Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction and Women’s Writing: (Re)Writing Desire into Canon

Abstract

This paper examines slash fanfiction based on the Harry Potter series as a form of women’s writing. In doing so, it seeks to explore the ways in which slash fanfiction as a genre, with its queering of canonical content and often explicitly sexual narratives, represents an avenue for women to explore ideas of desire and sexuality while separating it from the female body. Considering the readership is also largely female, it also looks at whether slash fanfiction constitutes a form of pornography for women, by women, and therefore whether it holds any potential to be examined as feminist texts.