Draft- Who

According to Camille Bacon-Smith’s research done in the 1980s, slash writers/readers fit into one particular profile. This profile is as white, middle-class, highly educated (hold college degrees), single, heterosexual women. Bacon-Smith’s conclusions on who writes and reads slash have been, until recently unchallenged and supported by academics who study this phenomenon. Now newer ideas concerning who write and reads slash are being published and the slash writers and readers themselves are speaking up and labeling themselves. The recent book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, published in 2005 and written by Rhiannon Bury speaks out against this traditional view of the producers and consumers of this genre. Bury finds that those who analyzed slash, “presumed a heterosexual female reader and writer. Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins were the first to recognize that ‘lesbian and bisexual women have always participated alongside straight women.’ Boyd indicates that 52 percent of the respondents to her study identified as bisexual, lesbian or gay.” Bury herself refers to her own study subjects who self-identified as heterosexual (seven subjects), bisexual (six subjects), but she states that “most refused such fixed classifications” (Bury 81). Another area in which Bury finds fault in Bacon-Smith’s conclusions is in the conclusion that the women are single. At least two of Bury’s respondents identified themselves are being part of a couple. One makes reference to a husband who does not understand her desire to read and write fan fiction and the other admits that her female life partner actually introduced her to the genre.