The above are the first half of the slides I presented at GeekGirlCon (along with some annotations to explain things I only said out loud 🙂 ) – for the second half, read more below the cut. I’ll also be sharing the slides from the other presenters here, too, as they’re posted!
The gender representation work is part of a longer analysis that I will be posting in full soon!
Beneath the cut are also a few additional slides that I would have presented with a bit more time – several of which address things that came up in the question session.
…And the extra slides:
Are you telling me that there’s three or four times more straight romance labelled as ‘queer’ than lesbian romance?
I wondered if I was the only one picking up on that too. Because really, are you kidding me? Why and how is it even there in the first place?
Ah – okay, this is a place where the slides by themselves (without the accompanying talk I was giving) can apparently lead to confusion. I’m writing a much longer post on this for Tumblr that should be a lot clearer (and more in depth), so stay tuned. 🙂
To clarify, I wasn’t calling F/M queer; it was there as a point of comparison in all cases. The first “queer relationships” slide shows the breakdown of AO3 by every available relationship category (not mutually exclusive, since some stories have multiple tags). I highlighted the queer and potentially queer categories in rainbow colors, and my main point was that there was more queer than straight fic, mostly M/M. That’s partly historical archive reasons and other factors, but my next step was to compare those shipping ratios to the ratios you might naively predict – at least in movie fandoms – from the fact that only ~30% of characters onscreen in the source material are women (I’ll post more on that soon, too), though of course there are also many other factors that influence shipping and what fic gets posted to which archives. I showed that based on canon you might actually predict M/M > F/M > F/F, though not in exactly the numbers on AO3. I also put FFN in as a point of comparison; there is far more F/M on that platform, for various reasons (more soon, too… you may begin to see why I’ve been working on the more complete write-up since May! ;D )
Hope that makes things a bit clearer in the meantime!
Also, responding to the sort of sneering tone I’m detecting towards queee m/f. It’s real, and I write it. Bi/pan/trans and ace characters exist and their m/f relationships are queer. Do I think there’s four times as much of this as there is f/f on AO3, no, and that’s clearly not what Toasty was saying either. She was predicting the ratios of f/f, m/f, and m/m pairings based on canon gender ratios and then comparing them to the actual ratios on AO3. But there’s no neeed to clutch your pearls at the idea that m/f relationships might be counted as queer.
Excellent additional point about queer F/M… I can’t detect that using these particular methods (and it’s definitely not the point I was trying to address in this case )… But it totally exists, and I’m so glad it does (both because I value having a wide variety of stories out there , and because I’ve been involved in a number of queer F/M relationships).
Super interesting stats, and I am so glad to have queer F/M as a term–I hadn’t heard this word before but I really like reading it and am thrilled to have a better way of referring to it!
Question of Smoke 