Cruising The Archive of Our Own: Mapping Perversions in Saffic Tolkien Tagging
Part 1/ ? parts
This post is an introduction to the project: I will be posting additional posts that focus on the data and my first analysis of it, but given the current schedule (editing two anthologies!, preparing for two conferences! trying to get together a proposal for a third! plus Zoom meetings!!), I’m not promising regular updates!
This project originated with a 2109 presentation that I planned to develop into a chapter for an anthology on queer approaches to Tolkien that I was editing with two friends. I was unable to find the time/energy in 2020 to finish the essay for the anthology.1 Now, when the three of us are in the final stages of putting together the manuscript for peer-review, I am *very* happy about my retro-planning because I do not have to revise my own essay as well as dealing with all the Editorial Duties! I am happy to say that the anthology itself is going to be published: we’ll be sending the completed manuscript to McFarland for peer review early next year (2024)!
I think this project might still be of interest or use because it adds queer women to existing queer Tolkien scholarship which has tended to focus primarily on queer male characters (our anthology is going to help change that tendency!); in addition, the methodology and the source for the methodology might be of interest to other scholars.
One of my areas of interest is fanfiction, specifically Tolkien & Jackson fic.2 One genre of fanfiction, slash, that is stories written primarily by women about the romantic, erotic, and sexual relationships between male characters is fairly well known, but there is also slash about female characters (variously called f/f slash, femslash, or saffic).3 And, although the other genres are not as well known (all the media attention back in the day went to the “omg women are writing sexy stuff about MEN!), there are het, F/M, stories as well as "gen" stories which have no romantic, erotic, or sexual material at all.
For the presentation I did in 2019 on the project, I did some quantitative analysis of the tags generated by fanfiction writers who posted saffic (f/f slash) on the Organization of Transformative Works’ Archive of Our Own (AO3).4 This method, as well as the title of my project, is based on Melissa Adler’s *brilliant* monograph, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge.
One inspiration for the Cruising project was bibliographic research I did for previous Tolkien essays, including but not limited to my bibliographic essays.5 That earlier research shows a clear pattern in Tolkien studies of women, often but not always feminist scholars, writing about (straight by default) female characters in Tolkien while gender and queer scholarship is mostly done by men about male characters.6 One result is that queer women in Tolkien studies (whether characters, readers, or theorists!) receive minimal attention or acknowledgment.7 As a queer woman (asexual, genderqueer, autist, feminist and atheist), this exclusion bothers me all the more in that Tolkien studies has been more welcoming of women scholars than many humanities fields although the women being welcomed are, like the men, mostly White.
This exclusion is not unique to Tolkien scholarship as Diane Watts pointed out in a 2013 review essay, "Why Men Still Aren't Enough," published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Watt argues that the the study of "men and masculinity" in medieval gender studies resulted in "women and femininity [being] sidelined once again" as the central focus shifts to "gay male history and queer male sexualities" (452).
Watt never says, nor do I, that scholarship on men and masculinity is a bad thing, or that it should not be done. Such work is important; the problem is the absence of queer women from feminist, gender, and queer scholarship in Tolkien studies, a problem that is caused not by individuals but by sexist systems in a kyriarchical culture.
In Cruising the Library, Adler analyzes the extent to which the Library of Congress's cataloging system created and continues to create difficulties in accessing books about gender and sexuality by humanities scholars. Specifically, the cataloging and shelving of these humanities texts using categories created for medical scholarship that historically defined "perversion" as criminal and aberrant behavior has resulted in the diffusion and marginalization of more recent works. Adler’s opening example, or inspiration for her project, is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, a book I taught a number of times in my gender theory graduate course. Adler’s introductory chapter, “A Book is Being Cataloged,” focuses on Sedgwick’s book in the context of the Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings which “were designed when the LoC moved into its new home, the stately Jefferson Building, in 1897” (p. 15).
Adler denaturalizes and deconstructs the classification system through historical analysis of the system itself, how it changed over time, and how the system “contributed to the construction of a national history and identity of the United States, and [she suggests] that the subjects were not only arranged in relation to one another but in relation to an imagined nation and its interests” (p. xi).
A key part of this approach is that her analysis is on the systems, not the people who work (and change!) them:
I use examples of library classifications in their applications to specific texts to make sense of such tensions and to assess the performativity of these systems. To be clear, the examples that appear throughout this study are not intended to be an indictment of any individual or group of catalogers. Cataloging is hard work, guided by excruciatingly detailed rulebooks on how to describe and categorize bibliographic texts. Like many rules, the Library of Congress’s are open to interpretation, and every cataloger arrives at a text from a particular point of view. Given the options set by the Library of Congress standards, any two catalogers are likely to disagree about where to put a book. What is important to register is that the subject cataloging standards produced by the Library of Congress and deployed in libraries of all types designate possibilities for where works can be placed and how they can be described. The Library of Congress and its systems direct conversations and connections by setting the rules for ranking and ordering works, distributing them across the disciplines within the library space, and providing authorized terms for subjects. For this book I’ve collected and cataloged some of the ways in which library subject cataloging standards inform the history of sexuality and the processes by which norms and authority over reading and research practices have taken hold. The production of “perverse” subjects in library classifications has mapped and indexed normal and abnormal sexualities and bodies (Adler, Preface, pp. xi-xii).
For this project, I decided to analyze the tags fanfic authors create for their Tolkien saffic on the AO3: tags are the AO3’s subject headings, but there are no “excruciatingly detailed rulebooks on how to describe and categorize” the fics! While AO3 is not the only archive for fanfiction, it is one of the largest, and it does not exclude slash fiction (as fanfiction.net has for some years). Finally, AO3’s tagging system and search tools make it easier to do quantitative analysis. I started with saffic stories because I consider them examples of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Melissa Adler call "reparative taxonomies," classification systems which resist the normative and universalized categories of dominant systems (such as the Library of Congress classification system). "Perversity" in this context is defined as strategies of resistance to the normative/universalized systems.
AO3 is a "fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, non-commercial archive for transformative fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic." The AO3 uses a hybrid method in which users can create their own tags, a “freeform tagging system,” for their works and volunteer tag wranglers build a classification system that works to "sort and make connections between tags."8
I found a fantastic resource by a fandom statistician who runs "Destination: Toast," a sort of a hub for statistical analysis of fandom much of which, I strongly suspect, is done by fans (albeit with statistical training) for fans, studying fandom in the way fans have always done. Toast has done a lot of work with AO3 (and on some other fan archives) and makes the raw data available as well as the results. She also links to statistical work done on a variety of sites by other people and has created a tool fpr generating statistics on AO3 that complements the archive’s own tools.
Using Toast's tool, I generated statistics on the number of tags relating to the three major published works by Tolkien, and it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that the largest percentage of saffics in the general Tolkien category are in the Silmarillion fandom: 7%. Only 2% of the fics in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings categories focused on female characters. A 2016 report Toast did on the growth of f/f fics on AO3 showed that the percentage had increased from a little over 4% to about 9%.9
The reasons I never finished the project were Covid, my decision to retire and escape from Texas (which I did in 2020), and other projects that were closer to publication ready (or, in one case, was on what I considered a more important topic).
By areas of interest, I mean not only for scholarly research, but for creative projects! After I fell in love with Jackson’s Fellowship, I started writing slash fiction, posting on LiveJournal in the company of some amazing friends. Some (but not all!) of my fanfic is hosted on AO3 under my fan pseud. Fair warning: I’ve also been posting some of my academic presentations on fanfiction topics there (in fandom genre terms, it counts as “meta” which can be posted along with fiction on the archive!). Writing fanfic eventually resulted in getting some ideas for novels which I am hoping to finish up in retirement (though I seem to keep writing scholarly stuff! Talk about perversions)!
Because fandom, like academia, tends to debate terminology, there is (as far as I know) no universal consensus on the best term for f/f slash; my preferred term is “saffic” (because I dislike the slash is the unmarked term and f/f slash is marked. I have a major saffic that I started years ago and still hope to finish some day.
The tagging system is one of the reasons AO3 won a Hugo Award for “best related work” (a rather controversial issue but that’s off-topic for this piece).
The purpose of a bibliographic essay is to analyze the patterns in the scholarship on a topic I’ve done two bibliographic essays on topics in Tolkien studies: the “Race and Tolkien” essay in Tolkien and Alterity, and a feminist bibliographic essay on the history of female characters in Tolkien’s work for Perilous and Fair . The essay is a feminist one because it is by a feminist; I neither argue that Tolkien was a feminist nor that essays about female characters are automatically feminist (he wasn’t; they’re not). But bibliographic research (putting together a bibliography of relevant research on a topic) is something I’ve done for all my scholarship; those essays have a different purpose and use the scholarship differently (for a review of the arguments in the relevant scholarship to identify areas of agreement, disagreement, and gaps, if any, as context for my argument on the topic.
Yes, it is more complicated than that, plus things may have changed: having retired, I no longer have access to the subscription databases for publications in recent years (not since 2020). Not all the women (I personally know) publishing Tolkien scholarship are straight (I am not going to out or dox anybody!); not everybody writing about “gender” is a man writing about male characters and focusing on masculinity although most of them are. I also know a number of non-binary and trans* scholars who are in graduate school these days who promise to significantly transform the scholarly fields they choose!
One of the few exceptions to my observations about gender patterns in the scholarship is David Craig’s “‘Queer Lodgings’: Gender and Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings” in which he covers not only Sam and Frodo’s relationship in the context of the changing constructions of gender in England between the two World Wars but also provides one of the best interpretations of Tolkien’s characterization of Éowyn that I have ever read. However, with this one exception, the work on homoromantic/homoerotic/homosexual elements of Tolkien’s male characters is almost entirely by men (some of whom are denying those elements exist with every breath they take, of course—my favorite denial argument is “it is a SPIRITUAL love”). Another standout exception is Anna Smol’s “‘Oh. . . Oh. . . . Frodo!’: Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of the Rings.” Smol analyzes Sam and Frodo’s relationship in the context of feudal medieval relationships, relationships between solders in World War I, and in the context of contemporary slash fanfiction. Notice her 2004 article is published in the special theme issue of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies!
As far as I know, and I would be happy to be proven wrong, my 2009 essay, "Thrusts in the Dark: Slashers' Queer Practices," Extrapolation, vol. 50, no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 463-483, is the only one. I am happy to share a PDF of the essay for scholarly use: email me at robinareid AT fastmail.com.
In recent months, a number of former and current volunteers at OTW have posted about ongoing racism and other structural problems at OTW. For those interested in keeping up to date with events, Synonymous is doing an excellent job of posting links to reports on a number of social media sites in That AO3 Callout Post.
I will have to do some searching to see if that report has been updated, or if I can run it with Toast’s tools, to see what the status is seven years later!