Every month the OTW hosts guest posts on our OTW News accounts to provide an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom. These posts express each individual’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy.

Silja Kukka (she/her) is a university lecturer in Oulu University, Finland. She holds a PhD in contemporary literature and has done extensive research on fandom and fan fiction for more than ten years. She still reads fan fiction daily and is constantly astonished by the pure joy that fan works bring to fans. Today, Silja talks about sexual and gender identity development in fandom spaces.

How did you first find out about fandom and fan works?

My history with fan fiction and fandom dates back to the early 2000’s. I was in the Finnish equivalent to high school, so I must have been around 16 or 17. I was talking with my friend—something about a book I was really into at the moment, it might have been Robin Hobbs’ Farseer trilogy—and she asked me if I’d ever heard of fan fiction. I said I hadn’t, but as she explained it to me, something about it seemed so familiar—I realized I had unknowingly been writing fan fiction in my head all my life and playing out scenarios about my favorite books with my Barbies as a little girl.

After school that day, I ran home and immediately went online. I’m not even sure how I knew what to look for, nor do I remember what site I first stumbled onto, but I found what I was looking for: some slash fics about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. Now, in my defense, I did not intentionally search for slash, nor for that pairing, but that is what I first found. I don’t believe I even knew what slash was—I certainly did not know the word—but like with fan fiction, it just felt immediately familiar, like I had been living out slashy scenarios in my head for years as well!

That’s how it began for me. Slash opened something in me—some window to a secret garden I didn’t know existed. My own sexual awakening coincided with my first fannish awakening, and I believe, although I didn’t realize this at the moment, I was learning from slash about queer sexualities and using what I learned to better understand myself and my own queerness.

You’ve since gone on to conduct academic research about sexual and gender identity formation in fan fiction communities. Can you share a little bit about your research projects?

My academic interest in fandom first began when I was preparing for my master’s thesis. I had discussed some research ideas with my seminar group—something about a feminist look into fantasy novels—but I wasn’t really getting anywhere with it. Then one night I was out having a beer with my best friend and was moaning about my lack of research ideas. She very forwardly asked why I wouldn’t write my thesis on fan fiction, as “that’s what you are spending all your time on anyway.”

Long story short, I learned about the rich history of fandom studies and immediately began planning my own research project. My master’s thesis was about fan fiction as a new wave of feminist literary practices, and I published two research articles for it. I then wrote my PhD thesis on what kinds of sexual and gender identity development stories can be found in slash and how fandom spaces can help people develop their own identities.

For my post-doctoral research, I’d like to further develop my PhD thesis by doing a historical review on the role that fandom spaces and fan works have played in people’s understanding about queer issues in the past and how that has developed over the years. As part of that research, I’m currently working on a project that looks at how asexual people view or engage with erotic or pornographic fan fiction.

What does your research highlight about the importance that fan fiction and fan spaces can hold for people whose sexual or gender identities are marginalized?

My PhD thesis highlights the very rich and varied stories fans tell about the development of sexual and gender identities. I learned how these stories have changed over the decades and how fandoms today truly have the potential to be queer spaces—not only open or welcoming to queer people, but queer in how they can change the way we culturally understand and speak about gender and sexuality. In this way, I find fandoms to be political, as the people in them are often the ones who suffer from the neo-conservative backlash that seems to be going on globally and are aiming to change the political landscape and discourse.

For my PhD, I collected survey data from people in kink meme communities. My respondents spoke freely about the importance of anonymous fandom spaces for developing or learning about queer sexualities. They also discussed how very important kink memes were for them as women, as they felt that their gender inhibited them from freely expressing themselves sexually or that their lack of comprehensive sex education had given them harmful ideas about sex and desire. They felt that kink memes helped them combat these harmful ideas and offered them a venue to explore desire and learn about themselves as sexual beings.

What are your hopes for your current study about how fans who identify as asexual view erotic fan fiction?

What was truly interesting to me about the survey data from kink meme communities was how many of my respondents were asexual and, despite their own lack of sexual desire, were writing these really intimate depictions of sexual desire and sex. I knew there was something in there that I needed to learn more about.

I hope to further delve into how and why people who have little or no sexual desire themselves frequent these erotic, pornographic, or even kinky online spaces. I wish to learn what motivates them and what kind of role these spaces play in their lives. Are they engaging with erotic material to further learn about their own sexual identities? Or perhaps to live out fantasies they may have but have no interest to pursue in real life?

I wish to further the understanding about asexuality as a spectrum and an identity and consider how an asexual perspective might enhance our understanding of porn and erotica. Could fannish porn learn something about desire and its many forms from the asexual point of view, and could this increased understanding benefit people who are perhaps coming to terms with their asexual identity?

How did you hear about the OTW and what do you see its role as?

When fandom spaces began to migrate away from places such as LiveJournal, many found a new home on Archive of Our Own (AO3). I’ve felt that this was just what fandom—and us as fans—needed. On LiveJournal and even on sites such as fanfiction.net, there was and continues to be a threat that these spaces are not welcoming to all or are in danger of being taken away from fans. The way that LiveJournal began to weed out sexual material felt appalling to me, as they seemed to view all queer material as pornographic and “perverted”. This of course is nothing new, as queer people and queer material have long been associated with pornography or “perversion” by people who benefit from labeling us as dangerous.

I feel that the permissive policy on AO3 with regard to pornographic content is the right one, even if it allows some content I rather wish was not published. As a researcher, I understand that even material I personally would not wish to see or engage with can be of value to others, and we should not be making decisions on what can be published based on what I or someone else finds “icky”. That road can lead nowhere good, as there are inevitably people who would ban all queer material as well if they got the chance and power to do so.

What I find truly inspiring about OTW is that it really is for the fans, by the fans. Many fandom spaces already operate on that idea, but as long as they are situated on commercial platforms run by faceless corporations, I find that they can never truly be free. For-profit platforms can of course be welcoming and important to fans, but we can easily be kicked off them if the corporate overlords feel we disturb their business model. If fandoms and fan works really are non-commercial and aim to operate outside the capitalist framework, they also need a platform that is non-profit, fan-owned, and run by fans.

What fandom things have inspired you the most?

What I find truly inspiring about fandoms and fan works is how versatile and changing they are. In studying the history of fan fiction and especially slash, I was astonished to learn just how much they’ve changed even in my own time as a fan. When I first started reading slash fics, the common ethos seemed to be to try and operate outside real-life queer politics and issues. In the early 2000’s, many fics were unwilling to name the characters as gay or bisexual. Instead, they often placed same-sex lovers in some nebulous utopia where the characters could live with a same-sex partner and have all the gay sex they desired but still not label themselves as members of the LGBTQA+ community.

In some ways this was inspiring, as it envisioned a world where there would be no need for labels, but unfortunately we do not live in that world. And in our world, there is an ongoing battle against queer and especially trans people. Making queer identities invisible in fandom spaces does not help us—the queer people—in that fight.

So what has inspired me is the willingness of fandom spaces and fan works to change—to embrace queerness not only in fan works but also in real life. I feel like fans can hold up a mirror for societies and reveal how badly we have failed our queer children, but also demonstrate how we can all do better. I guess I wish for fandoms and fans to be the change we wish to see in the world.

We encourage suggestions from fans for future guest posts, so contact us if you have someone in mind! Or you can visit our Pinboard account to catch up on earlier guest posts.