Imagining queerness / queer imagination : online slash fiction and radical fan productions

Abstract

The subject of inquiry for my thesis is slash fiction, a subset of fanfiction which creates queer identity, romance, relationships, sex, or desire where it was not ostensibly present in the proto-text. I divide my thinking into a non-linear model of five nodes in order to open up multiple in-roads towards examining the queer work of slash without crystalizing into a comprehensive theory that would efface its nuance and particularities. These nodes figure under notions of failure, embodiment, archives, temporality, and hybrid body erotics. The current, motion, and energy running through all of these nodes is what I call critical queer imagination. Critical queer imagination is not an overarching theory that explains slash (or queer creative works in general), but rather a gesture towards the impulse behind queer activism as well as a signal towards queer futurity. It is ultimately this queer critical imagination that allows me to argue for slash fiction as part of a larger queer project that is necessarily engaged with queer potential and political imagination.