Cultus Dispatches: Fandom Voices - Women in Fanworks

Tolkien's legendarium presents a challenging landscape for fanworks about women. The lack of women characters, the missing names and details, and the sexist leanings of some of his writings can all act as barriers to creating women-centric fanworks.

This month's Cultus Dispatches column is one of our Fandom Voices columns, where we present a question or two to the community in an attempt to capture a range of fan experiences with a topic. For this round, we focused on the experience of creating (and reading/viewing) fanworks about women. What is it like to make fanworks about women in the Tolkien fandom, we wondered, and how has this changed (or not) in the decades of the fandom's existence?

We received twenty-two responses by the time we compiled the article, which highlights some of those responses with light analysis (and includes the entire collection so that you can draw your own conclusions). Participants highlighted the challenges of writing about women in the fandom, a major part of which was the fandom itself. While not a universal experience, many observed that the Tolkien fanworks fandom was overtly hostile to writing about women in the first decade of the 2000s, a status quo that fans have worked to change, resulting in a climate that is more openminded today. However, the lingering effects of that hostile history continues to impact some creators, and many respondents see ample work that still needs to be done.

You can read "Fandom Voices: Women in Fanworks" here.

Also note that our Fandom Voices surveys never close. If you didn't get a chance to share your experiences and want to, it is not too late! We will continue to add new responses to the collection as they come in. You can respond to the "Women in Fanworks" survey here.

Finally, we are in the midst of a series of Cultus Dispatches articles focusing on the history and culture surrounding women-centric fanworks in the Tolkien fandom. Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions from all members of the fandom, so if there is a character or pairing, event or website, or other approach to fandom history and culture involving women (or any other topic!) that you'd like to explore in an article, contact our moderators and pitch your idea! Our reference editors will support new researchers and writers through the process, so don't let unfamiliarity with research writing dissuade you from sharing your ideas with us.

Posted on 26 November 2022 (updated 24 December 2022) by SWG Moderators