This topic of conversation comes to us from the Supernatural fandom (but
it is by no means exclusive to it). For those of you that don’t know in last
week’s episode Dean had a gay thing. I would love to spend the next 4
paragraphs discussing the shippie implications of this moment but unfortunately
it stirred up another round of the age-old slash fandom argument about sexual
orientation and shipping so we’re going to talk about that instead.
Whether you want to admit it or not sexual ordination plays an
important part in the shipping community. As much as we love to pretend we live
in a world where flexible sexuality is the norm (fan
fiction is a wondrous place) it’s just not true. Personally I believe that
sexuality is a hell of a lot more fluid than most people admit but society
mostly sticks to a pretty rigid heteronormative binary when it comes to sexual ordination
and the media generally follows suit.
Sorry I got a bit academic there didn’t I? It happens sometimes, I
can’t help it. Basically in most television series, movies or books a
character’s sexuality remains relatively fixed. If they are shown flirting,
hooking up with or dating a member of the opposite sex then that character is
straight (unless explicitly stated
otherwise). For those of us that choose to engage with slash
ships (by slash ships I mean the coupling of two canonically straight
characters of the same sex) this presents a problem.
Generally it doesn’t bother us that much – part of the fun of
shipping slash is going through the text with a fine-tooth comb looking for
hints and suggestions that your ship is ‘real’. So it doesn’t really matter if
the character is canonically straight because we can use evidence from the text
to create our own headcanons in the sexually fluid world of fanon. The other
side of it is queerbaiting
– where the powers-that-be deliberately bait the slash fandom with hints
towards a ship becoming canon but then never actually follow through. Queerbaiting
sucks, and it’s just as bad for the fandom to take subtext and call it
representation.
Look nobody likes to have their ship sunk and unfortunately for
slash fans heterosexuality is a pretty common cock block so we are constantly
have to find ways around it. As I said above most of the time a character’s
canon sexuality doesn’t really matter. Sure a lot of us hope that one-day slash
ships (and a flexible idea of sexual ordination) will be more acceptable. Then
hopefully our favourite same-sex pairings won’t be dismissed quite so easily
but realistically we understand that we have a while to go before we get there.
Most of the time we’re content analyzing subtext but sometimes fanon
becomes so prevalent that it is accepted as canon (at least by part of the
fandom). This, of course, clashes with the side of fandom that does not engage
with fanon at all, those fans that only accept of what actually happens in the
text. This is how arguments – like the one seen in the Supernatural fandom this week – happen.
The side of the fandom that is taking fanon just a little bit too
seriously takes a moment of subtext (or a joke or a hint) as proof of a
character’s queer sexuality. In this case the Supernatural fandom takes Dean getting flustered when a guy tries
to pick him up as proof that Dean is canonically bisexual. This upsets people
that stick to canon. It’s not the first time this has happened (I’ve already
added it to my personal headcanon for Dean Winchesters sexuality) and it
probably won’t be the last but as much as I hate to admit it there is nothing
about this moment that actually changes Dean’s canon sexuality.
For those of us that choose to read Dean as bisexual it’s just
another in a long line of hints that we use to justify our headcanon but that
doesn’t mean that I can start listing Dean Winchester as canonically bisexual
character. In canon we have only ever seen him talk about and act on a sexual
attraction to women, which means he’s straight.
The thing is – representation is really important in regards to
queer characters (especially those outside the gay/straight binary). There
aren’t that many bisexuals on television so claiming a character that is NOT
canonically depicted as queer as a queer character just because of subtext is
not cool. It’s kind of like going back to Hayes-Code era cinema where the only
way queer characters could be depicted was through subtext. I like to think
we’ve gone beyond that now so let’s not ruin it by claiming that slash subtext
is actual text.
It’s completely all right to talk about subtext and create
headcanons about character’s sexualities but you can’t claim it as canon unless
it actually is. If you do choose to state that something is text when in
reality it’s subtext then you can’t really blame people for disagreeing with
you.
…and that’s all I have to say on the matter, feel free to argue with
me in the comments or send me angry anonymous messages on Tumblr.
