zen's review
4.0
Very insightful analysis of fanfic tropes and communities under a queerfeminist lens, particularly for what concerns sexual consent. As someone who’s pretty much outside of the RPF sphere, the Hockey RPF essays was particularly interesting.
I’d say my only issue with this is in chapter 7, when it is argued that “[the fact that] the author meant to write a romantic relationship is of less importance than the abusive relationship that the audience is reading.” And while this is something that actually happens in fandom, I also feel like it’s not something that’s always positive.
By which I mean that fans are capable of reading texts and subtexts and understanding that some canon relationships are indeed written from a perspective that’s steeped in rape culture, but other times it’s the fans themselves that can’t seem to overcome their own biases and therefore see an abusive relationship even when it isn’t there.
This happens a lot when there are BDSM dynamics involved (which is another community that relies on deep discussions on and around consent, which isn’t well-known in vanilla spaces), and it is even more obvious when canon works come from a different culture where there might be different ways (sometimes subtler, maybe because of censorship) to express concepts and narratives. The essay feels a bit lacking exactly because this possibility—fans misinterpreting things—isn’t even touched on, not even in the epilogue where the topic of racism in fandom gets its own couple of paragraphs.
I don’t think that this devalues the points made by the book as a whole, but I think there is still a lot to say on the topic and I’d love to read more discussions on it.
I’d say my only issue with this is in chapter 7, when it is argued that “[the fact that] the author meant to write a romantic relationship is of less importance than the abusive relationship that the audience is reading.” And while this is something that actually happens in fandom, I also feel like it’s not something that’s always positive.
By which I mean that fans are capable of reading texts and subtexts and understanding that some canon relationships are indeed written from a perspective that’s steeped in rape culture, but other times it’s the fans themselves that can’t seem to overcome their own biases and therefore see an abusive relationship even when it isn’t there.
This happens a lot when there are BDSM dynamics involved (which is another community that relies on deep discussions on and around consent, which isn’t well-known in vanilla spaces), and it is even more obvious when canon works come from a different culture where there might be different ways (sometimes subtler, maybe because of censorship) to express concepts and narratives. The essay feels a bit lacking exactly because this possibility—fans misinterpreting things—isn’t even touched on, not even in the epilogue where the topic of racism in fandom gets its own couple of paragraphs.
I don’t think that this devalues the points made by the book as a whole, but I think there is still a lot to say on the topic and I’d love to read more discussions on it.
shroudofthesea's review
3.0
while it’s certainly refreshing to see many of these topics tackled in a semi-scholarly setting, i found the argument presented in this book to be fairly repetitive and only really addressed the ethical complexities of fan spaces towards the very end (and even then, i would’ve liked to see more head-on grappling with the fact that not every depiction of “dubcon” in fanfiction is created equal)
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