I got into a conversation elsewhere that got me thinking about this, and it seems like something to share here.
I’ve been increasingly coming to the conclusion, admittedly based almost entirely on anecdotal experience, that the vast majority of fans active in slash fandom are queer.
I use ‘queer’ in a very broad sense here, to mean ‘having an experience of their sexuality that is not in line with societal expectations.’ I have a theory that slash fandom overwhelmingly tends to attract people whose experience of their own sexuality jars in some way with the expectations society seems to place on them. Thus, non-straight people might be the most obvious crowd this would apply to, but there are a whole lot of others: people on the asexual spectrum (who can be straight, and asexual); people who’re highly drawn to kink; just about any woman, straight or not, who has run afoul of the sexual roles she’s expected to play.
(And in this sense, I think a hell of a lot of women are ‘queer,’ and that this may be why slash fandom attracts them so disproportionately. Maybe that’s doing a disservice to queer people and opening the definition of an important word too much, but at the same time I think it’s important not to underestimate how many women can’t find themselves in the sexual space they’ve been allotted, and that that is an issue that is very much a part of the battles that queer people are fighting.)
I think all these people come to slash fandom because it lets them express and explore their desires in directions that they’ve simply never been able to in mainstream society. I mean, where are you going to find that? Not in your average movie or novel. If you’re lucky, you might encounter the kind of romantic/sexual partner willing and able to open up that world for you and help you explore yourself. But a hell of a lot of people never meet that kind of partner, or if they do they’ve often already had a string of the less than spiritually nurturing sort.
So I mean, yes, I’m saying that my suspicion is that slash fandom tends to attract queer people almost by definition, that the appeal of slash may be its particular flavor of queerness, that in fact maybe it is a kind of (mostly feminine) queer lit.
And I can see an almost self-defeating trap in a lot of the sociological information-gathering and conversation on sexuality in fandom I see even from people who themselves identify as queer. Even those of us who know better tend to talk about gender as if it’s the primary axis along which sexuality is defined.
We keep saying that gender orientation is only a part of sexuality, but then we keep trying to define sexuality as being categorized as what sort of person you’re attracted to. But as I said, really there are so many axes: the gender(s) you’re attracted to, and also other personal qualities you’re attracted to, and how strongly/how often, and what kinds of acts turn you on… Again: you can be heterosexual and demisexual at the same time; they’re two different axes. I’m increasingly convinced that ‘kinky’ can be an orientation. I know a bunch of people for whom it isn’t the qualities of one’s partner that gets the fires stoked, but the practices they engage in (just as one example, BDSM).
And if you break out romantic orientation from sexual orientation (which I think is a good and true thing to do), you have two whole different kinds of interpersonal relationships going, and your orientations for them may overlap to a greater or lesser degree. A whole lot of people in the world are looking for very different things out of their romantic relationships vs. their sexual encounters. Even perfectly mainstream heteronormative folks can run face-first into this, and because we don’t talk about it or have the language for it, they can’t figure out what’s going wrong.
So that’s, you know, an issue when we try to talk about whether fandom is ‘queer’ or not. Because ‘queer’ is not necessarily synonymous with ‘not straight.’ And if you open up that definition of queerness, I’m betting you’ll find the engine that’s driving slash fandom.