The Politics of the Digital Transition: Lessons from Slash Fan Fiction Communities at the Turn of the Millennium

Abstract

To understand the relationship between gender and the internet in the present, we must return to the transition from print to digital media at the beginning of the enormous social, legal, and economic changes that we are still living within today. Slash fan fiction communities, that is international communities of primarily women organized around the circulation of amateur stories that set existing characters in new same-sex relationships, faced challenges in carving out protected pockets of digital space wherein women’s relationships, creativity, and erotic imaginations could thrive. They were early adopters and adapters of digital technologies, connecting a web of corporate and independent internet infrastructure and tactics to hide slash from the scrutiny of censors yet also make it searchable and findable by potential new readers. These women’s social and narrative experiments on the early internet offer a unique example of stridently independent tech-savvy foremothers whose labor to create livable spaces within the early web are easily made invisible by corporate and male-focused internet histories. The women of slash fan fiction communities serve as a critical reminder of the economically and sexually radical paths offered by the early web and the possibilities for autonomy and independence that may still remain today.