Notions of love and sexuality and their discussion in male/male slash fiction from the realm of children’s and young adult literature

• Applicant: Dr. Melanie Babenhauserheide
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438976018

The prospective study will explore how readers and authors of fan fiction discuss different perspectives on love and sexuality and will also focus on the style, content and form of their contributions. The question at hand is examined by analysing online fan fiction and the way it is introduced by the authors, as well as readers‘ discussions of the respective literary texts. The sample of the study consists of fan fiction from the Harry Potter realm – J.K. Rowling’s global bestseller and the most successful work of children’s and young adults’ literature of the millennium – which presumably has a high number of adolescent contributors. More specifically, the study focusses on the romantic pairing of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, which is the fandom's most common pairing and belongs to the subgenre of male/male slash fiction: a genre centering around gay relationships, that has an especially large female following. Many of these texts cross the genre boundaries between romantic literature and pornography. Whereas existing research on adolescents' attitudes towards pornography concludes that girls show little interest in online pornography, this prospective study could generate hypotheses regarding the kinds of sexually explicit material girls consume by also focussing on elements of gender performativity in the texts. The literary material that the study will be based on, is viewed - in accordance with Bernfeld – as a subject matter that belongs to the field of adolescence research. Fan fiction, however, is produced and read by people of different ages, thus adding a potential intergenerational perspective on conflicts and differences between fan fiction readers and authors.The methodology applied in the study is an advancement of Ritsert' s ideology critical content analysis, specifically developed for the purpose of this study. Additionally, this approach will not only consider emotional reactions and literary form, but will also adopt a perspective of constellation, that seeks to focus on the relation of the different text forms to each other. In terms of innovation the prospective study is the first research project to thoroughly investigate aesthetics, form and content of sexually explicit material, as well as including the perspective of adolescents. The aim of the study is to reconstruct, how erotic fantasies expressed in fan fiction and participants' reactions, can be understood in regards to current theories in the field of sexology – especially the diagnosed cultural shift from traditional sexual morals to shifting attitudes concerning sexual behaviour, that focus on the issue of consent between two equal partners. Therefore psychoanalytic approaches, as well as theories from the field of cultural and social studies, that deal with the current and historical relationship between humans and their sexuality, will be referred to.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants