fanfic forensics

So, that preamble over with, why do women write m/m romance? There are many possible reasons because each author is different, but here are some answers which are true of many women.

Elayne Rapping, a professor of women’s studies and media studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo, said it’s such as it ever was: You can look back to classic paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries and see fully clothed men with nude women.“That’s been a constant of Western culture for centuries in representational art — that women have been presented as objects for what in film theory is called ‘the male gaze.’ The assumed viewer is male, and the woman is to be looked at for male pleasure,” she said.

The male gaze is social power, which it both draws from and reinforces. You therefore cannot have a female gaze. You can have individual objectification and desire, but there is no gaze.

your space. You're free to write whatever the hell you want in it. But, don't be surprised when people call you on your shitty behavior and poor manners. Because on livejournal, your space gets incorporated into my space. That is, afterall, what its all about.

As far as one can make out from the current squabble in other fandoms, it is not academics as such who are disregarded or disdained by other fen.  It is, almost exclusively, the Faculty of English Language and Literature who have made themselves unwelcome.  This seems to me significant.  It seems to me more significant still that it is, so far as I can determine, primarily American dons of Frenchified theoretical leanings who are making themselves unpopular with the mass of fandom.  I mean, if the academic fen in question were, say, Womersley of St Catz, Shrimpton of LMH, or Turner of Jesus, let alone Jenkyns of LMH, I shouldn’t expect the same quarrel to have arisen. My primary point is simply that this seems not to be a case in other fandoms of something I’ve never seen and don’t anticipate seeing in mine: of ‘the revolting peasants rising against their intellectual superiors’ or of ‘all academics sucking the soul out of fandom like so many Dementors’, which appear to be the two rallying cries here.  One simply doesn’t observe this sort of anger’s attaching to historians or those who read Law at university or even to wild-eyed, Balliol-Wadham-and-Grauniadista sociologists and anthropologists, at least not in my fandom.  Therefore, I submit that it is misleading and contrary to resolution of the quarrel to cast it in terms of all fen in all fandoms against all academics of all schools of thought.

Teachers sometimes complain that popular culture competes for the attention of their students, a claim that starts from the assumption that what kids learn from media is less valuable than what schools teach. Here, however, much of what is being mastered are things that schools try-and too often fail-to teach their students. (It has been said that if schools taught sex education the same way they taught writing, the human race would die out in a generation.)

such informal teaching occurs across a range of other online communities.

we could talk about young anime fans who are teaching each other Japanese language and culture in order to do underground subtitling of their favorite shows.

If the current media environment makes visible the once invisible work of media spectatorship, it is wrong to assume that we are somehow being liberated through improved media technologies. Rather than talking about interactive technologies, we should document the interactions that occur amongst media consumers, between media consumers and media texts, and between media consumers and media producers.

On-line fan communities might well be some of the most fully realized versions of Levy's cosmopedia, expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture.

Fan women routed around male hostility, developing web communities 'that combine the intimacy of small groups with a support network similar to the kind fan women create off-line.' Discussion lists, mailing groups, webrings, and chatrooms each enabled fan communication.