More on fandom and slash, this time with STATS and numbers.

[prozacpark]

Over the weekend, someone was arguing with me over how slash is really a small subsection of fandom and isn't really the new fandom majority. I know from experience that that's not true, but could not find any stats. But then it occured to me that a good way to break down the numbers would be to search for these cateories on AO3 and analyzing the

Comments

[lilacsigil]

In my experience, lots of slashers and femslashers post to AO3, lots of het writers post to forums and fandom-specific archives *because* there's so many of them and they're very comfortable there. I see more slashers on multi-fandom archives because there's a lot of cross-fandom continuance (e.g. lots of Inception slashers moved to XMFC and Avengers), femslashers because there's few fandom-specific femslash archives since the days of Xena.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to see the proliferation of slash (and not slash as a genre itself) as a manifestation of how patriarchal narratives train women (and men!) to mostly care about and identify with (white!) male characters while writing women and people of color out.

Yes, and I appreciate that you're phrasing this as the prevalence of slash rather than any particular writer (personally I write gen, femslash, slash and het) because talking about YOU OVER THERE doing it wrong is unhelpful, but talking about why this is a trend and how it fits into historical writing trends is useful and interesting.

Then again, there were a huge number of women writers around in the 19th century (not to mention letter-writing, which reminds me a lot of LJ), just not as respected or re-published!

[prozacpark]

You're right, and I hadn't considered het-only communities, especially when the het ship is vaguely canon. Good point, as much as it fraustrates me that I cannot get ACCURATE stats. ;) I know there was an LJ user who used to do stats on Yuletide requests and fic turn-out, specifically in terms of looking at femslash vs. slash. I may have to hunt down those entries.

Yeah, when people take you out of context, it's possible that they're being willfully ignorant, but it's also totally possible that you didn't clarify enough. So I wanted to make sure that I got it across that I don't have a problem with slash as a genre, and actually, I had quite a history of slashing before the proliferation of men in fanfiction made it so I mostly only care about female-centered narratives these days, which sort of limits me to het, femslash, and gen. But the trend is interesting (and the proliferation problematic) and worth looking at in terms of how/why women consume fiction.

Of course, women's literature is never considered WORTHY until men start participating in it in some form. When the novel emerged as a popular fictional form in the 19th century, 'true literary artists' turned their noses at it, but I suspect it was largely because it was mainly being written and consummed by women. And once men started writing novels, they somehow became elevated to the level of timeless and epic literature.

And I have no idea if this is still around in slash circles, but when I participated in those, there definitely was a feel of how slash was TRENDIER than het or femslash with WOMEN. But now I feel that we still have this attitude about slash somehow being BETTER (Lyssie's comment below about how 'good' fic writer somehow gets equated with slashers, which I have also seen a good deal of), but can we still call it edgy when it's a majority in a large number of fandoms?

[lilacsigil]

I think in the case of AO3, there's a perception that the originators were recruiting the "better" writers when in fact they were recruiting their friends, many of whom were primarily slash writers. There's obviously a knock-on effect there, where people see their friends and people in their communities posting to AO3 and follow them there. I do agree that slash is considered trendy, but I haven't seen it called edgy in about 6-7 years (slash been a big thing in X-Men fandom for about 15 years now).

Yeah, I used to write a lot of slash and when I do now, such as in the XMM ficathon this year, it still tends to be in a woman-centred story. In my case (and I'm DEFINITELY not speaking for anyone else here) I used to be the kind of baby feminist who thinks that being feminist is all about claiming male privilege and saying pink/girls/feminine things are icky and boy stuff is cool: therefore writing the "main" heroes is feminist (though at least this included Scully!). When I got to know more geeky women, I realised that I was being an idiot and what I liked was geeky stuff and while that may be gendered in popular media, I could choose how I participated. And then I started to read and write more about female characters.

[prozacpark]

Yeah, 6-7 years would be right around when I stopped slashing for the most part, which is around the time I discovered comicbooks and X-men and the draught of femslash made me focus only on that because how is it even possible that Rachel/Kitty isn't an EPIC fandom OTP? Sigh, I'll never understand this.

Culturally, we get trained to think feminine things are inferior, so that's a step a lot of feminists go through? And unfortunately, a lot of feminists never get beyond that. Which is part of why the whole "strong women" thing in fandom sometimes makes me worry because fandom has a very specific idea of STRONG, whereas, I tend to like characters for their weaknesses and flaws, so I half want to add "weak female characters" as an LJ interest. ;) Because I enjoy all women in fiction, and we need variety to fight the streotypes. And what you said about reclaiming your geeky narratives makes a lot of sense to me. I admit that when I am consuming a new media, I often anticipate getting through it really fast so I can get to all the fanfic about all the WOMEN in the text. Few texts have women as the main protagonist (and I admit that even when they do, I often end up falling for the women in the background since I do tend to lean towards anti-heroines), but that's a gap fanfic fills for me by telling me stories about the women canon didn't care for, which is part of why I get so fraustrated when I see women slowly disappearing from fanfiction.