1. I would like to acknowledge the vital support and insight provided by Meghan M. Chandler, Miriam Forman-Brunell, and Denise McKenna, and to thank the attendees of the University of Pittsburgh's Humanities Center Colloquium for their feedback on an earlier version of this article. Furthermore, this piece would not exist without the Johnlock Tumblr community, whose incredibly creative minds were a key source of inspiration. Thank you all for sharing.
2. Richard Siken, Crush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 62.
3. Steven Moffat, “The Fabulous Baker Street Boys,” Empire, January 2014, 157.
4. “Slashing” is a fan-coined term historically used to describe the sexual coupling of two male figures. Originally popularized by female fanfiction writers surrounding the TV cult series Star Trek (CBS, 1966–69), the term literally refers to the punctuation mark “slash” (as in Kirk/Spock or Holmes/Watson). The slash symbol is now primarily employed in digital communities to flag fanworks containing same-sex romantic content, graphic or otherwise. However, in fanfiction tags, nonsexual queer pairings are often announced through an ampersand (as in Holmes&Watson). “Subtextual scanning” is a locution I use to convey the reading practices queer audiences have historically deployed to retrieve same-sex representation from mainstream media. See Terry Castle's and Patricia White's scholarship on lesbian moviegoers reappropriating Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as legible queer icons: Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Through groundbreaking, these works focus on a single sexuality (lesbian) and a specific medium (cinema) during a period in US film history marked by morality-based censorship (the Hays Code) and unilateral modes of film production (star and studio systems). In this paper, I aim to open up notions of queer identification and fan reception through the analysis of transmedia television, social media subcultures, and non-heteronormative female viewers.
5. David M. Halperin, “The Normalization of Queer Theory,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, no. 2 (2003): 334.