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As you may recall from a few posts down in my journal, I'm doing a research paper on queer women in SF/F fandom. You can see the thesis of the paper in that post, and I got a number of volunteers that I'm very excited about hearing from.
If you missed it the first time, but you would still like to participate, here are my survey questions. You can feel free to answer them and send them to me in an email ( bettyplot at yahoo dot com); anything I get before about Monday or Tuesday is liable to make it into the paper. If you want to answer some but not all of the questions, that's cool too.
1. Describe yourself: name (legal or your fan alias(es) -- something I can identify you by), age, where you live, and how you identfiy yourself in terms of your sexual orientation.
2. To what degree are you out? Within fandom, with your RL friends, with your family, at work?
3. How long have you been involved with fandom? What were your first fan experiences? Were you “fannish” before discovering other fans? How did you find out that fandom existed?
4. Briefly describe your fannish history (with particular emphasis on SF/F fandoms). What fandoms in particular have you been involved in? Do you attend or organize cons? Are you a fanfic writer? Active on usenet, mailing lists, posting boards? RPGs?
5. How long have you identified as non-heterosexual? Has that been consistent throughout your life, or was there an event or a process of revising your thinking on that subject? Do you remember particular experiences or periods of time that played into that?
6. Tell me about any SF/F texts or characters that you feel you responded to specifically as a queer woman. Did you identify certain female characters as sex symbols? Did you identify any of them as canonically queer, or as coded queer? Did any of the texts that have been significant to you deal overtly with issues of sexuality? Did any of them seem to reflect your issues and concerns as a queer person subtextually or metaphorically? Are there texts you suspect you read/view differently than a heterosexual audience might?
7. Tell me about your experiences in the fan community as a queer person. Have you felt particularly uncomfortable or particularly comfortable in fan settings? Are you more out within fandom than in RL, or less? Do you interact with more queer people within the context of fan activities than you do in other contexts or not? Are there any particular people or groups of people that you’ve met through fandom who have been or are significant to you in terms of your sexuality?
8. Are you involved with the slash community? As a reader or a writer? M/M or F/F slash?
9a. If you write or read m/m slash, do you think you approach it differently than a heterosexual woman might, or not? Do you view the characters as queer within the context of those stories? Is the way the story handles their sexuality important to you or not? To what degree does the SF/F setting influence the way you view these characters and their sexual identity?
9b. If you write or read f/f slash, what attracts you most to a story or a pairing? Do you view it as erotica? Are you chiefly interested in stories that focus on the particular relationship of the characters? Is it important to you that the characters deal with their sexuality in ways that feel realistic to you as a queer woman, or do you view the stories sheerly as fantasy? To what degree does the SF/F setting influence the way you view these characters and their sexual identity?
10. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?
If you missed it the first time, but you would still like to participate, here are my survey questions. You can feel free to answer them and send them to me in an email ( bettyplot at yahoo dot com); anything I get before about Monday or Tuesday is liable to make it into the paper. If you want to answer some but not all of the questions, that's cool too.
1. Describe yourself: name (legal or your fan alias(es) -- something I can identify you by), age, where you live, and how you identfiy yourself in terms of your sexual orientation.
2. To what degree are you out? Within fandom, with your RL friends, with your family, at work?
3. How long have you been involved with fandom? What were your first fan experiences? Were you “fannish” before discovering other fans? How did you find out that fandom existed?
4. Briefly describe your fannish history (with particular emphasis on SF/F fandoms). What fandoms in particular have you been involved in? Do you attend or organize cons? Are you a fanfic writer? Active on usenet, mailing lists, posting boards? RPGs?
5. How long have you identified as non-heterosexual? Has that been consistent throughout your life, or was there an event or a process of revising your thinking on that subject? Do you remember particular experiences or periods of time that played into that?
6. Tell me about any SF/F texts or characters that you feel you responded to specifically as a queer woman. Did you identify certain female characters as sex symbols? Did you identify any of them as canonically queer, or as coded queer? Did any of the texts that have been significant to you deal overtly with issues of sexuality? Did any of them seem to reflect your issues and concerns as a queer person subtextually or metaphorically? Are there texts you suspect you read/view differently than a heterosexual audience might?
7. Tell me about your experiences in the fan community as a queer person. Have you felt particularly uncomfortable or particularly comfortable in fan settings? Are you more out within fandom than in RL, or less? Do you interact with more queer people within the context of fan activities than you do in other contexts or not? Are there any particular people or groups of people that you’ve met through fandom who have been or are significant to you in terms of your sexuality?
8. Are you involved with the slash community? As a reader or a writer? M/M or F/F slash?
9a. If you write or read m/m slash, do you think you approach it differently than a heterosexual woman might, or not? Do you view the characters as queer within the context of those stories? Is the way the story handles their sexuality important to you or not? To what degree does the SF/F setting influence the way you view these characters and their sexual identity?
9b. If you write or read f/f slash, what attracts you most to a story or a pairing? Do you view it as erotica? Are you chiefly interested in stories that focus on the particular relationship of the characters? Is it important to you that the characters deal with their sexuality in ways that feel realistic to you as a queer woman, or do you view the stories sheerly as fantasy? To what degree does the SF/F setting influence the way you view these characters and their sexual identity?
10. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?
