The Darker Side of Slash Fanfiction on the Internet
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In the 1960s slash introduced a major new premise to fan fiction (fanfic) - slash eroticised the homo-social undercurrents between the male protagonists from popular culture. Slash is: Erotic fanfic written by heterosexual women for heterosexual women, using appropriated characters from popular culture. The sexual pairing, indicated as character/character, is always two men. The actors portraying these characters must be thought to be sexually available to the women i.e. heterosexual, and at least one of them is sexually attractive to the writer/reader. Slash has never been published in mainstream media despite widespread publication of similar male-oriented erotica. The Internet has provided the means for widespread self-published, uncensored circulation, allowing women to realise a shared, common sexual fantasy. They no longer need to feel isolated and ashamed, believing their sexual fantasy to be unusual. Researchers suggest that slash, while written with very explicit homosexual sex, is not about homosexuality; it is a female idealisation of relationships acted out on male bodies. The writer can ascribe emotions and behaviour she desires from the men in her relationships. Research to date argues for slash as a reworking of the traditional romance novel formula; inherently between unequal partners, portraying a model of male authority. Slash is suggested as a means of substituting a situation in which a loving relationship between equals is possible, allowing the writer/reader to identify with the hero’s partner, a social equal, a friend, and a desirable person. While this appears to be a realistic interpretation of some slash stories, I argue that this is not the case for a large proportion of slash - the darkfic slash. These stories are more complex, based on unequal, complicated relationship showing evident dominant/submissive roles, often sadomasochistic, sexually explicit and/or violent. On entering most of the large, dedicated slash Web sites, one is directed to search for stories containing specific themes, many of these themes come under the classification ‘darkfic’: bondage, erotic asphyxiation, horror, kink, mutilation, non-con, torture etc. It is clear that within the slash writer/reader community there is an awareness of this darker aspect of the literature, an aspect that has barely been acknowledged by academic researchers to date. This darker side of the slash genre is the area that I am exploring in my research.