Slash and the Id Vortex

Sometimes history is a battleground.  One such battle I've seen played out, see played out, is the argument over slash.

There are a lot of spaces, a lot of people who will dismiss slash writing.  I am probably not the right person to summarize the argument made by people who are opposed to slash, but I am at least going to make an attempt, because I think the argument deserves to be fairly represented, without being muddled up by all of the virulent personal attacks and hatred that have, historically and in the present, been directed at slash writers.

As far as I can tell, the primary argument against slash is one of _standing_.  Many, if not most, writers of slash are women.  Many, if not most, writers of slash are some variety of heterosexual.  For these women to write homosexual male fantasies is a violation of appropriate fictional boundaries, is tokenizing, is destructive to the relationship between these two characters _intended_ by their professional writers.  Fundamentally it is not their place to tell these stories.

And since I am not interested in direct arguments, I am not interested in battlegrounds, my response to that argument would be of a different sort.  What place do women have, then, in the Star Trek universe?  Where do they belong?  I am particularly interested in this question with reference to the original Star Trek series, because it was this series, more than anything, that engendered the slash phenomenon.

I am not overly familiar with the original series.  I've seen some scattered episodes, and a couple of the movies, but I'm ignoring those because they seem like a different beast entirely.  The ones I know that I've seen, that I remember the titles and plots of to some extent, are Amok Time and The City On The Edge Of Forever, which I gather are some of the most acclaimed episodes of the show.

My impression of those episodes is that women have no continuing place in ST:TOS's narrative.  I note that "The City on the Edge of Forever" directly contradicts the stereotype of Kirk as a rough, rugged lothario who alternately kisses and punches alien women, because in this episode, Kirk falls in love.  Falls in love, in fact, with a woman who has a strong, distinct personality, played by a good actress.

Aaaaand at the end of the episode she's dead.  Now, this interests me.  You know, I just watched a whole documentary about the history of trans representation in cinema.  One of the ways trans women are marginalized in cinema, one of the very important ways, is that we are portrayed as tragic, unfortunate victims.

The character of Edith Keeler maps very, very well onto that stock character.  I think it's safe to say that Edith Keeler doesn't offer much of a viable space for women in the Star Trek mythos.

Amok Time, on the other hand, I recall as hinging on the relationship between Kirk and Spock.  This, it seems to me, is the central and best-developed character relationship in the show.  In it, Spock, who is normally a sensible, hyper-rational character, reveals a dark secret of his.  Vulcans, it turns out, are cyclothymic.  It is a long cycle, but on a recurring basis they go through some strange changes in their personality.  They cease to be rational.  This is portrayed as, well, somewhat horrifying and traumatic, particularly to Kirk, who sees a good friend who he cares about behaving in disturbing and inexplicable ways.

But Kirk wants to help his friend, so they go to his home planet together.  This is where my memory gets fuzzy.  I'm trying to reconstruct it with the help of plot summaries, but I'll be honest with you, this shit just doesn't seem to make sense.  Apparently some shit goes wrong and Kirk and Spock wind up having to fight to the death, and they play some dramatic music and oh lord here comes the meme machine.  This is the really memorable bit, right?  Kirk and Spock fighting to the death.  So much so that I don't remember so good what happens thereafter.

So apparently Spock seemingly kills Kirk?  Except it turns out that Kirk was just pretending to be dead?  And somehow him not killing Kirk resolved his Pon Farr which means he doesn't have to fuck anybody after all, which Kirk and Spock are both a-OK with?  That just doesn't make any fucking sense.  I've seen episodes of "Radar Men From the Moon" with more plausible resolutions.

Like, maybe I'm telling it wrong.  The overall impression I get though is that this is a terrifying period in Spock's life to Kirk and Spock both, that the idea of Spock having to MATE with a WOMAN is portrayed as a fate worse than death, and that the way he gets out of that is by sublimating his urges into an intensely homoerotic solo combat with his, uh, "best friend".

So what I get from these two episodes is that, at the show's best, Kirk and Spock were interesting and compelling characters.  While they were both portrayed pretty unambiguously as heterosexual, they nonetheless had a homosocial relationship that was more interesting and compelling than any of their individual relationships with women, which were mostly portrayed as being tragic and unfortunate.  I also got the impression from these episodes that Star Trek did not have any strong or compellingly drawn ongoing female characters.  A large part of being a "fan" for me is, honestly, to understand myself better through the thing I'm a fan of, to find a place for myself in that narrative.

For women, apparently, this was a lot of work, and it seems like different women tried different approaches.  For instance, apparently one woman attempted to create a strong female character who could hold her own with Kirk on the Enterprise.  Unfortunately strong characters are, it turns out, really difficult to create, and she wound up with a wish fulfillment character that was so derided and ridiculed that her character's very name - Mary Sue - became shorthand for a certain type of terrible fan writing.

The approach taken by the slash writers, while controversial, seems to have at least gone slightly better than that.  The slash writers mapped themselves, their deepest desires, onto the show's most compelling characters, who happened to be male, onto the show's most narratively compelling relationship, which happened to be homosocial.

I find these women to be, quite frankly, heroes of mine.  When I read the history of early slash, as told by the women who wrote it, I see women fighting their way into a boys' club that had no place for yucky girls, who refused to conform to the stereotypes the show's canon and, particularly, the show's male fandom placed on them.  I see women with the bravery to speak their deepest truths in the face of overwhelming hostility, abuse, and disgust from that gatekeeping male fandom.  I see women talking about ideas and experiences that resonate with me very, very deeply in my own (non-fanfic) erotic writing.

So I find the fanlore.org website to be an absolute treasure, and not just from a historical perpsective.  It is absolutely liberating to me as a queer woman to be doing the sort of research I'm prone to doing and come across this concept:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Id_Vortex

With some trepidation I will speak a bit here about my own experience writing erotic fiction.  I have a number of friends who do this, and - I'm not doing my own research here because nobody can contradict me - my memory is that sometime in 2015, I finally started writing some of my own.  I was working part-time.  I'd cut back my hours so I could attend school full-time, but school was not as time-consuming or taxing as I'd anticipated, so I had some spare time and the ability to keep odd hours.

I wrote a story, a self-contained story, and then I wrote another one.  But the second story, I just kept writing.  The words poured out of me.  Managing the sheer flow of information, not getting so consumed in it that I forgot to live the rest of my ordinary life, was a challenge, but it was a challenge that, for a time, I was more or less up to.

It quickly became apparent to me that my writing went deeper than simple erotic fantasy.  I recognized and understood early on that I was, in fact, writing about myself, about experiences that were too difficult, too powerful, for me to allow myself to address directly.

At the time I characterized this writing as "not _really_ being about sex".  I do not agree with this characterization today.  Being honest with oneself is a process and takes time and effort.  It was enough for me to admit, at the time, that my writing deeply resonated with my experience of mental illness, that it offered powerful catharsis and understanding and was fundamentally worth doing.

It was still something I struggled with, though.  I was not sure whether I really had the right to say the things I was saying.  A lot of the things I put my characters through (and they were, at least nominally, original characters) was extremely dark, was intensely traumatic, and I had throughout the process the worry that what I was doing was wrong.  The entire time I was writing involved negotiating with that feeling, with that voice.

Ultimately I concluded that what I was writing was, in fact, wrong, and stopped.  I still have the writings somewhere.  Multiple copies, I believe.  I may perhaps have sent an early draft to Sedric?  I don't know.

Part of my negotiation with my shame, with the inner voice that told me what I was doing was wrong, was telling myself, over and over and over again, "I am not my characters."  In retrospect it was an obvious mind trick, one that is thankfully less necessary for me today.  The process of writing those characters, characters I thought of as strong, psychologically complex female characters, was an essential part of making me who I am today.

Perhaps one day I will write down my story directly, with no narrative distancing tricks.  Until then, well, I'm doing well enough for myself.