[research] All fanfic and dojinshi samples selected, whew

[unjapanologist]

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

'Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities' was absolutely fantastic and deserves a long separate post. While I'm working on that one, a bit of news for everyone who didn't catch me crowing about this on Twitter: I've completed selection of the 100 dojinshi and 100 fanfics that I'll be comparing over the next couple of years.

The selection process was arduous and time-consuming, and is described in all boring detail here (kindly let me know if you catch me failing maths at any point in that text). You can see the dojinshi data set here, and the fic dataset here.

I've already entered data about genre (slash/het/gen), pairings, and whether characters are top/seme or bottom/uke in slash/yaoi pairings. Data about other narrative and visual elements to come. You can use the search function at the top of both datasets to filter data, but I'm currently doing battle with Zoho to create an interface where it's easier to compare data from the two sets. Here's a couple of things that struck me after a cursory first comparison of the datasets:

Genres (slash, gen, het)
    Fanfic: 16 gen, 61 slash, 24 het (note: doesn't add up to 100 because some samples contain more than one kind of genre)
    Dojinshi: 5 gen, 95 slash, 2 het (those 2 het djs involved Snape in a biologically female body, not Snape in a relationship with a woman)

Populair pairings (two most popular)
    Fanfic: Snape/Harry 34, Snape/James 0
    Dojinshi: Snape/Harry 10, Snape/James 61

'Division of labor' in slash pairings
    Fanfic: Snape bottom/uke 11, Snape top/seme 35 (plus many 'undetermined': it's much harder to figure out these roles in fic than in dojinshi)
    Dojinshi: Snape bottom/uke 94, Snape top/seme 1 (this feels skewed, I think I saw more Snape as seme than this. Will reconsider)

Food for thought. If you're the author of one of the works mentioned and don't want me to use your fic or dojinshi for this research, please let me know and I'll remove the entry from the dataset (see research ethics).

Comments

[mithen.livejournal.com]

It really is fascinating. I wonder if top/bottom has always been relatively 'unimportant' in slash fic, or if these roles losing meaning is some recent development. My personal experiences are a bit useless here, because when I first started reading fic somewhere in the late nineties, I read very little that wasn't based on Japanese works, and my slash reading is comparatively recent. What do you think? How would you judge the importance of top/bottom roles in slash?

I forgot to respond to this! I personally think that from its origins there's been a strong streak of resistance to assigning top/bottom roles rigidly (um, so to speak). If you want an early contemporaneous take on the topic, you should find a copy of Joanna Russ's Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts:
Feminist Essays, which has a fantastic essay in it called "Pornography for Women, by Women, with Love" which is the earliest academic writing about slash out there (1985). I was very struck by a passage where she discusses how a lot of slash is a fantasy of fluid gender roles, using Kirk/Spock to discuss how the "coding" of the two switches back and forth a lot. I think there's becoming more tendency to assign clearer roles, but there's a strong history of just the opposite--and I think a lot of bone-deep dislike of it in a lot of places. Like I mentioned, people will start to kick and complain a lot in certain circles if a male character is "the girl" (though in some cases I suspect it's because the WRONG character is being coded "the girl," not simply that one of them is...)

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

I'll check out that Joanna Russ book! (Just finished 'How to Suppress Women's Writing' and fangirling her a bit.)

I think there's becoming more tendency to assign clearer roles, but there's a strong history of just the opposite--and I think a lot of bone-deep dislike of it in a lot of places.

That would be a very, very interesting tendency. I'll try and see if I can pick up anything like this from the datasets, although they're probably too limited in time (five years or so).