Submissives, Nekos and Futanaris: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Glee Kink Meme
| Academic Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Submissives, Nekos and Futanaris: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Glee Kink Meme |
| Commentator: | Hannah Ellison |
| Date(s): | May 2013 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Glee |
| External Links: | https://www.readkong.com/page/submissives-nekos-and-futanaris-a-quantitative-and-6880567 |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Submissives, Nekos and Futanaris: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Glee Kink Meme is a 2013 article by Hannah Ellison, of the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. It was published in Participations: Journal of Audience and Perception Studies.
Excerpts
While general fanfic authors can, and often do, ignore the requests of reviewers, kink meme works only exist because of requests; the system is built on a notion of co-authorship. However, works are written with both the requester and the community as a whole in mind. Stories are written ‘for’ the requester but there is a system of seconding and thirding requests so that particularly popular ones gain more attention and are more likely to be filled.As such, the way in which the GKM is catalogued and archived has to support the ever present push and pull between the array of topics and fans’ very detailed desires. It has to allow for both those who want to write and those looking for stories they want to read to be very specific in their interests. Not everyone wants to read about Kurt Hummell receiving oral sex from his teacher but many may want to read about him receiving oral sex from his boyfriend. All stories are archived and can be searched for by one term or many terms in conjunction, allowing for someone to either find all the Kurt based stories, all the “dirty talk” stories or all the ones which involve both Kurt and “dirty talk”.
The GKM then becomes both a queer, inclusive playground of writing in which a panoply of interests are catered for and a repository for those looking for something specific.
However, while specificity is the modus operandi of the GKM its other defining element is tolerance. One of the main rules of the site is ‘Your kink is not my kink (and that’s OK)’. While one reader may visit the GKM in search of stories in which Rachel Berry loses her virginity that does not allow them to deride stories in which she engages with multiple sexual partners at once. In fact, there is a distinct lack of criticism and negativity throughout the meme. If a particular story does not interest, or even upsets a reader, the onus is on them to simply not read it. There is also a strong adherence to a policy of warning triggers; that is ensuring that in the ‘title’ of the piece any issue which might prove traumatic reading for some is listed.
These include topics such as suicide, kidnapping, alcoholism, abuse and non-con/dub-con. Non-con and dub-con stand for non-consensual acts and acts with dubious consent (in most cases this means being drunk or stories in which non-consensual becomes consensual).
The GKM is very strict on having every story properly labelled and categorised and has a team of people working to ensure that every story adheres to the rules. The GKM is heavily policed. While any sexual act, bar paedophilia, is permissible, not complying with the correct labelling rules can have a user banned. Consequently works in the GKM lack conventional titles; rather than having names stories simply have a list of kinks. For example ‘Faberry with Santana – slight dub-con – whipping, top!Rachel, sub!Quinn, forced orgasm’. (2012) This adherence to strict and accurate labelling makes the GKM a perfect place to not only take a quantitative look at how this particular subset of fans sees Glee but also the perfect place to look at the themes and tropes that this community of writers plays out in their participatory consumption of the show.
By far and away Kurt Hummel, the show’s first canonically gay character, was the most requested and the most written about; in fact 58% of all the stories on the GKM are slash, the next most popular is femslash at 23.85%. However, while both Kurt and his onscreen boyfriend Blaine are the most popular characters (both separately and as a pair, 25.7% of all filled fic on the GKM is Klaine [the pairing of Kurt and Blaine]) other male characters hardly figure at all. This suggests that rather than slash fiction being popular, in fact it is Kurt Hummel stories that are popular. The next most represented slash pairing is Finn and Kurt at 3% of the total GKM.This in some way undermines much of the thinking around fanfiction as a place for fans to “queer” the text. Anne Kustritz defined slash as ‘stories, written by amateur authors (who are almost solely heterosexual women), that involve placing two television or film characters of the same gender, usually male, into non-canonical romantic relationships with each other.’ Here instead the most popular works are sexual depictions of a very much canon relationship. In many ways Glee already “slashes” itself; depicting in canon the kinds of homosexual relationships that used to be the domain of fanfiction.
In this case “slash” loses its element of rebellion and instead the term simply denotes the presence of a homosexual pairing.
Perhaps the presence of a gay character in Glee feeds into the prominence of slash in fanfiction, but the lack of conically straight characters in the GKM’s slashfic seems instead to point to something else happening; an odd conservatism and faithfulness to the canon of the show, which is unexpected. Glee with its tenuous attachment to realism or narrative continuity seems to present a text primed for the work done by the writers of the GKM. The show’s somewhat dark undertones and panoply of canon sexualities, paired with its sing-along pop sensibility, and early evening broadcast scheduling leave spaces for the explicit sexualising of its characters without truly moving outside the realms of canon.
Or perhaps as Ika Willis suggests ‘writing fan fiction first of all makes gaps in a text that the cultural code attempts to render continuous, and then, rather than filling them in, supplements these gaps with intertexts.’ The work done in the GKM is bringing in erotic intertexts, including tropes found in multiple fandoms, to the sexual spaces Glee attempts to gloss over because of its supposed young teen audience. However, there is no need to take the further step that Willis suggests in having to completely open up these texts by ‘reading … canonical intensity and physicality according to a set of sexual associations, informed by readerly knowledge that homosexual desire does exist in the wider world.’ In Glee homosexuality does exist, it is desire that is somewhat denied. Rather than imagine characters have non-canonical reciprocal romantic feelings for one another the writers of the GKM must make gaps for the explicit sexual expression of these feelings. Where Glee stops at a sexually suggestive duet between a couple, the GKM authors follow on and consummate that which the canon text cannot.
Due to the constraints of network television, there are things Glee cannot physically show and so the work of the GKM becomes not to re-imagine relationships but instead to turn rather transparent allusions into actualities. Of the rest of the kinks that make up the popular topics in the GKM it is of little surprise that both inexperience and trysts that happen at school are among the most popular, considering Glee is a show set in a High School. However, again this points to the lack of what fanfiction authors call AU, that is, alternative universe depictions of these characters. Though there are sometimes elements which suggest a world other than the standard US high school (people with cat DNA for example) these tend to be the only “othering” element to the stories, the rest will usually be entirely canonical.
For example in ‘KittyKurt/Bigger AnimalDave AnimalPlay InHeat BP InPublic’, (2012) though all the characters have animal traits, they still attend the same high school and have the same personalities and relationships; in some ways the animal traits just become another way of expressing physical relationships that the canon text has alluded to. The GKM serves a different purpose to others forms of fanfiction where characters are often transposed into other times, places and genres, instead the GKM is about in-text fantasy. The GKM is only effective if the stories feel as if they could take place within the show because it is only then that become truly illicit.