Group items tagged

"To base queer readings only upon notions of audience and reception leaves you open to the kind of dismissive attitude that sees queer understandings of popular culture as being the result of 'wishful thinking' about a text or 'appropriation' of a text by a cultural and/or critical special interest group" (4).

Rhetoric is basically a pedagogical discipline comprising a number of pedagogical principles, where one is the principle of imitatio. According to the imitatio principle you have to, very actively, collect an arsenal of different strategies in the process of learning how to write and present a material.

With focus on imitatio and from perspectives such as genre, intertextuality, narratology, semiotics, we discuss the creation process of fan fiction in general and slash in particular.  

Further, and crucially, fic is a form of discourse that does not just analyse canon – it has the power to add to and change it as fanon and canon mix, encouraging ongoing reinterpretation and reframing of canon within the fanon/canon ‘verse as a whole.

Reading and writing fic remains a more popular online activity than taking part in meta discussion, but are the two activities so very different?

Harry Potter

However, the various academic accounts written about yaoi have a tendency to pathologize yaoi as well as its female fans in terms of gender displacement, female sexual oppression, or sexual starvation.

how Queer Theory can assist the academic discussion of yaoi and slash, and counter the tendency to pathologize.

The British television show Torchwood has generated a vast amount of fan fiction. Among these stories are some which involve human-animal transformations.

  In this paper I intend to study how the human-animal transformations are described in a selected number of fanfic texts.

Can these stories be read as a comment on the relation between human and animal, or should the animal in this context rather be read as merely a symbol or a plot device?

Ludology, the academic study of games, has maintained a critical distinction that, fundamentally, a game cannot contain a narrative, as its focus is more oriented toward necessarily non-narrative interaction between the game and its players.  Fan fiction seems capable of exploding, or at least complicating, this claim, as the process of a writer’s active and creative engagement with a previously existing storyworld, expressed through fan fiction, appears clearly to meet the requirements both for a game,

close readings

In existing studies on fan fiction, it has been established that the majority of previous studies have been ethnographical or social in nature. Only very recently have studies on the literary aspects of fan fiction begun to emerge.

Of course not all fans responded this way but even the well-meaning comments made in defense of David's actions served to erase his identity as a gay man. I described these fans as textual gamekeepers. Unlike the slash fiction writers who poach by queering the characters that have been written by the producers as straight, these fans "straightened out" the gay storylines. I bet there's a whole lot more textual gamekeeping going on in fandom that has yet to be uncovered.

Some scholars posit that today all viewers are interpellated as fans, that they are invited to engage fannishly by creating content and engaging within an imaginary online community. Does this mean that the old subcultural stance of media fandom has become obsolete in the face of a general shift in media consumption? Moreover, if such convergence can allow fans to become parts of the media industry, should fans embrace these options? And how are these economic issues deeply gendered if predominantly female spaces embrace gift cultures while men are more likely to turn their fannish endeavors into for-profit projects?

Fandom is always more complicated than the stories we tell about it, and scholars need to be careful not to create an imaginary feminist idyll. Simply inverting the gaze may keep subject/object relations unquestioned—a concern that has become especially important as queer and trans studies have complicated any naive feminist binaries that may have held sway during early years of media fandom. Likewise, as [End Page 106] De Kosnik and Russo illustrate, an unequivocal embrace of noncommodified fan work remains problematic within a world that requires paying the bills.

Both otaku and fujoshi

The moe character is a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and the response to its virtual potentials is affect.

Massumi argues affect is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential (Massumi 2002). The experience, what he calls an 'intensity,' is outside of logical language and conscious control. Moe provides a word to express affect, or to identify a form that resonates and can trigger an intensity.

It is for this reason that moe is consistently misunderstood as first and foremost images of young girls instead of a response to virtual potentials

In the field interacting with otaku and fujoshi, I was constantly confronted by the concept of moe, and found it necessary to engage it.

These are both men and their discourse centers on male otaku, but I will argue from them a more general theory, applied later in the paper to fujoshi structures of desire.

Honda, a youth-oriented novelist and self-styled moe critic, defines moe as 'imaginary love'

the salient point is his judgment that a relationship with a mediated character or material representations of it is preferable to an interpersonal relationship.

the moe man is feminized

While recognizing the conservative nature of otaku sexuality, Azuma attempts to account for the schizophrenic presence of perversion in the moe image. For Azuma, otaku are postmodern subjects with multiple personalities engendered by their environment and enthusiastic media consumption

To feel moe for all characters in all situations, the narrative connecting characters or moments in time is de-emphasized.

cat ears,

response is unconnected with 'reality' and thus offers new potentials to construct and express affects.

Separating their desire from reality allowed for a new form of affect called moe.

conditioning of young girls into 'pure consumers'

Such a space is disconnected from social and political concerns, and exists for the preservation of the individual.

the media and consumption feeding into moe is a specific sort centered on affect.

Manga scholar Itou Gou argues that since the end of the 1980s characters in anime, manga and videogames became so appealing that fans desired them even without stories (Itou 2005). Ito dubs such character types 'kyara,' distinct from characters (kyarakutaa) embedded in narratives.

Proof of this can be found in the rise of 'parody' doujinshi,

The doll-like and semi-human Ayanami became the single most popular and influential character in the history of otaku anime; fans still isolate parts of the character to amplify and rearticulate in fan-produced works to inspire moe.

virtual potentiality

'moe otaku' a superficial fixation on surfaces and accelerated consumption of disposable moe kyara, impetus for him to declare this younger generation culturally 'dead'

One man I spoke with said, 'Moe is a wish for compassionate human interaction. Moe is a reaction to characters that are more sincere and pure than human beings are today.' Similarly, another man described moe as 'the ultimate expression of male platonic love.' This, he said, was far more stable and rewarding than 'real' love could ever be. Manga artist Akamatsu Ken stresses that moe is the 'maternal love' (boseiai) latent in men,[xxi] and a 'pure love' (junsui na ai) unrelated to sex, the desire to be calmed when looking at a female infant (biyoujo wo mite nagomitai) (Akamatsu 2005). 'The moe target is dependent on us for security (a child, etc.) or won't betray us (a maid, etc.). Or we are raising it (like a pet)' (Akamatsu 2005). This desire to 'nurture' (ikusei) characters is extremely common among fans. Further, moe is about the moment of affect and resists changes ('betrayal') in the future, or what Akamatsu refers to as a 'moratorium' (moratoriamu). Moe media is approached as something of a sanctuary from society (Okada 2008), and as such is couched in a discourse of purity.

I will now demonstrate how it is further possible to reduce people to characters, or to reduce reality to fantasy in pursuit of moe.

Association with the two-dimensional world, and lack of depth or access in the three-dimensional world, makes a maid moe.[

The appeal of the maid cannot purely be sexual: As many as 35 per cent of customers are women

this arose in Japan in the late stages of capitalism as a result of shifts in consumer-information society

bias towards male fans of anim

aoi erases the female presence because fans say female-male or even female-female couples[xxxvi] are too 'raw' (namanamashii). Put another way, the reality of relationships is removed from yaoi to make the moe response possible.

the ambiguous yaoi 'male' is quite literally a body without organs

Many other fujoshi I spoke with dated men even as they imagined possibilities of coupling them as characters with other men.[xl] As Saitou points out, the reality of heterosexual relationships and virtual possibilities of homosexual couplings are separate and coexistent (Saitou 2007). Journalist Sugiura Yumiko explains this as the crucial difference between fujoshi and otaku, who approach fantasy as an alternative for things that they actually want but cannot realize in this world (Sugiura 2006).[xli] A fujoshi, for example, would not 'marry' a two-dimensional character the way some otaku advocate;

Sugiura is importantly highlighting that fantasy and reality are separate and coexistent, but this is widespread in moe culture and not solely a female quality.[xlii] As much as male otaku boast of their two-dimensional wives, they often do so with levity as a self-conscious performance

While it is true that men tend to feel moe for single characters that they can possess while women feel moe for relationships or character couplings, this broad difference is fast disappearing. In truth, the media popular among so-called 'moe otaku' in recent years has come to resemble yaoi aesthetics: multiple girls in a nostalgic or fantastic world with minimal male presence and heightened emphasis on relationships and emotions

In all cases, the database (Azuma 2009) is present. The elements that constitute and indicate a certain type of top or bottom, for example glasses or hairstyle or height, are predetermined; any given top or bottom is a construct of defined character traits and behavior.

One of the most recognizable features of the moe phenomenon is the anthropomorphization of objects into objects of desire. Otaku turn cats, war machines, household appliances and even men of historical significance into beautiful little girls to trigger moe. Reality is flattened, and from it emerge polymorphous forms of stimulation. Similarly, fujoshi can rearticulate anything into beautiful boys and sexualized yaoi relations. Moe characters can be based on a written description or drawn image, a physical person or even anthropomorphized animals, plants and objects.

The erotic fantasy effectively re-mystified their world, adding a layer of potential to the mundane (the very ground under their feet!) and making the familiar queer and exciting. Latent potential so unlocked, the three friends replayed the moe relationship across other potential players such as shampoo and conditioner, knife and spoon, salt and pepper.

More startling and subversive is 'moe politics' (seiji moe), where national histories, international relations and imposing world leaders are reduced to moe characters across which yaoi romance can be read.

It should be noted that Hetaria was written by a man, and these sorts of stories are becoming increasingly popular among young men known as 'fudanshi' (rotten boys).

it precisely because it is pure that it can give birth to such perverse and polymorphous possibilities.

Indeed, melodrama, like many cultural forms associated with "female interests," is simultaneously omnipresent in television and yet continuously undervalued; it is that which must be avoided if a show is to be considered "quality"

Indeed, some forms of slash are completely committed to the exploration of intimacies in the most taboo, fantastic, or simply impossible situations. Wincest might be an example of one such type; certainly incest is a kind of impossible situation.

To invoke the term queer in relation to slash is to enter onto controversial ground. Even so, it is the case that, for some fans, an investment in a community and even an identity was part of the small but virulent negative reaction to "Monster," an episode whose clever and occasionally aggressive metatextual play triggered feelings of hurt, exposure, and outrage.

Concurrently, the writer Siege displays a keen understanding of the emotional investments of a large segment of Supernatural's audience, as the publisher drools over Sam and Dean's moments of angst, sighing: "It's just the best when they cry."

Clearly, there is something emotionally alluring for fans about the idea of being known.

A milder and more frequent kind of complaint invoked expectations of privacy. Despite—or because of—the understanding that Wincest is a potential violation of the sensibilities of Kripke, or of the actors who portray the characters in question, there was and is a feeling that the references to Wincest are exposing something that should remain within the community.