Ika Willis

Writing the Fables of Sexual Difference: Slash Fiction as Technology of Gender

In this paper, I examine historically and subculturally specific writing practices associated with slash fiction: fiction written by women involving man-on-man (m/m) sexual and/or romantic relationships. I see these writing practices as a postpornographic technology of gender involving and enabling a transformation of ‘the body one feels oneself to have’ (to anticipate a turn I will take to Gayle Salamon’s theorization of gendered embodiment later in this paper). I argue that certain fantasmatic, identificatory and bodily practices associated with slash fiction cut across (trans-) existing categories for sexuality and gender; I also argue that theorizing these practices in relation to gendered embodiment helps us to understand the way in which practices of gender identity both require and refuse a stable boundary between gendered categories like male/female and cis/trans.

Introduction: Trans-: Across/Beyond

In 2012 at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian archives in Los Angeles, Cassils gave a first performance of the ongoing artwork Becoming an Image (a work that combines performance, photography and sculpture). In a dark room, Cassils repeatedly aggressed a 2000lb clay block, kicking and punching it. This sustained assault was recorded intermittently by flash photography. The photographer’s camera flash seared images of Cassils working over the clay into the retinas of those present. These transitory visions of the work in progress foregrounded its resistance to fixity, its studied elusiveness. Cassils has since exhibited some of the photographs taken that day. Subsequent to one performance at a solo show, Body of Work, held at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, Cassils showed the remains of the pummelled block as a sculpture, After. In an echo of Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), After was displayed accompanied by a sound installation piece, Ghost, a recording of the artist’s earlier violent attacks on the clay block. Ghost provided ‘sound-images’ of After’s production. Becoming an Image was originally intended to be site-specific, a one-off, but is now conceived of as a work in process, a becoming without envisioned end.

Come Here Aeneas, I Want You*

Bell conjured up Thomas A. Watson with a commanding utterance[...] ‘Watson, come here! I want you!’[...] Come forth, manifest yourself, Wat-son, cut the lines that separate us but whose wound enables me to command your arrival, your destination and destiny... Whether issuing from the political or the private sector, the desiring command inches you towards annihilation. It emerges from what is not present-at-hand: thus, ‘I want you’ phantomizes you. I want that which I do not possess, I do not have you, I lack you, I miss you: Come here, Watson, I want you. Or this may echo the more original call of a male god, a god that is not full, since he is full of resentment, jealousy, suspicion and so on. He calls out, he desires, he lacks, he calls for the complement or the supplement or, as Benjamin says, for that which will come along to enrich him. The god is at the controls but without knowing what he controls until the Other still lacking answers his call. Where the call as such suggests a commanding force, the caller, masked by the power apparatus, may in fact be weak, suffering, panicked, putting through a call for help. We suppose that the phonetic inscription has been rendered faithfully. Yet [...] the unavailability of a primary script frees a language into the air whose meaning, beyond the fact that it constitutes a demand, remains on shaky, if any, ground. Avital Ronell

Talking/having sex

In issue 17 of the Vertigo comic Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem wakes up in bed with his assistant, Yelena: ‘What happened?’ he asks himself. ‘Well, obviously, I know what happened’. But when she wakes up, Yelena insists – repeatedly – that ‘nothing happened’. ‘I’m sticky’, Spider argues; ‘Something must have happened to make me sticky’. ‘Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Nothing. Nothing!’ Yelena reiterates, though, in increasingly large and messy lettering.