Representations of fanfiction in the works of Rainbow Rowell; “Borrowing… Repurposing. Remixing. Sampling” (original) (raw)
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This study takes an autoethnographic approach that uses a piece of fanfiction and the author’s experience as both a fanfiction writer and a professional writer for television, to demonstrate how writing fanfiction and participating in the fanfiction community empowers women to express identity on their own terms and to resist the patriarchal impositions of mainstream media culture. Martin Buber’s dialogic ethics serve as an ethical foundation for comparing and contrasting the fanfiction and mainstream media systems for female writers. Fisher’s (1987) narrative paradigm and Hecht, Warren, Jung, and Krieger’s (2005) communication theory of identity provide a theoretical framework for investigating the benefits of fanfiction as a way for female storytellers to explore themes and issues that are important to them through their creative work and through communicating within the female-driven fanfiction community. This study finds that writing fanfiction is a more effective means of creative freedom and empowerment for women than working within the parameters of the mainstream media’s profit-based economy. Furthermore, though it has traditionally been derided by the mainstream and fanfiction communities alike, writing Mary Sue fanfiction, in which the main character is an idealized version of the author, is an especially effective way for women to use fanfiction to empower themselves creatively, build identity, and resist the stereotypes and patriarchal limitations of the mainstream media. Keywords: fanfiction, fandom, writing, autoethnography, identity, feminism, gender, media, Doctor Who
Culture: Raise 'low' Rethink 'high'. A Representation of the Academic Potential of So-Called 'Low' Culture., 2020
My chapter in Culture: Raise 'low, Rethink 'high'. With the rise of internet communities there has been a noted increase in the visibility of fandom and the way it shapes mainstream media. An increasing visibility that comes with the possibility for commodification or even exploitation of a distinctly female fan labour. Control may seem to have been seized back with the growing publication of fan fictions turned original fiction such as the Fifty Shades book series (E. L. James, 2011-2012). However, my focus is on the subsections of fan fiction that still remain resistant to normalisation, specifically the so-called ‘reader-insert fics’ that place the reader directly into their fictional worlds. Unabashed in their goal of (usually) women’s erotic pleasure, these works can be understood through academic theories on haptic visuality despite both their written format and low status within fan communities. By analysing the mainstream and fan response to these ‘reader-insert fics’ and fan fiction more broadly as a cultural phenomena via data collection from the popular fan fiction website Archive of Our Own. I hope to prove these ‘reader-insert fics’ serve as a form of escapism that specifically targets fans that do not fit the normative mould of a mainstream fan, and that the content within such works grapple with much more complex themes – women’s pleasure, radical re-centring of desires, blurring of subject-object positions – than their low cultural status would suggest.
2021
In recent years, slash fanfiction has become a place for trans and non-binary inclusivity in romance narratives. Slash creates a safe space for queer and non-binary fans to express their sexuality and gender identity, thus encouraging the normalization of non-heteronormative people and lifestyles. The first chapter of this thesis, dedicated to the slash fanfiction author, examines the interwoven relationships between the fan, the piece of media (or, canon), and contemporary social outcries for LGBTQ+ inclusivity in romance narratives. Combining both Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and Kristina Busse’s Framing Fan Fiction, I define the fluid relationship between author and reader, and who actually has authority over the text at hand. The second chapter analyzes what these fan authors are writing and how they have methodically created worlds that not only show trans and non-binary characters, but normalize their lives, bodies, and relationships. Through the fan-generated genre k...
Fanning Flames/Flaming Fans: Theorising Fanfiction
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
Fanfiction is an enormously popular genre with a niche audience. And this niche is growing bigger and wider as more and more people join fan communities. These communities establish their virtual presence through fan labor, and fanfiction is a major contributor to the influence that a fandom constructs for itself.Juxtaposing this phenomenon with the rise of the digitization of literary spaces opens up the discourse about the evolution of literary spaces and genres. Fanfiction is the new item on the agenda that is garnering attention. Although quite a vast field of study, this paper is concerned with a uniform taxonomy and theory of Fanfiction.
Questions of Sexual Identity and Female Empowerment in Fan Fiction
This Master's thesis discusses questions of sexual identity and female empowerment in fan fiction. Fan fiction is created by the fans of a source narrative to expand on the original material and resolve its shortcomings. Because of its transformative nature, fan stories are unsanctioned and non-profit. Since fan fiction is not restricted by the commercial market, it offers a prime opportunity to examine the unadulterated psychology of its authors. The vast majority of fan writers in the most popular digital archives today are women belonging to completely different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds. Thus, the female identity is extremely relevant to comprehend fan fiction and its themes. Several fan fiction tropes are analyzed in this work, but particular attention is given to questions of gender roles, sexual identity and female empowerment. Slash and femslash fan fiction are closely analyzed, as the protagonists of these genres are queer. The abundance of such stories inspires hope for the development of queer-friendly communities across the globe, while the significant number of well-crafted women characters suggests that the precepts of feminist activists have successfully reached part of the younger generations. Fan fiction is also an informative genre, explaining delicate topics such as sexism, consent, psychological illnesses, homophobia and abuse. This educational potential can reach the level of any formal speech or essay due to the wide scope and appeal of fan fiction in comparison with other instructional material. For these reasons, this thesis advocates the entry of fan fiction in the academic world as a worthy object of study.
The 'Fanfic Lens': Fan Writing's Impact on Media Consumption
Participations. Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 2023
Scholarship frames fanfiction authors as inhabiting a complex double role as 'prosumers', both consuming commercial entertainment products and critically reinterpreting them in their own creative output. What has been overlooked are the ways in which fanfiction changes consumer behaviour beyond the moment and the spaces of fan engagement. I argue that even when approaching a completely new piece of entertainment media, fanfiction authors exhibit specific patterns of consumption shaped by their experience of agency, and habitual resistance against source texts, in fan writing. I propose that by adopting an authorial role, fan writers develop a lasting fandom-sensitive attitude I term the 'Fanfic Lens', which can be understood as a specific set of literacy skills gained from socialisation into fan communities. Using empirical participant data generated through an online survey and semi-structured interviews with young adult fanfiction authors, I identify four ways in which fanfiction may shape its authors' experience of media consumption. Building on these, I investigate how the 'prosumer' role of fanfiction authors is actualised in practice, calling for increased attention to its complexity and variability.
When Fans Become Authors: a new generation of young adult fiction authors
PopCAANZ, 2019
Young adult fiction authors utilise fan fiction methodologies, a form of adaptation, to write stories influenced by a specific source-text or texts. Source-texts can be published fictional works, historical archives or any other narrational influence. This paper discusses four popular fan fiction methodologies used by authors known as reader-writers: oppositional gazing, alternative universes, cross overs and mash ups. Young adult fiction forgoes the rules of traditional adaptation and genre conventions and creates its own space for narrative experimentation. Modern reader-writers instinctively find spaces for their stories in the gaps of their chosen source-texts and feel driven to contribute to the source-text. This relationship between text and reader is ultimately an intimate experience for the reader and can take greater precedence than the relationship between text and author. ISBN: 978-0-473-51654-3.
Fan (Fiction) Acting on Media and the Politics of Appropriation
Media and Communication, 2017
Fanfiction is the creative appropriation and transformation of existing popular media texts by fans who take stories, worlds and/or characters as starting points and create their own stories based on them. As a cultural field of practice, fanfiction questions prevalent concepts of individual authorship and proprietary of cultural goods. At the same time, fanfiction itself is challenged. Through processes of mediatization, fanfiction grew and became increasingly visible. Third parties, ranging from the media industry (e.g., film studios) and copyright holders to journalism and academia, are interested in fanfiction and are following its development. We regard fanfiction communities and fan acting as fields for experimentation and as discursive arenas which can help understand what appropriating, writing and publishing in a digital culture and the future of writing might look like. In this paper, we outline important debates on the legitimacy and nature of fanfiction and present preli...
Fanfics and Identities: What do our Fan Stories Unveil? (MONOGRAPH - NOT REVISED)
2016
Amorim, Aline dos Santos; Moura, SML. (Advisor). ‘Fanfics and Identities: What do our Fan Stories unveil?’. Rio de Janeiro, 2016, p. Monograph – Departamento de Letras, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. This monograph was shaped with the objective of understanding how identities arise from fan fictions produced by high school students from a public institution in Rio de Janeiro, Colégio Estadual Compositor Luiz Carlos da Vila, after introducing the genre at school as a Pop, creative and personal resource to stimulate English learning. Sections include theory background on Applied Linguistics, Reflective Teaching, Fan Fiction and Identity; methodology include the collection of interviews after the presentations of eleven outstanding stories based on Universal Studios’ Jurassic World, collected throughout the months of November and December of 2015, respectively. Fan fiction writers try to portray characters’ identities, but they can also portray personal experiences in stories, borrowing elements from their own lives. This dialogic phenomenon is present in all the analyzed stories, and it may be noticed in other texts related to the genre. Key words: Applied linguistics, creative writing, fan fiction, identities, pop culture.