ABSTRACT
This chapter untangles the contradictions between how publicness is understood in legal theory, public sphere theory, and vernacular usage to argue that in both the print and digital eras slash communities have constructed “pocket publics” that balance between protecting members from discrimination and allowing for potentially interested strangers to recognize and find each other. Further, due to their position vis-à-vis the media industry, their commitment to creative expression, and their participation in a queer female community within a persistently sexist and homophobic society, slash communities fit the key characteristics of a counterpublic, which questions the normative terms of publicness and politics. The liminal public nature of slash communities thus allows them to offer members and passersby an opportunity to encounter and produce unexpected representations that may expand their imagination of possible identities, relationships, communities, and political futures.
