Femslash and hurt/comfort

[snowynight]

Hurt/comfort is a genre that involves the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character.  It's a very popular in fanfic. I enter hurt/comfort as keyword in del.icio.us and gets 14441 results. However, the trope is not highly represented in femslash. Using AO3 as an example, there're only 269 story tagged as hurt/comfort which contain femslash pairing. Why the disparity?

I don't have concrete answers. But I have hypothesis.

1. Hurt/comfort usually requires adding and extrapolating the hurt endured by a characters. Unfourtunately, in most of the canons, the female characters suffer, lose their power, are deprived of their agency too many time that we don't feel comfortable writing or reading additional hurt piled on the female characters.

2. Because our canon don't necessary pass the Bechtel's test with flying colour, there's often no other female characters that are reasonably available at these points of the hurt character's life to provide comfort. It can be bypassed, but there're effort.

3. As a lot of femslash writers are identified as female, there's not much distance between the hurt on the characters and the writers themselves. It's easier to identify with the character being hurt and thus harder to fetishizes the hurt.

4. In popular narrative, women are supposed to suffer. As their stories're considered not so important by the society, we're less likely to be trained to acknowledge and expand on the woman characters' suffering. 

Take me as example, if hurt /comfort exists along on a spectrum, I 'm more inclined to hurt the characters and withhold the comfort because I enjoy characters who stoically and bravely endure the bad things in life. However, for some female characters I love, their life basically are bad. Marvel superhero Carol Danvers experienced enough rape as drama, depowering, addiction problems and such that I admire her for being a surviver, but it hurt me to read the canon myself, not to mention creating fanwork based on it. It's harder to provide comfort because Carol's female friends are often not literally available. I'm also less likely to indulge in hurting female characters  because it makes me guilty, as if I were joining the canon writers in depowering the female characters.

It's my hypothesis. What's your opinion?

Comments

[soukup]

*nods* I agree strongly with what you say in #3 -- I can think of plenty of fiction by male authors that seems to "fetishize" (your word describes it perfectly) female pain, in a way that I find really creepy and gross. This makes me reluctant to dwell on the details of a woman's suffering, particularly if there's also a stronger "saviour" figure involved (male or female). Also, I like writing people I admire, especially women I admire, and one of the things I admire a lot is self-sufficiency, independence. It's way more satisfying for me to write a story about a character who goes through something tough and handles it herself.

And when it comes to romance, I'd rather read about people in a relationship who both feel like they can walk away from it -- who have no debt to each other, who see themselves as equals and who are together for love alone. When it feels like one of the characters is with the other in part because she feels obligated or indebted or something, that leaves a gross taste in my mouth.

[snowynight]

Thanks for commenting!

Fetishized violence of woman is so often found in the media that I think few of us are willing to duplicate it in fic. nd I agree that co-dependency doesn't make a healthy romantic relationship.