the feminist librarian reads

fansplaining:

In our most recent episode, we asked Jackson Bird if there was any element of fandom that helped him come out as trans. He told us:
During my darkest periods of gender dysphoria, I was most heavily in the Glee fandom, and there is so much trans Glee fanfic. Trans AUs and even just, like, Kurt and Blaine, even if they’re both cisgendered, just like the queer representation going on there? All of that, that was my escapism my last two years of college was just like reading every Klaine AU I could get my hands on. And it’s almost embarrassing to admit, but I will totally own that because that’s what helped me survive those years, was having this endless supply of stories about characters that I loved in fresh situations every day, but also situations that really resonated with me that either the show wasn’t tackling or they were doing a shit job of tackling because Glee tried to be everything and sucked at all of it, but…
Jackson’s answer was really striking, and it got us thinking: how many of our listeners have had parallel experiences using fanfiction to process personal issues? Has fanfic helped you get through tough times? Have you read or written fanfic to help process your thoughts about your own personal identity?
So we’d love to hear from you! Reply to this post, send an ask, reblog and add your comments, or email us at fansplaining at gmail.com. We’d like to share your answers at the start of our next episode (and if you’d prefer to remain anonymous, please let us know). Just let us know: how has fanfic helped you?

Fanfic (writing and reading across a variety of fandoms) has been both a private (in childhood) and then communal (with my partner-now-wife) way of exploring my own sexual identities. Talking back to canon is a way of talking back to mainstream culture about what is and isn’t working for me/us in terms of scripts around relationships and sexuality. It’s a way to explore fantasies and desire imaginatively, consider what turns you on and doesn’t, and what you might want to try in the physical world. It can be a way to work through the dissonance between what “everyone” says you should want, or what sex “should” be like, and what your gut is telling you is right for you/your relationship(s). Fic has also been a fantastic avenue for opening up the realm of possibility rather than foreclosing it. Because it offers plural readings of nearly every canonical text, suggests alternate endings, encourages us as readers to identify with characters whose voices are rarely centered in mainstream stories. I found (and created) characters who resonated with my own experience through fanfic – and I also discovered how identities and experiences very foreign to my own could also be rendered intimately familiar through the process of storytelling. This isn’t a characteristic exclusive to fanfic but I think the communal nature of fanworks – the collapse of reader/writer dichotomies – makes that cross-identity empathy and exploration easier, more open, both private AND shared at the same time. So I would say that fanfic gave me a way to render my queer and feminist politics in intimate terms, to try and answer the question of what sexual relationship possibilities existed (or could exist) in the world that didn’t require constant struggle against normative pressures that didn’t quite fit, felt destructively claustrophobic to me. Fic offered me a place to play as both a reader and writer, to play a remaking the world of relational-sexual intimacy into something nourishing instead of toxic. In that way it’s been a very affirming and healing activity for me – it’s part of what helps me wrestle with cultural narratives I believe are harmful without just becoming a cynical, bitter woman. Instead, I go and write slightly more utopian worlds to remind myself what we are working towards.