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professor-fangirl

Professor Fangirl

Professor Fangirl (PFG — not to be confused with PervyFicGirl) is a professor of English at a U.S. university who is into both fandom and Queer Theory. She is considered a BNF in the Skyfall and BBC Sherlock fandoms.

Here are some nonnies' descriptions of her:

  • Hilariously pretentiously misunderstanding and/or overinterpreting the canons she follows, and occasionally drags fandom into her professional life.”
  • She's not so much a fan in academia as a fan who pads out her arguments with it.”
  • She's best known here for being the ~sapiosexual who calls the 'intelligent and erotic' fanfic she enjoys 'thinkysex'.”
  • Professorfangirl has … gotten hugely on her high horse about queer theory and ~transformative works and how perhaps the love of a beautiful boy can fix James Bond. She also has Very Definite Opinions about how perfect and beautiful anal sex is, and finds Bond/Silva fic repellent and morally irresponsible.
  • Her reading comprehension is atrocious. I'd give more specific examples but they'd out me. Suffice to say if someone asks a general question she loves to hijack the post for a lengthy, never-use-one-word-if-you-can-use-five explanation of something unrelated that the asker already knew. … If it turns her on it's daring and gamechanging and mindblowing and a step forward for queer rights. Funny how she only seems to care about fictional queer people. And how the fictional queer people she cares about are never queer in-text.“
  • Did anyone else see her Tumblr post where she explained how Eve Sedgewick [PFG's academic advisor] gave her honorary queer status because her husband was a feminist and therefore not a real man?“
  • Every thought she has, often the most trivial observation or an insight any English major has grown tired of, she shares like it's a rare jewel of original thinking. It's all the worst aspects of teachers rolled into one: self important while not being very self aware. And while she can't help that she hasn't been in fandom all that long, it'd sure help if she realized that people had meta thoughts before Tumblr or Sherlock.“

Other nonnies discuss the issues with PFG's grasp of queer theory, her disregard of race issues, and how she (a straight cis woman) talks over actual queer people here, here, and here.

As of this writing, the first mention of her on FFA per Dememe was in mid-October 2013. This nonny was apparently alluding to PFG as having said that shipping Q with women is homophobic; a different nonny contested that reading in a rather OAA style and implied that the first nonny was grudgewanking. (The PFG post in question.) This wank was rehashed in March and May 2014.

In November 2014, PFG wrote meta on AO3 titled, “A note to those new to fanfic and this Archive.” On an FFA thread titled //"Professorfangirl: "Students, Co-Workers just don't get the complex simplicity of buttsex,"// the OP summarized the meta thusly:

professorfangirl, she of the “I'm putting my real name on everything because I'm ~proud to be a fic writer and everyone should” and “if it's posted publicly on your tumblr it's up for wank debate no matter how much I have to dig for it” and “tenure? who needs job security like that?” is now apparently dealing with the fallout of the first, denying that the second applies to her, and wishing she had thought harder about the third before she started plastering her real name on explicit gay porn.

Oh yes, and queer male sexuality is a tool for ficcers to use. Because it's like, symbolic and shit.

Another nonny provided this tl;dr: “I post this shit publicly under my real name because I'm not ashamed and have my principles, but my students stay out because it's private and off limits to you in particular, because I say it is.”

In the thread, nonnies discussed PFG showing her students explicit Johnlock fanart, a paper proposal she was putting together about top/bottom tropes in Bond/Q fic (nonny commentary, with more details about PFG's straightsplaining), and her meta on Ben Whishaw.

Another professor wrote of PFG, “Teaching is not about indulging your private tastes or getting a kick of using the material in a public space. Teaching is about always making sure your students are on board with you, and taking the (however tedious) time of introducing them to the corpus before you can push subtler points forward.”

Yet another nonny:

People have tried [to talk to her]. I'm one of them. Turned out she respected my opinion enough to ask my permission to use my fanworks in her classroom, but not enough to listen to me when I tried to explain why her fetishization of m/m relationships (particularly 00Q over anything involving Silva, the canon bisexual) felt disrespectful to me, a queer man.

She also, in her rebuttal, changed my sexuality to “gay” on my behalf. To give you an idea of her reading comprehension level.

This discussion continued to the next post, where we learned that PFG has written the sentence “I have made no secret of my fondness for the demure peen.” It was also discovered that someone in the AO3 comments linked PFG to last post's discussion of her, which meme roundly condemned (and which fueled her sense of persecution).

In the same post, nonnies also revisited the aforementioned October 2013 wank.

Next post featured the continuation of PFG's long war with Tumblr user SoyonsCruels. The post after that featured a PFG discussion in the TYWAU thread, a discussion of PFG's post "A subject responds to fandom meta," and yet a third thread in which members discuss her meeting her match in pretension and ill-informedness (gascon-en-exil).

In December 2014, a nonny confessed, ”I started thinking about ~demure peens~ about an hour ago and am still giggling,“ which inspired another to RHPS filk:

What ever happened to Ben Whishaw?

That delicate uncut peen?

As it clung to his thigh, how I started to cry

'Cause I wanted to see Craig lick it clean…

In the aftermath of Sherlock 221b Con Wank in the first half of 2015, it came to light that PFG has been among Graceebooks' bullying victims after she admitted publicly that, ”as much as I wish for it, I don’t think the showrunners are heading for textual queer love [i.e. canon JohnLock].“ (archive) Meme discussed. Despite her own wanky history, meme was on her side in this case, noting that ”she may be pretentious, hypocritical, and occasionally wanky and offensive, but she is in no way a toxic mess like those people.

In August 2015, nonnies ridiculed PFG for claiming that not holding hands with her partner in public was being a good ally.

It’s complicated. Holding hands in public is one of the things my (male) partner and I don’t do, because we never have to fear weirdness or violence over it, and our queer friends do. It’s the same reason we never got married. But hey, now same-sex marriage is legal, so sure, we might get hitched. But until a same-sex couple can walk down the street and hold hands in complete safety, we won’t, because we’d be banking on het privilege. If observers see you as an opposite-sex couple, they’re giving you a pass, no matter how you identify. Just something to keep in mind.

Later that month, a nonnie brought up PFG's thoughts on Ben Whishaw's thinness in a thread on terrible meta.

professor-fangirl.txt · Last modified: 2021/08/30 06:32 by nonnymousely