metameta (?): Homosexuality at Online Hogwarts

I was sick on Thursday and couldn't make it to class, so here's my 2 cents on the Tosenberger paper! (...Am I doing this right? Pls send help)


I thought it was interesting that Tosenberger starts off by summarizing what fanfiction is (and isn't). The article was published in a journal called "Childen's Literature" (I think?) so perhaps there aren't a ton of articles concerning fics in this category? (I would've thought there would be though, so maybe this kind of intro is just standard protocol.) I wasn't sure if I agreed with her definition of fanfiction, specifically regarding how she says that "Fanfiction (“fanfic” or “fic,” for short) differs from other forms of “recursive” fiction (Langford 805)—such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning March, and every Sherlock Holmes pastiche ever created—by its unofficial methods of distribution" (185). Like, y'all, what the heck is an official method of distribution?? There's a lot of Jane Austen fanfiction (JAFF) that's gotten published, so has it graduated from fanfic status? I guess we could also assume it has to have "widespread" distribution in pop culture -- a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- but even then, I'd argue that fanfiction could accomplish that. Idk man

I thought this line was particularly striking: "In short, the insistence that slash must transgress the existing canon rather troublingly assigns to the canon a heteronormativity it may not necessarily possess" (187). It reminds me of the "Why is Straight the Default?" scene from "Love, Simon," and the fact that nearly all the YA novels I consumed as a kid had a white, (presumably) straight protagonist. (I remember really distinctly this one time in 7th grade where I'd been reading a book and about halfway through realized the protag wasn't white. I literally stopped for moment and went "wait, what?" because the image I'd had in my head -- 'according to the dictates of YA lit' /s -- was wrong.) There's a quote by Julad later: "[S]lash is not so much queer in the act as it is queer in the space . . . . Slash is a sandbox where women come to be strange and unusual, or to do strange and unusual things, or to play with strange and unusual sand" (190). I feel like the association of queerness and strangeness is still there for a lot of fans (like Julad), although it is not necessarily meant to be a negative one. (It's kinda hard to see "strangeness" as not having a negative connotation though, so maybe it's sorta sarcastic and riffing off our heteronormative society?)


This article was the first time I'd heard the terms "buddyslash," "enemyslash," and "powerslash." (I've heard them more as tropes/tags like "friends to lovers" or "enemies to lovers" so it's interesting that academics seem to have created their own terms to avoid using ones that might be more unwieldy?) Tosenberger goes on to talk about how early slash fics tended to address homophobia as an obstacle that their pairing had to overcome, and how that trend is (mostly) fading. In the future, when non-heterosexual relationships are (hopefully) treated as equal to heterosexual ones, I wonder if the idea of "slash" will still hold? (Will writers still feel the need to make a distinction?)