thinking about smut/erotic fanfiction/art practices. the communal queer (in the expansive sense) experience of shared pleasure that is decidedly not a sexual encounter/relationship by any normative definitions; a particular type of liminal intimacy and affectual connection, transcending temporal and geographical and relational borders in fascinating ways.
thinking about the practices like beta'ing (please tell me, did it make sense, the way their bodies moved in space? how did it make you feel? did it touch your soul? were there any typos?); translations, illustrations, affectual comments: the ongoing reciprocity of affect and the labor that goes into that.
thinking about fanfics written to be gifted: combing through a friend's ao3/blog/etc to make sure you know exactly what kind of freak they are because you want to give them the ultimate pleasurable fantasy experience (happy birthday, here are some feels, i crafted them for you by hand). then posting it publicly as a tagged gift so everyone else can join in too. a present for all.
thinking about the history of slash fanfiction practices spanning the last 50+ years and the way female and queer fans clawed out spaces for that, not only within the heteronormative patriarchal culture at large but within fandom spaces:
het fanzines and later websites refusing to publish slash or, at best, doing stuff like publishing it with a whole page warning and on a differently colored paper
cishet women writing and drawing slash smut for each other and having to hide it from their husbands; their secret, erotically-charged lives shared only with other women
diy typing out and printing of slash zines, of a 100, 200 pages each, to avoid printer screening and tracking; having to start own printing shops or finding queer-run ones; the materiality of it all
mailing slash zines for free and in secret to avoid not only copyright but sodomy and obscenity laws, like the (still active) federal mail law that criminalized mailing pornography, whether images or text (and how, when the 1964 Supreme Court ruled it inapplicable to noncommercial letters between consensual adults, the precedent excluded homosexual letter exchange)
thinking about fanartist Virginia Lee Smith, who, in the 1980s, drew explicit af K/S smut for a dozen zines, and her interview in 2009 about donating her 200 zines collection, where she said, laughing, "The reason I handed this over is because I know that my poor kid, if I die, will be so embarrassed[...] I know he's gonna burn them. Lost forever. So, I have no idea how many k/s fanzines have been burned quietly for that reason." thinking about how she said she outgrew it when she stopped drawing; and yet she kept all 200 of them anyway.
thinking about the ephemerality of pleasure and the continuance of shame.
thinking about what purity culture, carceral feminism, and moral panics do, and how short collective memory is. thinking about how we keep going in circles, unable to escape from the paranoid, queerphobic lens that is always in search of predatory boogeymen, always vigilant, a cop on duty, armed and ready to go.
jacobvanloon
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
stormborns
origamiaround
romaincrisis
