ATTENTION, F-LIST! IMPORTANT!
As some of you may know, I have a paper to write for my Queer American Studies class. It's going to be about slash fanfiction (and comparing it to lesbian and gay pulp, yadda, yadda). Well, I'm going to need your lovely opinions, fellow fanfic writers and readers. I want to take a bit of an information survey as well as get your opinion and strike
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Age: 21
Gender: female
Sex: prefer not to define (I'm uber-liberal like that XD), meaning that I've only ever been attracted to males but there's no reason I wouldn't be attracted to a female sometime
Nationality: American
Writer/Reader/Both?: both
What do you believe dominates fanfiction and why?: slash-fanfiction tends to be about going beyond the canon and fulfilling wishes. LGBT relationships tend to be extremely marginalized in mainstream culture media of any sort, so fanfiction authors want to do something about it.
Also! A lot of popular media are very male-dominated-I'm speaking as someone involved in the Star Trek fandom, where we have one major female character, and one or two minor female characters. Rather than throw random females into the mix (like the actual shows/books/movies do...), fanfiction authors usually want to work with established chemistries.
On a whole, do you think slash fanfiction is mainly written by females? Why do you think that is, if you do think this?: Yes-there is still a lot of societal taboo for males to act any way that isn't totally masculine. I wrote a paper on bullying of LGBT students and read a court case of a student who was physically assaulted, called names, and had a knife pulled on him at school because he didn't act sufficiently masculine. Guys can think lesbian sex is hot because two naked girls are involved, but liking slash automatically paints them as "gay." Sadly, it is still an insulting term for a lot of men.
What do you believe male fanfiction authors write the most of?: I have no idea, sorry!
What is your view on the representations of gay/lesbian/bi/trans/ect. in fanfiction? I have more experience with male gay/bi characters than anything else, so I'll stick to that. Sometimes authors try to feminize one of the men in the relationship to fit more with the heteronormative standards of our society. I'm a little guilty of that myself-I'll pick one character to be super protective of the other. There is definitely a dichotomy of protector/protected that in some ways mimics stereotypes of heterosexual relationships. Some people will pick a character to constantly "bottom," which sometimes has the effect of feminizing that character. This isn't to say that gay males who are not the dominant partner are feminine, but when authors choose one character who is always on the receiving end for no apparent reason and no connection to canon, it often leads to them giving that character more stereotypically feminine traits.
If you write fanfiction, would you allow me to use your fanfiction (and cited, of course) in my paper?: Yes, absolutely! I'd love to help.
Anything else? Good luck! <3
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I should also mention that these are just some issues I've noticed, but I generally don't have a problem with it.
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