Dalam beberapa tahun terakhir, tingkat partisipasi para fans dalam fandom telah mencapai tingkat keterlibatan yang semakin tinggi. Karya fans yang berfokus pada slashing atau pada pasangan laki-laki telah sering menjadi subyek diskusi akademis karena dianggap sebagai wadah untuk mengeksplorasi konstruksi gender. Namun, hanya sedikit penelitian akademis yang dilakukan pada karya self-insert karena karya heterosexual diasumsikan tidakmemiliki potensi subversif yang sama seperti karya ‘slashing’. Penelitian ini akan berfokus pada karya self-insert dalam bentuk fan work baik dalam bentuk visual ataupun textual pada fandom anime pada khususnya, karena secara historis, fandom anime lebih dikenal sebagai fandom yang didominasi laki-laki. Dengan menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dan mengambil konsep dari gender performativity theory, penelitian ini akan membandingkan dan mengkaji protagonis wanita dalam karya self-insert di fandom anime dan bagaimana karya tersebut telah mengeksplorasi secara kreatif identitas gender dan seksual mereka sebagai bentuk perlawanan terhadap norma gender konvensional.

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In recent years, fan participation in their respective fandoms have reached new levels of higher and deeper involvement than ever before. Fan made works that focus on ’slashing’ or the pairing of two male characters have been subject to plenty of academic discussions as they offer rich data to explore gendered discourses in the narrative construction of fictional and real-life identities. However, there has been less academic research done on self-insertion fan works where the author inserts her own self into the narrative. Self-insertion fan works more often than not, focus on heterosexual relationships, and thus has been neglected by scholars as it is assumed that

heterosexual works do not have the same subversive potential as slash fan works do. Though self-insertion fan works has been seen as an inherently feminine practice, this paper will focus on self-insertion fan works in the form of fan fiction, and visual forms of self-insert fan works by the anime fandom in particular, as the anime fandom has been historically known to be more male dominated. By using a qualitative approach to the study and

drawing on concepts from gender performativity theory, this paper will compare and examine the female protagonists in several chosen self-insert fan works in the anime fandom and how the female authors have creatively explored and played with their gendered and sexual identities as a form of resistance to conventional gendered discourses.