Yearning void and infinite potential: online slash fandom as queer female space.

To me, slash is about cracks and crevices in a text, a yearning void in both the text and the reader. So space is a vacuum-something that isn't there but could be. But in the larger terms of community, culture, politics, space is less about vacuum and more about potential.The slash space, to me, is remarkable in its fecundity. It is space that is never filled, potential that never runs out. No matter how many stories, how many writers, there's always more space. Slash as space, space as both yearning void and infinite potential. (Julad 2003) o date, work on women, queerness, and online communities has mainly focused on lesbian and queer-identified women's use of online space in the service of identity and sexuality narratives played out in the physical world. 1 In this project, we expand the scope of such inquiries to include ways in which particular online spaces, cultures, and practices can queer women (and other gendered subjects) in ways not accounted for by most identity narratives. We are interested in the interactions between women which structure online media fandom, specifically the exchange of sexually explicit slash stories which depict relationships between male characters and actors from films, books, and television shows. In the virtual spaces we invoke in this paper, such shared sexual fantasies bring people together from a wide array of identities and locations. Our experience in slash fan communities on LiveJournal.com (LJ) suggests that participation in electronic social networks can induct us into new and unusual narratives of identity and sexuality, calling into question familiar identifications and assumptions. Slash fandom's discursive sphere has been termed queer female space by some who inhabit and study it; we want to explore the function of this space in the lives of the people who occupy it, how it is structured, and what it can do. We have chosen not to pursue our exploration by producing an academic research essay which draws evidence from experts external to the community it discusses in order to construct an argument that will build to a final conclusion. Rather, we want to demonstrate the open-ended theorizing in which fan fiction writers and readers participate, bringing into a different sphere some conversations that continue to take place in spaces other thanthough not always dissimilar to-the conferences and seminar rooms of academia. To do this, we created an online discussion space, which we used to invite some fellow fans t

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