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robin_anne_reid) wrote2007-09-02 03:16 pm
robin_anne_reid) wrote2007-09-02 03:16 pm
Scholarship and online issues
I've been fascinated to watch how Henry Jenkins posts about scholarship (his own and others) in his blog. In theory, I'm all for such free publication; in practice, of course, there are issues about publication that I'm still working on (i.e. I often develop a presentation into a publication, and am not sure I want the presentation floating around to be considered sort of previously published). However, there are all sorts of ways one can publish online, so I've decided to try something here. Behind the cut is an abstract for an article I'm developing based on a presentation I did at last year's Slash Fiction Study Day 2 (de Montfort Univerisity). The Call for Papers for Slash Fiction Study Day 3 is
here: http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/International/0865.html.
It's in pretty much the same format that I've sent off (I've removed the phone numbers, and the fan URLs since I'm working on permissions). If the proposal is accepted, I'll be submitting the final paper January 1, and given the academic nature of this LJ, if people are interested, I'll talk somewhat about the process.
here: http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/International/0865.html.
It's in pretty much the same format that I've sent off (I've removed the phone numbers, and the fan URLs since I'm working on permissions). If the proposal is accepted, I'll be submitting the final paper January 1, and given the academic nature of this LJ, if people are interested, I'll talk somewhat about the process.
"'A Room of Our Own:' How F/F Slash Queers Female Space"
Robin Anne Reid, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Literature and Languages
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Commerce TX 75429
Robin_Reid[@]tamu-commerce.edu
Submission: Issue #2 IDeoGRAMS
"'A Room of Our Own:' How F/F Slash Queers Female Space"
This project examines the implications of the development and growth of homoerotic slash about female characters in both Fictional People and Real People Fan fiction (FPF, RPF) during the last ten-fifteen years, specifically the genre of slash fiction. The first scholarship on slash defined it as consisting of "straight women writing about gay men," or as women writing about two gorgeous men rather than one in a primarily heterosexual matrix. Despite the problematic nature of that perception, it has been popularized in print and electronic media although it is contested by fans as well as later scholarship. Few would deny that the majority of fans are probably straight, but making a minority population invisible is problematic.
Slash fiction by women about women grew during the eighties, but the growth in the last decade or so has been notable. Earlier fan studies scholarship failed to consider the implications of stories which create an additional queering of the female spaces of fan fiction. That failure may be in part due to lack of access to texts before the internet but is also, I will argue, caused by theoretical and methodological assumptions. The growth in a genre which currently has no widely accepted name (possible variants are female/female slash, femslash, femmeslash, and saffic) can be attributed to a number of factors. These include changes in cultural attitudes about sexuality, including the sex-positive movement in feminism and the increasing visibility of BDSM and other alternative sexual practices; the growing numbers of queer women (lesbian, bisexual, transexual) coming out not only in fandom but as part of growing and activist sexual equality movements; the presence of a small but significant population of queer and straight men writing and reading fan fiction; changes in how the media presents female characters.
In this project, I point out gaps in earlier scholarship that have begun to be addressed by debates among fans writing in the genre known as "meta," their term for their own analyses of individual and cultural fan practices. I do not claim that the fan meta consciously addresses the scholarship although a number of fans writing meta do read the scholarship. I draw upon queer theory (specifically, Judith Halberstam's work on female masculinity and postmodern geographies), but I do not claim that I will use the theory to open up a singular meaning of fan texts or discourse. Instead, I argue that fans, through both fictions and meta, are agents in creating discursive spaces where theorizing about gender and sexuality takes place within fandom. Fan discourses thus cannot be set aside as separate from other discourses, such as identity politics, activist, feminist, and queer theorizing.
My work places fan theorizing in the context of what is more traditionally understood as "feminist" and "queer" theorizing; like Eve Sedgwick and Judith Halberstam, I see the need to draw on interdisciplinary methods and multiple discourses. I am not trying to argue that all slash, or any sub-genre or type of slash, or that writers of slash, are by definition feminist, or that all slash or writers are homogeneous in their attitudes; the discussions over misogyny and homophobia in slash fandom reveal a wide range of ideologies. Neither am I arguing for a generic authorial intentionality although, in some cases, fans do state directly their intentions of intervening in cultural discourses about gender and sexuality through means of their fictions.
With the growth of cultural debates and academic work around the discursive spaces of "pornography," "sexual identity," and "queerness," the omission of female-centered fan fiction (whether hard-edged "dykey fics" or softer romantic "saffics") from consideration is a gap that must be addressed. If it's possible to argue, as some do, that "slasher" can be defined as a sexual identity, then the question of whether or not "femslasher" is a sexual identity surfaces; here the complications of writer and reader identification arise. A self-identified bisexual woman writing a story about sexual relationship between two female hobbits which is read by a self-identified straight woman who is anxious to read more about female hobbits may work in different ways from a self-identified dyke in law school writing a story about Alex and Olivia (LO/SVU) which is read by a MtF graduate student in queer studies.
However, having observed a number of debates between fans who disdain academic writing or even fan meta and aca-fans who speak clearly about their pleasure in writing meta, I believe fan scholarship in general needs to consider the complexity and range of pleasures, breaking down the binary in which, as Judith Halberstam argues, sexual identities and pleasures have been deemed as private and thus not important compared to other aspects of identity (5). I would not care to make the claim that one type of slash is more associated with pleasure than another since I have seen how different readers find different pleasures in writing different types of slash for different purposes. Much work remains to be done in fan studies, in scholarship on fan fiction, in regard to these different pleasures and different ideologies.
Selected Secondary Sources
Bacon-Smith, Camille. 1992. Enterprising women: Television fandom and the
creation of popular myth. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
---. 2000. Science fiction culture. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
Busse, Kristina. 2005. “Digital get down”: Postmodern boy band slash and the queer female space. In Eroticism in American culture, ed. Cheryl Malcolm and Jopi Nyman, 103–25. Gdansk: Gdansk Univ. Press.
Cumberland, Sharon. 2000. Private uses of cyberspace: Women, desire, and fan culture.
MIT Communications Forum. January 25. http://web.mit.edu/comm-
forum/projects/cumberland.html (accessed September 29, 2005).
Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
---. 2005. In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York:
New York Univ. Press.
Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan cultures. London: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. New
York: Routledge.
Jung, Susanne. 2004. Queering popular culture: Female spectators and the appeal of
writing slash fan fiction. Gender Forum Gender Queeries 8. http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/queer/jung.html (accessed September 29, 2005).
Penley, Constance. 1997. NASA/Trek: Popular science and sex in America. New York:
Verso.
Russ, Joanna. 1985. Pornography by women, for women, with love. In Magic mommas,
trembling sisters, Puritans and perverts: Feminist essays, 79–99. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press.
http://www.totse.com/en/erotica/erotic_fiction_o_to_p/pornogra.html (accessed September 29, 2005).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between men: English literature and male homosocial
desire. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
---. 1990. Epistemology of the closet. Berkley: Univ. of California Press. 1990.
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And regarding your article, I can't wait to read it. Moreover, I can't wait to cite it, because I've been wanting to read/reference published works on "meta" for some time now. I think you have a chance to disseminate important language that all aca-fen can use when discussing our world, whether we're slashers or not.
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The topic of this paper looks really interesting. I don't read 'femmeslash' in the normal run of things, but I do read Halberstam and Sedgwick. If this becomes available to read in its entirety, I look forward to doing so.
I've 'friended' you in order to keep up with your writing.
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