The Morass of Feminist/Gender/Queer Approaches to "Tolkien" Part 1
An Incomplete Fellowship: The Exclusion of Queer Women from Tolkien Studies
Introduction
This post is the first of what I hope will be a short series of patchwork1 posts pulled together from various bits and pieces that I worked on sporadically between 2017-2021. It started as a presentation given at the 2018 Popular Culture Association (PCA) conference for one of the two paper sessions on “Queer Tolkien” we did that year. The sessions were our first step toward an anthology on Queer readings of Tolkiens legendarium, its adaptations, and transformative works, that I was co-editing with two medievalist [I am the postmodernist in the trio ;>] Tolkienists: Christopher Vaccaro and Stephen Yandell. It took a while to finish (Covid-19 derailed and delayed a lot of academic projects as well as just about everything else). But the manuscript for “There are many paths to tread”: Queer Approaches to Tolkien's Middle-earth is currently at McFarland for peer-review and, we hope, will be forthcoming in 2025.
Our anthology was inspired by and responded to the monograph by Jane Chance (Tolkien, Self and Other: This Queer Creature [2016]) and the anthology edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor (Tolkien and Alterity [2017]. Our goal was to address some of the gaps in Queer Tolkien Studies2 and generate some questions/issues for future work:
What do “the Other[s]” and “the Queer[s]” have to say about Tolkien’s legendarium, the adaptations and transformative works, the global phenomenon of the readership that has flourished during the past seven decades? Given the dominance of the heterosexist interpretations in scholarship, when will “the Straight” (or “the Normative”) scholars acknowledge the limitations of their subject positions when interpreting texts rather than assuming their (personal sense of) universality is, well, universal? Finally, how can Tolkien scholars change the academic spaces we inhabit to become more diverse and intersectional than has been the case in the past?3 (“Introduction”).
For a while, I tried to build part of the introductory chapter to our anthology around the presentation, but I realized as time went on and unsatisfactory drafts piled up that it didn’t fit *that* project, and never would fit it, no matter what I did.
I kept it around (you never know when something might become very useful at a later date!). I did play around with developing some parts in earlier Substack posts (which I have now added to the Web Project section (you can read the all the related posts in the section by clicking on the “Web Project” link above), and I include those specific links in the patchwork posts as well.
And I’ve now realized that some of these earlier pieces were my attempt to start to theorize/understand what an intersectional queer feminist analysis of “Tolkien,” the Jackson films, and the collective impact/reception of both on the transformative works fandom might look like.
Scrap 1: The Big Picture!
As a queer white woman who is an atheist, an autist, and a feminist who has been in an asexual lifetime partnership for three decades, I bring my personal and professional experiences in addition to my academic training, to the work I do in Tolkien studies. I define “Tolkien studies” not as a more or less coherent body of published work (for one thing, Christopher Tolkien’s immensely valuable posthumous publications of his father’s drafts and notes immediately raises the question of “what IS the ‘Tolkien canon?’), but more broadly as a global cultural phenomenon that has been building for seventy years.
Thanks to recent work by Nick Polk and Leah Hagan I now have an awesome term for that phenomenon: a hyberobject!
In their excellent work in progress, “Heritage as Hyperobject,” Nick Polk and Leah Hagan introduce the concept of the hyperobject, a term “used to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Timothy Morton) They point out Tolkien’s legendarium is such a hyperobject; I would agree with that, although noting that the published legendarium, voluminous as it is, is only part of a larger hyperobject, what I call the Tolkien global phenomenon, which includes not only all the translations and adaptations of Tolkien’s work but also all the criticism, fan and scholarly.
This hyperobject encompasses not only Tolkien's published works but the posthumous works, commercial adaptations, translations, criticism (fan meta, literary criticism and reviews, academic scholarship, fans’ transformative works, fantasy fiction influenced by Tolkien, and probably more—heck the art and music created based on and about Tolkien’s counts as well) and is clearly “massively distributed in time and space,” and we’re all just dabbling in the parts we can access/understand!
Nobody can deal with the whole thing — but it’s useful to keep in mind that it exists to avoid the problem of assuming an expertise that is impossible to sustain.
One part of the hyperobject that interests me are the patterns in the academic scholarship although it’s useful to keep in mind that reviews for the general audience and books for a popular audience came first, as did fan scholarship (in fanzines! I was there, Gandalf, back in the day when we used mimeographic machines to crank out our ‘zines!). And there are overlaps: fans were writing analyses (meta!) using tools they learned in school from the very start.
Scrap 2: Stories from My Classroom!
These are some of my experiences teaching multicultural literature (by the time I retired, the preferred term was “marginalized literatures”) at a small university in rural Texas. In that context, it’s worth noting that I feel very lucky to be retired because most of the classes I taught—outside of business/technical writing—were on topics that the christofascist state regimes are rapidly trying to make illegal; even back in the 1990s, I rarely went a year without one or more of my assigned books being challenged/banned in Texas!
When I was lucky enough to be hired for a tenure-track postion by a small regional university in rural Texas, my position description specified that I was hired to teach (and in theory develop a resarch agenda for) creative writing, critical theory, and multicultural literature.4
In my first semester on the job (fall 1993),5 I was assigned tthe graduate seminar in "Multicultural Literature and Languages." One of the books I assigned was This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. It was one of the most important intersectional works of theory and activism I read during my doctoral program, one that informed my work on feminist science fiction and inspired later work with critical race and intersectional theories in my teaching and scholarship. It is a major work of what Cassius Adair and Lisa Nakamura call the "countercultural canon.”6
My department head met with me in November for my first annual evaluation. At the end, he told me that while he supported academic freedom, he wanted to let me know that a senior colleague whose name was never mentioned had asked why there was a book about homosexuals in a multicultural class. I pointed out the importance of a collection of writings by radical women of color. The multicultural graduate class was taught once every three years. As someone in early years of a tenure-track job, I decided to drop Bridge the next time I taught the class. I brought it back, along with others in that "countercultural canon," after gaining tenure, the third time I taught it.7
Another year, one of the course evaluations from my undergraduate women writer's class had the following comment: "I did not expect to read works by African-American women and lesbians in a class on women writers."8
That instance reminded me of a comment at another university where I taught a sophomore-level science fiction class for the department in which I assigned equal numbers of books by men and women authors. That evaluation consisted solely of the question: “What do women have to do with science fiction, anyway?”
Still later, in my graduate "Texts and Genders" class, I assigned Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf as the class literary text [that meant that our class discussions and would involve applying the different gender theories we read to the same text throughout the semester).9
By then, not only was I tenured, but I’d begun attending the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University to participate in the Tolkien at Kalamazoo sessions. I had found some queer medieval scholarship when I was cruising (heh) the bookroom, and thought ah-hah! One of my male senior colleagues overheard me discussing my class with the medievalist in the department: what, he asked me, does Beowulf have to do with gender? The medievalist told him that she strongly supported assigning Beowulf in any and every class which ended that discussion.10
Some of the students in class had a more sophisticated response than my colleague: they asked whether we were imposing our contemporary view of "homosexuality" on this character in a medieval epic. After acknowleding the potential dangers of presentism, I asked them to re-read the poem, looking specifically for any evidence in the text that Beowulf was what we would call heterosexual or straight.
They reported the following week that they could not find any evidence to confirm their strong belief that he was straight, and we discussed how seeing a character as "heterosexual" was, necessarily, also presentist!
Scrap 3: Fun with Bibliographic Scholarship!
The bibliographic stuff will be coming up again in future scraps: first, an excerpt from my Scholar GOH talk Mythcon 49 (2018). “On the Shoulders of Gi(E)nts: The Joys of Bibliographic Scholarship and Fanzines in Tolkien Studies.”
I must start with a confession though: becoming a fan of bibliographic scholarship was a shocking mid-career change for me. I never had a course in bibliography and methods because my first Master’s was in Creative Writing in an English department that exempted us from the “academic” bibliography class and my second was in English at the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer graduate program developed for teachers, that took a different approach to graduate studies. When I eventually got to my doctoral program, there were minimal course requirements, and I did not seek out a bibliography course because I shared the common attitude that having to read essays on literature is tedious and boring compared to actually reading literature. . . .What changed my attitude toward bibliographic scholarship was Tolkien!
. . . .
The kind of bibliographic scholarship I do hovers on the boundaries of the field as defined by “The Bibliographical Society of America,” the “oldest scholarly society in North America,” which started in 1904. The Society defines bibliography as the study of “books and manuscripts as physical objects” on its home page, and as a branch of library and/or information sciences with specifice sub-branches that focus on listing books relating to specific topics, or books in a specific location, or lists describing books as material objects. Bibliographies have expanded beyond books to include articles, and lists about texts in other media are identified by different names, filmographies for films, for example. A term has even been coined for a list of web pages, “arachniography.” It was invented by a NASA engineer, Andrew J. Butrica. According to the entry on “arachniography” on WhatIs.com (a resource about information technology for those working in the field to learn each other’s specialized terminology), he first thought of calling it a “webography” but disliked the mixed etymology (the Germanic “web” and Greek “graphy”). His brother, a Classics professor, suggested a word coined from two Greek ones instead, which I admit to liking more than his original idea.
Another type of bibliographic scholarship [in addition to generating lists of books or other texts] involves the evaluation of published work. In 2000, Michael D. C. Drout and Hilary Wynne published an extensive and authoritative essay accompanying their thirty-page bibliography of Tolkien scholarship from 1984-2000, starting from when Johnson’s ended. Their essay, “Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism Since 1982,” identifies and addresses two related problems in Tolkien criticism: first, the tendency of Tolkien critics to not read the published criticism, which leads to the second, the repetition of certain basic arguments. They identify other bibliographic resources (I learned about Judith Johnson’s book from this essay!) and analyze the scholarship from Shippey’s first book to the time of their essay. They discuss the state of work on major topics in Tolkien scholarship—textual and manuscript history, source studies, themes of good and evil, Tolkien’s “Mythology for England”—and then go on to identify weaknesses and gaps they would like to see addressed in future Tolkien criticism. The weaknesses they identified include “defending Tolkien against his detractors” (113) and “attack[s] on” Tolkien “fandom” (123). The gaps in the scholarship which need filling are, most importantly, stylistic analysis and applying contemporary socio-historical critical theories that involve consideration of constructions of race, class and gender to Tolkien’s work, although they seem somewhat dubious about the contemporary approaches. They also argue that good critical work requires studying The History of Middle-earth.
My contributions tend towards a narrower focus, specifically on topics and approaches relating to my scholarly interests in contemporary feminist, critical race, queer, and intersectional theories.11
Drout and Wynne’s list of scholarship that accompanies their bibliographic essay is a selective one (they chose the publications they considered the best/most substantive/and necessary for scholars to read). My approach in my bibliographic essays so far, which have a very specific focus, has been more comprehensive because I am interested in the question of when (and who) began to write about women characters, or constructions of race/racisms in the legendarium.
The first, and so far the only, bibliographic essay on queer approaches to Tolkien is Yvette Kisor's "Queer Tolkien: A Bibliographical Essay on Tolkien and Alterity," published in the 2017 collection, Tolkien and Alterity (Vaccaro and Kisor). She argues that the queer scholarship on Tolkien falls into two major categories: the first, focusing on "queer sexuality and identity," and the second on the broader category of “queer” as anything that is non-normative which can mean a focus on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, etc. (18).12 Concluding that there is little consensus in existing scholarship, Kisor identifies possible approaches for future queer study in both categories.
While she sees little scope for any further discussion on "the homosexuality of characters in The Lord of the Rings," she notes other characters in Tolkien's legendarium might repay such analysis and that building on existing work on fan fiction and fan art as well as film adaptations has potential. Other possible areas for development in the broader sense of the word include more work with Emmanuel Lévinas' philosophy, building on Deidre Dawson's essay in Alterity and building on Tison Pugh's use of queer theory to discuss medieval genres, a type of "medieval queerness."
I agree with the majority of what Kisor says, with the only real area of disagreement being about which category David Craig’s essay fits into (and his overall argument) which I will discuss more in the next post of this series because Substack is already warning me this post is too long for email!)!
I am thinking about a possible bibliographic essay for the anthology that Cami Agan and Clare Moore are editing: "Great Heart and Strength": New Essays on Women and Gender in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. My goal will be (as this whole project involves!) an intersectional feminist queer bibliographic essay trying to point to some of the complicated intersections in Feminist, Gender, and Queer scholarship. I will be drawing on work by Sara Ahmed and Melissa Adler to note13 exclusions in feminist, gender, and queer Tolkien scholarship, as well as drawing together the recent scholarship (published in the ten plus years since I completed the feminist bibliographic essay).14
My recent work on the queer anthology has made clear that one of the major exclusions is the focus on male characters (and male theorists)! Such exclusions are neither unique to queer Tolkien studies nor to Tolkien studies in general; they are based on normative systems which have been, until recently, unchallenged in academic and social structures. Tolkien scholarship originated in medieval studies, and medieval scholars are still strongly represented in the field although recent years, in the wake of Peter Jackson's live-action films, have seen the growth of work by scholars trained in different periods. Feminist medieval scholars have pointed to gender exclusion problems in medieval queer studies; in her 2013 review essay in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Diane Watt notes the extent to which the study of "men and masculinity" in 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 points out that queer women, while not appearing in medieval queer scholarship, do appear in medieval feminist queer studies, exemplified by the 2001 monograph, Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn, which includes eleven chapters mostly but not exclusively by women, to analyze:
the insights of feminist scholarship, gender studies, and queer studies to reconfigure the presence and voice of women who desired or loved otehr women--and at times fully and dangerously consummated their love for them. In so doing, these essays reconsider the very ways pre-modern sexualities are discursively displayed: many view terms such as heterosexuality and homosexuality not merely as linguistic anachronisms but as categories instrinsically unable to serve the complex array of self-perceptions, legal definitions, and visual and literary representations that chart the busy map of medieval sexualities (17).
And the scholarship on women and Tolkien that I wrote about for P&F tended to exclude any queer readings of the female characters (and since a lot of people can barely grasp that some women (and some feminists) are Tolkien fans, I doubt they’d do any better with queer women, non-binary, or femme fans (but I may just be getting cynical in my old age).
One question is whether feminist and/or queer Tolkien studies have begun to re-center queer “women and [femininities].” I should end by noting I do not consider the claim that none of Tolkien’s female characters are lesbian any more valid than the "parallel” homosexual claim about male characters.
Of course, The Lord of the Rings, and probably most of Tolkien’s work, fails the Bechdel-Wallace test for the simple (HAH!) reason that the female characters are isolated; never seen with another female character (Ioreth’s discussion with her kinswoman from Imloth Melui doesn’t even pass)!
Of course, as I’ll be developing for the project later on, that sort of thing doesn’t stop the determined fen: when I did a search for “Ioreth” in “Lord of the Rings — Tolkien” [as opposed to “Lord of the Rings — all Media Types”], there were over 100 works (mostly fics, though I’ve found at least one podcast), which I’m reading. Now, 100 works is an incredibly small number in the context of other fics/fandoms, or even in the context of all “Tolkien” fics, but still, given the small amount of narrative space Ioreth has in LotR, I think it’s worth noting!15 Plus as I used to explain to my students, the importance of a character (or any other textual element) is not solely determined by how many words the author devotes to said character/element!
Book cover with the Patchwork Girl of Oz from my first fandom, though I didn’t know the word at the time I discovered Oz at age five. I just knew I loved it, and constantly read and re-read the Oz books for at least two decades (and not just the L. Frank Baum ones; in some ways I loved the Ruth Plumley Thompson ones ever more!)
The issue is, of course, The Many Meanings of "Queer"
And more meanings will probably develop in future!
Ever since an anonymous reader insisted that my “queer” reading of Éowyn was wrong and that because I was a woman, what I was writing had to be a “lesbian” reading [although I was not and am not a lesbian], I’ve realized it’s important to define the term in my work.
In his excellent queer film studies book, Alexander Doty opens by providing six different definitions of “queer” that he has seen used in “film and popular culture studies" (6).
I’ve found Doty’s list immensely valuable over the years; it’s my ‘go-to’ source for clarifying what specific definition I’m drawing on for any specific project (I am especially fond of #6!). And one of the most important points is that assuming “queer” is automatically “progressive” is a mistake (see ""Gays for Trump" for a pertinent example!
One caveat about the list below: saying something is queer according to one of these definitions does not necessarily indicate a radical, progressive, or even liberal position on gender, sexuality, or other issues. For example, the queer work a straight person does in writing about a gay- or lesbian-themed film might express a conservative or normative ideological position. Some would like the term 'queer' to be reserved only for those approaches, positions, and texts that are in some way progressive. But, in practice, queerness has been more ideologically inclusive. Hence there is a need to discuss the politics of queerness carefully and specifically and not just assume that to be queer is to represent a position somewhere on the left.
"Queer/queerness has been used:
1. As a synonym for either gay, or lesbian, or bisexual.
2. In various ways as an umbrella term
a. to pull together lesbian, and/or gay, and/or bisexual with little or no attention to differences (similar to certain uses of "gay" to mean lesbians, gay men, and sometimes, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgendered people).
b. to describe a range of distinct non-straight positions being juxtaposed with each other.
c. to suggest those overlapping areas between and among lesbian, and/or gay, and/or bisexual, and/or other non-straight positions.
3. To describe the non-straight work, positions, pleasures, and readings of people who don't share the same "sexual orientation" as the text they are producing or responding to (for example, a straight scholar might be said to do queer work when she/he writes an essay on Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, or someone gay might take queer pleasure in the lesbian film Desert Hearts.)
4. To describe any nonnormative expression of gender, including those connected with straightness.
5. To describe non-straight things that are not clearly marked as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered, but that seem to suggest or allude to one or more of these categories, often in a vague, confusing, or incoherent manner (for example, Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs or Katharine Hepburn's character in Sylvia Scarlett).
6. To describe those aspects of spectatorship, cultural readership, production, and textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or transgendered understandings and categorization of gender and sexuality—this is a more radical understanding of queer, as queerness here is something apart from established gender and sexuality categories, not the result of vague or confused coding or positioning (I would contend that Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is a queer avant-garde film by this definition) " (6-7)
Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. Routledge 2000.
In a totally nifty connection with the my Oz fandom story, the cover of the paperback edition of Doty’s book has the first two words of the title, “Flaming Classics” in green smoke against the sky written by the black-clad Wicked Witch (just like in the film!), and the second chapter is “‘My Beautiful Wickedness’: The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy”! I’ll have to re-read that essay sometime soon! For another look at lesbian Dorothy, see Seanann McGuire’s story, “Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust,” in the anthology, Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen Here, McGuire says she was inspired to work on a dark urban fantasy Oz trilogy that I would strongly consider renting my soul, if not selling it, to get my hands on. I hope McGuire is able to write that trilogy some day!
You can learn a bit more about the anthology through our interview with Alicia, Grace, and Leah, over at the Queer Lodgings Podcast!
I used to joke that I was probably the only faculty member with that sort of portmanteau focus: colleagues hired the same year, or soon thereafter, had specializations such as: Composition, the first “half” of the British Literature track (basically Beowulf to the 17th or 18th century); Children’s Literature (the university had started as a teachers’ college and the College of Education was the 800-pound gorilla on campus); American Literature (which, like British Literature was split into historical period-based halves), Spanish, and French, as well as various specializations in Linguistics (it was a Department of Literature and Languages).
The first six years in a tenure-track position, you are an “at-will employee” who can be let go/fired at any time for any reason. In that sixth year, you put together your application for tenure and (at many universities) promotion which is evaluated at the department level (by all tenured faculty), by your department head or chair, then by the Dean, then by the President who makes the final decision based on the recommendations of the earlier levels of review. Sometimes there is a college or university committee of tenured faculty who do a review: the year I went up for tenure, there was a new College of Arts and Sciences review committee that had just been formed.
Bridge was originally published by the independent Kitchen Table Women of Color Press in 1981. It has remained in print since; the fourth (expanded) edition came out in 2015 by SUNY Press. In a 2017 essay, “The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy, Cassius Adair and Lisa Nakamura evaluate it as a book that is "now countercultural canon, one of many radical interventions into white feminist theory that now undergirds much intersectional work on gender, race, class, and homophobia" (255).
I was initially denied tenure and promotion on the basis of a report from a college committee that declared my work was below average in teaching, scholarship, and service despite the fact that the faculty in my department unanimously voted that I met and exceeded the criteria for tenure and promotion. My department head appealed the decision, and I was eventually granted tenure, although not promotion that year. I later heard through the campus grapevine (small university, small town, equals active gossip) that a number of the members of the college committee were horribly offended at the popular culture work I did in my research. I strongly suspect that my being an unmarried and childfree woman who lived with another woman and taught queer and feminist theory as well as marginalized literatures also played a part! At least one Dean later complained to my department head that I should just be teaching T. S. Eliot and everything would be fine (said Dean was a chemist who could never understand why English scholars didn’t do poster sessions instead of writing those icky essays!)
This may be the place to explain that the retiring faculty whose position I was hired to fill had been “the department feminist!” After she left, I filled that position. Happily, by the time I retired, a significant percentage of the faculty were feminists. The first department feminist had created the Women Writers course in the 1970s and took it through the process of going from a “special topic class” to an approved course in the department, and getting it on a list of ten courses that that satisfied a 3-semester hour “multicultural requirement” for English majors. All classes except the remedial writing course and the Spanish and French courses were 3SH; the others had a one-hour lab component for 4SFH. So while Women Writers was technically a required course; it was taught on a three-year rotation, and there were nine other classes (also taught on rotation) that a student could take to meet the single-class graduation requirements. (The three-year rotation was the minimum required to keep a class on the rolls without doing a huge amount of paperwork to justify keeping it around).
Every semester I taught the course, I assigned a different class text, but students could write their final paper on any text they chose (although I did require them to get approval early in the term). From memory, other texts I assigned incuded Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, and Rachel Caine’s Ink and Bone.
I know many medievalists in literary studies who became medievalists because of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I did not (in fact, I ran like heck from the Chaucer class I tried as an undergraduate). I don’t think there was a Beowulf class in that department. I spent a lot of time in Shakespeare and British Lit classes as an undergraduate, then did my first Master’s in Creative Writing, and by the time I got into the doctoral program, I was doing feminist and postmodern (contemporary) marginalized literatures (using Foucault as a means of shoehorning feminist speculative fiction into my dissertation even though nobody on my committee did anything with sff). But at all my programs and universities, I tended to hang out with the medievalists who were the period specialists most likely to be fans of fantasy and science fiction (the modernists back then—we’re talking 1970s-80s-earlyy 90s—tended to be virulently anti-”genre” fiction, especially sff!). The Victorianists hadn’t quite gotten into the more popular culture approach back then; obviously, a great deal has changed over time as sff became more mainstream/popular.
My two published bibliographic essays are:
Reid, Robin Anne. "The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliography." In Perilous and Fair, eds Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, 2015, pp. 13-40.
Reid, Robin Anne. "Race in Tolkien Studies: A Bibliographic Essay.” In Tolkien and Alterity, eds. Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor. Palgrave, 2017, pp. 33-74.
I have some complicated feelings about this second category of meaning although, as I note in The Many Meanings of Queer, the “anything non-normative” meaning is one part of the many meanings!
Cruising the Archive of Our Own: Mapping Perversions in Saffic Tolkien Tagging uses Adler’s work to start analyzing patterns of tagging fics at AO3. It was intended to be an essay in our queer anthology, but life interfered with plans, and I did not have time to develop it. But I’m sure it will be useful in this later project.
I use "exclusion" rather than "gap" because "exclusion," although a noun like "gap," is formed from a verb, "exclude," which implies an agent, whether conscious or not, and an action taken by that agent.