1. An absent presence
[1.1] At one of the first dedicated slash fan conventions in 1985 in Houston, Texas, attendees were treated to a comic performance that would go down in fandom history. Two fans dressed in "lovingly colored penis suits (one in daring dusky rose, one in ever popular, enticing olive)" interacted in a "lively dance…until both the dance and the penises came to a logical climax" (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Dancing_Penises) (note 1). The audience's fits of laughter marked the importance that color-coded genitalia played in their fandom, with hundreds of fics offering loving descriptions of Spock's alien green penis interacting with Kirk's more familiar human pink one. Both Kirk and Spock were played by white actors, yet such contrasts in skin tone cannot fail to hold a racial dimension. Seeking to contribute to the growing field of critical race fan studies, I examine how racialized power structures manifested in and through slash's earliest shared fantasies and collective imaginaries. How might the racial dynamics of early slash have shaped fandom's racial dynamics as the creative and scholarly influence of K/S's spread?
[1.2] K/S, which began as a stigmatized subset of Star Trek fandom and grew rapidly into a subculture to be reckoned with, spawned a cottage industry of articles, scholarly and journalistic alike, exploring why communities of women gathered to write erotic stories about fictional or fictionalized men (Russ 1985; Bacon-Smith 1992; Penley 1997). Participants in and scholars of K/S shaped the public and academic image of fan fiction writing as well as the institutions that have been built to support it, including the Organization for Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own. Fans and scholars have had much to say about slash as a space for queer and feminist worldmaking in which imagined male bodies provide opportunity for shared erotics and creativity (Green et al. 2006; Lothian et al. 2007; Busse and Lothian 2017). As critics of both fan studies and fannish infrastructure have repeatedly noted over the past few years, this was a predominantly white genealogy whose dominance has rendered less privileged fannish narratives imperceptible or illegitimate (Wanzo 2015; Pande 2018; Stanfill 2018). As Mel Stanfill (2024) notes, slash fan fiction's inattention to race is one among several key factors that limits its capacity for queer disruption. The foundational absent presence of race goes some way to explain how slash fans' beliefs about their own racial progressiveness have failed to line up with the reality of the content of their stories.
[1.3] The concept of racial salience, developed by Mark Jerng in Racial Worldmaking (2017), provides the framework I use to examine slash fan fiction's fantasies of sex between white men. In asking us to attend to when and how race becomes "salient," Jerng demonstrates how genre conventions structure racial worlding (18). Slash fan fiction is a genre form in which readers and writers have rarely marked the salience of race, instead naming it primarily as an analytic absence when explicit or implicit racism calls for critique. Taking critiques of the whiteness of the genre and the field as my starting point, I seek to understand slash fan fiction as a formation in which race has never not been salient.
2. The racial context of K/S
[2.1] Slash fandom emerged and grew in close proximity to US science fiction and fantasy (SFF) fandom, and its relationship to race and representation shares much with these genre formations. Until the last decade or so, explicit scholarly discussions of race in SFF were relatively rare. Jessica Langer describes race and colonialism in SFF as an "elephant-shaped hole," noting that while the apparent absence of racially marked or colonized bodies might appear to constitute an absence of race or of anticolonial critique, the genre is imbued with racial and colonial metaphors (2011, 1). Science fiction, in Isiah Lavender's words, "often talks about race by not talking about race": Histories of racialization are rendered metaphorical or abstract through genre tropes such as alien species or far-future civilizations (2011, 7). Writing about fantasy, Helen Young (2018) names the foundation of the genre as a set of consistently reproduced "habits of whiteness" that reinforce the dominance and domination of whiteness through unmarked assumptions. The work of these and other scholars demonstrates that the structuring presence of race emerges when we examine what has typically been taken for granted.
[2.2] To track the racial salience of K/S, we must first understand the racial landscape of Star Trek and its fandom. Celebrating an imagined future for the 1960s' version of liberal diversity, the multiracial cast of the original series famously allowed for television's first interracial kiss; Nichelle Nichols's role became iconic both for Afrofuturism and for liberal visions of racial progress. Yet the visible presence of a Black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise was never made an explicit part of the show's plot or world-building, much to Nichols's own frustration (carrington 2016). Nichols's presence as a symbol of Black future possibilities was genuinely meaningful for Black viewers, who famously included Martin Luther King Jr., yet the organized fan activity in zines and conventions that has made its way into fan studies did not reflect the diversity of folks who seem to have been invested in the show. The fan and industry spaces that nurtured fannish infrastructure and created archivable records were likely unavailable or hostile to many racialized viewers. The racial worldmaking in which Star Trek participated allowed both the show and its white fans to claim a degree of progressiveness that did not necessarily unsettle the racial status quo.
[2.3] A similar evasion of the salience of race has structured a great deal of fan studies. As Rebecca Wanzo (2015) points out, imagining race as an absence from both fandom and fan studies allows both the community and the field to envision itself as a progressive space that just happens to be predominantly white. The perception of race as a limitation in fan studies is also a limitation of perception in terms of the work that whiteness has always done. It has become an aphorism that canonical fan studies has failed to acknowledge race and that predominantly white scholars writing about predominantly white fans and fandoms simply allowed whiteness to become invisible (as it does tend to do) while they focused on gender, sexuality, capitalism, law, and other facets of fan community and creativity (Pande 2018; Stanfill 2018). The truth of this diagnosis with respect to slash fan fiction studies can be borne out from reading almost any article published in the 1990s and 2000s. However, when we return to some of the earliest scholarship that brought slash into scholarly purview, we find that race makes significant explicit appearances in descriptions of its erotic landscape.
[2.4] Early slash, and the scholarship that was written about it, made Star Trek's sublimation of race onto the figure of the alien one of its key features through the character of Spock. Spock, for those unversed in Star Trek lore, is half human and half Vulcan, his alien side most visibly signaled by pointed ears and green blood. He was played by Leonard Nimoy as an intellectual, rational foil to Captain Kirk's red-blooded, white-bread future American (William Shatner). Spock's species difference stood in for an overdetermined racial and/or ethnic alterity, likely aided by Nimoy's public Jewish identity (note 2). At times, Spock's opaque interiority and technological proficiency activate orientalist tropes, with Kirk proclaiming Spock to be Chinese in one episode that sees the characters transported to 1930s New York (note 3). In series and fan fiction alike, Spock's cultural and physical differences from his captain and friend Kirk are repeatedly emphasized (Selley 1986). As Joanna Russ writes, "Instead of presenting us with a couple who are of different sexes but the same species, K/S creates a couple who are of different species, but the same sex" (1985, 96). Spock's difference offered a fertile ground for fans' fantasies and projections of their own gendered experiences (Coppa 2008). As fans wrote their fantasies into fic, Spock became a flexible figure for racial analogy and settler colonial archetype.
[2.5] One of the first academic articles on slash, by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith, uses an epigraph from Leslie Fiedler's 1960 Love and Death in the American Novel. The quotation describes an "archetypical relationship" that "haunts the American psyche: two lonely men, one dark-skinned, one white, band together over a carefully guarded fire in the virgin heart of the American wilderness; they have forsaken all others for the sake of the austere, almost inarticulate, but unquestioned love which binds them to each other and to the world of nature which they have preferred to civilization" (1986, 235). Lamb and Veith describe K/S as a romantic and erotic version of Fiedler's foundational friendship that neutralizes its problematic racial elements in favor of a "true love and authentic intimacy" that "can only exist between equals" (240). While this emphasis on slash as storytelling about gender-egalitarian love has been widely taken up in fan studies, its establishment through a racial analogy is rarely acknowledged. Yet drawing on Fiedler at length, Lamb and Veith describe Spock's racial coding as alternately Black, Indigenous, and mixed race. They describe Spock's racial coding in settler colonial terms and note that "he will never 'pass' in a Federation still dominated by Human (analogically, white) males" (238). When we make race salient in rereading Lamb and Veith, it becomes clear that the fantasy at play is based both on equality and its opposite. Inequality never arises because Kirk and Spock are so perfectly balanced, but also Spock is the dark-skinned partner whose species marginalization structures the shape of the relationship.
[2.6] In Fiedler's model, as Lamb and Veith (1986) do not point out, the "unquestioned love" is a fiction constructed by a white author. The dyad Fiedler describes uses a vision of love and a Black or Native racialized other to promote redemption for white America's foundation in stolen land and stolen labor. Fiedler writes that the white author "dreams of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended" and receives it through a fantasy of interracial companionship that the reality of history and politics render very far from the real (1948, 670). There is a frisson of such redemption also in white slash authors' writing of Spock as a sympathetic and misunderstood equal whose bodily alterity can be freely and deliciously fetishized. Yet Spock is nevertheless literally and metaphorically white, sharing with Kirk the apex position of space explorer and principal character, which renders any fetishization of inequality quite risk free.
[2.7] Is early slash a white woman's version of the yearning for redemption that Fiedler describes, penetrating wilderness and colonizing space without risking complicity with ongoing acts of genocidal violence? For Russ and for Lamb and Veith, as well as numerous scholars thereafter, slash's erotics are feminist because women are reckoning with the constraints of patriarchy, writing onto the bodies of fictional men what the authors might want to have for themselves. Lamb and Veith write that "K/S stories remove gender as a governing and determining focus in the love relationship…Joanna Russ has commented, 'The 'What If' behind K/S is: What If I Were Free?'" (1986, 254). Russ, describing the content of K/S stories, expands further on this idea by writing that women writers of slash "have––ingeniously, tenaciously, and very creatively––sexualized our female situation and training, and made out of the restrictions of the patriarchy our own sexual cues" (86). This fantasy of slash as gender freedom elides difference: A "female situation and training," or what it might take to feel free, will diverge radically depending on race, class, location, and other factors, but such possibilities are filtered out by a whiteness the authors seem not to see. If the men about whom the stories were written were not similarly situated amid an unacknowledged whiteness, the racial presumptions embedded in this fantasy of sex without patriarchy might be much more visible.
[2.8] Writing a decade later, Constance Penley produces some of the same elisions by presenting the interraciality of the Kirk/Spock relationship at face value. In the flexible analogy of Spock's racialization, Blackness seems to have retreated by the 1990s; Penley finds it "significant that the slash fans consistently avoid writing Vulcan culture and history—and Spock's race—as African or African American." She notes that fans "prefer to orientialize or romanticize the color divide in a strategic yet unconscious evasion of what has historically in the US been the most bitterly contentious racial division" (1997, 137). Yet despite acknowledging that slash fans "are undoubtedly complicit with a traditional American tendency to obscure racism and racial tensions (both in their writing and in the everyday life of the fandom)," Penley insists that K/S is an antiracist pairing. The racial dynamics of K/S seem full of possibility because she assumes that the fictional racism the half-Vulcan, half-human Spock experiences is commensurate with racism's operations in the real world. Setting aside the absence of nonanalogical racial difference between the two white actors on screen, she asserts that "the slashers have ingeniously rewritten and recast the American mythos of interethnic male bonding by making that relationship homoerotic rather than homosocial" (145). She even goes as far as to state that slash has eliminated the racism of typical interethnic bonding by "celebrating miscegenation" (145). Airing as it did while Loving v. Virginia passed the United States Supreme Court, it is no great leap to imagine that Star Trek might have viewed Spock's human/Vulcan heritage as a commentary on miscegenation (Delmont 2018). But the history of miscegenation as a concept in US culture and law cannot be meaningfully addressed without engaging anti-Blackness. A fantasy of eliminating racism without the presence of people of color is difficult to differentiate from a fantasy of eliminating racialized bodies.
3. Racial fantasy and the content of K/S
[3.1] I turn now from the context to the content of K/S fan fiction, offering some brief examples drawn from works that scholars of early fan studies are likely to have read. The Vulcan motto of "infinite diversity in infinite combination" operates, in Penley's work, to frame Star Trek as a horizon for fans' commitment to progress and even utopia (1997, 141). Such a claim is not without powerful resonances that situate slash fandom in conversation with the long history of Black Star Trek fans (carrington 2016). But it is a deeply limited claim also, one that relies on reading fictional alienness as a stand-in for the real racialization that is also present and ignored in original and fan texts alike. In what may be the first Star Trek slash fiction, Jennifer Guttridge's "The Ring of Soshern" (1968), Kirk and Spock suffer, comfort one another, and find love in a cave on a planet on which they are stranded (note 4). Human and Vulcan discover one another while the native inhabitants of the planet first threaten and then—when confronted with the power of modern technology in the form of phaser fire—worship them, bringing food offerings that allow Kirk and Spock to survive long enough to be rescued. The description of "primitive" "apemen" with "guttural" language, closer to "beasts" than men, leaves no doubt that Kirk and Spock sit side by side in the racializing landscape of colonial fantasy even as they meet one another across the divide of fictional species.
[3.2] If the plot of K/S stories can place Kirk and Spock in the guise of allied colonizers, masters of all they survey, then their sexual encounters are where fantasies of alterity play out at length. The episode "Amok Time," written by acclaimed science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon and aired in September 1967, introduced a profound difference between Vulcan and human sexuality. The episode introduced the Vulcan mating cycle of pon farr, an intense and debilitating "blood fever" that occurs every seven years and can only be resolved through a bonded mating, a fight to the death, or excruciating pain, insanity, and eventual death. This biological drive that compels a Vulcan to mate or die must be hidden at all costs in a society that prides and defines itself by rationality and the repression of emotion. "Amok Time" is arguably the ultimate source for myriad fan fiction tropes that explore the interplay among sexual desire, physical compulsion, culture, shame, and love. It also exemplifies the contradictory, overdetermined forms of alterity that swirl around the figure of Spock. Both hypersexual and asexual, powerful and weak, driven by instinct and hyperrational, Spock is available as a screen on which numerous racially gendered narratives can be projected. Plausibly deniable fantasies of Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and more play out on his fantasized figure.
[3.3] The juiciest site for erotic projection is Spock's body itself—and here we return to the notorious green penis of my title and opening anecdote. Star Trek's decision to mark Spock's nonhumanity by rendering his blood green left a lot of scope for speculation. Fans were more concerned with the implications of green-bloodedness than were the makeup artists for the show, who kept his lips a fetchingly implausible shade of pink. As slash fan communities came together through zines, letters, and conventions, contemplation of Spock's coloration led to extensive speculation on what Vulcan genitalia might resemble. Leslie Fish's 1977 K/S fic "Poses" includes one of the most compelling examples, which I quote at length:
[3.4] At length his hands brushed through the dark-furred pubic thicket and came to rest over the enclosed genitals. Intrigued, he looked closer at the alien arrangement—the three protective petals folded tight as a rosebud, but pulsing faintly as he touched them…Kirk continued to stroke and watch, entranced, as the petals slowly engorged with blood, flushed pale green, swelled, and began to part…Fascinated, he watched the three petals curl back to reveal glistening chartreuse surfaces studded with hypersensitive spots of darker green, the two side tendrils gracefully uncoiling to stand like oiled serpentine honor guards beside the rising, proud, gleaming central shaft. "Like an orchid," Kirk whispered, "or a cross between…an orchid and a great green anthurium…Oh, it's beautiful!
[3.5] Delight and pleasure resonate through this gleefully detailed fantasy of genitalia. The queer erotic possibilities of the plantlike appendage are endless, and it is no surprise that this vision was taken up by several other writers (note 5). Fish's use of feminine-sounding language such as "beautiful" and "gracefully uncoiling" may have inspired Russ's (1985) excitement about K/S's erotic androgyny. This penis may be a male part, but it does not participate in the masculine power that threatens rape. In the context of this particular fic, that is especially meaningful, because prior to this culminating moment Spock has been wracked with guilt because of his belief that he raped Kirk during pon farr; Kirk has been reassuring him that he in fact enjoyed it and confessing his love. The radical pleasure Russ identifies in K/S, the pornography by women for women with love in which fetishization is replaced by intimate, collaborative play, can be viscerally experienced in this passage.
[3.6] Yet when we read with an eye to racial salience, there is more at stake here. Floral metaphors for the depiction of intimate body parts are most commonly attached to depictions of women, and the metaphorization of bodies to decorative objects activates the history and present of orientalist desire (note 6). Spock's flexible, racialized gender here approaches the positionality of an Asian woman held in a colonizing white gaze. Kirk's admiring approach to his decorative green penis provides the slash writer and reader with the thrill of fucking androgynous alterity. Kirk even names the embodied landscape he is traversing with his home world's flora, the "orchid" and "anthurium" mapped over whatever names Vulcans might prefer for their own penile strands. A narrative of discovery, demanding metaphorical expression through connections to the nonhuman natural (earthly) world, offers irresistible pleasures for a writing and reading community steeped in orientalizing, colonizing discourse and desire.
[3.7] Early slash writers pursued fictional world-building over real-world resonances, writing difference onto white male bodies through myriad fics about Spock's alien physiology and culture as a Vulcan among humans. K/S's erotic fantasies are founded on a presence-but-erasure of race in which the color-blind stereotype "I don't care if you're black, white, or green" becomes literal. The material histories that undergird racial imaginaries slip out of sight as the fantasy of species alterity transforms political marginalization into interchangeable fetish. The racial fantasy of the unknowable other, with his alluringly versatile green penis, allowed slash's writers to fetishize racial otherness without placing themselves at the risk of participating in racism by directly depicting human races.
[3.8] In closing, I want to suggest some ways in which the racial structures underpinning early slash might have shaped fandom's racial dynamics as the creative and scholarly influence of K/S spread. If we were to follow Penley's claims about the antiracism of slash fandom to their conclusion, then we might assume that since slash fan fiction transforms the heteronormative paradigms of dominant media, its writers ought to be well placed to recognize and challenge paradigms of racial exclusion and white supremacy as well. This argument has indeed been made, and during transformational moments such as RaceFail09, it was a powerful one that led many slash writers and readers to question their own unchallenged assumptions (TWC Editor 2009). Yet it has become increasingly evident that the problematic racial erotics of slash's pleasures cannot always be easily educated away—as the persistent undervaluation of characters of color in fan fiction over the years has demonstrated (Coker and Pande 2018). Fans steeped in the racial imaginaries initiated in K/S's whiteness may have been underprepared to deal with the different cultural meanings carried by the fantasy sexualization of bodies that are racialized in the real world. In other words, the flexible fetishization of Spock's imaginary penis risks creating habits that perpetuate racial fetishism when applied to bodies of color.
[3.9] None of this is to say that the pleasures of fantastical fluorescent genitalia, dancing on stage or unfolding like flowers, can or should be denied. The complexities such visions evoke, and the erasures they may inadvertently perpetuate, simply must be acknowledged. Efforts toward inclusion cannot succeed if they are enacted without recognition or critique of underlying structures in the realms of both fantasy and material reality, where racialized bodies and figures are never interchangeable. Fandoms' underlying racial imaginaries do not necessarily transform when different bodies move to the center of their narratives. And if slash's founding fantasies have shaped the salience of race in this way, then we must know how they have operated in the past in order to change them for the future.