rec: Fifty Shades of Grey: Fanfic, feminism, and BDSM.

[beatrice_otter]

I've recced this before, but with the movie in theaters I thought I should point this out again.  John Lennard is an Oxford grad who's taught at Cambridge, and who is also a fanfic author (bracketyjack ).  He's written a very thoughtful essay on just why Fifty Shades is problmatic by explaining all the various and sundry ways the author is trampling all over fanfic, feminism, and bdsm while profiting from them.  It's both readable and well-researched, and you can pick it up for a couple of bucks at Amazon, or read it for free if you have Amazon Prime.

Comments

[threeringedmoon]

I follow Bracketyjack on LJ, and had just clicked and bought it after he mentioned it.

[beatrice_otter]

I know him through the Bujold email list--he quoted me in one of his essays on fandom. I really like his stuff; not many academic writers manage to be sympathetic to and even-handed about fans, and most of those were fans who went into academia. He's an academic who found fandom.

[threeringedmoon]

I hadn't realized he found fandom after academia: I had just assumed he went the other way.

[beatrice_otter]

Well, I mean, he was a devoted LotR fan from childhood, but not connected to fandom at all. Just him being geeky on his own. Then when he was an adult and a lit professor (still geeky, still not connected to any larger fandom) he discovered Bujold, and then fanfic, and then went on to write about it professionally. He talks about it a little bit in his essay "Of Criticism and Continuities: A Personal Account of Serial Reading in the Age of the Web" in Of Sex and Faerie: Further Essays on Genre Fiction (That's the essay I'm quoted in)