Ashton Spacey

Fandom can address racism, misogyny, and ableism, but it can also contain those things, and there’s a lot of slash that contains disturbing topics, including violence, dub-con, and A/B/O where biological differences as destiny is fetishized rather than criticized. These essays go into some of these complexities, generally with fandom-positive views overall. From an essay on asexuality in slash: “when sex is out of the picture, the core of slash fiction is all still about equality; about placing the conversation about body, relationship, power and love in a setting where heteronormative patriarchy cannot reach.” I liked the essay about the futanari genre originating in Japan, in which a person assigned female at birth also has or gets a penis/phallus without changing her gender identification, often retaining a vagina. “Futanari as a trope creates a space in which the queering of bodies allows for a wider scope of female homoerotic imaginations at the same time as it reinforces a heteronormative paradigm of power, as articulated through the privileging of the penis in sexual actions. Futanari simultaneously queers the body and resists queering symbolic power.” I also liked the dub-con essay; though there’s nor really much in there that isn’t also on Tumblr, it’s nice to have another academic essay work through the complexities of a fantasy whose meta-structure is the author/reader’s control over a diegetic lack of control: “What may be at the heart of dub-con’s appeal is the conflict between the erotics and anxieties of uncertainty.” Also, “dub-con makes no attempt to hide the contradictions between what we find erotic and what we believe is acceptable. The depicted relationship is usually unequal and deeply problematic, and while the scenario may be presented as culturally normal within the context of the story [here I think is mostly a reference to A/B/O], a dub-con narrative does not allow a reader to believe that this is fair or correct…. Every dub-con narrative explores not only the murky waters of consent in fan fiction …, but the very nature of consent itself nd the myriad ways in which it is obtained, ignored or abused.”

I have to object to the A/B/O essay’s argument that the initial A/B/O trope comes from Amok Time in ST:TOS, in which Spock “is a slave to his biological urges” and the episode hangs on biological determinism and “a biological imperative that the characters cannot escape.” I’m ok with the geneaology, but a key plot point of Amok Time is that Spock need not, in fact, mate or die; he does neither (but rather lives long and prospers). Watch for the contradiction in this bit: “If we think back to Amok Time it is obvious that the female T’Pring takes the role of the omega of the episode, with Kirk and Spock acting as two opposing alphas … Kirk … remains the alpha of the USS Enterprise, whereas Spock continues as his second in command (beta), or, as some could argue, as his omega. This inherent inequality is crucial in A/B/O slash fiction; ruled and defined by their biological roles, human alphas and omegas traditionally interact in an inflexible [way].” The genius of deterministic fantasy is that it makes us see biological destiny even when its absence is staring us in the face, and the essay’s slippage on this point I think says something about the attractions of A/B/O, though I too find far too many examples of the genre fetishizing and accepting uncritically this supposed biological imperative. Culture is regularly harder to change or see through than nature!… (more)