Slash

Abstract

Slash describes creative fan works featuring same‐sex romantic and sexual relationships, often expanding on homosocial bonds in the source texts. Broadly, it can be used as a general descriptive genre of homoerotic transformative art, but more commonly it means a specific historical, social, and economic category connected to media fandom, the creative primarily female fan communities of live‐action Western TV shows from the 1960s onward. Slash fan fiction has been a central focus of fan and audience studies: its primarily female readers and writers as well as its explicit homoerotic prose defies easy explanations of women's genres and media receptions. Moreover, its often‐aggressive alternate readings of popular media texts exemplify reception models of resistant readings. Following greater visibility of queer characters and relationships on screen, slash continues to be popular especially in its exploration of non‐normative sexualities and sexual identities.