'Fix-it fiction' gives queer women the happy endings they deserve
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| Title: | 'Fix-it fiction' gives queer women the happy endings they deserve |
| Creator: | Payal Dhar |
| Date(s): | 6.30.2020 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Femslash, Fanfiction, Fix-it fic |
| External Links: | 'Fix-it fiction' gives queer women the happy endings they deserve, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
'Fix-it fiction' gives queer women the happy endings they deserve is a 2020 article by Payal Dhar on the use of fix-it fics within femslash fandom.
Topics Discussed
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In 2016, Elena Maris, a media and tech researcher, wrote a paper about the influence of technological innovation and queer fandoms in the production of mainstream television series. She used the syndicated show Xena: Warrior Princess to illustrate her findings. Many queer women consider Xena to be TV's first mainstream lesbian story, even though it was all subtext. “Online fan communities,” Maris wrote, “enabled [LGBTQ] groups to communicate their desire for alternative narratives.”This need for different narratives evolved into what’s called “fix-it fiction.” This is a subgenre of fan fiction in which writers “fix” the stories that went wrong. It manifests as either correcting the biases of show makers, or giving queer women the happy endings they deserve.
One of the people I spoke with about queer fandoms and their fanfic goes by the nom de plume Lulu. She’s a 25-year-old educator from England who has been crunching numbers at the fan fiction website Archive of Our Own (Ao3 for short) since 2013. She estimates that the F/F (female/female) fandom could be as big as 100,000 people worldwide. “It’s hard to know how big a role fanfic plays in the wider scheme of things,” she says, “but I’d say it’s a significant subculture. Fandom definitely has ties to other parts of LGBT culture, especially for queer women.”
There is one thing that makes the female/female fandom stand out from other queer fandoms, Russo says. Namely, the assumed correspondence between the sexuality and gender of the characters and of the fans. The femslash fan demographic, she says, “is queer women who are fans of queer women, and that, I think, creates a different sense of identity and support.” (Male/male fans are mostly straight women).This solidarity sometimes spills over to activism, which is what happened with the death of Lexa on the CW's The 100. Lexa was a lesbian character whose 2016 demise created an immense backlash from fans and propelled the bury-your-gays trope back into the limelight. It also resulted a group of creatives establishing the seven-point Lexa Pledge, which asked writers, producers, and directors to do better by their queer viewers and make shows that offer better representation.