A Blast from the Past: David Halperin Writes About Slash
/Three decades ago, at the start of my career, I was a professor in the Literature section at MIT and more or less across the hall from me was my colleague, David Halperin, who was one of the founding figures in Gay and Lesbian Studies. Halperin was an important influence on my early work. He and Ruth Perry ran an informal workshop on the study of gender and sexuality which introduced me to a wide array of new authors and ideas as queer approaches to culture were becoming more wide-spread in academia and as the AIDS crisis was pushing queer activism into the streets, not to mention the museums (debates around Robert Maplethorpe’s work were boiling over). Halperin was a patient and sometimes petulant guide through this material, which would become a core foundation for the ways I wrote about fan fiction especially in Textual Poachers. And in return, fan fiction became a topic which we collectively considered.
I could not have been more flattered when Halperin, a considerably more senior scholar, began to incorporate some of my work into his writing as part of his larger project of “queering” classical studies. He spoke on more than one occasion of what could be learned by juxtaposing slash fiction with other works of fiction. But he never published this writing and through the years, I have found myself reaching for it since it feels like a lost chapter in the history of fan and fandom studies. When he retired recently, he stumbled upon the manuscript of one of those talks and shared it with me. He explained, “I never finished that essay, and I gave up hope of publishing it long ago. I think the whole project of “queering” canonical texts got very old very quickly — which is not to say it has run out of steam. On the contrary, there is a new vogue for queering Greek tragedy — but since tragedy is about what happens when things go wrong, to say that it is queer does not really tell us anything we didn’t already know. Anyway, I rather liked that old paper, fully thirty years old now, when I reread it, but I don’t write that way any more.…”
I asked if I might share it with my blog readers, nevertheless, and he consented. So here for the first time in print is his essay on slash fan fiction.
Enjoy.
