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Popular Culture Review
Finally, and I would argue, most importantly, there is the influence of the
heavily gendered nature of the canon itself. The W40K universe is, to quote one
interviewee, “ 100% mansauce”; a universe of testosterone-fuelled conflict with
little or no room for the emotional complexities or morally grey areas that
characterise everyday life. As ‘Dean’ put it;
Generally the readers of Warhammer 40k fiction are male, and
looking for scenes of gory action or fast-paced espionage and
intricately-detailed combat. They want hard, scarred veteran
sergeants instead of mushy-feely characters who want
‘relationships’ . . . The universe that Games Workshop and the
Black Library brings us is a dark one, and the fans of it want
to keep it that way.
In contrast, then, to female fans engaging with ‘masculine’ popular cultural
texts, male W40K fans do not have to ‘transform’ the canon in order to make it
address their concerns and fit their interests. As Henry Jenkins (1992), Camille
Bacon-Smith (1992) and Sheenagh Pugh (2005) among others have argued,
when female fans approach media texts, such as science fiction TV shows, they
are invariably faced with ‘masculine’ texts; texts that are largely written by and
intended for males. In order to fully enjoy them, to quote Jenkins (2006:44),
women (as well as other minority groups) thus have to either “perform a kind of
intellectual transvestism—identifying with male characters in opposition to their
ow