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.
Read more about this topic: Slash Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words critical and, critical, queer and/or attention:
“The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”
—Jean Piaget (1896–1980)
“The disaster ... is not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect—this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they’re not critical to a culture’s existence.”
—Twyla Tharp (b. 1941)
“With my desire to write he seemed in full sympathy, and in urging our early marriage he argued that my first necessity was leisure in which to develop and to master my craft. It appeared to me that with such a man as teacher and guide I could not fail, and it was in a queer mixture of young love and vaulting ambition that I became a wife.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“From three to six months, most babies have settled down enough to be fun but aren’t mobile enough to be getting into trouble. This is the time to pay some attention to your relationship again. Otherwise, you may spend the entire postpartum year thinking you married the wrong person and overlooking the obvious—that parenthood can create rough spots even in the smoothest marriage.”
—Anne Cassidy (20th century)