Erotic Fanfiction As a Form of Cultural
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\Slight dub-con but they both wanted it hardcore": Erotic fanfiction as a form of cultural activism around sexual consent Milena Popova A Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of the West of England for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education University of the West of England, Bristol October 2017 Abstract In this thesis I argue that the treatment of issues of sexual consent in erotic fanfiction can be viewed as a form of cultural activism. Using a combination of traditional, digital and autoethnography, as well as discourse analysis, I trace engagements with sexual consent among readers and writers of erotic fanfiction both in their creative output published on sites such as the Archive of Our Own and in their conversations and day-to-day interactions with each other as well as beyond the fandom community. The original contribution of this work is two-fold. Firstly, it maps in detail some of the ways in which sexual consent, particularly in the presence of power differentials, is treated in erotic fanfiction. I argue that through the use of techniques particular to fanfiction, readers and writers within this community are able to issue powerful challenges to dominant discourses about gender, romance, sexuality, and consent. Secondly, I argue that these engagements can be viewed as a distinct form of cultural activism. While cultural activism is traditionally seen as directed outwards to the general public, the production, circulation, and discussion of fanfiction allows the community to form powerful alternative imaginaries of sexuality and consent, make prefigurative gestures, and establish a praxis of consent within the community itself. The knowledges generated in these ways are then applied to community members' own day-to-day lives and engagements with sexuality, consent, and rape culture. This points to the fanfiction community as a source of a powerful discursive resistance on issues of rape and consent, and supports an expansion of the definition of cultural activism to cover activities directed at challenging internalised dominant discourses within the boundaries of a community. ii Acknowledgements There are so many people without whose encouragement, support, and wisdom I would not be here. Some of you got me to the beginning. Thanks are due to Ada Cable for running out of a room to put her name on a piece of paper, thereby inadvertently starting all this; to Professor Roger Eatwell, for not giving up on me during my wilderness years; to Dr Catherine Baker for early encouragement and feedback on draft research proposals; to Dr Rachael Livermore and Dr Harriet Archer for sharing their experiences. Many more of you made sure I got to the end. I would like to thank my amazing supervision team: Professor Jonathan Dovey for being the most challenging and most supportive of critics, and for getting excited about my work; Dr Esther MacCallum-Stewart for becoming the critical writing voice in my head; Estella Tincknell for making sure I had good answers to questions about why I didn't do things differently. No supervisors were cried on in the making of this thesis. This is to their credit more than mine. Thank you to my examiners, Professor Clarissa Smith and Dr Sherryl Wilson, for engaging with my work on its own merits and making my viva a genuinely constructive and collaborative experience. Huge thanks to my partner, Dr Paul Wady, for the epistemology squabbles and asking about the scatter plots, for valuable comments and practical help, and above all for the unwavering support in all my undertakings. Thanks also to my parents, Mimoza Popova and Ivo Popov, and my grandmother Stanka Daskalova for moral and financial support (and particularly to my father for asking \Are you writing?" every time he spoke to me over the course of three years|I look foward to returning the favour). I am grateful to Dr Martin Nyx Brain for trying to talk me out of this and, once that had failed, providing advice, expertise, and invaluable material support. Thanks to Charlie Ann Page for, despite having a name designed to fuck with citation systems, fixing mine. iii Thank you to my amazing support network who made sure I got out of the house and spoke to actual humans once in a while: Charlie (again), Fi, Tory, Debbie; Dom, Judith, Warren, Weeza, Mead, Andy, Carina; Rose and Joe. Thanks to Luke Rudge for supporting my endeavours to foster a PhD community. Thanks to Jackie Barker for starting the Bath Shut Up And Write group, for sharing and halving sorrows, for generously proofreading the almost-final draft, and for an amazing friendship. Thank you to Bethan Jones for her collegial support and being an awesome partner in crime. Cultural Theorist Cat was with me through all of this, so very nearly up to the viva. He graciously let me live with him and slightly-less-graciously let me look after him, sometimes. His praxis of consent was an inspiration, and he is sorely missed. Finally, I have greatly appreciated the caffeination and office space that Comins Teahouse have provided over the last 18 months. Contents 1 Introduction 5 1.1 The grey areas of rape culture . 6 1.2 Erotic fanfiction and consent . 8 1.3 Aims and objectives . 10 1.4 Structure of the work . 11 2 Literature Review 16 2.1 Introduction . 16 2.2 Power, oppression, and resistance in culture . 17 2.2.1 The audience and the message . 17 2.2.2 From hegemony to discourse . 19 2.2.3 Representation and resistance: approaches from the margins . 21 2.2.4 Cultural activisms . 25 2.3 Sexual consent . 27 2.3.1 Power/agency: two approaches to consent . 27 2.3.2 Attempts to reconcile power and negotiation: unwanted sex . 30 2.3.3 The different discourses of sex: the law . 32 2.3.4 The different discourses of sex: psychology . 36 1 CONTENTS 2 2.3.5 Culture's dual role in constructing sex: porn, romance, consent . 39 2.4 Fan studies . 44 2.4.1 Studying texts/studying fans . 44 2.4.2 Meaning-making in fanfiction: dense intertextuality/communal practices . 46 2.4.3 Slash: sexualising equality/romancing porn? . 52 2.5 Research questions . 56 3 Methodology 58 3.1 Introduction . 58 3.2 Ethnography and discourse analysis: an unlikely partnership? . 59 3.3 The role of the ethnographer in online settings . 61 3.4 From site to journey: ethnography for the internet . 66 3.5 Follow the trope . 71 3.6 Temporality . 78 3.7 afk . 81 3.8 Conclusion . 84 4 \Dogfuck Rapeworld" 86 4.1 Introduction . 86 4.2 The Omegaverse . 87 4.3 Sexual scripts . 90 4.4 Three stories representing the Omegaverse . 93 4.5 Sexual scripts in the Omegaverse: the question of gender . 95 4.6 Negotiating disjunctures in sexual scripts . 98 4.7 Porn, affect, and the Omegaverse as an analytical tool . 104 4.8 Conclusion . 108 CONTENTS 3 5 Rewriting the Romance 110 5.1 Introduction . 110 5.2 Romance, work, emotion . 113 5.3 Thor/Loki Arranged Marriage . 121 5.4 Thor/Loki and the inequalities of marriage . 123 5.5 Emotion Work and the Happily Ever After . 129 5.6 Marriage consummation . 133 5.7 Conclusion . 139 6 Blurred Lines 141 6.1 Introduction . 141 6.2 Real Person(a) Fiction in the wider fanfiction context . 142 6.3 Rape: culture, perception, the law . 144 6.4 Home ice: studying my fandom . 145 6.5 Humanising the law . 148 6.6 Living our values . 159 6.7 Conclusion . 166 7 The Praxis of Consent 167 7.1 Introduction . 167 7.2 Schr¨odinger'sauthor: dead and alive . 169 7.3 Mainstream media, fanfiction, consent . 171 7.4 Exploring sexuality|breaking defaults|challenging the law . 178 7.5 From practice to text/from text to praxis . 189 7.6 Conclusion . 196 CONTENTS 4 8 Epilogue 198 8.1 Summary of findings . 198 8.2 Limitations and future directions . 204 8.3 Impact/activism . 209 A Interview Questionnaire 211 Chapter 1 Introduction You know what the magic word| the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is one thing. You can do anything. The left will promote, and understand, and tolerate anything as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine, whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left. Rush Limbaugh, October 2016 (Media Matters, 2016) This is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life. The fact that he now has to register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life forever alters where he can live, visit, work, and how he will be able to interact with people and organizations. Dan A. Turner, June 2016 (Cleary, 2016) It is not clear how anyone is supposed to prove that consent was given. Is the CPS really suggesting that you have to get a signed statement off someone before they have sex? Philip Davies MP, January 2015 (Drury, 2015) 5 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 6 1.1 The grey areas of rape culture American talk radio host Rush Limbaugh defends then Presidential candidate Donald Trump for boasting about how he can \grab [women] by the pussy" (Jacobs, Siddiqui and Bixby, 2016) by casting the idea of sexual consent as a strange, outlandish, immoral invention of \the left".