Hi Friends!
It’s wonderful to be back at the helm of Queering Your Bookshelf after a little summer hiatus while I put up my show The Birds and the Bees: Unabridged. I’m thrilled to have a bit more free time, and already, plenty of that time is going towards some super queer reading. This month I’ll be focusing on something a bit different- a whole genre of literature that exists primarily online. Fanfiction!
I’m a newer fanfiction reader, mostly drawn in by my love of the (very queer) Canadian TV show Lost Girl. I had essentially run out of exciting YouTube videos of the cast at Comic Cons or dressing up as Chipmunks to raise money for their upcoming films. I knew a little about fanfiction mostly as a punch line to some of the more geeky humor from shows like Buffy and Xena, but had never really sought it out. So, I did some Googling and came across one of the most popular fanfiction sites on the internet (fanfic.net). After a few reads, it became clear that I had discovered not only a fascinating exploration of various popular TV shows, movies and more, but also a mind-boggling insight into the likes, dislikes, desires and imaginations of real-live people all over the world.
In short, fanfiction (aka fan fiction, fan fic, fanfic or fic) is a term that encompasses a huge wealth of stories about popular media characters or fictional worlds written by the fans of the shows themselves (as opposed to the more formal show writers or creators). In the words of fic writer Lev Grossman in Time, “Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker…The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
I wasn’t surprised to learn of the popularity of “Slash” (fic featuring two male characters who are romantically or sexually involved) or “Femslash” fiction (fic featuring two female characters who are romantically or sexually involved). Since there are no bothersome networks to censor content or ratings or conservative viewers to appease, authors of fanfic can take characters of all genders and sexual orientations and essentially queer the crap out of them. I know that while I was growing up, (back in the days when actual queer characters on TV were few and far between) it was kind of a game for me to take my favorite female TV characters and imagine them in queer relationships and encounters. I can’t tell you how much I wanted Dr. Jeanie Boulet to finally notice the awesomeness that was Julianna Margulies as Nurse Hathaway on ER. In my ideal world, Jeanie would woo Carol away from Doug forever to live the rest of their lives happily together with a couple of cats in a large, but modest Chicago apartment. Little did I know, later in my life I would find people across the country writing just that! Gender swapping is also a frequent trope in fanfiction, particularly in the Sci-Fi genres where a female character turning male or vice versa is well within the reality of the worlds created. I have yet to run across any fic I’d qualify as featuring a non-problematic trans narrative, but I feel confident that if it doesn’t exist yet, it will soon. Not all fanfiction is queer, but since its inception in 1960’s Star Trek “Fanzines,” Slash pairings like Kirk/Spock are far from uncommon, regardless of the show and it’s potential (or lack of potential) for queer characters.
I also love that fanfiction writing is (and always has been) a female-dominated field. As explored in the book, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, 83% of Star Trek fan fiction authors were female by 1970, and 90% by 1973. Indeed, with male characters, writers and directors still dominating American media, fanfiction has been a way for women to expand, erase, deepen, as well as re-invent the oftentimes problematic representations of women and queer women in the media.
Sexuality and desire is also a frequent subject in fanfiction, which shouldn’t be surprising since, as the Wall Street Journal reports in their article, The Online World of Female Desire, “All across the planet, what most women seek out, in growing numbers, are not explicit scenes of sexual activity but character-driven stories of romantic relationships.” Perhaps a recent (NSFW) viral video says it best when Brenna Twohy offers her spoken word perspective on why she far prefers Harry Potter fanfic to porn. On most fanfic sites you can choose your own smut-level preferences via a rating scale that frequently ranges from “Kid Appropriate” anywhere up to “Mature” or “Explicit.” You have a spectrum of options from some pretty steamy character erotica, to stories focused completely on non-romantic plot points.
This isn’t to suggest that all fan fiction is politically correct, sex-positive, feminist lit devoid of the occasional cringe-worthy swoon, questionable objectification or racially insensitive stereotype. Not every author writes with the intention of creating three-dimensional, self-actualized, privilege-aware characters, but the best (and arguably, the worst) thing about fan fiction is that ANYONE can write it. Fanfiction.net hosts over 2 million stories written in dozens of languages. You can find Fanfiction about Battlestar Gallactica, Saved by the Bell, Curious George or alternatively, the musical, Sunday in the Park with George. Some fictions have become popular enough to turn into mainstream book deals like Fifty Shades of Grey (a product of Twilight fanfic) and The Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman, (often described as “Harry Potter for adults”- incidentally, also quite good, I recommend it). However, not all fics are masterpieces, and while the abundance of material often means a little something for everything, it also means a lot of slogging through plenty of less than entertaining pieces who never quite seem to snag the grammatical difference between “they’re” and “their.”
I could go on forever about the fascinating anthropological observations that can be made as a result of fanfiction and the reasons for its popularity and prevalence. There have been some interesting theory-based books written about the fanfic phenomenon. Books like Anne Jamison’s, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World and the aforementioned Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. (http://www.amazon.com/Fan-Fiction-Communities-Age-Internet/dp/0786426403/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=19Q82B0K6J9NCT7P9E59) But it’s probably most fun to go straight to the source. Go browse around on fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org and see if you can find your favorite book, comic, TV show or movie turned into something new. If nothing else, it’s sure to be an adventure.
Live, Love, Learn,