Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: Sexuality and Gender Exploration in Contemporary Slash Fanfiction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Questions of Sexual Identity and Female Empowerment in Fan Fiction
This Master's thesis discusses questions of sexual identity and female empowerment in fan fiction. Fan fiction is created by the fans of a source narrative to expand on the original material and resolve its shortcomings. Because of its transformative nature, fan stories are unsanctioned and non-profit. Since fan fiction is not restricted by the commercial market, it offers a prime opportunity to examine the unadulterated psychology of its authors. The vast majority of fan writers in the most popular digital archives today are women belonging to completely different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds. Thus, the female identity is extremely relevant to comprehend fan fiction and its themes. Several fan fiction tropes are analyzed in this work, but particular attention is given to questions of gender roles, sexual identity and female empowerment. Slash and femslash fan fiction are closely analyzed, as the protagonists of these genres are queer. The abundance of such stories inspires hope for the development of queer-friendly communities across the globe, while the significant number of well-crafted women characters suggests that the precepts of feminist activists have successfully reached part of the younger generations. Fan fiction is also an informative genre, explaining delicate topics such as sexism, consent, psychological illnesses, homophobia and abuse. This educational potential can reach the level of any formal speech or essay due to the wide scope and appeal of fan fiction in comparison with other instructional material. For these reasons, this thesis advocates the entry of fan fiction in the academic world as a worthy object of study.
A SOFT EPILOGUE: LGBTQ FANWORKS AS REPARATIVE READING
2019
What drives fans to create works of art for free? What motivates so many members of the LGBTQ community to create both large scale movements and personal projects? The purpose of this study was to explore these questions by examining the ways in which LGBTQ fanworks unsettle cis-heteronormativity in mainstream fiction, while also providing some context as to why transformative fanworks have had such an impact on the LGBTQ community. I engaged in this inquiry by collecting personal accounts from members of the LGBTQ fandom community that recounted how and why transformative fanworks have affected them. By examining and contextualizing these accounts through a lens informed by concepts from Reparative Reading, Communities of Practice, Testimonios, and Textual Poaching, I found that LGBTQ fanworks give members of the LGBTQ community the power to take up space in pop culture media and in wider society as a whole. This study revealed the myriad of ways in which engaging in practices such as creating and consuming LGBTQ fanworks can be a form of reparative reading. The results also open possible discussions about representation of oppressed groups in media. While the power members of the LGBTQ community gain by poaching text is significant, what can we do to get to a point where that kind of bricolage is no longer necessary? What can we learn from these kinds of studies that might empower us to remove the oppressive conditions that made them possible in the first place?
Yearning Void and Infinite Potential'': Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space
English Language Notes, 2007
To me, slash is about cracks and crevices in a text, a yearning void in both the text and the reader. So space is a vacuum-something that isn't there but could be. But in the larger terms of community, culture, politics, space is less about vacuum and more about potential.The slash space, to me, is remarkable in its fecundity. It is space that is never filled, potential that never runs out. No matter how many stories, how many writers, there's always more space. Slash as space, space as both yearning void and infinite potential. (Julad 2003) o date, work on women, queerness, and online communities has mainly focused on lesbian and queer-identified women's use of online space in the service of identity and sexuality narratives played out in the physical world. 1 In this project, we expand the scope of such inquiries to include ways in which particular online spaces, cultures, and practices can queer women (and other gendered subjects) in ways not accounted for by most identity narratives. We are interested in the interactions between women which structure online media fandom, specifically the exchange of sexually explicit slash stories which depict relationships between male characters and actors from films, books, and television shows. In the virtual spaces we invoke in this paper, such shared sex-
Queerer than Canon: Fix-it Fanfiction and Queer Readings
Undergraduate Research Journal, 2021
This essay examines queer fanfiction, or fiction based on previous narratives, through the lens of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of "reparative readings" to argue that fanfiction is the instantiation of "loving criticism," and of grassroots queer praxis. I explain fanfiction and its common constructs, and then explore how queer reading functions to challenge and subvert heteronormative narratives for better representation and for validation. Fanfiction provides space for healing and pleasure, and delegitimizes heteronormative ideals, giving space for queer readers to grow and learn about themselves. This essay highlights fanfiction about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barns from the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a case study of fanfiction as a Kosofskian reparative reading. In this example, fanfiction works to give voice to the sublimated themes that lie beneath more overtly heteronormative messages, and brings queer identity to the forefront of these stories. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe's connections to hegemonic and capitalist forces, these messages can be buried beneath commercial values: fanfiction repairs this damage, I argue. Fanfiction not only gives space for different sexual identities, but also provides representation for different physical abilities, racial identities, and gender identities. In consuming fanfiction, readers may undo the harmful ideals not only within the narrative, but within their own psyches, which empowers them for future queer activism, or praxis.
Writing the Fables of Sexual Difference: Slash Fiction as
In this paper, I examine the historically and subculturally specific writing practice of slash fiction, seeing it as a technology of gender which involves and enables a phenomenological transformation of ‘the body one feels oneself to have’. I argue that certain fantasmatic, identificatory, and bodily practices associated with slash cut across (trans-) existing categories for sexuality and gender. Moreover, I argue that a theorization of these practices in relation to work on gendered embodiment helps us to understand trans- as a figure of crossing which both requires and refuses a stable boundary between gender identities (male/female or cis/trans). Published in parallax 22:3 (2016)
THE CREATION OF WHAT CANNOT BE FOUND: A Study of Sapphic Identities Through Femslash Fanfiction
2023
Queer representation in mainstream media is known to be lacking and, at times, even harmful to members of the LGBTQ+ community. The depictions of Sapphic people are based on erasure, attribution of pernicious tropes, and unjust character deaths. Therefore, it is understood that Sapphic representation in mainstream media is not sufficient or satisfactory for Sapphic audiences. This study relies on the hypothesis that due to the insufficient and unsatisfactory Sapphic representation presented by mainstream media, Sapphic people turn to reading and/or writing femslash fanfiction in order to find stories and characters with whom they are able to relate. To develop this study, the existing literature on (femslash) fanfiction and the mediatic presence of Sapphic people was reviewed. The literature review was followed by theoretical approaches to explore fanfiction and its aspects, and to examine Sapphic people and their connections to the media and femslash fanfiction. In addition to the theoretical investigations, the present study is embodied by qualitative research that consisted of interviewing Sapphic people about their experiences with queerness, media representation, and femslash fanfiction. The data collected was transcribed and then analyzed. The findings indicate that representation is, indeed, one of the reasons why Sapphic people interact with femslash fanfiction. Furthermore, the data collected also demonstrates other positive implications that femslash fanfiction holds in the lives of Sapphic women and shows possibilities of future studies that may be undertaken.
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2019
As defined by Ika Willis, slash is "fiction written by women involving man-on-man (m/m) sexual and/or romantic relationships" (290). Refracted through the contemporary theories of moral philosophy, this paper names such slash as cultural appropriation; however, it further contends that such cultural appropriation is not inherently unethical but instead represents a generative imaginative space in which new configurations of gender and sexuality might be theorized. Building upon this premise, this paper argues that slash's appropriative nature only becomes problematic when it generates misrepresentations that decouple the gay community from its histories, both joyous and painful.
Fan Studies aims to de-pathologise fans, their communities and their fannish practices (Jenkins 1992). In doing so, Fan Studies privileges fan voices by interrogating their quotidian on- and offline fan practices (Brooker 2002; Hills 2002), demonstrating the emotional connection these fans have to texts. Much of this fannish engagement revolves around the creation and consumption of slash fiction (Bacon-Smith 1992; Hellekson & Busse 2006), a fan practice occurring in fan fiction communities that has been identified as a ‘queer female space’ (Lothian et al 2007, 103). This work predominantly explores why women create these fan texts with little consideration given to the fan’s source text. In spite of this, little attention has been given to LGBT+ fandom and how self-identifying LGBT+ fans negotiate mediated representations of LGBT+ identity, especially when considering the increasing level of LGBT+ media representations on television and particularly on Teen TV programmes. Therefore, this thesis addresses the ways in which fans negotiate non-normative identities represented in the teen mystery TV series Pretty Little Liars (2010-) by investigating ‘queer’ modes of fan production, namely ‘fan talk’, (fem)slash fiction, digital (fem)slash and fan theory-making created by PLL fans. PLL hosts a range of diverse LGBT+ representations and includes a large number of LGB producers and creative talent. This investigation occurs by employing a reader-guided textual analysis (Ytre-Arne 2011), a method that centralises fan meaning-making by analysing the fan’s source text through these fan interpretations. I argue that reader-guided textual analysis (Ytre-Arne 2011) allows us to better understand how fans negotiate LGBT+ representation, how fans accept or reject these LGBT+ representations and the characters’ relationships. The implications lie not just in Fan Studies methodologies and fan production, but also for Queer Theory’s ‘evaluative paradigm’ (Davis and Needham 2009) or how Queer Theorist assess representations as either positive or negative.
Fandom as a Middle Ground: Fictive Queer Fantasies and Real-World Lesbianism in FSCN
This essay presents a case study of one of the largest and most popular slash fan sites for the Chinese reality TV show Super Girl, Fei Se Chao Nv (hereafter FSCN). I argue that an examination of fan discourses on FSCN indicates how this slash fan site acts as a middle ground between normative notions of deviant lesbianism and queer fantasies about media characters. Fans often project normative cultural positions onto their virtual slash practices and, as a result, constantly suspend their queer challenging of mainstream culture’s heteronormative ideologies.