bert-and-ernie-are-gay:“A Notational Erotics: Locating (Queer) Female Desire in Supernatural Slash F
bert-and-ernie-are-gay:“A Notational Erotics: Locating (Queer) Female Desire in Supernatural Slash Fanfiction”: the director’s cut! now available for download*[*and in fact you gotta download if you wanna see the GIFs giffing & read the excessively voluminous notes, aka actual presentation through which I raced]Samuel Delany endorsed a popular misconception when he asserted: “Slash is usually written by straight women…[and] appeals to straight women in the same way lesbian sequences in commercial pornography appeal to straight men” (2001). His pronouncement is directly contradicted, however, by recent data; comprehensive surveys indicate female reader-writers of slash that pairs male characters overwhelmingly identify, on the contrary, as lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, queer, and every orientation other than heterosexual.Delany’s statement not only dismisses female-authored slash but speaks to a more widespread invalidation of female desire, voicing an aspect of our culture’s attempt to police it, whereas transformative works have offered an opportunity to visualize and enact sexual relationships freed from the power imbalance of gender politics (Bacon-Smith 1992, Russ 1985). I further argue that the form and structure of slash itself provides participants with a stabilizing set of signifiers which yields information about what might be erotically and emotionally valuable to this audience: what constitutes an act of intimacy and arousal in female thinking, even when portrayed via the discursive male body.This paper explores the idea that the tropes and traits of slash offer its reader-writers what I call “notational erotics.” These instances—the themes, behaviors, characterizations, utterances, visual descriptions, exposition, and other typified and repeated textual cues—can be read as a rubric to interpret fanfiction in terms of female desire and pervasive concerns about misogyny, identity, and rape culture (to name only a few problematic aspects of being gendered into the object position). In particular I focus on the high volume of slash written around the CW Network’s genre show Supernatural, considering specific and disparate examples of notational erotics which can be catalogued and examined for their usage, derivations, causality, consequence, and meaning.Massive gratitude to a gabillion fanfic writers (who will all be cited more fully and thoroughly in the still-in-progress paper/chapter/book, and obviously I’ll also be contacting everyone before anything hits actual print, which may actually happen someday, just to make sure you’re totally cool with having your pseudonymous fic thusly analyzed in terms of literary theory but in this particular presentation I only had time/space (barely) to quote from the work of: tiptoe39, unlockaflockofwords, greymichaela, rageprufrock, psychofink, xylodemon, and bettydays (the latter of whom did her level best at the eleventh hour to make order from PPT chaos, as well as patiently listening to me rave incoherently at her from the parking lot of an Apple Store the anxious night beforehand, as she surreptitiously took extremely useful notes).And there aren’t words to express my debt to the invaluable work of centrumlumina, whose meticulous statistics (like those of destinationtoast) have been the backbone for everything I’ve thought and done from the very beginning of this ongoing project, a little over a year (?!) ago.In conclusion I adore all y’all beloved slash reader-writers, so much. I can hardly wait to make you all, uh, sort of academically famous (though most of you already have as much AO3 notoriety as you can probably handle).Problems, concerns, delights, appreciations, bones to pick, stuff with which you disagree vehemently, things with which to hound me? [email protected]; and I really would be happy to hear what you think. In fact, my whole raison d’être right now involves hearing what slash practitioners think. Plus I’m not only utterly human but also overworked and exhausted so I make lots of mistakes, and the only way I ever learn anything is through screwing up and reorienting and trying again; so feel no hesitation in thusly thinking at me. -- source link
#fandom culture