Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

literature that explicitly constructs a coninuum of male homosocial desire also may bridge gaps within the continuum of female homosocial desire, acknowledging commonility between groups patriarchal norms work to separate.

distaste for female sexuality and feminine bodies.

series of movements from an initial partnership, through a crisis in communication that threatens to disrupt that union, toward its reconfirmation through sexual intimacy.

both utopian and dystopian elements can be located in most slash stories.

Slash throws conventional notions of masculinity into crisis by removing the barriers blocking the realization of homosocial desire;

(14). If these programs evoke an ideal of male bonding, they must also repress the specifically sexual dimension of these relationships; the male characters are inscribed into short-lived relations of heterosexual desire (the romantic guest of the week) lacking the depth and intensity that binds the two men together.

Fictional representations of male friendship often depend for their emotional power upon the suggestion of strong homosocial desire between men, even as they isolate that desire from any explicitly recognizable form of sexuality:

“a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted

What fans have discovered in these programs is a subtext of male homosocial desire.