#why fandom

So, this column is going to be different to next columns – this one is about* this article (*’about’ as in, I’m bastardizing it and taking my favorite parts from it and leaving out big chunks, like a good ol’ fanfic writer), written by Darlene Hampton, that studied how in the context of LiveJournal’s HP Slash communities, practices emerged that defied gender and sexuality norms, creating spaces to perform the female desire, questioning heteronormativity and the patriarchal culture.

This is not an idea that sounds too weird for any of us that have inhabited fannish spaces for a considerable time, isn’t it? Fandom feels extremely queer, at least for me. And when we look for the history of fandoms (you can start by browsing fanlore), fanfiction spaces have been historically described as female/non-male and queer-ish dominated (and if the AO3 census of 2013 with over 10,000 responses is anything to go by, this idea is true - 71% of respondents were not heterosexual and 94% non-male. You can check this post for a summary of the census and other stats, and the master post on AO3 with the analysis, including specific trends on M/M fans).

At the same time, there are these extended ideas that fandom spaces are mostly focused on Slash, which is actually up to debate (data here) but also this idea that it’s mostly straight women (anyone has these vague ideas about ‘horny housewives’, ‘crazy fangirls’ and ‘fujoshi’ used derogatorily? that’s what I mean), which, as proven by the previous data, is actually not true – fandoms, particularly Slash-centred fandoms, seem to be extremely queer spaces; spaces where people are exploring their identities, roles, and all in all, their desires. I’m a big data nerd, but debunking these myths is not to make the spaces ‘legitimate’ (because they still would be), but to actually understand why we vibe with fandoms, and particularly, what’s the role of Slash fandoms.

Like Wolfstar.

(My personal hypothesis, based in reading countless of opinions so ofc it’s not mine, is that Slash fandoms are a playground where people can project a less-patriarchal ideal, where social hierarchy doesn’t seem as strict since we start with two men, who are theoretically less constricted by this structure. People can explore then those constructs and hegemonic discourses without feeling the weight of misogyny. Of course, we know that in real life patriarchy permeates all our relationships, including M/M relationships, but I digress. A different, but very interesting hypothesis can be found here)

Anyways, we have established here, like the article did, that fandoms are predominantly female/non-male queer spaces. Now, the article “Bound princes and monogamy warnings” shows us the analysis from a Case Study for the community around a Drarry fanfic in LiveJournal. If you don’t know what that is, LiveJournal was a platform for personal blogs, very big in the early 2000s – in a way, similar to Tumblr, but constructed more around the personal site idea than as a social network (there are still fics there that you can go check right now so you can get an idea. See this post for example for R/S content). LJ was basically replaced by Tumblr after a massive purge of explicit content, and some issues about the archiving system, but it used to be one of the big places for fandom.

Case studies, to understand what the paper shows, are qualitative-led or mix-methods research that do not seek to generalize or properly prove something, but they are done to understand the qualities of a phenomenon in depth, in a particular context. Based on that analysis, Case studies can propose lines of research and/or build theory (as in, propose models for how complex systems work). In “Bound princes and monogamy warnings” the author, who I’m gonna call Darlene from now on since we are amongst friends, wanted to study how repeated scenarios (as in, tropes as scenarios in which we put the characters, but also the ~fandom~ in a general way as an scenario, understood as a place where fans engage in a ‘performance’ of their online/fannish personas), communitarian practices held in the collective space of fandom (like comments, public profiles, etc), and personal narratives (again, through comments, profiles, author notes, etc) articulated around the particular fic to show performances around queerness. Performance not as ‘something fake’, but as something that’s being tried (‘test trailed’ if you want), something fluid and ever-changing, defined in the same process that’s being acted.

One important idea is the one about scenarios, then. In fanworks, the scenarios are created mixing repetition (of tropes, but also the use of the characters that we already know and parts of the story that are also assumed to be known) and change, based on the personal experiences and desires of every creator. We make the characters ‘perform’ in a scenario we all know, but that somehow always ends up changing. This gets interwoven in the notion of tropes - in Slash fandoms we find some specific tropes that repeat themselves through different Slash fandoms in history (hurt/comfort for example). This tension between change and repetition in itself can be understood as ‘queering’ the original text. Slash fanfiction pushes the scripts, based in cultural dominating codes, that the original author gave us to interpret canon, to build ON them by repetition of scenes (for example, in the Wolfstar corner picking over and over again Lie low at Lupin’s), but never making them the same - playing in this sense with the script, making it lose consistency. We are making the roles, genders, any black and white possibility, deviate from the lines the author intended for us to use to read the books (*cough lines marked by cisheteronormativity and misogyny cough*). Gender roles and the gay/straight binary start to loosen up after the 10,000 hurt/comfort fic (because a MAN? taking care of another person? How scandalous!). We romanticize your friendship (or maybe friendship-cize romance?) to make a brotherly embrace a lovers’ re-encounter. This encounter moves in the margins to not be a hundred percent gay (okay yes it is pretty gay) nor completely straight, because of this tension between canon and fanon, between repetition of tropes and changes that put the characters in a same trope but in one position in this fic, in a slightly different one in other, and then another and another, until it’s symbolically this in-between.

In making Slash fanfiction, reading it, interacting with the fandom, we make oblique the lines of what’s a legitimate interpretation of the canon, the characters and tropes. It’s still oriented by new angles: there are new rules on play here - the rules of Slash tropes. But it switches from the source material, and deviates from its own rules over and over again.

And since I’m talking about turning a friend’s re-encounter into a strangled lover’s caress, I can bring how Slash fandoms not only queerify by making the characters, well, gay. Darlene uses queer theory to show how queerness in this context is the crooking, the distortion that goes beyond the mere sexual orientation. We disrupt the lines of genre; we are disrupting the intentions. Instead of writing YA, the case study is rated for adults. Instead of the single, authorial voice that claims the universe, we have multiple voices, we have collabs, we have remixes. Instead of fantasy, we write romance, drama, angst, smut. In Drarry, they are not only Straight™ in canon, but also enemies, and Drarry writes them as *le gasp* lovers. The Wolfstar fandom doesn’t do this same move, but instead of “childhood bros” we write them as former lovers or pining idiots. The argument remains then, as the lines are disrupted, re-interpreted, and lanes are switched.

The product of distorting these lines, of queering the text, is not perfect, of course. In our fancontent, culturally dominant values and subjective desires and experiences find themselves in conflict, and build their ugly babies in the process. The product, our dear Darlene tell us, is a negotiation of dissonances between these two levels – personal desire and culturally dominant values. As a performance, as a play with 20,000 iterations, each of them slightly different (because here is a mid-1800’s performance, and here race-blind 2020’s one; here’s one done in Brooklyn, another done in Cali, Colombia; one performed in the community theater and one in the Sydney opera house, to use the metaphor), the fan content will be something in the grey area of the rules of fandom and canon, between dominant, repressive-aligned discourses and other ideological subjectivation processes – subjectivation, as an ever open process of constructing ourselves as people, in relation with others, in relation with the ideas that are dominant in our time and the inevitable resistances that emerge with them.

So yes, Slash fanfiction can be “regressive and traditional” – but it’s usually built in an in-between that makes it complex and oh so interesting to live in. Authors and readers move in these margins too, writing one thing and then reading something that seems like the opposite as what they write, and going bonkers for it.

So okay, if you reached this part of the text, wow, I’m glad I was able to keep you tuned in. Still, you might be thinking, “cool, Moth, but what do I do with all of this academic titbit?” Well, dear reader, my purpose with bringing this paper to discussion is to open the question about transformative works and queering the texts. You see, we are used to seeing, every time we access AO3, those references to transformative works and whatnot. So, what I want you to question yourself is - what does it mean for fanfiction and fanworks to be transformative for you, after reading this? How do we make sense of the reiterative, tropey, dominated by stereotypes nature of fanworks, with the individual desires, individual development, personal exploration nature of them? This ‘individual’ card isn’t necessarily the panacea and ‘unquestionable’ thing we want to think, since as it was pointed, also plays with a tension between dominant discourses and political subjectivation, of ‘self-queerification’, we might say, in a process of questioning the self, but also internalizing misogyny, white supremacy, classism…

So I want to ask you, reader, what do we do with these ideas, when topics like racism and discrimination open their jaws to show us how pervasive white supremacy and other structures of domination are, how imbricated in our ‘intimate, lonely’ mind spaces they are? How do we queerify our own minds, when we have so many blind spots?

My response, although not complete, and not the only one that is possible, would go in line with the question about collectiveness and community. We can’t close our eyes and claim the transformative nature of fandom just on an individual level. We need to queerify other things in fandom too – in the sense offered here. Not only ‘make it gay’, but deviate meanings from the mainstream interpretations, analyze how we intercalate our desires with fantasy and repetition. We need to open fandom and fanworks to solidarity, we need to break the lines handed to us when it comes to thinking a reading of a text as something individual, because it’s not. Fandom has already been doing that for a long time in processes of intertextuality, of commenting and building on top of the previous tropes. We just need to keep interrogating our spaces and queering everything in our reach. Creating new spaces so people with different voices open new reads, new paths away from the reading the author offered, even from the paths fandom has been constructing.

I might be an optimistic, but I think we can do it. At least, I don’t see that many outraged cries about making a white character a person of color. But that might be me, just keeping myself safe from assholes *shrugs*.

So yeah, that’s what I have to offer for today, and I hope this gave you some pause and opportunity to reflect. Now, go and queerify your lives, colorful readers! I’ll be here waiting to read how you see your own writing, or other’s writing, changing these offered lines of production and commodity, and how you answer the questions about how these ideas might help us build a different community with time (or like, how they don’t).

Colorfully,