Episode 133: Slash: The Discourse
In Episode 133, Elizabeth and Flourish talk directly about a topic that creeps into a lot of Fansplaining discussions: slash fic and the people who write it. They walk through the history of “slash fandom” and the ways that early narratives about it endure to this day, and they dig into the fraught gender politics around slash, wrapping up with a discussion of whether the term means anything at all in 2020. They also read a slew of listener letters about the topic of the last episode, purity culture.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:02:02] Episode 132, “Purity Culture 2020.”
[00:24:46] The interstitial music is “Three Things You Need To Know About Today” from Music for Podcasts 6 by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license. This is also a good moment to note that we’re talking about media fandom, not SFF fandom, in this episode!
[00:33:02] The famous “slash is what happens when you take away the glass” quote originally appeared in the first issue of Strange Bedfellows, a slash apa from 1993. It’s excerpted on Fanlore.
[00:36:59] “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from the Terra Nosta Underground and Strange Bedfellows” is an article edited and introduced by Shoshanna, Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins. It appears in the 1998 book Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, and you can read about it on Fanlore if you don’t have access to the book.
[00:39:00] We’re referring mostly to Joanna Russ’s essay “Pornography by Women, For Women, With Love,” in her book Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts. There’s a good Fanlore article about it, and you can read it in full online too.
[00:41:00] We’re talking about the letter that inspired Episode 127, “A Fan of Fandom.”
[00:47:49] The internet definitely massively enabled migratory fandom, but as @NorsEllie pointed out, it’s wrong to imply that there weren’t physical zines that included multiple fandoms in them—there were!
[01:19:38] Our outro music is “Where Was I” from Music for Podcasts 6 by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Transcript
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaning, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #133, “Slash: The Discourse.”
FK: I can’t believe we’ve never done an episode that was just about slash discourse—I mean, the slash discourse—before.
ELM: Yeah, I think it is a theme that lurks beneath many of our conversations, and just like kind of putting some firmer—not boundaries, but laying out our scaffolding a little bit for how we talk about purity culture? I think that this is a good idea. We got a message from a listener saying they were looking through our back catalog, swearing they had seen this, and being like “Where is it?” Which I think probably reflects the way we’ve been going about it. It’s something that is underpinning our thoughts about transformative fandom and gender and race and you know, all sorts of ways those—and shipping!—those conversations interact. This idea of what quote-unquote “slash fandom” is or what “slash fic” is.
FK: Yeah. Definitely.
ELM: But we never talk about it with, uh, the title of the episode and kind of trying to have a structure around that conversation.
FK: Yeah, and I think it’s really important because obviously I think that a lot of our listeners share some background and have some understanding of some of the places we’re coming from with this, but if you don’t talk about sort of those assumptions that you’re making, it can be really easy, like, to have someone who had missed a chunk, you know, of that discourse. Or, you know, maybe it turns out that we’ve missed something and our listeners will be like “Hey, what about this?” You know? So it’ll be good to do!
But before we do that, there were some responses to our last episode about purity culture.
ELM: More discourse.
FK: More discourse. Always more discourse. OK, so we have four responses and we’re gonna go through them kinda—not super-quickly, but they’re long, they’re thoughtful, we’re gonna read them and respond quickly and then, you know, not relitigate everything about purity culture right now.
ELM: I don’t wanna have another purity culture episode yet.
FK: Great, we won’t. OK. Shall I read the first one of these?
ELM: Do it.
FK: All right. This one is from Ruth.
“Hi Fansplaining,
“Thanks for the great podcast, always a thought-provoking listen! In your episode 132 on Purity Culture in the year of our Lord 2020, you referenced a tweet about the grossness of the ‘character falls in love with the child they've raised’ trope and talked about how that…doesn’t actually happen very much unless the older character is a villain. As soon as I heard that, I thought of the book The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman. I don't know if either of you have read it, but it was covered on the Overinvested podcast by Morgan and Gav, so you're probably at least aware of it by osmosis. Anyway, in that book, we see Malcolm Polstead decided that he’s fallen in love with Lyra, who is a) his student; b) a decade his junior; c) while she's not exactly his adopted child, the last time we saw them interact she was a baby and he was taking care of her and changing her diaper.
“Malcolm is definitely presented as a Good Guy in this story and to be fair he doesn't actually make a pass at Lyra (at least not in this book…!) but still…ew. This all felt a bit gross to me (and to the Overinvested podcasters also) and I felt Pullman was a bit out-of-touch here including something like this in an uncritical way.
“Keep up the good work, Ruth.”
ELM: Yeah, so, this is interesting. It’s interesting that this wasn’t the only response that we got trying to guess—
FK: Right!
ELM: —at what this, what this was referring to. We also had a listener tweet at us, wondering if it was about what’s-his-name. The werewolf man. Jacob!
FK: Yes! Jacob in Twilight and Renesmee, who is a child whom he imprints on—she is also like a super-fast-growing child?
ELM: Right, I remember that. The pregnancy was like—
FK: Who like ages up really quickly?
ELM: —like three days long, right? It’s a real fast pregnancy.
FK: Yeah, and then she like…becomes…
ELM: The baby, the child of Edward the vampire and Bella, Kristen Stewart.
FK: Who’s basically Jacob’s ex. So there’s a lot of things that are kind of weird and gross going on here.
ELM: I think you would have had to have lived in isolation, like, in Antarctica to not know that Bella was choosing between Jacob and Edward, a vampire and a werewolf—I said that reversed, but you understand what I mean—
FK: I do.
ELM: —and that she chose the vampire.
FK: Correct.
ELM: I, I haven’t read these books. But I know this.
FK: You would have to, you would have to be under a rock. And that one too I was like, I don’t know if people are thinking about that. Also doesn’t seem totally, like—doesn’t seem to totally fit, but could be that people were thinking about that? I think that this is a similar one where it’s like, yeah, that seems a little icky, like, particularly the changing-diaper thing. I don’t know that it totally fits, right? Like, I don’t know if a 10-year-old can be like, raising or grooming somebody in that way that, like, makes it feel maximally creepy, if they’re a decade apart, you know? But that doesn’t mean it feels great to have someone who—to change someone’s diapers and then fall in love with them—that’s a little odd.
ELM: I think the way this veers into purity culture—it’s like this assumption that, you know, that the character may have desired them as a child, right. Or associates them, if they knew them as a child, there’s—you see in purity culture people arguing a lot that like, childhood best friends growing up—and then getting together—is gross.
FK: Even if they were the same age.
ELM: Because they knew each other as children so they’ll always remember them. And it’s like, OK, but will they—are they thinking longingly of the child-version of the partner? Like, if not, that’s a very normal human experience, that people very often wind up getting together with people they knew from a young age, because historically people have lived in small groups! With limited pools of people! [laughs] They didn’t like, move to the big city and go on a medieval dating app or whatever, right? So.
So that’s, it’s interesting. But also I understand why it gives people, like, squishy feelings. We’ve talked about our discomfort or our like, weird fascination with the de-aging trope in fandom.
FK: Yeah, that’s true.
ELM: Right? Where it’s like, two adults that you like, and then one of them gets turned into a kid, and you’re like “Uh, OK but what’s their relationship now?” And this is in the context of the ship, too, right? So you’re like “Normally they’re adults, but now one’s a kid…”
FK: I don’t love it. You can write it if you love it. I don’t love it.
ELM: I, I don’t love it at all. Yeah. Go, go forth, but it’s—it’s, I’ve read a few of them and I’ve just been like, “I don’t understand what we’re doing here.” Like, I, you know, it’s strange to me in a way that one of my favorite tropes, getting turned into a pet, is not. That’s totally normal!
FK: I also, I—OK. You, you do you Elizabeth. Should we listen to—[both laughing] You do you, Elizabeth.
ELM: I don’t condone bestiality! I’ve never read one of those stories where there was lust involved! [laughing]
FK: Should we read the next letter? We’re goin’ down a road. Read me the next letter, Elizabeth!
ELM: All right, all right. This was in a similar vein, but coming at it from a different fandom angle, in terms of speculating about what the original tweet was talking about. So this was from an anonymous letter-writer.
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish. I enjoyed your latest episode on purity culture, and wanted to provide you both with a bit more context on the grooming/age difference tweet you mentioned early on. I will preface by saying that I am a Westerner currently enjoying a lot of Chinese media.
“As I engage in this fandom (mostly through Twitter), I’ve noticed some significant division and hostility from Chinese fans directed at Westerners for misinterpreting cultural norms, tropes, and other aspects of Chinese fandom that might be lost on those of us from other countries. At first, I found it difficult not to take these attacks personally, considering my own nationality. However, I noticed that Western misinterpretation and subsequent condemnation of Chinese media is, well, pretty rampant these days, and I feel like Chinese fans have every right to be pissed.
“While I’m not 100% positive on the original intentions of the tweet, the subsequent discussion has focused primarily on a trope commonly present in Chinese danmei—” Is that how you say it? D-a-n-m-e-i?
FK: I think “don-may.”
ELM: That’s how I’m gonna say it. “Male/male novels aimed at female readers. This trope deals with age gaps and power imbalances (i.e. mentor and mentee, teacher and student, general and soldier, soldier and scholar, etc). These tropes are not unique to Chinese media, but tend to be less subverside than when they appear in Western media.
“As an example, I'm currently reading a danmei where the male protagonist (who is of a consenting age) falls in love with a man who, in his youth, was something of a mentor figure to him. Our protagonist will regularly call his mentor Yifu, which is a Chinese word for ‘adoptive father,’ even though this character was never particularly fatherly, considering his general attitude and the fact that the two are only six or seven years apart. As the trope goes, there is usually a conveniently placed years-long timeskip, where the younger character, who has now aged up into adulthood, will revisit his former mentor, both characters will develop intense crushes on each other, spend 50 chapters or so trying to suppress their urges [FK laughing] (because even they’re a little squicked by the age gap and power imbalance at first), and eventually profess their love.
“If we look at this through the lens of purity culture, all power imbalance is wrong, all age gaps are grooming and rape, and relationships must be 100% equal in order to be ‘good.’ As you mentioned in your episode, the media we produce and consume might not reflect our specific views, but it does reflect reality. Viewing media through a black-and-white lens and condemning entire tropes as good or bad completely loses sight of the nuance that occurs in all aspects of reality. Relationships are complicated, and I think exploring differences is interesting to read.
“I also think that, when dealing with cross-country fandoms, it’s very easy to conflate purity culture with Western ignorance, and that instead of just acknowledging nuance in media, we can also acknowledge nuance in fandom.”
FK: This is really interesting to read about, since I don’t read danmei and, you know, I mean, it sounds like they could be up my alley. [laughs] But no, it was interesting to read about because I feel like I, you know, am not as plugged into that particular discourse, and I always love—I mean I think that we both always love hearing from listeners who are coming from fandoms that we’re less attuned to, and like, telling us about what’s going on there.
It sounds super familiar, actually, like the way that whenever you have a cross-national fandom or—I don’t know what the best way to frame that is, the best word to use. But you get what I mean, something that’s international, where people are reacting to stuff that was not produced in their own culture—there’s always challenges like that, right? Because this stuff means something different based on who’s reading it. So.
ELM: Yeah, I also think it’s interesting because if you were outside of…we were just about to talk about slash fandom, right? If you’re coming from a different part of the world and a different tradition and background and you were to get, you know, to suddenly see Good Omens—I’m trying to think of the most like, archetypal…
FK: Slashy.
ELM: Western, slashy fandom. And then you were like “OK, I’m gonna check this out,” which actually probably happens to tons of people all the time, right? You know, coming from different countries, speaking different languages, so there’s already a language barrier, so you maybe have to rely on your own translations or other fans who speak your language translating for you, so there’s already huge things that are gonna get lost in translation. And you were to try to pinpoint what the norms are of, you know, even this relatively narrow, right, like, Western, English-language male/male romance, you know, et cetera, et cetera—and you know, maybe you were to ask like five different people who ostensibly were quote-unquote “in that fandom,” and they would probably give you wildly different answers about like, oh, what are the norms of the culture I come from and what—and how does that relate to the, like, the way I interpret this show and the way I interpret and write these fanworks, right? Like…
FK: Totally.
ELM: And so it’s completely, I find it wild that people will do this very strident—and I see this coming in all directions—of like, “This is the way it is in this place, and this is what we all believe, and you people from a different place don’t understand,” you know, and it’s like, “I’m not sure that’s how it works, because I can see this in my own world and it’s definitely not how it works,” you know?
And that’s not to say—ideas about cultural relativism are very fraught, they always have been, and that’s at the heart of anthropology and sociology, right, this idea of like, if things are acceptable in your own society but it’s cool elsewhere, like—where are those lines? And can anyone ever determine those lines? Like, maybe murder is not good anywhere? Right?
FK: But also how do you define murder, because it’s defined very differently in different societies, right?
ELM: Absolutely! And to my previous point, you pull 10 Americans into a room and ask them if they think the death penalty is OK and you’ll get wildly different answers, right? So it’s like…so anyway. That’s fraught. [laughs]
FK: All right, well, let’s move on to, let’s move on to our next comment. Because I don’t know that we want to delve into intercultural purity culture here right now.
ELM: No, but I do love this, I love that topic and I would love to have even more transnational conversations because I do think that our backgrounds, coming from Western fandom with mostly Western source material, the past couple of years have seen an explosion—because of the means of distribution, basically—in Western access to all sorts of different kinds of, you know, I have people I met in Sherlock fandom who are now into like Thai dramas.
FK: Totally.
ELM: [laughs] And that is not something I could’ve predicted when we were in Sherlock fandom, right? Y’know?
FK: Nope!
ELM: So that’s really, that’s a really interesting trend, and I would love to talk to people trying to navigate these cross-cultural conversations.
FK: For sure. All right. The next letter is from an anonymous person.
“In your recent episode on purity culture you mention briefly how some people like or even crush on villain characters for some reason. I believe that a reason for this for many villain fans is because of queer coding. Villains are often coded in canon material in ways that reflect the LGBT+ community and people pick up on that, especially if we are LGBT+ ourselves. There continues to be a lack of good representation in canon material all around and so when we see parts of ourselves reflected in characters, we tend to latch onto them, regardless on if they are supposed to be evil or not. It’s less of a reflection of us liking the character because we think they are ‘unproblematic,’ and more of the fact we are so starved for representation that we cling to whatever we can get.
“It’s a shame, really. I wish we could all enjoy villains as villains. I wish we could look at them and go ‘Oh yes, that bad guy makes a great villain because of all these fleshed out reasons. we just love to hate them!’ and not look at them and go ‘I like them because I can see a relatable representation there that we don’t get anywhere else.’”
ELM: All right, well, yeah, I mean—definitely, queer coding villains is a very foundational part of, you know, the history of Western media, right? That’s true.
FK: [laughs] Yeah, it totally is. And I’m sure that that’s happening sometimes. I do think that in a lot of cases that we were talking about, like—I don’t know how relevant it always is? Just thinking about things like—you know, I mean like, speaking as a Reylo, like—
ELM: Good, yeah.
FK: —and as a queer person! I don’t think that queer coding has to do with why I think that Kylo Ren should bang it out with Rey. I do think queer coding is a real thing that obviously is really important to, to people and the reception of everything, obviously, that’s absolutely true. I just don’t know how much, um…
ELM: Hold on. “Bang it out” is not necessarily the same thing. I think maybe we’re conflating a few different things here. I think one of the complaints is that people woobify villains—
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, that’s fair.
ELM: —which is not necessarily a term that gets a ton of play these days, though I still see it pretty regularly, which is the kind of like, you know, “Oh, he’s just misunderstood.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? And obviously that’s a big part of the Reylo discourse, undeniably.
FK: Sure!
ELM: I mean, that can also get kind of tangled up in queerness or not-queerness, right? This kind of idea with Reylo of, you know, there’s a lot of Reylos who are romantically attracted to men, and there’s this undercurrent of that discourse, of like, wanting to—the woman wanting to fix—
FK: Sure.
ELM: —save, save the man. That kind of, you know, that sort of…
FK: Absolutely. A powerful, powerful trope in the history of romance.
ELM: Right.
FK: And also in personal lives, for many people!
ELM: Sure.
FK: For better or worse.
ELM: I have encountered that in my travels through the world, knowing some women and some men! Yes. So, so like, you know, obviously gender and sexuality are all tied up in all of these things, but I don’t necessarily think it’s super black-and-white.
FK: Agree.
ELM: All right.
FK: All right, read me our last of the letters.
ELM: Speaking of not super black-and-white…such a fraught topic.
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth, I’ve really enjoyed your ongoing discussion of purity culture. One thing Elizabeth said in your latest episode struck a chord with me: ‘It’s okay to put rape in your fic, but don’t be racist.’ I’ve thought exactly the same thing and then, like Elizabeth, wondered if I was being inconsistent.
“For me, the distinction comes down to AO3’s warning tags. If you put a Non-Con tag on your fic, you’re not only making sure a reader isn’t accidentally traumatized, you’re tacitly acknowledging that rape is socially unacceptable and not okay in real life (even if you think it’s really hot when these characters do it in this particular fantasy). Whereas when fic writers perpetuate bigoted tropes—for example, all the characters of colour die in their story and all the white characters survive—they probably either don’t realize their fic is bigoted or won’t acknowledge it as such. Calling it out is a way of saying ‘this is not okay’ in a context where people might not realize the harm they’re doing.
“In the ‘real world’ outside AO3…would I have been more okay with Twilight if it came with a prologue saying ‘Contains stalking. If someone does this to you in real life, it’s a red flag for potential abuse’? Yeah, I think I would—because a lot of Hollywood movies don’t make that clear. I stopped reading George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire because I got sick of all the rape scenes, but it’s not enough to say ‘don’t like, don’t read,” because Martin has excused himself with “that’s just the way it was back then’ and ‘blah, blah historical realism.’ Honestly, I’d respect him more if he opened his books with ‘Look, you should know there’s a lot of rape in here because I’m fascinated by it for some reason I don’t care to examine’ or even ‘because I’m a giant perv.’ (The ‘historical accuracy’ thing is BS: as people on Tumblr have pointed out, if he really cared about historical accuracy, half his soldiers would have died of dysentery instead of on the battlefield, but you don’t see burly men on Game of Thrones shitting themselves to death.)” [both laugh] Great. This is really good.
“Obviously, mainstream creatives aren’t going to tag their novels and movies and TV shows. This is where cultural criticism is important, because we need to call out these things that might otherwise be accepted as OK. But I think the ;my fave is problematic’ attitude is the mature response, as opposed to purity culture. You can love Game of Thrones and still acknowledge its sexualization of violence against women and its problematic treatment of race. This is how we get better shows in the future. This is how we evolve as a society. The purity-culture response is to just purge the ‘evil’ and shut down the discussion. But this discussion is how we work out what is and isn’t socially acceptable. By shutting it down, not only are they not helping, they’re driving the potentially dangerous people to the dark corners of the internet, where we don’t hear about them until they’re on the evening news.
“Thanks for the chance to rant on and on, and thanks to Fansplaining for making me think through these issues in a way I maybe wouldn’t have otherwise. You all are the best. Skepwith.”
FK: Aw, thank you Skepwith, that was a very nuanced and, you know, I really liked that letter, I guess is what I’m trying to say! I think there really is something to point out about that, you know, the way that people can and cannot, like, warn about different themes in their stories and so on. Which is not necessarily to say that that’s like, a good situation—I don’t even know how to begin unpicking what it would look like to live in a world where people were like, consciously aware that they were doing racist things in their story and then like, self-aware enough to tag for it? I don’t even know—I struggle with imagining that world existing, but it’s a really interesting comparison to be making.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, all right, I have a few thoughts from this letter. And like, coming up from that one—this is one of the things that actually has frustrated me a lot about the AO3, OTW, Black Lives Matter conversation, is the real dismissal of an idea that you could take race and racism more seriously as an institution by saying that people won’t know—this is, for the record, this is not what Skepwith is doing here. But I’ve seen this argument a lot, that people won’t know their racism, so they won’t know to tag for it. Seeing that used as an argument about why, “Oh, nothing can be done.” Right?
FK: Yeah, I mean, that’s obviously not the case. And the fact that people won’t tag for it doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t have tags for it, right? The fact sometimes—anyway, I don’t know that that’s what they should do, but I’m just saying that that’s not—it doesn’t all follow.
ELM: Yeah, and you know, obviously people who know that there’s racism in it do tag for it—though it’s often because it’s like, some character is being explicitly bigoted.
FK: Right.
ELM: The vast majority of things that I think are racially problematic in fic are things that clearly the author has no awareness of, right? You know? It’ll be in the description of a character or in just the way a character is framed, you know? Who knows, also I’m a white person, so maybe the people of these various groups that I think are being problematically described in these fics might not get red flags the same way that I am, cause like, I can’t speak to that personal experience, you know.
FK: Well, I think it’s also a bit different, the, the sort of category of the thing that you would tag than “rape.” Like, rape is an event that happens in a story. Or sexual assault. These are things that happen in your story, and you’re dealing with the ramifications of them and so on, right? But a lot of the things that people find most offensive, race-wise, in stories are often things I think that are about leaving characters out or giving them weak characterization compared to the ones that you actually like and spend time with who all are white, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: Things like that. And those things are things that we don’t tag for in—about gender either, right? Because, you know, how many fics have you read where, you know, I mean—
ELM: There’s only one woman!
FK: Less so today than in the past.
ELM: Doesn’t pass the Bechdel test because there are 17 men in this, like, crime-fighting squad and one lady.
FK: Right, or where you kill off the character’s love interest so that they can go have a happy, you know, same-sex relationship with their work partner. Or whatever. And I mean, I don’t want to equate those things, because obviously it’s a totally different experience to have that stuff happening in fic depending on what axis of oppression it’s about—it’s not that it’s the same thing, but I think that there is something to say. Yes, you can tag for—“this is a, this fic is intentionally playing into racist ideas about sexual prowess, because I think that’s hot.” You can tag for that, and I think people could tag for that and it would be a good idea if they’re gonna write that fic—
ELM: People have tagged for that.
FK: Yeah, people have tagged for that, I’m not saying that people don’t tag for it now, you know what I mean. But that’s like tagging for the existence of rape, do you see what I’m saying? Cause that’s like an event within the fic, kind of.
ELM: Mm. I do like the argument, though I know there’s obviously a lot of disagreement amongst fans of color about this, that—that tagging for something like slavery—
FK: Oh, absolutely.
ELM: —as a major archive warning, would be more equivalent. Or racialized violence.
FK: Yes, agreed.
ELM: Because rape is—I’m trying to say not always, but it is always gendered violence, right, in some fashion, regardless of the person—the assaulter and the assaulted. It’s about gender dynamics. And it’s hard to say, it’s not, we’re not tagging for misogyny, right? We’re not tagging for—unless you’re explicitly including it and someone is being misogynistic. But the kind of patterns you’re describing, the exclusions—I mean, yeah, I’ve certainly seen even white female characters, the same sort of cringey descriptions where I’d be like, “Ooh, that feels a bit sexist.” Or depictions, right? She’s depicted as some, like, dumb bitch, right? You know.
FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely.
ELM: Because she’s in the way of your slash ship or whatever. Absolutely encountered those, and people don’t tag for them because they’re not conscious of them. So I know I’ve seen some people saying, “Who even cares about a slavery tag?” But I’ve seen a lot of other people saying, “Yeah, I would like that. Because—”
FK: There’s a lot of people who care about that, yeah.
ELM: “—any kind of slavery, even if they’re in space and everyone’s an alien, still reminds me of historical slavery,” and obviously the Atlantic slave trade and American, North American chattel slavery is not the only historical instance of slavery—
FK: It is not!
ELM: —but it is the one that fundamentally shapes the lives of millions—hundreds of millions, if not billions!—of people on Earth right now, even centuries later.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: So…so I don’t know.
FK: Well, I agree. I think this is an interesting topic and I know we’re gonna talk about it more, I’m sure, in future episodes of this podcast. I would like at this point, I think, to take a quick break, because…
ELM: [laughing] Is that what you would like?
FK: I would like to do that, because you know what I would like to do?
ELM: Drink a glass of water, because it’s important to stay hydrated?
FK: Get into some slash discourse.
ELM: No no, I thought you were telling me what you were gonna do with your break time.
FK: No no no. After the break.
ELM: You should drink some water! Everyone should just pause and drink some water.
FK: OK. Go get a drink of water, everyone we’ll be back in a moment.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back, Elizabeth has drunk some water.
ELM: Flourish didn’t have any water.
FK: Yeah, it’s too bad. And I think that we need to talk a little bit about Patreon before we get going!
ELM: OK!
FK: We are supported by Patreon. That is how we get almost all of our support. We’ve had a couple of little things here and there but like 95 to 99% of it is from listeners like you. And you can support us at patreon.com/fansplaining, and we’ve got a ton of really great rewards for our patrons, and we’re just moving into a series of new special episodes, which I think are going to be exciting for people! In this coming month we’re gonna be doing three special episodes on three shows that have been highly Emmy nominated.
ELM: Yes we are, though you skipped right over the one we just released.
FK: That’s true! We also just released one and that one was great too. That was another part of our Tropefest series, this one about found family.
ELM: Right. But so, a little bit of a departure. This was basically an excuse to talk about Succession, which I watched twice in the months of June and July, and there’s no reason to just randomly talk about Succession, except it was nominated for a lot of Emmys—go Jeremy Strong, I’m rooting for you. And so then we were like, “Well, what could we—maybe there’s a way to fit it into something,” and then we were like “Oh yeah, the Emmys!” So we thought of two other shows we wanted to talk about, Watchmen and Schitt’s Creek.
FK: I am really excited about talking about Watchmen! I have just barely started watching Schitt’s Creek so I am not either excited or not-excited yet, but I am pleased to have the excuse to sort of binge an entire series!
ELM: So we’re gonna do those three leading up to the weekend of the Emmys, which is the third weekend in September.
FK: Indeed.
ELM: Not that I actually care that much about the Emmys, so again, go Jeremy Strong.
FK: All right, there’s also a bunch of other rewards. We have these delightful little pins which we just reordered, and if you are a $5-a-month patron, in addition to getting your name in the credits you also will receive a Fansplaining pin, which I am really stoked about.
ELM: Sent via USPS!
FK: USPS!
ELM: Who doesn’t love the post office?
FK: Yep! And Elizabeth is working on our next Tiny Zine, a collaboration with Maia Kobabe, so that’s gonna be exciting to get one of those out after a long time.
ELM: Also sent through USPS!
FK: If you do not have money or just don’t feel like supporting us monetarily, then that’s cool, you can still support us in other ways! You can subscribe to us on your favorite podcatcher, give us a rating and review on your favorite podcatcher, wherever that may be. You can tweet at us or send us an email at fansplaining at gmail dot com, or send us an anonymous ask, which we have a little box on our website, or we have Tumblr. Basically we’re Fansplaining everywhere. Or you can give us a call and leave a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS. Tell us your opinions, your thoughts, respond to what we’re talking about. As you can see, we really enjoy getting those, and we incorporate them into episodes!
ELM: OK, so we’re moving on now, though a good segue: our episode was inspired by a message on Tumblr. So that could be you in the future if you have an idea for an episode.
FK: Absolutely!
ELM: Go in there and write a message.
FK: Yeah, so thank you to tsthrace, I hope that that’s how you say your name, for prodding us to talk about this!
ELM: Wait, read the actual ask, because I really liked the way it was phrased.
FK: OK. Quote: “Am I delusional or did y’all do a deep dive at some point into slash fic, the women who write it, and all its implications, both empowering and problematic? I went through the archive and saw ‘Slash: The Movie’ and ‘The Play’ but I couldn't find ‘Slash: The Discourse.’ Let me know!” So we literally took your title, “Slash: The Discourse.”
ELM: Thank you very much. All right, let’s get discoursing!
FK: So maybe we should start off by defining “slash,” which I know seems really obvious, but maybe it’s not to everybody, so let’s do that.
ELM: All right, well, in 1966—did I get it right?
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: [laughs] No, I think that’s right! It was the mid-’60s, right? It wasn’t the early ’60s.
FK: No, that sounds about right but I actually do not know.
ELM: Maybe I’ll say in 1967! We’ll say it happened slightly later. People wrote stories about Captain Kirk and Lieutenant…?
FK: Mister.
ELM: [laughs] Is there a title? He doesn’t have like a rank?
FK: He’s a Lieutenant Commander, but he’s called Mr. Spock.
ELM: I got it right! About how they were in love. And they wrote it Kirk and then a backslash, and then—or is it a forward slash? Backslash.
FK: Backslash.
ELM: A backslash. Spock. Done!
FK: Anyway, one of the things that I often see people who are not really involved in fandom—or who are involved in fandom but, like, only sort of tangentially—say is that they think that slash is a term for all romantic fanfic?
ELM: I’ve seen it as people think it’s erotic fanfic.
FK: Yeah, or all erotic fanfic. And slash is not necessarily erotic, and it is also not everything. Slash is just homosexual relationships, I think, is usually what people would say? Some people would even say it was just male/male relationships—
ELM: Yes.
FK: —and use other terms for, like, “femslash,” I think that’s probably the most common for things that involve women. This discourse has not evolved to acknowledge the existence of nonbinary characters, so I don’t know what that would fall into, but you know, language gotta catch up.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, this is part of what we’re gonna talk about and you’re really jumping the gun right now, but that’s fine.
FK: [laughing] Sorry! I mean, we couldn’t be defining this without acknowledging that.
ELM: Yeah, I know, but we’re gonna get there because that’s a huge part of the current discourse.
FK: It’s true.
ELM: Get with it, Flourish.
FK: Get with your particular idea of how this discussion is going to go! You have it all laid out in your mind.
ELM: No, no, but I just think it is—it is, the term has really broken down in the last 5 to 10 years.
FK: It’s true.
ELM: And I think that’s a big part of it.
FK: OK. but, but, before the last 5 to 10 years…
ELM: You’re not very good at structuring, obviously, so…
FK: Oh my God, Elizabeth, I’m gonna smack you. I’m not gonna smack you, but I’m gonna think about it. I can’t smack you, because…
ELM: Good thing that you’re so far away from me.
FK: You’re very far away from me. Anyway.
ELM: We’re actually not that far away from each other.
FK: Anyway, but, but, if you go back in time 10, 15 years, that’s what “slash” would mean.
ELM: Yeah, I mean let’s go back even further. So like, 25 years ago or whatever, people coming onto the internet in the years from Kirk/Spock and like, you know, Man From U.N.C.L.E. is also seen as one of the founding media fandoms—
FK: Starsky and Hutch had a big thing—
ELM: Yeah, but that’s a decade later, so—
FK: Yeah, that’s true.
ELM: I’m in the ’60s still.
FK: I meant as we move forward in time.
ELM: Yeah, sure. It’s two male colleagues, nominally cisgender…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And nominally heterosexual, because it is the ’60s and the ’70s and the ’80s.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And the ’90s and the 2000s and the 2010s and the 2020s. I’m just saying. [FK laughs] Still. Things haven’t actually changed that much.
FK: Nope!
ELM: In the mainstream media.
FK: Nope!
ELM: But I think if you look at these quote-unquote “foundational” slash ships, a lot of them are the sort of—there’s a lot of colleagues, kind of, who have a close homosocial relationship on screen, and it’s—
FK: Yeah, partners.
ELM: And more compelling—they have ostensible lady love interests who kind of flit in and out, but it’s never anything that challenges the foundational heart of those shows, which is these two men and their bond, right? You know, like—”Don’t worry! He sexes a lady sometimes, but men and their bonds, right?”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah, and also because it’s often like a situation where you’ve got—you know, who’s the recurring actors, right? Who’s the—that’s who it’s about, they’re the stars, so everybody, everything else gets pushed to the background.
ELM: Yeah, and obviously before media fandom, like, there were people writing Holmes and Watson erotica.
FK: Yeah. The term “slash” wasn’t being used, but people were definitely writing.
ELM: The whole time. And again, a similar sort of setup, right? Which is the canonical point of those characters is about their bond, these two men.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? And so slash—there’s that famous quote, which remains a very good one, though I hesitate to quote Henry Jenkins in 2020—about how slash is what happens when you take away the glass, referring to that scene in…The Wrath of Khan…
FK: Yeah? You got it!
ELM: Star Trek film.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Where, uh, Spock and Kirk are separated by a glass. And one of them’s gonna die, right?
FK: Spock is, Spock does die.
ELM: [gasps] Does he become resurrected?
FK: You’ll have to watch the Star Trek movies to find out!
ELM: I’m not going to!
FK: Yes. I think that it is—it is totally reasonable for me to spoil [ELM laughing] Star Trek 3, entitled The Search for Spock, in which Spock is resurrected.
ELM: Man, that would be ruined for me if I just looked at Wikipedia titles, and I woulda been like “Oh, all right, there he is!”
FK: Yes. There is a plot that involves a—you know, never mind. It doesn’t matter what the plot is. Spock is dying very dramatically, he has just saved the ship, and Kirk is like, touching one side of the pane of glass, and Spock’s on the other side like being irradiated to death, and it’s extremely dramatic and it’s super touching and I cry, because it’s a cry moment! It’s a moment when you cry.
ELM: Sure. Right. And so, why I think that metaphor is really perfect is this kind of idea—I mean, it’s, it’s within all of his work on participatory fandom, right, so it’s this kind of idea that the fans are the ones removing the glass. You don’t need them to suddenly open the door and touch hands for real in the thing, right, it’s the idea that you remove the glass and you put them closer together.
Which, you know, is something I thought a lot about—I think I may have brought this up on the podcast—but when I was in the Sherlock fandom, it was very interesting, because that was such a classic slash ship in that way, in that framing, right? Just like, what needs to happen in these stories is they already have this like, extreme bond, and you just need to close that distance, right? With an extreme privileging of, like, a sexual relationship.
FK: Right.
ELM: But it’d been interesting, because my ship prior to that was Torchwood, Jack/Ianto, where they’re banging all the time—that’s two dudes, by the way—and I had been in this world for a few years where the fiction, it kinda had to do the opposite thing where it had to—
FK: Pull them apart?
ELM: No! Not pull them—you would never pull them apart! But it actually had to give them that emotional bond that was missing on the screen, right?
FK: Ah, right.
ELM: And part of that is deliberate in the show, because it’s like, he’s still keeping him—Jack’s still keeping—Jack’s immortal and he knows Ianto is probably going to die sooner rather than later, cause they have a dangerous job. So he keeps them at this like slight distance, right. But there’s also a very like, it’s not that deep a show? [laughs] So like when you have like, you know, an 80k fic, you can actually really get into it. But like a lot of the work of that was how do you really show that they have these feelings, in addition to what we see constantly on the show, which is them fucking at their workplace, you know.
FK: Yeah, which is exactly the opposite of like, the classic—
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Slash formula. Completely.
ELM: And it’s interesting too because that’s a show—Russell Davies is a gay man and it’s a gay showrunner and he has this queer agenda that he’s been, you know, perpetuating at the BBC for decades, right, where you’re just like, “I’m gettin’ in as many gay characters as I can! Can’t stop me!” Right? And so it’s funny, whereas like, a lot of what I think of as traditional slash world comes from writers who may not even realize that they’re—you know, the kind of classic Hollywood surprise.
FK: Right.
ELM: That women are imagining these two guys that they thought were like brothers! [laughing] Actually, they want them to bone, right?
FK: And this, this brings up something that I think is interesting and relevant which is that slash historically has been framed by various people as something that is written by women.
ELM: Yes.
FK: Which is not necessarily true, but it is true that like, some of the—like, there’s a very famous essay called “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking.”
ELM: Yes.
FK: [laughs] You know? And when you look at the—when you look at older discussions of slash, older meta written about it or older academic work about it, there’s an assumption that this is not just something that’s written by women, but something that’s written by women in response to the media landscape that they’re in.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: “I don’t see myself in this show, therefore the only way I can see myself in this show really is to like, read into Spock and sort of read him as sort of female-coded.” And then, I’m going to write Kirk/Spock and—I mean, I don’t think, by the way, I don’t think that this is a true, like, description of what’s going on for people, but that was definitely an attitude that a lot of academics—and a lot of slash writers themselves—held about what they were doing, especially in like the early ’90s, late ’80s.
ELM: Sure, yeah, and the feminization of—yeah, that’s interesting too, because immediately when you said that I was thinking of another older argument, which is one that is much more about gazing at two men. And there’s often this response of like, “Well, you know, like, men like to watch lesbian porn!” You know? And you’re like “All right…”
And I’ve encountered that particularly from some older fans and from cis straight women, which is obviously the old stereotype about male/male fiction romance being written by cis straight women, which is not remotely connected to reality—but there are plenty of cis and/or straight women who do engage in it. And I definitely—you encounter those older arguments of that sort of like, inserting yourself in, but it’s rarely done in a way that feels connected to either the gender—the queer or gender discourse of the time.
FK: Right.
ELM: Or of this time. Right? It’s not like I am embodying Spock as an expression of genderqueerness. You disagree?
FK: Um…
ELM: I’m talking about historically, not about now.
FK: No, I think that there were some people historically. I mean, I think that, like, Joanna Russ, like, writing about slash was—
ELM: OK.
FK: —very familiar with some of those things. And that was like a very well-known, you know, aspect of it. So I’m not, I don’t—but I agree with you, I think there was a lot—
ELM: I don’t wanna say blanket statements. But I also, it’s when you contextualize some of that writing within feminist writing from those periods, from the ’70s and ’80s, and also with queer theory from those times, and the places where those groups intersected, but also the places where those groups—
FK: Don’t.
ELM: —did not. Is very notable to me.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Yep.
ELM: And it feels today like a lot of that has—those, those divisions have collapsed. Though you still get a lot of people who may be drawing on various traditions and like, lines of discourse, and don’t really know to communicate or want to communicate—
FK: Totally.
ELM: —those foundations to other people who have different foundations.
FK: And I think it is, I think it is notable for any listeners who have not read older slash fic—I highly recommend that people go and, like, seek out fic from the ’70s, from the ’80s, and from the ’90s for that matter, and really read and understand how different some of the tropes and some of the ways people talked about sex, and the ways people interacted, and the way they thought about gender. I mean obviously again, not a blanket statement, there are some fics that you read and you’re like, “Well, that feels like it could’ve been written today, sure.” But there really has been a lot of change in what’s sort of normal in stories. And the way that being gay is treated, the way that—the way that men having sex with men is treated, right, like, not even “being gay.”
So I really really recommend that because I think that once you—when you start reading that then you begin to understand a little more why some of these statements, which seem totally out of touch and completely irrelevant to the current state of people writing and reading slash, how those statements came about. You go “Oh, OK, well if I was reading all this, if that was what I was studying, then maybe I would have a different perspective on what slash was.” But of course that was the slash of 40 years ago.
ELM: Yeah, and I think that’s a really great point. I also think that like, you encounter—definitely people who’d have the attitude of “Well, that’s in the past,” right. But it makes me think of that letter that we responded to about the “fan of fandom” and about the traditions of—you know, these writers coming out of Harry Potter fandom, and coming and shaping current fantasy and SFF spaces with their writing. And how you could approach those writers and not ever know that they came from fandom, and not know that they were shaping the language there too. Or you can approach them with that knowledge, and maybe you were there reading that at the time, or you’ve read it since.
And I think that there’s, it’s very easy for people today to say “Well, the—those old slash conversations don’t have anything to do with me and the stuff that I like.” But, you’re sharing a space with people, some of whom may have even been around then.
FK: Oh yeah, absolutely!
ELM: But less so than that, a lot of people would’ve been around 20 years ago. And those people were around with people who were around 20 years before—I’m not saying that you only get to be in fandom for 20 years and then you turn into a chrysalis or something, but like…
FK: But it is true that, like, the people who were in the very beginnings of Star Trek fandom are quite old by now.
ELM: Right, and if you were over the age of, you know—if in 1965 you were 50, you are probably no longer with us.
FK: Right, which people were. Totally.
ELM: And it was a broad age range. I think there’s, there’s such an assumption with the age discourse that like, fans are young, but like—my knowledge of older fandom spaces 50 years ago is, it feels like it was much more often women of—
FK: Yes.
ELM: —30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, than—
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: —the presentation we have today.
FK: Right, and doesn’t it blow your mind to think about the fact that that means that some of those people were like, you know, born in…
ELM: 19—they’re my grandparents!
FK: 1915, 1910!
ELM: Yeah, my grandparents were born in 1919!
FK: Right? Like…and there were absolutely people who were my grandparents’ age who were in that fandom.
ELM: I also immediately just thought of either of my grandmothers engaging in—I can’t imagine it.
FK: I feel sure that my grandma Donna would have thought it was hilarious. She would’ve loved it. I wish that I had introduced her to it.
ELM: I know that one of my grandmothers did read romance novels. She was a real paperback reader, you know, she had tons of them and they were very—you know the way that they, imagine like ’80s paperbacks, the curl of the—
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: You know! And I read one of them and it definitely, when I was like 11, and—it was like, it really imprinted on me, my knowledge of what those kind of books are. It didn’t ever make me think about her internal life. I was just like “Yep, these are books she reads!” Total disconnect between the fact that she was reading them.
FK: Well, you’re age 11 and she’s your grandmother, and that’s probably a big leap to take, right?
ELM: She wore slacks and she wore sweaters…
FK: Yep!
ELM: Very sensible.
FK: Like my grandmother! Slacks and sweaters.
ELM: Did your grandmother wear slacks and sweaters?
FK: Sure did.
ELM: A slacks-and-sweater grandmother?
FK: Slack-and-sweater grandma.
ELM: You know my other, my Italian grandmother, she had blue eyeshadow and she had a new outfit every four hours, it felt like, and…
FK: Ah, yes, the two kinds of grandma.
ELM: The two grandmothers!
FK: Oh my God.
ELM: Hold on, let me tell you one side note. Did I ever tell you about the pictures I found recently of my Italian grandmother? Italian-American grandmother, obviously.
FK: No.
ELM: Where she was in uniform? Did I tell you this?
FK: No!
ELM: OK. So she was in uniform, and I said to my mom, “Was she in the military?” Some women were, right?
FK: Yeah, was she like a WAC or a WAVE?
ELM: Yeah. And my mother said “No, that was an outfit she put on to write to her, like, men.” She, she was like writing letters to multiple men, and sending them like, legit pinup shots. Like, they’re real cute. They’re like next-level.
FK: Whoa!
ELM: I have a bunch of them, maybe I should put one in the show notes. But I just love, I mean, she’s kind of like a camgirl. Kind of.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Not like they were paying her or anything but like—I don’t know! She was like, a gal for multiple guys it sounds like!
FK: Wow.
ELM: And what happened when they came back and they were like…I should write a fic for this. This is like a Captain America fic, isn’t it?
FK: This is a Captain America fic waiting to happen.
ELM: [laughs] Anyway…
FK: In fact, I can tell you, I can tell you what the slash version of this is: Captain America writes letters to multiple guys…mm-hmm!
ELM: [laughing] No, there’s something…
FK: And what happens when they come home and try and find their girl?
ELM: Oh, he—he does it like a what’s-it-called—not Cyrano. Yeah! Cyrano! You know, he pretends to be—yeah.
FK: Yeah! That’s the fic.
ELM: Oh wow. Flourish, write that right now. [FK laughs] I’ll give you my historical knowledge of Brooklyn, something that I feel you will need for this.
FK: I would need that for this, if I were gonna write this fic, which I am totally not going to do. [ELM laughing] Someone else! Someone, our listeners, someone write it please!
ELM: Inspired by Josephine Corvetti.
FK: But let’s get back to slash, because we were just, we were just talking about how there is this sort of history of slash fandom that does actually, that is actually relevant—not necessarily because any, you know, not because you or I have experienced it exactly, but because we were in spaces with older people who were in spaces with older people—it does have an impact.
ELM: And this is something that I think scholarship around that period was very bad at acknowledging: the whiteness of those spaces.
FK: Yeah, super bad.
ELM: And I think even—I mean, I take your point that I don’t think everyone was pretty bad on gender and sexuality, but I do think there were some assumptions made from some people writing about those periods back in the day, and you see this in meta as well. And so it becomes this very [laughs] it gets a little second-wavey to me, this very like, “This is women, but like, white women—or default, you know,” kind of like, “We’re just women, women, like reclaiming this man-made media.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “And it’s a feminist act.” Right? And then that is the narrative that really stuck. And that narrative persists, right?
FK: Yeah, and it’s interesting to note that that was not the only narrative that people had about fandom at the time, right? I mean, like, that was the narrative that Henry Jenkins basically took and that’s the narrative people ran with, but there were other people working on this who had different ideas about what was going on, and those narratives did not persist in the same way, which is interesting.
ELM: I think some of those other narratives also had like, second-wave-ish failings.
FK: Oh, for sure! Absolutely!
ELM: [laughing] But they were like, different failings!
FK: No no no, I’m not saying that they were less problematic in those particular ways, just saying that there were like—we shouldn’t, it’s not like this was a fated situation, you know what I mean. I just want to preserve the, yeah, multiplicity.
ELM: You know, with my deep love of history, that I don’t believe anything that has ever happened is fated.
FK: [laughs] I know what you believe, I’m just saying. Continue on.
ELM: It’s not a belief! It’s just a description of the world!
FK: Continue on, continue on.
ELM: So anyway, we’re into the ’90s, into the 2000s, I think that it was in the ’90s that the idea of “migratory slash fandom” kind of had its roots.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think it was really with the internet that—it’s hard to say, I think that obviously it happened, but the internet was what allowed migratory fandom in general to really take hold, because it was so much easier to pass on the word and to help people move from, just I’m thinking of like an old-school webring, but like, people moving from one fandom to the next via—
FK: Absolutely. Right.
ELM: —other fans they like. Obviously people always have done this, but like, not in the way that the internet facilitated.
FK: Yeah, it’s different, right, because if you’re getting your slash from fanzines at the table at your Star Trek convention, which again, you know—think about how different this was, right, in the ’80s and ’90s you have a Star Trek convention every weekend, somewhere, just for Star Trek. And so they might have some stuff for another show that whoever’s running the booth happens to also like, but you know, you’re going to your Star Trek convention, you’re not going to your Starsky and Hutch convention. You’re not going to your Highlander convention or whatever.
So you’re gonna have a limited amount, until you really decide to make that jump, or unless you happen to have a bunch of friends who all decide to get into a new thing at once just out of nowhere—which probably you don’t really have that happening—it’s a lot harder to move. Whereas by the time you get the internet it’s as easy as just like, “Let’s look on Usenet and see if there’s a newsgroup for that,” you know what I mean? Which is even the old internet, the early ’90s, if you’re a fan online at that point it really starts enabling you to also like dip your toe in, right. You don’t have to pay for a fanzine for a show that you don’t know if it’s like, your thing.
ELM: Well and also writers—as structures developed into the, like, 2000 decade, just like you’re saying, the writing—you probably wouldn’t get a zine of the collected multifandom writings of your favorite writer.
FK: Right.
ELM: Unless they felt compelled to make that, that’s not the way it was normally done, whereas like, as things started to get organized and as less became—because the early archives definitely mirrored zines in that way; you would go the X-Files archive, right? But with fanfiction.net, then into LiveJournal, it really became about the fan themselves and the things that they liked. And then obviously this has gone completely skyrocketed with a combination of Tumblr and AO3 that both do this, in their own way. They’re actually quite similar in that way in the sense of like, if you look at someone who’s written a lot of fanworks and you click on the list on AO3, and they’ve got like 75 fandoms, and you’re like “Holy shit,” right? And it’s actually not that much different than someone putting 15 fandoms in their bio on Tumblr and then reblogging everything under the sun, right?
FK: Completely.
ELM: But I feel like sometimes I frame them differently, but it’s not actually, you know. It’s a similar mindset of “I am the fan, and these are all the things that have caught my interest, some more than others.”
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: And so if you get people following specific fans, specific writers they like, that gives you more of an opportunity to be drawn into the next thing. Tons of people have moved from one fandom to another because they noticed writers they liked moving on to a different fandom. And so that’s I think really where the patterns—what was more a foundational framework for looking at media for some fans, just as much as people writing het, they obviously have a foundational framework for looking at media!
FK: Completely!
ELM: It’s looking for that het romance dynamic, right? So it’s not, it’s not to say that there was something special about slash. Just only in that it was working against a mainstream depiction, right? But it’s when you start to get into really people migrating from fandom to fandom via fans that they like that I think that it starts to feel—the pace picks up so much, then this kind of idea of a migratory slash fandom, that’s what “slash” means.
And that’s where you start to get the term “any two guys,” you just show up in a new property and you’re like, “Which guys am I shipping?” You know? Or “slash goggles,” that term, which I feel like you don’t see so much anymore, right, where you just—you’re watching the mainstream media, trying to pick out the two strapping white dudes that you think should, as you would say, “bang it out.”
FK: Yeah, and I think—it’s interesting, you’re right. I haven’t heard the term “slash goggles” in a long time, which is funny.
ELM: Blast from the past! It’s interesting that it’s so gone now.
FK: Yeah! But I think there’s a bunch of different factors that have meant that…I don’t know, I feel like “slash” as a concept is becoming less powerful, I guess? I feel like there was a period in…
ELM: Oh, absolutely! I barely think it exists anymore, right?
FK: Yeah! I don’t think it’s a—it’s not the way that people orient themselves anymore, towards like what they’re doing in fandom.
ELM: Don’t skip ahead of that, though. I want to talk about how we got there. How did that start to shift and when? Right? Like, back in like 2002 or whatever—
FK: One thing I think—
ELM: Well, hold on. I have a question for you. Can I ask you a question?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: I’ve always kind of teased you and called you a het shipper, and you’ve always pushed back against that. But like, in 2002, you wouldn’t have said “I’m in slash fandom,” even though that would have been a normal thing for people to say who were, like, shipping Harry/Draco. Right?
FK: So the reason I wouldn’t have said that is because—at the time I would have said that I’m an omnivore, basically.
ELM: Right, so you would actually have to—
FK: I read a lot of slash from slash fandom, but I wouldn’t have identified as a slasher because I felt like that meant that you were really in some of these sort of tropes and like, putting on your slash goggles and things. And I didn’t feel like that applied to me.
ELM: Interesting.
FK: I have never once felt like I had slash goggles on. I’ve loved slash fic, but I’ve never felt like that was sort of my orienting way of looking at the world.
ELM: Mm, that’s interesting. And so did you find there were a lot of people who would identify as omnivorous in that way?
FK: Yeah, not a lot. I would say there was probably more than…yeah, there was a chunk. I mean, I was, I guess at the time there was like a—because there was like the shipping forums on the FictionAlley, you know, the FictionAlley boards, and I was very engaged with one of the threads, which was the Switzerland, which was the “all-ship ship,” you know? [laughs]
ELM: Sure.
FK: So I guess I had more interaction with people who felt that way than a lot of people did, probably.
ELM: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
FK: So I don’t know if I can really judge that. But I would say that I felt like there were a lot of people who, if you were not—I think at the time there was also a lot more pressure if you were not a slasher and you like, did not define yourself as a slasher and you defined yourself as a het shipper, there were some expectations that you were anti-slash.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Right? And so you couldn’t really say “I’m a het shipper, I only read het,” without there being a lot of assumptions being made.
ELM: Like you’re a terrible homophobe or something.
FK: Yeah, that you’re a terrible homophobe! And I don’t think that was totally fair to everybody who felt that way, but I think that there was, like, especially among slashers that feeling. So I think that that also probably had some impact on it, because if you did enjoy ever reading slash, or even if you just thought that people should be allowed to, there was kind of, you know—you didn’t really identify as a het shipper. That wasn’t really a thing that was like a positive for you.
ELM: Yeah, so that reminds me, so like, we’ve talked about this relatively recently I think but like, the cultural context of this in the early 2000s, and I think that like—maybe this is, it’s very striking to me because that was the time when I was coming of age, but the cultural conversation around gay people, in particular in the United States—but it was also in Europe, and I can’t speak to outside of the Anglosphere—was super heightened and super loud and super fraught, right? So this kind of idea of shippers—regardless of their personal sexual or gender identity—being mostly women, or IDing as women at the time…I think it further heightened the kind of narrative of underdog victimhood, this kind of idea of like, “We are reclaiming this narrative from the, from the straight man media,” you know? Like, and, and we are doing something super-subversive. I definitely encountered those attitudes back in the day.
FK: Sure.
ELM: And I think I still see them now, and it’s like, it’s not—it’s not that subversive. You know? I don’t—right? And again, so, with all of the…
FK: Now it’s certainly not. I mean, I think in 2000 it was a bit of a different situation.
ELM: Yeah, I think it’s really hard for…I say this as someone who was not like, living in a super-conservative place, or in a conservative family, or in a very religious household or something. You know? Where almost all of my media in high school was like, my actual media, aside from Harry Potter, was like—most of it was made by queer people about queer characters, right? And so…
FK: [laughs] Yeah, that was not my experience.
ELM: Yeah, I know that, because you didn’t consume a lot of media because you didn’t have TV, right?
FK: I meant more about the…there was totally media that was out there, I meant more about the area and the expectations.
ELM: I mean, the broader area that I’m from, don’t get me started. We had to sing that song that goes “God is watching us from a distance” in a concert to support the troops in March of 2003, which I think is probably violating the First Amendment. I don’t think that a public high school is allowed to ask you to sing that song in a patriotic concert, but that’s fine. Also as you know my town, I mentioned this before, big fan of the double ribbon. Half yellow.
FK: Yes.
ELM: Half American flag.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think that—I didn’t perceive the media landscape as being very queer-friendly or made by queer people at the time, even though of course I knew about things like—I watched Queer as Folk, I listened to queer artists making queer music. But—
ELM: Well, kinda sounds like you did!
FK: But I don’t know! It felt—that stuff felt to me like it was very…it wasn’t stuff that everybody was listening to or that everybody was watching, you know what I mean?
ELM: I didn’t think of it as necessarily—I wasn’t saying that I thought that that was all that I was encountering, but it’s what I was actively choosing to engage with, right? Like, obviously I also watched NBC for the entirety of the ’90s, I saw almost every show.
FK: Oh my God.
ELM: So like, you know. To be fair a lot of that media was made by queer people, it just wasn’t—wasn’t very queer on the screen. [laughing]
FK: I think that what I’m trying to say is that I did feel, I don’t know. I felt very isolated despite being in a situation where I had access to a lot of that queer media, and also like at a high school with a large Gay-Straight Alliance—term blast from the past!
ELM: Yeah, that’s right.
FK: And yet, despite all of that, I still felt very isolated and you know, like, kind of under siege, and in the—in the early 2000s.
ELM: Right, but you didn’t actually turn to slash and say “I’m a slasher,” and frame that as this sort of subversive oppositional—
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, I don’t think it’s really—it never felt the way it feels now where people will say “this queer ship is less problematic and more,” what’s the word I’m looking for? Valorizable? That’s not the word I’m looking for. Deserving of valor?
FK: I like it as a word though.
ELM: I don’t, there’s gotta be a word but I don’t know what it is. You know, that kind of argument you’ve gotten over the last—the very Tumblr-era kind of, like, “You should watch this show because,” or like, “You should ship this because,”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, “Because it’s a good ship.”
ELM: I’m not saying I felt like that was happening but I do feel having primarily been in slash spaces for almost all of my time in fandom, and in the 2000s being in spaces where people would say “this is slash, we’re writing slash” about somewhat normative white good-lookin’ male bodies—as it being some great act of subversion that women were writing these important stories, and that it was morally better somehow because they were gay stories and not…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Bigoted straight stories. [FK laughs] Right?
FK: Thanks! Yeah, totally. No, I hear you.
ELM: You know what I mean? But this, this speaks to your—what you’re observing kind of sitting in the middle of all of that, right?
FK: Definitely, definitely.
ELM: So I guess watching those breakdowns in the last decade, those foundations were already there. But I think you got a lot of new fans coming in who were younger who didn’t have that history and potentially were even a little confused by the idea that there was like, you could be on a slash track or a het track or a femslash track, you know? The three tracks, as they say!
FK: Absolutely. And I also, I also think there was probably some element of the international, the increasing amount of like, international engagement in fandom. Because I feel like with the internet, over that period of time, that was also the time in which instead of being actually fairly localized communities, where you—I mean realistically, even when you were on like Usenet or whatever there would be some people from different places but it was still very English-language-speaking, there was still not necessarily great internet penetration everywhere or like, histories of this stuff, right? You know what I mean? It was not as diverse in terms of cultural background and so on, and I think that people showing up from all over the world has something to do with this too, because not everywhere had the same history of those conventions and all of that stuff, right? Like, not everywhere took part in that.
ELM: I’m having a very—my narrative is an extremely Western-Anglophone one. There’s a parallel one that evolves in Japanese media around male/male romance.
FK: Absolutely. And those things were touching each other in the ’90s, certainly, and I think that that—and I think that that had an effect too, right? Because I think that people coming out of that tradition—you can look at this in all sorts of fandom stuff, right? You can look at fanvids, the way people thought about them versus AMVs, Anime Music Videos, right. And those are totally different and people within the fanvidding sphere had this very, still have this very politicized thing about what they think they’re doing with fanvids sometimes, and I have not observed that among AMV people.
ELM: Interesting.
FK: And the differences have almost—I don’t even know what I would, I don’t even know that “fanvid” versus “AMV” as different things are like, that’s not a current term anymore I don’t think, you know? Maybe it is, someone’s gonna write in and tell me that it is, I’m sure. Please do if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem like it has the same currency that it once did.
ELM: Yeah, I feel like I know a lot of people who are self-described vidders and have feelings about, like, the kind of—the small place it gets in the broader conversation about transformative works, and vidding as a tradition and you know, with its specific conventions and all that, but I, they’re actively a part of that community, whereas I think there’s a lot of people in fandom who consume vids who don’t think of that as, like, a body and a tradition and sets of norms and stuff.
FK: Even though it—which is so funny because it is, like, more than almost—than many other things in fandom, you know what I mean? Way more.
ELM: But I think that—and that exactly parallels what I’ve encountered from newer fans and often younger fans coming into male/male romance spaces. Also coming at it from professional queer romance spaces, reading mostly that stuff. And you start to get, you know, arguments about #OwnVoices and what are all these women doing…
FK: Right.
ELM: Why is, these women are getting it so wrong, why are they so obsessed with the damn towel, which is just like a really fair point because like— [FK laughing] I’m glad that year ended. But like, you know. Often, like, cis gay men coming in and saying like, “This is not what gay men are like at all,” and this is—as long as this has been on the internet this has been a part of these conversations around slash. And obviously like, men coming in and saying wildly contradictory things, like, cause you know, not all men.
FK: Shockingly, yeah, shockingly enough, different gay men have differing experiences of what it’s like to be a gay man! News at six!
ELM: But you know, these ideas of whether women should be able to write it at all, and then in the last 5 years I would say—maybe 10—it’s gotten really really really messy as more and more AFAB people, in particular, I’ve found, have started to really, been given the language and the tools to think about gender. And you know, whenever we talk about—I’m extremely interested in questions of gaze. With a Z. I mean, I’m interested in gay questions also. But like, gaze and how that relates to the author and like—I’m interested in that in all fiction, right? Like, I find narrative perspective to be one of the most interesting parts of analyzing fiction.
But you know, when we were doing our shipping survey we really struggled with that one question that I really wanted in there but that we couldn’t get quite right, which was “do you embody—” If you are an AFAB person and you, however you identify gender-wise, and you’re writing about cis men, do you embody them? Do you look at them? Is it both? Is it—you know, like, it’s really really messy and I feel like we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people being like “This one really tripped me up and I actually don’t know how to untangle, I’m just, I’m just feelin’ it and now I wanna know, what am I actually doing and how does that relate to my body and the way that I see these characters and what they’re doing and what I desire and what they desire?”
FK: Yeah, and I think that there’s something tied in with that too about how much more people are—how much more people talk about themselves as a human being with a body and a history and all of this, on the internet right now. You know what I mean? I think that part of the change has been in how it is more normative to have a real name.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Or if you don’t use your real name, then at least to say, you know, age, race, gender—who you are in general, which, I mean, not to say that people did not do this in the past: they absolutely did, and in fact there are moments in the history of the internet where everyone, like, had a—you know, almost everyone had a college login with your real name attached to it or whatever. But I feel like there was a long period where people were much more, you know, “I am a disembodied mind.”
ELM: Right, right.
FK: In fact, that was a very explicit way that a lot of people enjoyed the internet, and a reason a lot of people enjoyed slash and talked about it that way. And I think that that was maybe masking some of these questions about gender that have always been there, but that really were not able to be talked about, your gender and your relationship to the stories you’re writing.
ELM: Yeah. I think that you see some of those tensions now with a lot of people who still want that experience, right? It’s hard. One thing that I’ve noticed browsing around, because I look at AO3 to look at what people are writing about, is people—assigning a, a marginalization to a character that they don’t have in the canon, whether it’s genderbending or racebending or disability or fatness or any sort of—or trans or queer identities, and then putting “The author is blank.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? Which is something I wouldn’t, like, I don’t know if I had ever seen at any scale 10 years ago, right?
FK: No, absolutely not. I didn’t see that either.
ELM: You might’ve gotten someone on their LiveJournal when they’re just talking about themselves saying like, talking about why they’re writing it, you know.
FK: Or someone saying like “I’m a doctor and that’s why I’ve chosen to set this alternate universe in a hospital.” In that way.
ELM: But people would also do that with their identity—
FK: I’m not saying that’s about identity, I’m just saying that’s the level on which anyone was disclosing something about their own life.
ELM: Right. But I definitely saw there were instances where people would say like, “I wanted to explore this element of the character because I am this kind of person,” right, or “I made them this way because I am this way.” But it feels a lot bigger now and just to put it in the tags—and sometimes I find that really reassuring when I am, like, when I’m putting together “The Rec Center” and someone’s recced something and I’m like “Oh.” Like, we’re explicitly asking for works about characters of color—and in particular Black characters—to really try to make our list less white, because…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Hey, this is a lot of white dudes on these lists! You know, and sometimes when I see the author tags, like, or they write the author’s note, like, “the author is Black,” I’ll be like, “OK!” You know? Because like, I’m not reading these stories, right, so there is always a worry in the back of my mind that like—
FK: Yeah, you’re going to accidentally have something in there that’s going to be…
ELM: Yeah, I don’t want to send out a story that’s inadvertently racist. Like, no! But I also obviously like, that’s not to say that an author of any background won’t write something that people of that background won’t find offensive. But like, it’s a little bit of a signal that, you know, it’s probably partly based on personal experience. But I just find that to be a really interesting trend.
So now this is all coming to the lack of non-binary characters in the three genders—femslash, het and slash. I think what you see now—so there’s a real turn away from what was really popular, in the early 2000s in particular, of the gay panic, where like half the story would be like, the ostensibly straight man—
FK: “OH MY GOD! I’M ATTRACTED TO MY PARTNER!”
ELM: “What do I do?” You know.
FK: “HOW DOES IT WORK?!”
ELM: I think we’ve talked about this before or at least I’ve written about it, I do somewhat regret the utter rejection of that, because I think that then you wind up with a lot of fic, most of what I read now, where—and frankly what I’ve written too—where characters just are, and they’re livin’ their life, and there’s no reference ever to the fact that they ever may have struggled. It’s interesting because I think this marks—there’s been a huge shift over the years and now you have, I don’t know. It’s less firm lines around what, you know, what slash—“slash” doesn’t mean much anymore. You know? That’s not really a term. It’s still a term people use, but it’s like, if you have stories where characters are queer and, you know, maybe you like a ship and it’s a same-sex ship, but like, the way that it’s presented—it’s like a lot of those…obviously a lot of the tropes and the way those stories were written are still embedded in, like, the DNA of fanworks, because it’s a body that builds on each other, but it feels really really different now than it did even 10 years ago.
FK: Yeah. I think the only time that I would really start applying the term “slash” to some of this stuff is like—there’s a couple of fandoms that are very older fandoms where people go in and they’re just like “and we made all of them gay.” You know. Like it’s an older fandom, everyone in this thing was heterosexual in the original thing, and there’s like a very dedicated—
ELM: You define that as slash?
FK: Well, it’s not that I would define that as slash, it’s that I think that the attitude…I don’t know, maybe I wouldn’t frame it that way. I guess I do feel like there’s something that’s different that’s happening, maybe it’s not slash, maybe it’s something else, that there is like a queerifying, you know?
ELM: There definitely is.
FK: It’s not slash, now that we’re talking about this I wouldn’t use—you’re right, that’s not the right term for it at all.
ELM: I certainly encountered that back in the—you know, you’d be reading this Harry Potter story and you’d be like “Wait, every man in here is gay?”
FK: “Everyone in Harry Potter is gay?!” [both laugh]
ELM: Like, the odds of that are—are unusual because I know there’s all those jokes about how, like, you know, in real life friend groups or whatever, but these aren’t friends, this is just like the whole society!
FK: Yep!
ELM: Just like, all wizards are gay?! Like, OK! But I read those in like 2003, and I’d just be like “That seems quite unlikely that in fact every single person Harry knows is gay. Like, what are the odds?”
FK: Even Arthur and Molly Weasley are gay, they just decided to have children.
ELM: Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, “OK!” That’s definitely a thing and I think you see a more modern version of that now where you like read the tags and it’ll be like, “Pan!Thor and like, Ace!Clint and Gay!Steve,” and you’re like, “All right, everyone’s getting a new label,” and you’ll do it with other things too, like “Neurodivergent!Whoever and Trans!Whoever” and you’re like “OK, everyone here’s got something going on.” And it’s interesting, and I often don’t read those stories, I just read the tags cause it’s not my favorite tagging style and it gets you into the kind of like, I don’t know. Maybe this is another strand of discourse, you know? How substantive is it if everyone is just getting, you know, a little—it can feel a little whitewashy in that way. Not the, not the race white, but the way that term gets used.
FK: No, I hear you, I hear you. You’re just painting with a broad brush across everything.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Yeah, on the other hand I do think that—I do really appreciate, I feel like, I guess as a—this is gonna sound a little silly but as a person who did not feel like I was very identified with slash culture, but did like reading stories about, like, slash stories, you know, and also stories about queer people who maybe aren’t queer in canon, I feel really great about how this has changed, personally. I really, I feel like the world has—the world has gotten on my level! [laughs] You know? Like, I mean, that’s a very—that’s kind of a shitty thing to say.
ELM: No!
FK: But I do feel like it a little bit, you know? It’s, it’s a really—it’s more pleasant now for me as a reader of fanfic to no longer feel like I have to be, um, sort of have to plant my flag, you know what I mean? Or not plant my flag, maybe that’s the wrong way, to declare my allegiance.
ELM: No no, I think it’s a really good evolution. I think that what was going on 10 to 15 years, or 20 years ago or whatever, was not ideal. And like, you know, it’s another way that I think that the AO3 and like, Wattpad to some extent, you know, and other sites now, have, have really reshaped this too, because like, it’s much easier to go broad, you know? And to be like, you know, “You love reading my character! You can click on that character,” and you can see all the different relationships that they get put in, right? Or all the different ways that they are presented in the world. And that’s not, you know, when people were more cloistered and thinking of this as a worldview, then that was a lot harder to find. That being said, I think a lot of people still do have those framings, and I think that’s where you get a lot of these clashes, right?
FK: Sure, absolutely.
ELM: This kind of idea…and I think there’s a lot of people doing it who don’t necessarily realize that they are still engaging in patterns. And like, whatever! I can’t judge, I, I’ve had, you know, my six ships have all been slash ships when you get right down to it, right?
FK: That’s OK. I still love you, my filthy slasher. [laughs]
ELM: So the only way I would identify as a—I wouldn’t identify as a slasher. But as having been in slash fandom is that being into Harry/Draco in 2002 meant you were in slash fandom. That was it! Like, and people used terms like “intellislash.”
FK: They sure did.
ELM: That was a thing that they did.
FK: That was a thing that people did unironically.
ELM: [laughing] And so…you know. But like, it’s weird for me too because you get these things of being like, “Slash is only when it’s not canon,” and it’s like, “I thought I had only slash ships, but two of my six ships ever have been canon queer ships,” right? So like, that was not…and I think that attitude comes from that old argument of like, “Well, slash is you pulling away the glass.”
FK: Totally.
ELM: “We don’t need those, those straight men who run Hollywood in their suits to pull away that glass,” right? So we’re probably running out of time, but it isn’t even—you know, then you get into the representation conversation and the idea of you wanting your ship to be canon and how that intersects with gender and sexuality and race—not to diminish that, right?
FK: Absolutely, no, that can’t be diminished.
ELM: As we’re having this whole conversation, it gets so gendered, and race is this elephant in the room through all of it, right, when you think about how if you have these bodies of work that were created and these attitudes and these channels and these ways of thinking and you go from one thing to the next and it’s a pattern—it’s not even just race. It’s really specific kinds of bodies. It’s arguments about tops and bottoms. Which are—
FK: Oh my God, Elizabeth, Elizabeth.
ELM: —deeply problematic.
FK: Let’s not talk about tops and bottoms right now because that’s like a whole other episode.
ELM: I don’t ever want to talk about that but that’s fine. But yeah, you know, like, the top and bottom thing gets into these—I mean, these ideas about gender and what, “Oh, you’re presenting this masc character as too effeminate” or whatever, you know, and gets really pretty problematic pretty fast, and I think it always has been. I think these conversations, I definitely, like, was encountering these kinds of conversations back in the day.
FK: Yeah, and then just also all the ways that any discourse about gender is going to intersect with race, especially when you start talking about sex, and just—there’s so much there too. So much there.
ELM: And how much erasure then you get into with the idea of like, yeah. Yeah, gender is inherently tied up with race. Which I find, it’s hard, because I—it’s one thing that makes it tricky with fanworks and this thing, discussing these kind of shifting attitudes about how present you the author need to be, right? Because I think that in pro works where it’s attached to your real name, people will very often talk about their characters, especially if they’re writing about—you know, if they’re a marginalized group and talking about that group and talking about how that shapes their view and how they wrote the plot or whatever, but like, for a lot of people, while this is an opportunity to explore the similarities you might have or to read yourself into a character, it is also a place to be detached and embody someone very very different. You know.
And that’s one of the longstanding arguments about slash, about like, white dude slash, too, is like, “I am not those things, and I am going to move into the body and the worldview of this person who,” you know, it’s inherently, you’re punching up, right, because you—he’s got all the, you know, all the privilege points or whatever. Obviously this gets muddy if it’s a straight lady doin’ a gay dude. Not doin’ a gay dude. You know what I mean. [FK laughs] But like, um…
FK: Not, not doing.
ELM: Right? But so like I think that the—there’s like, while obviously some people have this impulse to self-disclose and say, you know, like, “Black characters, the character is Black,” or—the writer is Black, sorry. Or with trans characters, the writer is trans. There’s also a lot of people who A, want to be detached or removed and say “I’m the author,” and even if that’s not the way they’re approaching it on a personal level, they may not necessarily wanna talk about it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? And so then it gets really hard, then, for—it’s harder to have those conversations because you don’t even have a full 100% participatory pool of people who wanna talk about that openly, and no one should be forced to talk about that, you know? I mean I don’t think pro authors should be forced to talk about every aspect of their personal life and how it relates to their fiction either and yet you see demands for that regularly.
FK: Totally.
ELM: Cool. That’s all I get in response. Just a “totally.”
FK: I don’t know what to say—sometimes you go on these very long, smart, like, statements, and then you get to the end of it and I just, I’m like, “Yeah!”
ELM: “Yup. Sure!”
FK: “Yeah! I agree. Nothing, nothing more to add, guv’nor!” Like, “I know!”
ELM: All right! Reclaiming my time from you.
FK: [laughs] All right, I think this has been a good episode covering sort of the discourse around slash over this period, but there’s obviously tons more to say. Literally you just listed a bunch of things that we barely even touched on and like—
ELM: There’s so much! This could be like five episodes. And I don’t really want it to be five episodes, but I’m sure we could talk about it again. I’m sure people are gonna have things to say.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: I think it’s really hard for people to, if they’ve attached themselves to the idea that the fanfiction that they’re writing or reading is a great subversive act, to let a little light in on that, you know?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, for sure.
ELM: I think that’s why the, the race conversations—one of the many reasons the race conversations are so fraught. It’s like, “Well, you’re not as progressive as you think you are.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But that doesn’t erase the history of what it is, and things can be subversive and not at the same time, through different axes and through different lenses. You know? Like…
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: It just depends on what the, what you’re subverting, basically, or what you’re challenging. Which I think is a strong parallel with all of feminism here.
FK: Yup. [both laugh] All right. Well, I’m really glad—thank you again to tsthrace for inviting us to talk about this basically, because it was a great idea, and I’m really glad we did it!
ELM: Love that discourse. Always happy to discourse!
FK: All right. And now it is time for the discourse to come to an end.
ELM: End discourse.
FK: [laughing] I will talk to you later, Elizabeth?
ELM: Ah, yeah, I think you will!
FK: All right. That’s a threat. [laughing]
ELM: You will!
FK: Bye!
ELM: OK bye!
[Outro music, thank yous and credits]