The Female Fantasy of Slash Fiction: A Corpus Analysis of Hetero/Homonormative Power Negotiation

Abstract

Slash fiction—a proliferating genre of fanfiction that places heterosexual male characters into homosexual relationships with each other—is one of the only genres of literature of which we can identify the specific subculture that creates and consumes it. That is, slash fiction is established around a female-dominated online community. Scholars thus tend to analyse slash fiction as a literary genre and correspondingly use their findings to make generalisations about the larger female community that writes and reads it. Yet there is an overreliance on subjective qualitative analysis in current approaches to slash fiction research that inevitably prevents empirical or representative generalisations to be made of the overall genre, let alone the larger slash community. As a solution to the above-mentioned weakness in current slash scholarship, this study proposes and adopts a new interdisciplinary approach towards slash fiction analysis that enhances the objectivity and representativeness of scholarly slash analysis. Specifically, I apply corpus linguistics alongside literary analysis on a representative case study corpus of popular Steve Rogers (Captain America)/Tony Stark (Iron Man) slash stories. In doing so, I can qualitatively and qualitatively evaluate a well-established claim in existing slash scholarship, that of slash fiction being a space for fulfilling and indulging a shared female fantasy. The novel findings of this study reveal that although the female slash fantasy is created around dominant gender and sexuality ideologies and aspects of cultural hegemony, female authors negotiate a complex process of appropriating these widely-accepted beliefs and subtly subverting them in empowering ways. In uncovering what existing scholarship has yet to identify, this thesis contributes to deepening the current understanding of the unique genre of slash fiction as well as its community of readers and writers. I hope to have also shown the value in employing both quantitative and qualitative methods through this thesis.