Slash Fiction - Critical and Queer Attention

Critical and Queer Attention

Slash fiction has received more academic attention than other genres of fan fiction. Slash fiction was the subject of several notable academic studies in the early 1990s, as part of the cultural studies movement within the humanities: Most of these, as is characteristic of cultural studies, approach slash fiction from an ethnographic perspective and talk primarily about the writers of slash fiction and the communities that form around slash fiction. Slashers have been configured as fans who resisted culture. Some studies - for example by Italian anthropologist Mirna Ciconi - focus on textual analysis of slash fiction itself.

Slash fiction was often ignored by queer theorists. However, slash fiction has been described as important to the LGBT community and the formation of queer identities, as it represents a resistance to the expectation of compulsory heterosexuality, but has also been noted as being unrepresentative of the gay community, being more a medium to express feminist frustration with popular and speculative fiction.

Science fiction writer Joanna Russ (herself a lesbian), author of How to Suppress Women's Writing, was one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously.