textual orientation

The preeminent figure in the study of slash (fan fiction that treats same-gender pairings), Henry Jenkins, demonstrates the tangled intersections between these three levels in a reading of early debates about Kirk/Spock slash that revolved around it’s “plausibility.” In contention here is the proper equilibrium at the audience/text nexus — how much leeway fan writers have to “transform” the “primary text” versus how much responsibility they have to “textual fidelity.” Fought on a muddy middle ground where “all fan writing necessarily involves an appropriation of series characters and a reworking of program concepts” (467), this sparring will never yield an undisputed victor. Ultimately, Jenkins concludes that “The reason some fans reject K/S fiction has, in the end, less to do with the stated reason that it violates established characterization than with unstated beliefs about the nature of human sexuality that determine what types of character conduct can be viewed as plausible” (468). As Sally Forth less discreetly suggests, arguments that dismiss Olivia’s tearful goodbye to Alex in “Loss” with references to their textual boyfriends may be less about a principled insistence on the show’s canon, and more about the ways the homophobic social field structures what differently positioned viewers can and can’t see.

However, as with most academic work on slash, which falls under the audience-oriented rubric of reception studies, Jenkins seems less interested or equipped to explore what elements of the text itself open up (or close down) queer interpretive spaces. Sara Gwenllian Jones critiques this tendency in “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters,” pointing out that “In such formulations, slash is interpreted as ‘resistant’ or ‘subversive’ because it seems deliberately to ignore or overrule clear textual messages indicating characters’ heterosexuality” (81). As such, these analyses are trapped, like the disdainful reactions to slash fiction that Jenkins evaluates, in the homophobia of “a wider cultural logic [that] dictates that heterosexuality can be assumed while homosexuality must be proved” (81). Jones asserts, rather, that slash is “an actualization of latent textual elements” (82). In another article on Xena: Warrior Princess, she elaborates on the theory that “heteroglossic cultural references which are easily read one way by queer viewers and quite differently by heterosexuals unfamiliar with the queer lexicon” (19) are a deliberate component of the TV industry’s market strategy. This perspective relies on a more nuanced understanding of television as a textual form (she is specifically describing “cult television series,” but I’d maintain that such conditions are characteristic of TV in general): “There is always a deficit between what is (or can be) shown and what the avid audience wants to see, explore, develop and know... It is this deficit between what is presented on screen and what is implied or omitted that cult television formats exploit in order to enthrall viewers” (13). In other words, the diverse pleasures fans glean from imaginatively filling in what their favorite shows formally and strategically leave out is a crucial element of marketability. As Sally Forth remarks, Olivia’s chronically boyfriend- and girlfriend-less condition is an intentional feature of SVU that stimulates much of the speculation and argumentation that swirls around her.