“In the new book, Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent, writer Milena Popova shows how these fanfiction sub-communities play with power rather than eliminate it. Stories of “dubious consent, or “dub con,” as it’s called, recognize that inequality sometimes implicates consent, making it not-so-clear-cut, ‘not a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” In the real world, writes Popova, it’s questionable whether “partners are free to know and express their own desires and limits without any external pressures or power structures.'”
—Jezebel
1 Introduction 1
2 Thinking the Unthinkable 15
Interlude: What We Talk about when we Talk about Fanfiction 31
3 “Dogfuck Rapeworld”: Sexual Scripts and Consent in the Omegaverse 35
4 Rewriting the Romance: Emotion Work and Consent in Arranged-Marriage Fanfiction 63
5 Blurred Lines: From Fiction to Real Life 91
6 “Tab A, Slot B”: Lived Experience and Knowledges of Consent 117
7 “Living Our Values”: A Praxis of Consent 141
Epilogue 165
Acknowledgments 177
Notes 179
Index 203