Back in the old days when fandom was just coming off email groups and getting into Livejournal, (2007ish) it was widely assumed by fandom itself that slash (m/m) fandom was written by straight women for straight women. This became such a truism that a lot of meta was written about why it should be so. Then a lot of meta was written about why it shouldn't be so, and we all ought to be ashamed of ourselves for (a) fetishizing gay men and (b) betraying femininity by hating women and not writing female characters.
That phase rumbled on for several years, at which time people also began to write meta that said "hold on a minute, I'm here in fandom and I am not a straight woman!"
Then gradually the more people who began to speak up about being a queer writer in fandom, the more it became blindingly obvious that fandom was a place where a lot of the writers had either been in the closet, or just hadn't known things about themselves, and that it was generally a much more queer place than had been thought.
(I know I joined fandom thinking I was a cis straight woman, and it wasn't until several years in the community that it dawned on me that I was in fact agender and asexual, and I think that was a very typical experience.)
So yeah, I haven't seen the Somerton vid, but it sounds like that part of it might have come from some ancient academic research by Henry Jenkins in particular. Now grown out of.
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Date: 2023-12-04 10:34 pm (UTC)Back in the old days when fandom was just coming off email groups and getting into Livejournal, (2007ish) it was widely assumed by fandom itself that slash (m/m) fandom was written by straight women for straight women. This became such a truism that a lot of meta was written about why it should be so. Then a lot of meta was written about why it shouldn't be so, and we all ought to be ashamed of ourselves for (a) fetishizing gay men and (b) betraying femininity by hating women and not writing female characters.
That phase rumbled on for several years, at which time people also began to write meta that said "hold on a minute, I'm here in fandom and I am not a straight woman!"
Then gradually the more people who began to speak up about being a queer writer in fandom, the more it became blindingly obvious that fandom was a place where a lot of the writers had either been in the closet, or just hadn't known things about themselves, and that it was generally a much more queer place than had been thought.
(I know I joined fandom thinking I was a cis straight woman, and it wasn't until several years in the community that it dawned on me that I was in fact agender and asexual, and I think that was a very typical experience.)
So yeah, I haven't seen the Somerton vid, but it sounds like that part of it might have come from some ancient academic research by Henry Jenkins in particular. Now grown out of.