#theorizing fandom

ii. on how not to defend fandom (or: mistakes I’m trying to stop making)

At first when I started trying to grapple with these two misconceptions, I spent a lot of time/energy attacking what now feel to me like symptoms rather than underlying causes, or offshoots rather than roots. When I heard academics say or imply things like, “Well, let’s face it, fanfic is just not really that good. It’s amateur (juvenile, underdeveloped) writing,” I initially responded to what felt like the most emotionally charged part of that statement. I was like, “OH, SO YOU THINK FANFIC IS ALL LIKE FIFTY SHADES OF GREY and AFTER? Well, here’s a list of ten fics that I think are gonna BLOW YOUR MIND with how good they are.” And typically I would cite a list of fics that were novel-length and that were written in a sort of self-consciously “literary” prose, while sweeping under the rug all of the PWP, fluff, fragmentary WIPs, fic outlines, etc. The more I thought about it, though, the more conflicted I felt about this approach. Did I really believe that all of Wattpad needed to be just like, cordoned off and sacrificed so that we could be validated by literary critics? Also, did I really think that Fifty Shades was a greater crime against literature or ~Feminism than like… idk… the collected published works of J.M. Coetzee? (GOD I HATE COETZEE.) Who was I protecting here? Who was I throwing under the bus to get my piece of cultural validation or authority?

I realized, too, that I couldn’t really say “look at how many fanworks look just like the stuff you already think is valuable” if I was serious about defending fandoms as amateur cultures, where people could learn how to tell stories, make art, and express themselves through creative activity. The stereotypes about fanfiction as underdeveloped writing were closely linked to stereotypes about fanfiction as like… niche subcultural spaces where weirdos gathered to do weird things. When people said things like, “Aren’t fandoms just, like, teenage girls and crazy Star Trek fans who dress up for conventions?” my response was, at first, to be like, “NO, LOOK AT ALL THE SMART PEOPLE HERE!!!! look at the lawyers and the people with advanced degrees and the literary critics who write fanfic in their spare time!!! Fans are basically critics! We basically have PhDs in our subjects!”

But again: the more I made some version of that argument, the more uncomfortable I became with it.* While I don’t want to suggest that fandoms are political utopias I do believe that in their best or most ideal forms, they are spaces/communities where culturally marginalized people can write and create in settings that are less heavily scrutinized or policed by people who might disparage their work. There are a lot of hidden barriers to access within fandom, but fandoms can/do provide… if not a safe space then safer spaces, partially sheltered havens, in which people our culture does not typically authorize to create can write – including but not limited to girls, queer people, trans folk, teenagers, people learning new languages, people without college degrees, people struggling with mental health issues, and anyone else who is trying to learn to tell stories that mainstream culture has not provided them models for telling. I started to realize that I couldn’t argue passionately for fandom as a space where people could figure stuff out in a less highly scrutinized environment – a space where people could be messy, could take risks, could try things that might not work, could explore things that had deeply personal emotional significance for them – and then in the breath say, “But you know what, let’s just keep them out of the way when we have company over. They’re sort of a bit, you know, embarrassing, and we want to put our best face on for our guests! So if we could get all of the fans with advanced degrees, perfect grammar, and socially respected professions to sit here in the living room – yes, good – and then everybody else, why don’t you go play in the cellar until our Very Important Visitors leave!” 

The tl;dr version of the above: I tried to push back on academic stereotypes about fandom by trying to prove that fandom was “worthy” on academia’s own terms. Fan writing was just as good as published writing (because some of it looked like published writing), and fans could be just as smart as critics (because some of us came from similar demographic backgrounds). And also (I said hurriedly, and not very loudly) maybe it was okay if some of fandom didn’t look like what we already thought was good! Maybe there could be valuable things about it even if they didn’t match up with academia’s values!

What I’ve come to realize, though, is that there is something super limiting about having to work within those two definitions of fandom: fandom defined in spatial terms (as a space you log in/log out of) and fandom defined in developmental terms (as a phase you age out of). Accepting those framings puts us in the position of continually having to prove that our practices “measure up” to standards that have been set by someone else – in this case, by academics and/or critics (mostly dudes, lbr) who have historically uhh not had our best interests at heart, to put it mildly. Much of the writing I have done in the last few years has focused on where those standards come from and who sets them. Who decides what “good writing” is? I wanted to know where our ideas about literary quality come from, both in a more abstract historical sense (do those ideas have an origin point?) and in a more practical sense: where do we learn what makes good writing, and who teaches us that? I wanted to know, too, whose interests those standards have historically served. Who benefits from our ideas about what makes “good literature”? Whose work is discounted or dismissed as bad, amateur, or insufficiently rigorous under those standards? Why do Hemingway, Eliot, and Joyce get to be geniuses, while my favorite fanfic authors (and many of my favorite published writers, too!) are dismissed as second-rate hacks, who lack the discipline or visionary insight required to write “real” literature? (I could spend a REALLY LONG TIME talking about that last question, but I will spare you the hundreds of pages of angry writing I’ve done about it in the process of writing my diss!)

iii. fandom is a good!!!!!

I believe that one of the reasons academics have so much difficulty valuing or even understanding fandoms is that they do not understand that fans use writing (and reading) in very different ways – and towards very different ends – than a literary critic or highbrow writer does. Academic and highbrow cultures place a lot of value on individual genius or exceptionality – a writer’s ability to buck convention and rise above the mindless masses, creating a shimmering, timeless work of genius that breaks with everything that came before. And genius (in this framework) is something that you either have or you don’t have. It is innately given! Divinely ordained! The genius rises above! (Oddly enough, it only ever seems to be white dudes who scale the lofty heights of genius, rising above the stupid, slavering, mindless masses… so weird, isn’t it, how women and writers of color never seem to quite measure up!)

In fandom cultures, much of the content fans produce on a day-to-day basis would look like frothy, insubstantial fluff if that content was carved out of its spheres of circulation and subjected to a rigorous close reading. This is not because fan writing itself is devoid of meaning or ingenuity. It is because fandom cultures generally do not conceiving of the activity of writing as a linear or teleological process, geared towards producing a final, polished text. Indeed, within fandom spaces, “writing” itself has a much broader meaning: it can include sitting down and writing polished fiction, to be published as a completed story online, but it also encompasses many other forms of content-creation, such as creating Tumblr posts, reblogging images or other content with discursive tags; composing meta-analysis of characters or unfolding situations; outlining stories on social media platforms or in group chats; responding to anonymous messages about story ideas; writing short sketches or excerpts (“drabbles”) in response to prompt challenges; and so on.

Fan practices of writing are always collaborative to some degree. I want to be clear that I’m not saying that all fanwork is essentially groupwork, or that individual writers do not expend significant energy creating works for the fandom communities they belong to. Maybe social is a better word to use here than collaborative. Fan practices of writing are always social practices, as opposed to models of creative practice that emphasize the self-made genius, the man set apart from the masses, who might be responding to his era but always seems to be creating works that are timeless and universal, speaking TO ALL GENERATIONS AND ALL PEOPLES, FOREVER AND EVER AMEN. Fandom is just so much more – local, shifting, evolving, alive. We write in response to what’s happening within the fandom community, and we situate our work as part of an ongoing conversation. And because fan writing uses a shared set of characters, we don’t have to put so much weight on “originality” in the sense of total uniqueness (behold, a character/premise that is totally unlike anything that came before!).

Fan cultures take pleasure in tropes, in mixing newness and familiarity, in drawing upon – sometimes in ways that challenge or rethink – collectively constructed fandom headcanons. Fandom headcanons (fanon?) are never the product of one individual thinker. They are loosely shared understandings of characters, relationships, or canon dynamics that get built up over long periods of time, which are articulated through many overlapping, ongoing conversations (fics, tags, anon/blogger exchanges, other private and public discussions, and so on). Those loosely shared understandings don’t just move along a linear track or unfold as a progressive development towards some final, complete answer, either. In our conversations about who a character is or what they mean to us, our positions shift, evolve, circle back. We repeat themselves, we take things back, we react excitedly to someone else’s take on something, we discover new information or find ourselves in new situations that prompt us to reframe older ideas.

I love the liveness of fan cultures – the messiness of them, the perpetual work-in-progress feeling of fan practices of making, even when we finish/publish our WIPs. i love that when I am immersed in a fan community, engaging with & thinking about stories becomes so fully integrated into my daily life that it is just like… part of what it means to be a living, thinking human in the world. And I also love that this work is done with other people. In creative fandoms, writing and reading are not just activities that we perform independently and then gather in the same (virtual) space to share the results with each other. Worldbuilding is, in a sense, how we talk to each other. Those forms of creative writing/making, broadly defined, are the loosely shared social language through which we forge relationships, negotiate conflicts, cultivate in-groups within larger communities, and develop a sense of who we are.

I’m still working on articulating what i mean here, but – there’s something I want to say about how the “chatter” of daily fandom activity (tags and anons and responses and back-and-forth of fic outlining and so forth) seems to be not “added onto” fan practices of writing, but an integral part of what it means to make things as a fan. I wrote about this in an anon response the other day, but I think that a lot of times we seem to get hung up on this idea of finishing, of producing a complete work that we can publish on AO3 or wherever. I’m super interested in thinking through that particular feeling – that pressure to feel that we must contribute completed works in order to be “valuable” contributors to a fandom, and that dissatisfaction with ourselves when we fail to measure up to our own standards – and it’s something I’ve written about (and discussed briefly in those little mini podcast recordings) from different angles in the past.

I’ve been thinking lately about how a lot of that internal pressure we put on ourselves comes from these preconceived notions about what real art is, what real writers look like, what constitutes “valuable” work or work worth making. But I think that this pressure also stems from some other sources, too, which I’m just gonna bullet point for ease of reading:

We do not have many models for valuing creative activity as an activity that is generative but not productive (in the sense of producing a complete, self-contained “product” or text). It seems to be hard for us to even talk about writing as, like, a mode of creative exploration or a form of imaginative play, something that can be joyful, exhilarating, absorbing, therapeutic, life-enriching, and just straight-up magical. Writing as play; writing as dreaming; writing as exploration; writing as something that grounds us in ourselves even as it opens us to new experiences. One of the things that fan practices of writing can offer, I think, is a way of accessing those forms of non-goal-directed writing (or perhaps a way of mixing non-goal-directed creativity into our more goal-directed activity).

We do not have many models for valuing the social aspects of reading and writing, which are such a huge part of fandom for me. As I near the end of my formal education, I often think about how deeply lonely academic writing is. So much of it takes place in solitude, and even if you get to share your work at conferences or in workshops or in journals or whatever, those moments of “sharing” often feel totally isolated, disconnected from your own history as a thinker. They’re like little performances you stand up and give, and then you go back into your study carrel and toil away for another six months alone, maybe checking in periodically with a writing group to do the performance-and-limited-feedback thing on a smaller scale. I plunged headlong into 1D fandom in 2015 at just the moment in PhD programs where you are structurally and physically most isolated from the intellectual community most people have in the early years of their programs. I was spending a lot more time working alone than I had been before, and it was kind of killing me. I genuinely think that some unconscious part of me understood that I was going to suffocate in this institutional atmosphere if I just holed up for three years trying to produce Knowledge alone. My body knew it needed less lonely forms of making.