times. The masculine role is very much like the one represented by the Vulcans who
are trained to act cool, logical, and not to express any feelings. As a consequence of
this, slash fiction stories are actually stories about everyday men, who are just as
“alien” as Vulcans are to women, and equally uncontrolled (Bacon-Smith 1992:
103f ).
The Kirk/Spock relationship has come to represent the Sci-Fi scene in the 60s and
70s and its dream of space exploration and, quite like the NASA program of that
period, going “where no man has gone before”. According to film researcher Con-
stance Penley (1997) the homoerotic question of Kirk and Spock has never come
to rest as it concerns the exploration of new frontiers, both of inner and outer
space. The slash fantasies have gone hand in hand with the cult of the handsome
male NASA astronauts. These issues blend scientific, social and sexual exploration
and make fans continuously write new stories, to continue to “boldly go where no
man has ever gone before”. Still, the K/S questions are left unanswered. When
asked at a fan convention about the possible love affair between Kirk and Spock,
Leonard Nimoy, who plays Spock, replied: “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” (Penley
1997:159)
In the slash stories, character relations are freely re-interpreted by the amateur
fans, but from an erotic perspective, adding another layer to stories. These are
usually well crafted to fit seamlessly into the main narratives and explain the gaps
and cuts in movies for inserting new meanings in the dialogues, often at places
that are ambiguous. Suddenly a harmless look means something completely dif-
ferent. It is a common understanding within the community that this is done not
with the mindset of sabotage, but out of love and devotion.
Many slash authors also mean that they reveal the true intentions of the original
creators, intentions that were suppressed by publishing companies and the distri-
bution lobby, or simply hidden by the creator to be deciphered by the most de-
voted fans. Hence, in the fan fiction scene, it is the passionate amateurs, the seri-
ous fans who take back the initiative, “liberating” the “true” intentions of the
stories and then reinsert them into the existing lines. They are not interested in
writing something entirely new, but instead a talented fan fiction craftsperson is
recognized on how well the symbiosis is developed in relation to the original
work.
What is fascinating with slash culture from my perspective is the format and tactics
it uses to find loopholes in the stories and insert its own (erotic) authorship into
these gaps of the stories. It furthers the fan fiction culture into fields of “unaccept-
able” possibilities, beyond the “creativity regime” of broadcasting and authorship.
Instead of accepting the cuts and closure of the producer and original creator the
fans use these to enrich the stories and multiply layers of gender complexity to the
narratives by re-reading the plots and lines of the stories, rebinding them into new
knots and meshworks along the lines the story flows. This is a process of taking
back the initiative from the media itself, reprogramming the predictable relations
in the story in a very hands-on way and then releasing them again through home-
made DIY vectors.
poaching
In fan fiction the consumer consumes the fiction, reacts to it, interprets it but also
changes it and reinserts a personal version. Even if we say the author is “dead” and