Kristina Busse is one of the founding editors of Transformative Works and Cultures as well as the co-editor of some of the most influential works of fan studies, including Fan Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet (2006) and The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (2014). Her own monographs include Framing Fan Fiction (2017) and the forthcoming Fan Fantasies and the Politics of Desire, co-written with Alexis Lothian. She and I are also currently co-editing a book called Reading Fanfiction/Fanfiction Readings for the University of Michigan Press. –FC
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I’d like to feature two scholars whose ideas resonate in a lot of early writings on the appeal of slash fan fiction, especially as it was initially conceived of—qua Joanna Russ—as “pornography by women, for women, with love.” Both books look at a range of literary works and tease out the way psychosexual drives, historical fantasies, material realities, and cultural ideologies exclude women even as they feature centrally as objects of triangulated desire and constitutive exclusion.
Leslie A. Fiedler, Life and Death in the American Novel (1960):
An archetypal relationship…haunts the American psyche: two lonely men, one dark-skinned, one white, band together over a carefully guarded fire in the virgin heart of the American wilderness; they have forsaken all others for the sake of the austere, almost inarticulate, but unquestioned love which binds them to each other and to the world of nature which they have preferred to civilization. (187)
Eve Sedgwick, Between Men (1985):
Each of these novels sites an important plot in triangular, heterosexual romance—in the Romance tradition—and then changes its focus as if by compulsion from the heterosexual bonds of the triangle to the male-homosocial one, here called “erotic rivalry.” In these male homosocial bonds are concentrated the fantasy energies of compulsion, prohibition, and explosive violence; all are fully structured by the logic of paranoia. At the same time, however, these fantasy energies are mapped along the axes of social and political power; so that the revelation of intrapsychic structures is inextricable from the revelation of the mechanisms of class domination. (162)
–Kristina Busse, Independent scholar
Posted: Francesca Coppa