Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent

by Milena Popova

How the treatment of sexual consent in erotic fanfiction functions as a form of cultural activism.

Sexual consent is--at best--a contested topic in Western societies and cultures. The #MeToo movement has brought public attention to issues of sexual consent, revealing the endemic nature of sexual violence. Feminist academic approaches to sexual violence and consent are diverse and multidisciplinary--and yet consent itself is significantly undertheorized. In Dubcon , Milena Popova points to a community that has been considering issues of sex, power, and consent for many writers and readers of fanfiction. Their nuanced engagement with sexual consent, Popova argues, can shed light on these issues in ways not available to either academia or journalism.

Popova explains that the term "dubcon" (short for "dubious consent") was coined by the fanfiction community to make visible the gray areas between rape and consent--for example, in situations where the distribution of power may limit an individual's ability to give meaningful consent to sex. Popova offers a close reading of three fanfiction stories in the Omegaverse genre, examines the "arranged marriage" trope, and discusses the fanfiction community's response when a sports star who was a leading character in RPF (real person fiction) was accused of rape. Proposing that fanfiction offers a powerful discursive resistance on issues of rape and consent that challenges dominant discourses about gender, romance, sexuality, and consent, Popova shows that fanfiction functions as a form of cultural activism.

Genres: Nonfiction, Fandom, Academic, Feminism, Fan Fiction, Sexuality, Books About Books

216 pages, Hardcover

Published October 5, 2021

About the author

Milena Popova is an independent scholar, activist, and consultant working on culture and sexual consent and the author of Sexual Consent, a volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series.

Reviews

[Julie Bozza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting look into issues around consent, in both fanworks and the "real" world, and how they each impact on the other. Having unknowingly worked through some significant boundary / consent issues in my own early fanfic - and having since knowingly written a fair amount of dubcon - I had some personal investment here. Though Popova's work isn't an entirely neat fit for my experiences (I suspect I'm older than her, for a start), her work still resounded with me. And I was particularly interested to read her discussions of the thoughtful character analysis that can be brought to bear on complex issues by RPF writers.

I was delighted to find Popova characterising fans - those of us who tend to write fanfic - as "mostly women and nonbinary people, and mostly members of gender, sexual, or romantic minorities". This has been my experience in fandom, and I've long been fed up with the frequent claim that we're all straight women writing about gay men. Of course some of us are, but generally we've always been a motley (or motlier!) crew. And this is the first time I've seen the notion in print. So, that was refreshing!

Also, btw, that cover is deeply gorgeous. Come for the cover, stay for the analysis! Recommended.

[Josephine Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

So very niche but right up my alley. I think Popova does a thorough job of not only defending their thesis but also the subject matter as a whole. Using fan studies and fanfiction as a lens to understand our larger media ecosystem and how audiences interact with the world is interesting and worthwhile. I do echo some other reviews in their complaints about the repetitive nature of the writing, as that was noticeable and detracted from my enjoyment a bit. Overall, I thought it was well put together and offered a lot to think about.

[nora · Rating 3 out of 5]

while it’s certainly refreshing to see many of these topics tackled in a semi-scholarly setting, i found the argument presented in this book to be fairly repetitive and only really addressed the ethical complexities of fan spaces towards the very end (and even then, i would’ve liked to see more head-on grappling with the fact that not every depiction of “dubcon” in fanfiction is created equal)

[Allie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was SO PREPARED to rate this 3 stars but I got more and more annoyed as the book went on.

I appreciated discussion of specific tropes that inherently include dubcon elements. There was a lot of what I wouldn't even class discussion though...

There was a bit too much repetition of key phrases and ideas for my taste. Early on it was nice because the text is a bit dense and I sometimes got a bit lost in the academic lingo (maybe my EPUB paragraphs were just hard to read). It got a bit easier to read each section when I noticed the author was saying the same stuff over and over again. Could have cut it down by saying everything once and including a key points wrap up at the end of each chapter.

In terms of specific chosen works, I appreciate that using early or foundational works helps to show what influenced later works. However, I also would have liked to see more recent trends as well - have common tropes changed or stayed the same as in early works? Have things like the #MeToo movement changed the way authors approach consent? The epilogue talked about fanfiction impacting activism (generally overstated in my opinion), but has activism impacted fanfiction??

I found chapter 5, which was about Hockey RPF, interesting initially e.g. cherry-picking core events, when real life actions interfere with fictionalised personas. I was very quickly disillusioned when the author started calling discussions in comments on fics "RPF techniques" that were "humanizing" a victim of SA. Felt like a bit of a reach considering people completely disconnected from RPF also imagine personas onto people from very little information. RPF CANON CONSTRUCTION PROCESSES SHUT THE FUCK UP

The Patrick Kane RPF statistics were done and explained in an odd way - I would have made a graph by month and pinpointed where events happened in the image. Of course I am going for the easiest ingestion of relevant information so perhaps there was some other reason to not do that.

Side note every time I see the word "fannish" I feel sick to my stomach.

Actually, let me speak on this!!

I am a master bullshitter and last minute essay writer. I am also someone who is very self-aware when I write something that isn't good but I don't have time to change. This book reminded me a bit of myself trying to fill a word count 1 hour before a report deadline. It was a bit painful actually. The pretentious vocabulary, the made-up sounding lingo, the needless repetition and explanation of information... I wish someone would have done more editing (from PhD to book) to make this accessible.

I also think this was oddly not quite targeted at people who are in fan spaces? Obviously, you have to explain things for people who don't know anything, but some terminology was completely foreign for me as someone who really should know this stuff. Ignoring words like fandom, fan (rather than fannish people) etc felt a bit like normal fan culture wasn't good or professional enough for the text :(

This is maybe not for me to talk about but I'm going to make an attempt regardless. The epilogue touches on how structural racism is apparent in some fanfiction tropes and ways of tagging. I was like oh good we ARE doing intersectionality today! However... why was racism only discussed in the epilogue? None of the points were brought up prior to the epilogue either. Felt like a complete afterthought on the part of the author. I would be really interested in a legitimate discussion of racism in fanfiction in an actual chapter, not an epilogue.

As much as I completely agree that tropes being removed from real world links (e.g. slavery removed from racism) is often unintentionally harmful, this whole book has been about a notoriously traumatising event (nonconsent, often removed from sexism or even human biology) somehow being a victorious activist exploration?? Complex issue as fan spaces are very White, but I fear this whole section gives Black people less agency over their trauma in comparison.

I think in general there were a lot of tangential ideas and influences that were really a stretch to apply to the scope of dubcon fics. I kept thinking to myself 'How are they going to tie THIS back to dubcon??' and I was very rarely satisfied by the answer.

[zenzeromante · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful analysis of fanfic tropes and communities under a queerfeminist lens, particularly for what concerns sexual consent. As someone who’s pretty much outside of the RPF sphere, the Hockey RPF essays was particularly interesting.

I’d say my only issue with this is in chapter 7, when it is argued that “[the fact that] the author meant to write a romantic relationship is of less importance than the abusive relationship that the audience is reading.” And while this is something that actually happens in fandom, I also feel like it’s not something that’s always positive.

By which I mean that fans are capable of reading texts and subtexts and understanding that some canon relationships are indeed written from a perspective that’s steeped in rape culture, but other times it’s the fans themselves that can’t seem to overcome their own biases and therefore see an abusive relationship even when it isn’t there.

This happens a lot when there are BDSM dynamics involved (which is another community that relies on deep discussions on and around consent, which isn’t well-known in vanilla spaces), and it is even more obvious when canon works come from a different culture where there might be different ways (sometimes subtler, maybe because of censorship) to express concepts and narratives. The essay feels a bit lacking exactly because this possibility—fans misinterpreting things—isn’t even touched on, not even in the epilogue where the topic of racism in fandom gets its own couple of paragraphs.

I don’t think that this devalues the points made by the book as a whole, but I think there is still a lot to say on the topic and I’d love to read more discussions on it.

[DonkeyKong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this because I was curious about the Omegaverse, but it was actually a great read diving into the subculture of fanfiction, and how a subset of that culture explores the concept of consent. I had no idea about some of the other fanfiction tropes mentioned like the arranged marriage trope, or the real people fan fiction. Here is a quote that I think sums up the thesis "if we live in an unequal world, in a society that structurally treats some of us as lesser in various ways, what can we do in our individual intimate relationships to negotiate and minimize those inequalities? And if those inequalities affect our ability to consent, then how do we get to a place where our consent can be made meaningful again within the coercive structures we live in?"

[asha · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting academic view on ff, I thought some of the bits about storytelling and layering were very interesting, some parts seemed less novel to me. very cool that this topic is being academically analysed