MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Authors of slash fiction can assume that everyone who is reading a Star Trek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer slash story knows what Kirk and Spock or Spike and Angel look like, how they move and speak, and so forth. Specific actors inhabit those roles in the canonical texts; therefore, their bodies become the canonical physical representation of those characters. Slash fiction written about Shakespearean characters, however, lacks these canonical bodies. There is no single official film or stage adaptation of Hamlet—is the reader to picture David Tennant, Mel Gibson, Ethan Hawke, or Laurence Olivier, to name only the most-well known choices? None of the above? Aside from, say, Hero’s shortness or Falstaff’s girth, Shakespeare rarely assigns specific physical attributes to his characters.This absence of bodies allows Shakespearean slash writers to create and insert their own non-canonical bodies. While definitions of canon may vary, fan fiction writers would seem to violate canonicity by claiming space and status for their own texts within another text or textual constellation. Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes describe Shakespearean fan fiction as “perpetual negotiation over the authorized and author-ized text” and “that occurs when active participants in digital communities claim Shakespeare for themselves.” If fan fiction creates and/or exploits gaps in a text as sites of resistance or redefinition, then Shakespearean slash is more resistant than most other subgenres because it permits authors not only to manipulate but actually to create the bodies it engages with one another in “unauthorized,” non-heteronormative ways. Thus, I argue, it offers a unique opportunity to widen the gaps in Shakespeare’s texts—to more radically question canonicity, authorship, and cultural normativities—while retaining the enormous cultural authority of Shakespeare’s name.