‘Dogfuck rapeworld’: Omegaverse fanfiction as a critical tool in analyzing the impact of social power structures on intimate relationships and sexual consent

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Omegaverse – a subgenre of sexually explicit fanfiction – and its engagement with issues of socially constructed power differentials and sexual consent. I argue that sexually explicit fanfiction, and the Omegaverse in particular, can be used as a critical tool to examine the relationship between power and consent in accessible ways which allow for affective, emotional and intellectual engagement with these issues. I approach the Omegaverse as a body of work marked by intertextuality, where individual stories are in dialogue with not only the source material but also each other and with writers and readers’ knowledge of the real world. I apply sexual script theory to the analysis of three Omegaverse fanfiction stories to examine how such stories articulate and explore disjunctures between sexual scripts at the socially and culturally mediated, interpersonal and individual levels. I draw from theories of sexual consent and insights from Fan Studies to show how the Omegaverse offers strategies for negotiating meaningfully consensual intimate relationships within wider power structures and dominant sexual scripts.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual consent
• fanfiction
• Omegaverse
• sexual scripts
• romance
• pornography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Milena Popova http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5827-8270