‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: online slash fiction as a site for activism and change

This article draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n = 429) that examines how women who write and read male/male erotica feel their involvement with the genre has affected their views on gender and sexuality and their political engagement with gay rights issues. Previous work has looked at how online slashfic communities might provide a safe space for exploring gender performance and sexuality, while other researchers have observed a tension between those who identify as queer themselves and those who only ‘play at queerness’ exclusively within the online environment. However, much of this work has examined the theoretical positioning of such forums as transgressive and/or political. Far fewer pieces have attempted to engage with the women who frequent such sites to ask them about whether their involvement in these online spaces has affected their attitudes and behaviours. This study looks not only at the ways in which online m/m fandoms can act as a safe space for women to explore their sexualities and gender identities, but whether and how these insights connect to women’s real-world lives. Data presented here shows a strong consensus among participants that involvement with explicit slash communities has had a positive effect on their lives, as well as contributing to beneficial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and practices with regards to LGBTQ+ issues. Overall, slash is seen as a medium which can create better allies, encourage cross-identification, and bring about positive personal changes. To this extent, I argue that explicit online slash sites can act as heterotopias.     

Creating New Schools for Bradford’s ‘Factory Children’: Obstacles and Outcomes, 1836–1850

Industrialization brought extensive factory development to northern English counties during the early nineteenth century, with new cotton, wool and worsted mills that employed many child workers. By 1840, some 1800 children, aged less than thirteen, worked in mills across the widespread Bradford parish – mostly in the central townships and predominantly in the worsted trade. Under the 1833 Factory Act, these factory children were restricted to forty-eight hours work per week and were required to attend school two hours each day. Available school provision was often poor and ill-adapted to mill-working hours. After delays, diversions and sustained lobbying, new Bradford schools – under the auspices of the ‘National Schools Society’ but specially targeted on factory children – started to come into being, soon reaching an attendance of some 1000 children. One of these schools – in a new, hastily constructed, building – gained recognition as a ‘model factory school’. Despite the perceived deficiencies of the 1833 Act, despite opposition and despite recurrent difficulties over finance, the 1833 legislation gave ‘leverage’ that, in Bradford, generated a new pattern of schooling.