Here's the conference program for Pippi to Ripley: The Female Figure in Fantasy and Science Fiction, being held at Ithaca College in NY on May 5. I'm giving a talk "An Introduction to Mary Sue and Her Critical Uses and Abuses," on a panel that also has a talk on Women in Refrigerators and on gender-swap fic, so I'm looking forward to it a lot. (Also, Tamora Pierce is the keynote speaker, which is cool.)
Question for you all: it seems to me that I don't see Mary Sues (or Gary Stus, if you prefer that terminology) in slash fic. First, of course, I see very few canon/OC slash pairings (people seem to do crossovers if they aren't feeling any of the canon dynamics). But the slant taken on canon male characters in slash seems to me to be geared toward making them objects not subjects, or to put it more concretely, woobiefication seems to be undertaken to make them suffer more prettily for the authors'/readers' aesthetic appreciation, not so that authors/readers can use them as placeholders for themselves. But this is just my impression and, of course, I don't write the stuff, so what do you all think?
(By the way, I had not noticed TV Tropes' opening quote when I picked this icon. Great minds, apparently.)
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