Johnlock

Slash fiction is loosely defined by Kelly Boyd as, "sexually explicit, amateur, gay male and lesbian tales produced predominantly by heterosexual women for heterosexual women, about characters in mainstream television series and feature movies." My research confirmed that slash fiction fans are predominantly female, but I also found that a significant portion identify as part of the LGBTQ/queer community. I look at past research to frame the functions of slash fiction and why media representation is important as it relates to the queer community and female sexuality. My research found that fans believe mainstream media's understanding of slash fiction and fandom culture is poor, but they also believe media representation has a significant influence on public perception and awareness of fandom culture. In examining the level of risk participants associated with slash in Kelly Boyd's 1997 study on slash fiction, feminism, and risk compared to 2015, I found that my participants were more worried about judgement for writing sexually explicit material than about homophobia specifically.

Fanfiction is the practice of fans writing stories using the world and/or characters of an established work of fiction in order to rework this material. This thesis examines the relationship between fanfiction and digital self-publication within the popular fiction genre of urban fantasy. Emerging technologies in digital publishing have created a new world for authors and readers alike. Online publishing companies make it possible for any author to self-publish an ebook and distribute it through a global platform without an agent. The practice of writing fanfiction connected with urban fantasy has combined with the relative ease of digital self-publication to create an environment within which many new authors can explore non-traditional forms of publication. While all genres have access to this possibility, I suggest that urban fantasy is one of the few that is poised to revolutionise the publication industry due to its historical connection with digital fanfiction. (Master's Thesis)

This thesis investigates the star/fan relationship at our current cultural moment. Using Real Person Fanworks and the fan communities that produce them as a case study, I argue that New Media are employed by the entertainment industry to produce newly open star texts, and these texts invite the collaboration of fans in producing the star narrative. Beginning with the fandom relating to The Lord of the Rings (Jackson 2001-2003), I argue that the star text as produced on New Media platforms invites viewers to engage with it and feel a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the star. Continuing to the Merlin fandom (Jones, Murphy, et al. 2008-2012), I argue that the response to this invitation results in the collaborative production of the mythologised star narrative. In the context of the Supernatural fandom (Kripke 2005-present), I argue that there is space enough in star texts to allow for the production of different and at times contradictory and disobedient star narratives. In the final chapter, I argue that in this system of production of star narratives, stardom and fandom are performative and mutually constitutive. The final case study is star Tom Hiddleston and his fandom. This chapter focuses on fandom as it is expressed on social platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr, with a particular focus on reports of star/fan encounters. These encounters make evident the fact that despite the promises entailed in New Media that stardom is now more accessible, more intimate and more democratic, the roles of star and fan are as clearly defined as ever. The epilogue asks if is possible to resist consumer culture in the context of the constant recouping of fan spaces, concluding that though fandom works generally in the interests of the entertainment industry, there is space, now and then, to resist its imperatives.

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 19, 2015

Because the history of fan fiction in Germany is not congruent with the more dominant Anglo-American history of fan fiction, it requires separate revision and evaluation. By outlining the history of fan fiction in Germany, we present and discuss certain national aspects in the development of the phenomenon, arguing that although the Internet globally links fans, the production of fan fiction is still strongly rooted in a national writing community.

Historians of book and textual history have largely ignored fan writing as an area of literary critique and history. This intellectual lacuna exists primarily because of the dual problems of genre and gender; much of what we will consider as fan writing and fan fiction in this essay originates from science fiction and fantasy media properties from the 1960s onwards, and much of it is written by women, especially young women. Early studies of fan writing centred on ethnographic approaches that were deeply ahistorical and more concerned with the fans themselves as objects of study rather than with fan writing as a point of interest on its own. Concurrently, recent revisionist histories of women’s writing have looked at the various methods by which women have either participated in or circumvented traditional modes of publication, whether through manuscript publication, literary translations, or setting up their own private presses. What we hope to show here is how the body of fan writing has evolved over time, how those writers have disseminated their works, and what this means within the broader context of literary history and authorship theory.

Seeing fans: representations of fandom in media and popular culture, edited by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth, 2016

A version of this paper will be presented at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 4, 2015.

The article challenges the models of resistance that are generally used as the primary way to understand the work of fandom. Instead, the article ponders the way in which the textual conventions and structures of fanfiction writing are connected with promoting and sustaining communality and maintains that fanfiction studies ought to put less emphasis on people-centred metaphors such as poachers and nomads. Significantly, as fannish activities such as fanfiction writing centre on texts, it is necessary that we analyse the processes of both producing and disseminating stories. The case study in the article is the fandom of Firefly, an American space western drama television series created by writer and director Joss Whedon. In addition to the devoted fan base, the case of Firefly is especially interesting due to the fact that the building of its fictional world and characters had barely got started when the show was cancelled, and the threads that had to be left hanging have actively been picked up by the fandom. Through the emphasis on the actual texts of fanfiction, the article also aims at casting light on why the genres of fantasy and science fiction seem to offer a more fertile ground for fanfiction writers than some other source texts.