Prophecy Granger Snape Proposal (note shameless key word abuse)
What does one say when one hasn't posted for six months? I'm alive? Oh, yay! I've been thinking about posting for weeks now, for months ... but then an inner voice always kicks in: "You idiot. They think you're dead or gone to Antarctica." And the longer you wait, the more idiotic you feel.
I guess I've finally reached my idiot tipping-point. So here we are. Hello to friends who still remember me! (And thank you again, dear Lorena and JuneW, for your messages the other day!)
To redeem this post from complete pointlessness, two items:
I'm going to Prophecy! I also know a bit about Toronto, even though as a Vancouverite I'm not supposed to say anything good about it. But damn, there are some great places to see there. And eat there. So anyone who's going ... for god's sake, don't restrict yourself to the hotel food! Let me at least show you Kensington Market. Or we could invade Chinatown.
And I'm doing a workshop on--can you guess?--Granger/Snape..
Still Out of Bounds: Transgressive student-teacher relationships in Granger/Snape fan fiction
At Lumos in 2006, I gave a talk entitled “Out of bounds? Transgressive Granger/Snape fan fiction and online communities.” I explored how inequalities in gender and power relations in this pairing were portrayed by three controversial pieces of fan-fiction: pieces that, when published, triggered contentious and at times painful debate within online fan communities. I argued that common fan-fiction tropes used in these and other stories-notably forgiving or falling in love with a rapist, or being on the receiving end of non-consensual sex or violence-allow women as writers and readers to work through a range of sexual and power dynamics: situations unavailable to them or far too risky to deal with in real life.
Unsurprisingly, some took issue with that argument. Shortly after Lumos, an article in The Observer expressed “annoyance” that the “female empowerment” focus of the presentation glossed over the fact that Granger/Snape fics depict “a relationship between a teenage girl and a fortysomething man, which often, it transpires, takes the form of a rape narrative” (Cadwalladr, 2006). Its occasional inaccuracies aside, this comment highlights a fundamental, and just as canonically transgressive, element of the Granger/Snape pairing: the student-teacher relationship. I now take up that theme in this proposed workshop, which analyzes fanfics in which Severus Snape, male professor and Hermione Granger, female student, engage in both consensual and non-consensual emotional or sexual relationships.
The workshop taps briefly into historical and feminist sources to trace attitudes about student-teacher sex and power relations, then invites discussion about student/teacher sexual relationships in several Granger/Snape fics (with a brief look at how this theme also plays out in Snape/Harry slash). Why is this theme so compelling to a number of fanfic readers and writers? Is there any way to reconcile such a transgressive theme with real-life limits and controls over student-teacher relationships, not to mention the moral and canonical boundaries of JK Rowling's universe?
=====
I have a number of Granger/Snape fics kindly recommended from last year that I'm looking at first for the workshop. But would anyone like to recommend some suitable Snarry as my "comparison"?
More to come. Honestly. Even though I'm now on FaceBook and wondering how the hell I'm going to keep up with that. Not even to mention the fun times I experience buying clothes for my beautiful purple-haired avatar in Second Life ... !
I guess I've finally reached my idiot tipping-point. So here we are. Hello to friends who still remember me! (And thank you again, dear Lorena and JuneW, for your messages the other day!)
To redeem this post from complete pointlessness, two items:
I'm going to Prophecy! I also know a bit about Toronto, even though as a Vancouverite I'm not supposed to say anything good about it. But damn, there are some great places to see there. And eat there. So anyone who's going ... for god's sake, don't restrict yourself to the hotel food! Let me at least show you Kensington Market. Or we could invade Chinatown.
And I'm doing a workshop on--can you guess?--Granger/Snape..
Still Out of Bounds: Transgressive student-teacher relationships in Granger/Snape fan fiction
At Lumos in 2006, I gave a talk entitled “Out of bounds? Transgressive Granger/Snape fan fiction and online communities.” I explored how inequalities in gender and power relations in this pairing were portrayed by three controversial pieces of fan-fiction: pieces that, when published, triggered contentious and at times painful debate within online fan communities. I argued that common fan-fiction tropes used in these and other stories-notably forgiving or falling in love with a rapist, or being on the receiving end of non-consensual sex or violence-allow women as writers and readers to work through a range of sexual and power dynamics: situations unavailable to them or far too risky to deal with in real life.
Unsurprisingly, some took issue with that argument. Shortly after Lumos, an article in The Observer expressed “annoyance” that the “female empowerment” focus of the presentation glossed over the fact that Granger/Snape fics depict “a relationship between a teenage girl and a fortysomething man, which often, it transpires, takes the form of a rape narrative” (Cadwalladr, 2006). Its occasional inaccuracies aside, this comment highlights a fundamental, and just as canonically transgressive, element of the Granger/Snape pairing: the student-teacher relationship. I now take up that theme in this proposed workshop, which analyzes fanfics in which Severus Snape, male professor and Hermione Granger, female student, engage in both consensual and non-consensual emotional or sexual relationships.
The workshop taps briefly into historical and feminist sources to trace attitudes about student-teacher sex and power relations, then invites discussion about student/teacher sexual relationships in several Granger/Snape fics (with a brief look at how this theme also plays out in Snape/Harry slash). Why is this theme so compelling to a number of fanfic readers and writers? Is there any way to reconcile such a transgressive theme with real-life limits and controls over student-teacher relationships, not to mention the moral and canonical boundaries of JK Rowling's universe?
=====
I have a number of Granger/Snape fics kindly recommended from last year that I'm looking at first for the workshop. But would anyone like to recommend some suitable Snarry as my "comparison"?
More to come. Honestly. Even though I'm now on FaceBook and wondering how the hell I'm going to keep up with that. Not even to mention the fun times I experience buying clothes for my beautiful purple-haired avatar in Second Life ... !