GLR January-February 2026

Spock—a pairing primarily known as K/S. Somewhat counter intuitively, the K/S fandom was overwhelmingly popular with women, many of whom identified as lesbians. Slash fiction was initially segregated from the respectable side of fandom, but its popularity exploded after the introduction of the internet, and slash was absorbed into the umbrella category of shipping. Slash still refers solely to male-male pairings and was incredibly pop ular within Tumblr’s queer communities throughout the 2010s. In a survey conducted in 2017, slash pairings made up 63 percent of the decade’s most popular “ships.” Slash not only provided a model for queer experimentation within fandom but also defied common assumptions of how queer desire should function. The popularity of slash among women was a point of consistent controversy and curiosity. There are dozens of theories, including one from prominent sci fi author Joanna Russ, who argued in 1985 that slash could be seen as a metaphor for sexual equality, with the submissive part ner being read in the female role. I would argue that for Tumblr users in the 2010s shipping allowed for a wider range of queer expression, giving younger users the opportunity to role-play beyond the confines of gender or sexuality. Rather than using slash as a representation of balanced heterosexuality, the genre became a space for exploring the erotic potentials of queer sex uality when, as a slash fan calling herself Shoshanna wrote in 2011: “[E]veryday life wasn’t differentiated from sex life.” Through this diversified lens, slash became a highly productive space for a range of queer becomings. For example, in 2015 the fandom for British boy band One Direction was overrun with young queer women and lesbians, many of whom devotedly shipped leading members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson in a pairing known as “Larry Stylinson.” At the time, “Larry” was the most popular ship on Tumblr and the subject of hundreds of thousands of posts, fan-edits, fanfic tions, and artwork. While this may sound like an odd addition to lesbian youth culture, scholars such as Jessica Pruett theorize that One Direction’s youthful, androgynous masculinity had “enormous lesbian aesthetic and erotic appeal.” Within the fan dom, lesbian-identified fans would share pictures of lesbians ac companied by One Direction lyrics, and other fans regularly used the framework of “femslash” to reconfigure Louis and Harry as two girls in love. Femslash is the female counterpart to slash, but femslash within the One Direction fandom engaged widely in gender swapping—another popular trope—to explore new avenues of the pairing’s queer masculinity. As such, Larry femslash crossed not only sexual boundaries but also gendered ones, to create con tent that hinted at transgender horizons beyond the immediate lesbian imagery. The example of One Direction and Larry high lights the collectivist and transgressive nature of queer fandom on Tumblr. Not only do frameworks like shipping and gender swapping provide a means of engagement for queer youth, they also create the necessary infrastructure for community building and collective experimentation, as well as a framework for as serting queer existence within a media ecosystem dominated by straight, cisgender perspectives. However, despite the somewhat utopian vision of lesbian One Direction fandom, Tumblr’s queer cityscape was primarily constructed out of seedy back alleys, courtesy of the inextrica ble relationship between fandom and kink that had formed on

the platform. While shipping provided the structure for queer re lationships, kink gave them something to do. Given the preva lence of young teens on the platform, fandom kink was shaped in equal measure by inexperience and unbounded perversion, forces which produced an overwhelming volume of work. The fandom surrounding the TV show Supernatural isoften held to be the north star for Tumblr perverts, a sentiment re flected in its fan works. Of the 261,025 works listed under the Supernatural tab in fanfiction’s Archive of Our Own (AO3), nearly 57,000 are marked as Explicit—the site’s most extreme content rating. While the wealth of low-effort smut on AO3 would indicate that most of the explicit works were inconse quential, fourteen of the twenty overall most popular works are sexually explicit. The works also contain evidence of substantial effort and passion. One standout is a 500-page epic devoted to Harry Potter topping his way through the casts of Supernatural, Hawaii Five-O, Fast and Furious, Grey’s Anatomy, and Sons of Anarchy . Others feature a wide swath of kinks including male pregnancy, dubious consent, incest, and “cum inflation.” While these categories may seem niche, each of the most popular works have been viewed more than 300,000 times, a count that sug gests either a respectable reach or a handful of fans in dire need of intervention. § I N MY OWN TIME ON T UMBLR , I got deeply engrossed in anything to do with the aforementioned gender-swap (sometimes called gender-bending) content. While swapping genders isn’t inher ently sexual, its erotic potential showed up in a variety of trans oriented kinks. The most common, particularly within the Supernatural fandom, was male pregnancy, which I consider a subcategory of gender swap. While some critics argued that the heteronormative mandate of procreation rendered slash pregnan cies less queer, my fleeting interactions with this genre of fan work left me with a radically delimited notion of the relationship between gender and embodiment. Now, I can even read a hand ful of these works as tacit (through likely unintentional) rejec tions of biological essentialism. Male pregnancy works were never my favorite, but they challenged my only other reference points for transness at the time: the character Ted’s recurring nightmares in the TV series How I Met Your Mother, in which the girl of his dreams turns out to have a penis. While trans smut was—and continues to be—rife with regressive representations, I found these depictions of an ostensibly transgender sexuality Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki in Supernatural . Warner Bros TV.

TheG & LR

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