“Mel Stanfill is the Assistant Professor of Texts and Technology and Digital Media at the University of Central Florida” (Mel Stanfill). She has a doctorate in Communications and Media from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has done research focusing on the relationship between media and fandom, and the ways racial, sexual, and gender identity affect media inclusivity and access to technology (Mel Stanfill| Bringing).
This source’s credibility stems from its currency, it was published July 15,2017. It also has been peer reviewed and submitted into a journal that publishes articles covering media as well as fandom studies. The source itself was included in an issue about queer female fandom (Transformative). Its credibility and appropriateness are also helped by the fact that the article itself, is extremely relevant to my research.
This journal article addresses two of my research questions, why is the femslash community so rare within the fanfiction community, and how has modern media affected the femslash community. The latter of which she answers when she talks about queerbaiting, as well as when she references Julie Levin Russo, who “contends that “tropes like sudden onscreen boyfriends may function as overdetermined markers of the places where lesbian desire most threatens to erupt.’”(Para 7). 1) The topic of queerbaiting is something I want to explore further, as it will give me more insight on how media affects the femslash community.
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When it comes to how well Stanfill, addresses my research questions, she provides a theory that may lead to an explanation as to the reason for femslash subculture’s rarity. In this journal article, she argues, “that all media (not just sitcoms) that center on or are driven by a relationship between women are structurally lesbian media, and that to locate structurally lesbian media after the Internet is to locate femslash fandoms” (Para 2). Essentially, she maintains that the presence of femslash within a fandom directly corelates with whether the source material has a predominantly female-female relationship at its forefront. This leads me to questions like, does the rarity of the subculture have to do with a lack of female-female centered relationships, in media, and do people join the femslash community because of a lack of identity representation.
In her article, Stanfill bases the majority of her argument on two sources, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture by Alexander Doty, and Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by Adrienne Rich. From Doty, she borrows the concept of the lesbian sitcom, a term that Doty used, that describes show that are “…structured around, and audiences ‘identify with’ or ‘take pleasure in,’ the centrality of women to each other’s lives…” (Para 3). She uses this as a basis for her idea of lesbian structured media, which encompasses all shows, not just sitcoms that fit that description.
From Rich, she borrows the idea of the lesbian continuum, “a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.’ (Para 3). From Rich she concludes that lesbian structured media does not have to have a lesbian romance at its center. Instead, Stanfill says it consists of “…primary homosocial intensity, transient heterosexuality, and homosocial-homosexual slippage” (Para 4). Therefore, she considers shows that exhibit a prominent homosocial relationship as structurally lesbian in nature. Stanfill also uses the Xena: Warrior Princess, Rizzoli and Isles, Frozen, Maleficent, and Once Upon a Time fandoms as examples of fandoms where there is a substantial femslash base. In order to back up this claim, she uses statistics from Tumblr and AO3, or Archive of Our Own.
Since this source is extremely relevant to my research I plan to reference it directly within my final paper. I plan to also use this as a starting point for my research into the media’s affect on the subculture. I also plan to look into the fandoms discussed to see if there are similarities and differences within femslash-based fandoms.
