, and Audiences
Frederik Dhaenens
Sofie Van Bauwel
Daniel Biltereyst
Ghent University, Belgium

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 queer-
sensitive 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.

Keywords: queer theory; audience; screen studies; queer readings; slash fiction

Jack followed Sawyer’s tight ass out into the blinding daylight, cursing his luck. He
was going to be pressed into the caretaker role again, and now he was paranoid that
Sawyer might think he was enjoying what he was doing. If Sawyer only knew that just
about nothing could make Jack happier than running his hands through his hair.
Arrow, December 1, 2005

So far, the highly acclaimed series Lost (2004) has not yet featured a homosex-
ual subplot, although the above quotation suggests that Jack and Sawyer, the main
male characters, seem to be going in the direction of a romantic or even sexual expe-
rience. This is where slash fiction, a productive fan fiction strand in which same-sex
television or film characters are subversively made into queer subjects, comes in. The
practice of queer readings (e.g., Babuscio, 2004; Dyer, 1990; Hennessy, 1995;

335

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336 Journal of Communication Inquiry

Lugowski, 1999), which is about repositioning texts outside the borders of hetero-
normativity (Hayward, 2000, p. 309), very much resembles some of the basic
premises of queer theory, the post-structural theory that contests strict categorical
views on gender and sexuality. However, slash fiction does not appear to be of inter-
est to queer film theorists. Henry Jenkins’ (1992) groundbreaking research on Star
Trek fans, for instance, underlined how fan authors were intensively preoccupied with
unraveling alternative representations of identity and sexuality. This article argues
that queer-sensitive audiences cannot be ignored in research on queer representations
and reception in media studies. Moreover, we will argue for a multidisciplinary
approach that includes queer theory frameworks and insights from audience and
reception studies.
After introducing queer theory and the core of its discourse, this article illustrates
how the current tradition of screen studies within film studies in relation to queer
representations primarily concentrates on the text and mostly ignores the audience.
We argue also that communication studies and even the disciplinarily more open cul-
tural studies could benefit from queer theory insights. We also explore the practice
of queer reading conducted by the small circle of queer screen theorists as an illus-
tration of “transgression in action.” Finally, the practice of slash fiction is introduced
as a research area that could be of benefit to (not exclusively) queer film studies by
drawing on audience studies and reception studies.

Mapping Queer Theory

The roots of queer theory can be found in the late 1970s when the concept of
homosexuality began to be questioned, which radically changed gay and lesbian
studies (e.g., Creekmur & Doty, 1998). At that time, homosexuality began to lose
its essentialist and uniform connotation while homosexual desire began to be posi-
tioned in a social and historical context (for an overview, refer to Seidman, 1996).
Gradually, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality were integrated into the debate
about identity (Seidman, 1995, p. 116). Social constructivism was the dominant
approach or paradigm within which identity and sexual orientation were discussed
from historical and cultural angles, from which emerged two important principles.
The first was that socially recognized sexual orientations vary culturally and his-
torically; the second suggested that in cultures where heterosexuality and homo-
sexuality are acknowledged, sexual behavior can move between these categories or

Authors’ Note: This article is based on the research project “Out on Screen: A Research Into the Social
and Emancipating Role of Gay and Lesbian Representations in Contemporary Screen Culture, Using a
Queer Theory Perspective,” funded by the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO; 2008-2011). Address
correspondence to Frederik Dhaenens, Ghent University, Department of Communication Studies, Korte
Meer 7-9-11, 9000 Ghent, Belgium; e-mail: [email protected].

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 Dhaenens et al. / Slashing the Fiction of Queer Theory 337

incorporate both (McIntosh, 1997, pp. 365-366). As a consequence, unified values

or political aspirations were rendered practically impossible because of the diversity
within the queer community (Seidman, 1995, p. 116).
At the same time, in feminist film theory contradictions were revealed. Research
on different feminisms focused on changing the structure of patriarchal societies in
order to end the oppression of women and other minorities, which in the 1970s expe-
rienced a theoretical transformation into film studies (Chaudhiri, 2006, pp. 1-2). In
this context the accomplishments of feminist film theorists were of great importance
(e.g., Laura Mulvey’s [1975] groundbreaking essay on questioning the male gaze in
cinema). But what seems to have been overlooked by both the British and the
American traditions of feminist film critiques were the “real” women. Teresa de
Lauretis (1987) pointed out that feminist theory continued to think in terms con-
strued by patriarchies, creating women as a universal sex category opposed to that of
men (cf. Benhabib, Butler, Cornell, & Fraser, 1995; De Vos & Van Bauwel, 2002),
making differentiating between women and woman impossible. Such a differentia-
tion required a radical rethinking of the concept of gender. Founded on Michel
Foucault’s technology of sex (1976), de Lauretis suggested that there is a technology
of gender that is the product of hegemony. This enabled research in which men and
women were analyzed in relation to power strategies and not merely in relation to
one another.
Judith Butler (1999, pp. 5-9) also reacted against the assumption of women hav-
ing a common identity. Although this insistence was constructed in the context of
women’s emancipation, conformity to the boundaries of representational politics
promoted exclusion and misrepresentation. Butler suggested a radical rethinking of
the ontological constructions of gender and identity within the frame of feminist
political practice. Butler, who is considered to be one of the leading queer theorists,
raised the issue that is foremost in communities of women and queers, namely, the
importance of understanding how categories such as “women” or “gay” are produced
and reiterated.
Queer theorists are concerned mainly with how gay and lesbian scholars try to
legitimize homosexuality as a sexual minority by positioning it within the binary
construction of homosexuality versus heterosexuality and by disregarding the hege-
mony that regulates and reiterates this framework. As a result, these minorities
remain conceptualized as the opposite extremes in a spectrum where the center is
intact. Queer theory is about reacting against these normalized hierarchies and
identity politics and conducting research outside the boundaries of predefined
gay or lesbian communities (Seidman, 1995, pp. 118-126; Stein & Plummer, 1996,
pp. 134-135). The concept of resistance is at the core of queer theory. It is a conscious
refusal of labels that define what it is against, and it emphasizes a retreat from binary
thinking (McIntosh, 1997, p. 365), which is why queer theory embraces all “non-
straight” identities relating to the need to revise societies’ assumptions about gender
and sexuality (Hayward, 2000, p. 309). In this context, Steven Seidman (1995, p. 128)

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338 Journal of Communication Inquiry

is right to suggest that we should push the hetero/homosexual opposition from the
individual to the cultural level and formulate it as a category of knowledge that
encompasses the possibility of imagining homosexuality at the center of popular cul-
ture and society, which also exposes the emphasis on heteronormativity. Larry Gross
(1998) makes similar claims in his work on sexual minorities and the media, argu-
ing that audiences—and especially minority audiences—can read media texts “as
if,” reversing the hegemonic meanings embedded in them. His arguments are simi-
lar to Jenkins’ (1992) claim that Michel de Certeau’s (1984) concept of poaching is
very useful for conceptualizing an active audience and signifying practices with the
potential for resistance to the dominant hegemonic heteronormativity.
Queer theorists draw on French post-structural theory, its methods of deconstruc-
tion, and Foucault’s legacy, particularly his views on power/knowledge and the
history of human sexuality (Lapsley & Westlake, 2006, p. 243; Seidman, 1995, p. 123).
A characteristic of post-structural theory is its rejection of a total theory, which implies
that texts can be approached from multiple perspectives, focusing simultaneously on
discourses and nondiscourses, uncovering multiple signifiers such as context, inter-
textuality, and different subject positions in addition to the text itself (Hayward,
2000, p. 362). Post-structuralists use deconstruction to analyze the signifiers and to
unravel the modes of representation in a text. Deconstruction is aimed at attacking
the ideological values of hegemonic institutions by revealing the illusions being
created in a text (cf. Derrida, 1987). According to Seidman (1995),

it is the rendering of literary analysis into social analysis, of textual critique into social
critique, of readings into a political practice, of politics into the politics of knowledge,
that makes deconstruction and the queer theory inspired by it an important movement
of theory and politics. (p. 125)

Finally, queer theorists are heavily inspired by Foucault’s (1980) view on power
as a possibly repressive and productive factor. The merit of Foucault’s concept of
power lies in his linking of power and the discursive position of resistance, in which
resistance is allowed to expand and be articulated as a reflection of power relations.
The risk of this perception, according to Mark Thorpe (1999, pp. 109-130), is that
when emphasis is laid on the social factor, a pessimistic view is created. The intro-
duction of discursive articulations of resistance gives power to each social actor, and
the inequalities in the power relations might be overlooked. He rightly argues that
valorizing the margins as progressive spaces of resistance can lead to problems in the
attempt to turn theory into empirical evidence. Based on his own research he makes
some suggestions about how to (re)consider the “margins of resistance.” Thorpe
(1999 says that these margins of resistance can be seen as both “‘something’ and
‘nothing,’ ‘there’ but ‘nowhere’ as one shifts between lived views, imaginative pre-
sentations, and localized structures of validity and meaning” (p. 111). Furthermore,
Foucault (1976) suggests that there is no essential truth of human sexuality as each

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 Dhaenens et al. / Slashing the Fiction of Queer Theory 339

time it is reconstructed in societies’ discourses where different sexualities are pro-

duced. The fluidity within sexual identity implies that queer theorists find it point-
less to conduct a politics of identity in the name of repressed sexualities that can
become new sexualities in the future; they rather prefer to focus on how subjects
construct their sexualities in relation to the mechanisms of power and knowledge
(Dunphy, 2000; Lapsley & Westlake, 2006, p. 243).

Queering Academia

Studies of queer representation are no longer served by the screen tradition, once
indispensable to research on cinema (e.g., Gove, 1996). Jeff Lewis (2002, p. 259),
for example, criticized the screen tradition for being concerned mainly with the
subject and how it relates to the text. In a similar vein, Ien Ang (1991, p. 180) criti-
cized the screen theorists’ textual determinism or their focus on the text as the main
source of meaning, thereby ruling out the text readers. According to her, these read-
ers are able to offer different interpretations of the same text. The noble goal of cre-
ating a unified theory of signification, ideology, and subjectivity had become
unachievable (Lapsley & Westlake, 2006, p. 12). Film theory in general initially
tended toward conceptualizing the audience as a textually constructed, passive spec-
tator, in contrast with the cultural studies approach of considering audiences as indi-
vidual active viewers, although this tendency began to change in the 1980s when
film scholars also began to notice real audiences (Meers, 2004, p. 150; Moores,
1993). An active viewer implies that a text no longer can be seen as signifying iden-
tity and class and that sex, ethnicity, and nationality are incorporated into the con-
cept of identity (Stacey, 1994, p. 73). This conceptualization embroiders on Hall’s
(1992, 1996, 1997, 2000) fundamental work on the theory of identity.
Yet Philippe Meers (2004, pp. 148, 150) suggested that “real” audience analyses
are still rare within film studies, and he emphasized the need to involve the cross-
cultural dimension of film consumption. Clearly, cultural studies encompasses audi-
ence research but involves other meritorious research approaches as well. Rosemary
Hennessy (1995) valued cultural studies because of “the intellectual’s commitment
to and articulation of the relationship between theory and practice” (p. 20). She
stressed that what distinguishes cultural studies from film studies is the scarce
acknowledgement within film theory of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, or the role of
gender in these concepts (Hennessy, 1995, p. 22). One could argue that gender
gained recognition in feminist film theory; however, even here some theorists did not
include race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, focusing solely on the construction of
“woman” (Chaudhiri, 2006, pp. 26, 76). If we consider Henderson’s (1995, p. 23)
remark on the ease with which cultural studies transgresses disciplinary borders, it
becomes clear how comfortably queer theory can be merged into them. The need for this
is accentuated by Lapsley and Westlake (2006) in their Film Theory: An Introduction,

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340 Journal of Communication Inquiry

which described how postmodernity in all its diversity demands different approaches
and methods. The authors stressed that “it is hard to see how anyone could now plau-
sibly advance claims for the universal validity of a particular orientation while dele-
gitimizing all others” (Lapsley & Westlake, 2006, p. xv).
Not only can film and cultural studies benefit from queer theory, but also queer
theory itself becomes more viable when its theoretical stances are integrated within
film studies or cultural studies, which both include research on queer representation.
Although queer theory engages in the promotion of individuality and tolerance of dif-
ferences, it never fully explains the type of difference politics it envisions. Seidman
(1995, pp. 135-136) even suggested a conscious refusal on the part of queer theorists
to formulate ethical and political points of view or imagine a constructive social pro-
ject. Seidman (1995, p. 137) referred to Judith Butler’s suggestion to expose and
undermine the compulsive reenactment of heterosexuality and the assumption of
causality between sex, gender, and sexuality by means of deconstructive critiques
such as drag or performative politics (see also Edwards, 1998; Halberstam, 2005).
Besides the theoretical emphasis on performance and subjectivity, it is important to
link these almost ontological positions to the subject position of the researchers and
the ideological and emancipatory positions of research on queer representations.
However, the critique that there is no solid stance could be countered, possibly by
applying queer theory to research on queer representation. Recognizing and identify-
ing the presence or absence of these representations would facilitate the formulation
of constructive social suggestions. Thus, queer theory could become an element of
research aiming at concrete, constructive, ethical points of view.

Putting the Queer in Film (Studies)

The integration of queer theory into film studies resides in a small but significant
number of essays regarding queer film production and reception (e.g., Gittings,
2001; Rich, 2004; Wallace, 2000). Researchers mainly depart from the key idea of
queer theory, which is a rejection of the biological and essentialist notions of gender
and sexuality, perceiving them as fluid and socially constructed. Harry Benshoff and
Sean Griffin (2004, p. 1), for instance, emphasized that queer film research aims at
exploring all non-straight sexualities and how they relate to the screen. The possi-
bility of broadening the spectrum beyond gay and lesbian identities makes it possi-
ble for scholars to embark on the practice of queer reading (cf. Clover, 2000).
Apart from Alan Sinfield’s (2004) queer readings of literature, one of the first
queer readers of texts was Eve Sedgwick. In Between Men, Sedgwick (1985) reread
English literature to expose discriminations and contradictions in what she called
“homosocial desire,” a continuum between the homosocial and the homosexual. In
doing so, she reacted against the opposition of the latter two as separate categories.
She found this opposition to be less emphasized among women than among men in

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 Dhaenens et al. / Slashing the Fiction of Queer Theory 341

current society. This difference in emphasis contrasts with Athenian societies that
recognized the homosocial continuum among men. For this reason, she suggested
that research on sexuality should be conducted in relation to historical power rela-
tionships (Sedgwick, 1985, pp. 1-5), a perspective that has been adopted by queer film
theorists in some of their essays on gender and sexuality. Caroline Evans and Lorraine
Gamman (1995) put great effort into revisiting gaze theory; they reviewed it in rela-
tion to queer theory and referred to the debates about identification in cinema that
raised (still unanswered) questions about gender and identity. The problem lies in the
concept of identity that sneaks in and prevents queer reading from being detached
from the identification practices in the queer gaze. Although the authors quite firmly
argue that identification is fluid and constructed, their idea seems to be approaching
the linear “natural” and “essential” bounds of queer reading and identification.
Alexander Doty is another prominent queer film reader to formulate propositions
in the spectatorship paradigm within film studies in a more balanced way. According
to Corey Creekmur and Doty (1995, p. 4), reading practices can vary from revealing
queerness in popular culture by questioning the role of mainstream culture and its
preferred readings to reinscribing queerness at the margins of popular culture and
positioning queer and queer readings on the scholarly agenda of research into popu-
lar culture. Doty (2000, p. 2) stressed—well aware of the irony of the subtitle of
Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon—that the practice of queer reading
should not be interpreted as making texts queer but rather as trying to understand
how texts might be understood as queer. Robert Lang (2002) also gazed at
Hollywood through a queer looking glass and discovered hidden homosocial and
homosexual bounds in films such as Batman and Robin (1997), Midnight Cowboy
(1969), and The Outlaw (1943). The latter is a modern western featuring the charac-
ter of Doc Holliday who is falling in love with Billy the Kid:

The Outlaw, as if to announce the end of the traditionally “innocent” address of west-
erns and to acknowledge the homosexual voyeurism at the heart of the genre, presents
Billy as the object of Doc’s gaze, a pinup for which we have been prepared by the nar-
rative’s overdetermined identification of him with his horse. And Billy, although he
tries to conceal it, is quite obviously dazzled by the older man. (Lang, 2002, p. 93)

The flexibility of the concept makes it possible to understand almost any film as
queer to a greater extent than standard lesbian or gay films. Doty (2000) referred to
classic Hollywood films such as Thelma & Louise (1991) or Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes (1953), in which he recognized the creation of an unstable space between
the same-sex leads that leaves room for all sorts of interpretations (Doty, 1995, p. 77).
However, he also emphasized the importance of making these interpretations,
alerting us to heterocentric and stereotyped ways of viewing films and other products
of popular culture in which queer characters are recognized as such only when they
are portrayed in clichéd and often pejorative ways (Doty, 2000, p. 3).

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342 Journal of Communication Inquiry

The concept of representation looms in every queer reading, although approaches

to it vary. Researching queer representation in a historical context involves consid-
ering the political and social contexts in which these films were made and seen.
Films that were made in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Motion Picture Production
Code (which forbade references to sexual perversions such as homosexuality) was
in force, had to find ways around it to enable the representation of gay and lesbian
characters on screen (Barrios, 2003). Queer reading practices that focus on contem-
porary culture either regard the representation of gay- or lesbian-identified charac-
ters or work on queering popular mainstream cinema. David Gauntlett (2002, p. 136)
falls within the latter tradition, although he regards queering texts as inventing alter-
native readings that the authors did not intend and most audiences do not recognize.
However, he drew on allusions to sexual minorities in the science fiction feature
X-Men (2000), which portrays the mutants as a misunderstood minority and tells
the story of their struggle against right-wing politicians whose concern is to protect the
American family (Gauntlett, 2002, pp. 87-88).
But what about the audiences that we focus on in our argument regarding the
value of cultural studies? The body of queer film studies is a diverse package of pos-
sible readings of queer and non-queer films in which the spectator is a mere con-
struction in the mind of the author. Doty (1995, p. 77), for instance, talked about
already queerly positioned viewers and straights, both of whom are assumed to be
prone to queer impulses. Meers (2004, p. 165) pointed out that the audience’s con-
struction of meaning is a complex process and that interpretations are based on the
audience’s cultural and social environments, especially class, gender, ethnicity, and
nationality. It is not hard to imagine that for some The Lord of the Rings trilogy
(2001-2003) could be read as a queer quest involving an unspoken love between Sam
and Frodo, whereas other readers would never consider the adventurous epos as hav-
ing a non-straight subtext. This would apply to both sides of production and recep-
tion. Nevertheless, both interpretations are valid and valuable readings of this
representation. They both have legitimate meaning and potentiality in relation to the
signifying practices of different readers and audiences.

Slashing the Straight

In discussions on queer reading, the dominant voice is that of the queer scholar,
while media producers and audiences are often overlooked. In this article we would
like to underline the function of the text in linking creator(s) and audience(s).
Drawing on the theoretical insights and empirical outcomes of cultural studies as well
as on the practice of queer reading, scholars are discovering slash fiction. The latter
refers to fan fiction, mostly written by heterosexual women. Slash fiction describes
same-sex relationships between male protagonists in some textual world (Staiger,
2005, p. 103), although there is a smaller segment of slash that focuses on female pro-
tagonists (Jenkins, 1992, p. 197). The first slash writers based their stories on Kirk

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 Dhaenens et al. / Slashing the Fiction of Queer Theory 343

and Spock, Star Trek’s main characters, placing an italicized punctuation mark
between the two names to indicate the attraction between these two protagonists
(Jenkins, 1992, p. 186; Thrupkaew, 2003). Kirk/Spock may have ruled the 1960s, but
the 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of other slash couples such as Han Solo and
Luke Skywalker, Starsky and Hutch, and Xena and Gabrielle1 (Jones, 2000/2002;
Thrupkaew, 2003). The spread of the Internet eased the distribution of the booming
new slash fiction based on films such as The Lord of the Rings and contemporary tele-
vision series such as Lost and Heroes2 (2006).
Janet Staiger (2005, pp. 103-104) summarized the academic debate about slash fic-
tion stories and their authors’ motivations for writing them. Some theorists focus on
the lack of a (credible) female character to enable identification with the male charac-
ters or on an appeal for equity in relationships. Others center on the issue of mas-
culinity, which in slash ranges from a way of letting men express their emotions to a
strong critique of traditional masculinity. Somewhat remarkably, writing slash fiction
as a method of revealing possible queer readings does not seem to come up in Staiger’s
summary, although the reference she made to Thrupkaew’s opinion on creating a richer
sense of possibilities next to the typical heterosexual romances might be interpreted as
such. As a matter of fact, Thrupkaew (2003) saw slash as a refreshing and straight-
forward approach to homosexuality and gender issues but emphasized that such an
approach is unlikely to create a grand, unified theory of slash. Thrupkaew even
claimed that although queerness is not treated subtextually, this does not justify any
statement about whether slash is or is not gay. That is exactly the point Jenkins (1992,
p. 189) tried to make: Slash is a reaction against the normative construction of male
sexuality on screen and against predetermined stereotypes of gender and sexuality. It
really embraces the possibilities of “a fluidity of erotic identification,” a conviction that
is very much cherished by queer theory. Jenkins (1992, p. 221; 1995) and Thrupkaew
(2003) also noted that the community of writers of straight, lesbian, and bisexual
women and gay men actively and self-reflectively discuss queerness, the social con-
struction of gender, and the politics of sexuality.
Although queer theory would seem to belong to queer theorists, it has found its
way into disciplines such as cultural studies and film studies, and it can be detected
in the fictional output of factions of the audience, namely, the fan community (e.g.,
Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995). Authors of slash fiction approach the textual material in a
similar way to how certain queer readers approach classic Hollywood cinema; they
deconstruct traditional narratives and reveal the queer from reading between the
story lines. The difference between them lies in the textual output and the position
of the authors—a nonfictional report written from a scientific point of view versus a
fictional love story written from a fan point of view. Nevertheless, in their reflections
they both embroider on queer theory, questioning the assumption of preferred read-
ing inherent in a heteronormative culture.
Elaborating on the idea that the fan is part of the audience, reception studies
focusing on slash fiction could unravel some interesting findings on active queer

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344 Journal of Communication Inquiry

readings by audiences. Jenkins (1995, p. 265), for instance, made clear that ethno-
graphic research is important to get a grip on resistant readers who sometimes
produce their own inverse content and change the ideological content of the rep-
resentation or the media text. This ethnographic link is highlighted in David
Morley’s (1980) research, which without falling into the trap of cultural populism
(see interpretations of Fiske, 1987) saw audiences as subjects but avoided conceptu-
alizing them as overactive agents. The practices of “the popular” are rather to be seen
as forms of resistance through the playing of creative and adaptive games that con-
stitute an integral element of this power. De Certeau (1984) distinguished between
power strategies and resistance tactics. A strategy is the way in which power is
appropriated for a specific sphere in which it develops its own subjectivity. A tactic
is a calculated action determined by the absence of a clear or specific locus. People
both benefit from and are dependent on opportunities. In other words, people use
others’ resources. The resistance lies in the use of cultural products of the dominant
economic order. De Certeau’s (1984) interpretation of the concept of resistance was
largely responsible for the demise of the idea of a monolithic and impenetrable cul-
tural industry (Barker, 2000). Both De Certeau (1984) and Fiske (1987) saw resis-
tance as something that can take many forms. Subversive politics or resistance
operates within a specific framework: It is politics of transgression. According to
Fiske (1987, pp. 124-125), fantasy is politics, or at least protopolitics. In relation to
the specificity of slash fiction, the pleasure of consumption, in which the emphasis
is on establishing the praxis of the production of meaning, is important. This con-
ceptualization can be defined as the “pleasure of consumption” paradigm (cf. de
Certeau, 1984; Fiske, 1987) and is especially useful when researching potential
resistance in the audience activity of slash fiction because the notion of power and
resistance can be conceptualized as a subversive or nonhegemonic articulation.
In addition, there is also a move to reintroduce queer theory and its ontology into
media studies. Until now, it is only at the margins of media studies or the outskirts of cul-
tural studies that queer theory has been embraced. An example from communication
studies is the work of Gust Yep, Karen Lovaas, and John Elia (2004), who from a queer
perspective examine conversations and nonverbal communication using semiological
phenomenology. Their work does not focus on the practices of audiences, yet media
studies and screen studies could benefit from the insights and theoretical conceptualiza-
tions of queer theory, especially when analyzing audiences’ practices and slash fiction.

Conclusion
This article argued that it is important for contemporary popular culture theory to
include themes such as dominance, exploitation, and resistance. This is the sphere of
hegemonic and antihegemonic ideological production in which, according to Best
(1998), social change and transformation are possible. In general, slash fiction and
queer readings seem to be practices within the realms of this potential resistance.

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 Dhaenens et al. / Slashing the Fiction of Queer Theory 345

Without pleading for a romantic turn to the radical politics of the voices at the margins,
we emphasize the potential for social transformation that would allow the margins and
the resistance to find places outside of and within the dominant order. This resistance
and queer reading would be articulated in specific queer texts and in the practices of
fan fiction and non-queer popular texts where the borders of heteronormativity are
sometimes blurred. Slash fiction is a typical example that seems to have been over-
looked in queer studies and their reading practices and is an example that embodies a
transgression of the boundaries to practices of queer reading and the theory of queer.
This dialectic of the queer discourse either in the hegemonic sphere or at the margins
can be understood only on the basis of a snapshot of the discursive repertoires. Queer
articulations are dependent on those that attribute meaning and have to be situated in
time and space. By conceptualizing resistance as fluid and situated, we are unable to
differentiate fixed, recurring patterns or to make general statements about the (in)exis-
tence of articulated queer resistance in the media sphere. The academic community
should pay more attention to the theoretical richness and relevance of queer theory,
especially the integration of these insights into film studies and media studies.
Researching gay and lesbian representation, queer theory and the possibility of trans-
gressing the boundaries by means of queer reading should be a part of this research in
which identification is conceptualized as being detached from spectatorship. Ultimately,
transgression of the boundaries between queer reading and slash fiction indicates the
need to violate disciplines, which is exactly what a queer would do.

Notes
1. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are characters from the first Star Wars Trilogy, Starsky and Hutch
are the famous duo from the television series Starsky and Hutch, and Xena and Gabrielle are the female
leads from the series Xena: Warrior Princess.
2. The slash fiction of the series Lost can be read on http://www.lostfic.com/index.php, the slash fic-
tion of the series Heroes can be checked at http://fantasticpants.livejournal.com/35297.html, and the slash
fiction based on The Lord of the Rings can be found at http://www.libraryofmoria.com.

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Frederik Dhaenens is a PhD student and a member of the working group Film and Television Studies at
the Department of Communication Studies, Ghent University, Belgium. His research focuses on queer
theory, queer representation, and screen culture.

Sofie Van Bauwel, PhD, is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies and is a member of
the working group Film and Television Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. She researches popular cul-
ture, film and television, and gender. She has published on gender bending in visual culture, gender rep-
resentations in the media, and feminist media theory.

Daniel Biltereyst is a professor in Film, Television, and Cultural Studies at the Department of
Communication Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the working group Film and
Television Studies. His research and publications are on film and screen culture as sites of controversy
and censorship, situated within public sphere theories.

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