Sex, violence and the body: the erotics of wounding by Vivien Burr Jeff Hearn

Author:Vivien Burr, Jeff Hearn [Hearn, Vivien Burr, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: aVe4EvA
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011-05-21T19:11:08+00:00

Fan fiction censorship

How should we think about sadomasochistic fan fiction? What are we to make of stories such as ‘Forbidden feelings’ by ksevfansd? Tagged ‘BDSM, slash,1 beastiality [sic]’, a nominee in round four of the ‘Multifaceted Harry Potter fan fiction awards’ 2007 under the award category of ‘Best extreme fic’. In this story, Lucius Malfoy ensnares the werewolf teacher Remus Lupin and our heroine Hermione ties up the latter and coerces three-way oral sex, while Hermione, despite her distress, fantasises about having sex with Lupin in his wolf form. And what of ansereg, the cultural practice of ‘consensual elvish BDSM’ created by one Tyellas within an extended Lord of the Rings universe?

Such ‘extreme’ fan fiction has been the subject of recent moral panics, perhaps part of the broader anxiety surrounding Web 2.0 and ‘usergenerated content’. In 2007 a group called Warriors for Innocence, based in the US, contacted Six Apart, the company that owns LiveJournal (LJ). LJ is at present one of the most popular sites for fandom blogs online. It has some social networking features, and many fan fiction writers maintain a presence there. Warriors for Innocence state (on their website) that their purpose is ‘hunting monsters on the web’ and ‘hunting pedophiles where they fester’. They demanded that Six Apart remove journals with content that they deemed offensive. Six Apart reacted by taking down around 500 journals. Many fan blogs and fan communities were removed from LJ on the basis of the courtesy-tag warnings that routinely accompany fan fiction. In this case, tags indicating content such as ‘slash’ (misunderstood as an act of violence rather than a reference to a male/male pairing) ‘incest’ and ‘non-con’ were picked up for prohibition.

So many LJ users expressed outrage at this development that Six Apart’s chief executive was compelled to publicly apologise a month later. The majority of fandom and fiction journals have gradually been restored since. This did not satisfy Warriors for Innocence. An article on their site entitled ‘It’s just fiction’ (2 June 2007) comments:

Writing child sex/rape stories is . . . sick and disgusting, but technically not illegal . . . While child rape/sex stories may not be illegal, they are pedophilia . . . Pedophiles are sexually attracted to children, they often write child sex stories. They get off on these stories and pictures of children. The more ‘stories’ they read and ‘enjoy’, the more they fantasize about children. REAL CHILDREN.

This article is cross-listed under ‘Fandom, Fanfic, LiveJournal’ and ‘Pedophile’.

The blogs on LJ taken down as a result of the Warriors for Innocence complaint included fandom journals, survivor journals and consenting-adult age-play journals, as well as ‘in real life’ (IRL) journals that described or sought illegal sexual activity. Harry Potter fan fiction was particularly affected. The slash and femme-slash (i.e. same-sex narratives only) Pornish Pixies, a self-described ‘smutty’ fan fiction and fan art community set in the Potter universe, was locked down until the weekend of 4 and 5 August 2007. Weasleycest is devoted to stories containing Weasley family (sibling to sibling) incestuous pairings.

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