Naughty Girls and Gay Male Romance/Porn: Slash Fiction, Boys' Love Manga, and Other Works by Female "Cross-Voyeurs" in the U.S. Academic Discourses

The presented research analyses a phenomenon which is considered curious in contemporary American culture: women who write or read about male homosexual relations. Despite the phenomenon s since the 1970s somewhat common character - popular genres such as Boys Love Manga or Slash Fan Fiction belong to the category - female cross-voyeurs are considered strange and unnatural , much to the contrary of their counterpart, i.e., men who consider female homosexual intercourse as stimulating.
From the perspective of Queer Theory, which discusses both our understanding of gender as well as our sexuality in general as socio-historical concepts, Carola Bauer researches the different perception of these women and genres in American academic texts from the 1970s to the present.
Methodologically a historical discourse analysis, the first part of this study focuses on the academic perception of female authors such as Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar, who specialised in depicting homosexual romances in their historical novel - a curiosum which up until today is subject to much speculation within American literary studies.
The second part of this study discusses Slash Fiction, a subgenre of Fan Fiction, in which mostly female fans imagine their favourite male characters from TV or cinema productions in homosexual relationships.
This genre, too, has been discussed to a disproportionally great extent within American Media Studies because, so it seems, the normal female interest in men bonking is seen as requiring explanation.
The final part of this study focuses on academic studies from America which discuss Boys Love Manga, Japanese girl comics which narrate homoerotic relationships.
On the whole, this study aims to highlight reoccurring patterns in the depiction of female cross-voyeurs within the USAs academic discourse since the 1970s to enable a somewhat directed discussion of research desiderata and problematic tendencies.

Autorentext

Carola Bauer (M.A.) studied 'Europäische Kulturgeschichte' at the University of Augsburg and 'Literatur im kulturellen Kontext' at the University of Bayreuth. Presently, she lives in Ludwigsburg.

Klappentext

Despite the fact that there actually exists a large number of pornographic and romantic texts about male homosexuality consumed and produced by American women since the 1970s, the "abnormality" of those female cross-voyeurs is constantly underlined in U.S. popular and academic culture. As the astonished, public reactions in the face of a largely female (heterosexual) audience of Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Queer as Folk (2000-2005) have shown, a woman's erotic/romantic interest in male homosexuality is definitely not as accepted as its male counterpart (men consuming lesbian porn). In the academic publications on female cross-voyeurs, the application of double standards with regard to male/female cross-voyeurism is even more obvious. As Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse note in their "Introduction" to Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Internet (2006), slash fiction fan fiction about male homosexual relationships mainly produced and consumed by women has stood in the center of fan fiction studies so far, despite being merely a subgenre of it. The reason for this seems to be an urge to explain the underlying motivations for the fascination of women with m/m romance or pornography within the academic discourse a trend which differs completely from the extremely under-theorized complex of men interested in "lesbians." It is this obvious influence of conventional gender stereotypes on the perception of these phenomena that provokes me to examine the way in which the works of female cross-voyeurism and their consumers/producers are conceptualized in the U.S. scholarly accounts. In many ways, this thesis explores unknown territories and respectively tries to take a closer look at academic problems that have not been adequately addressed yet.