Making Music

Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love

“…12 Katherine Morrissey points out that Lamb and Veith assume that "this equality is not possible in a relationship between a man and a woman" and that "slash writers and readers move beyond their day-to-day realities, and look instead to m/m romances and fantastic futures as a way of transcending the complicated realities women negotiate in their own relationships." 13 Morrissey argues that heterosexual romances, in both fan and commercial writing, also feature "themes of intimacy and equality" and are "often working to bring [their] characters from a place of inequality and misunderstanding into greater intimacy and connection." 14 In other words, many texts of women's culture-texts that are often derided as overly generic, formulaic, and low in quality, such as fan and commercial romances-attempt to "renovate" (Morrissey's term) the "complicated realities women negotiate" and the "feminine project" that can seem more like a trap than like the "promise" it is supposed to be.…”

“…12 Perhaps to burnish its reputation as a player in the literary world, in July 2014 Wattpad recruited Canadian literary icon and Wattpad user Margaret Atwood to judge a poetry contest. 13 In contrast to these sites, none of which came into existence in order to disseminate fan fiction, is a traditional fan fiction archive site: the Archive of Our Own (AO3).…”

“…12 Even classical music, the genre most prone to conceptualization in terms of individual creative genius, was improvisational until the late nineteenth century. 13 Today, aficionados still attend symphonies that perform different versions of the same works. 14 Repetition with difference is creativity worth seeing in many musical contexts; why treat other forms of cultural production differently?…”

“…When Gianduja Kiss brings together these representations with the more positive masculine ones from other shows, one effect is a flattening that obscures the sexism of fan representation. 13 Yet the juxtaposition also works to make heroic the unheroic, creating a different kind of love song in which the weirdness of Becky and Marci no longer need be held in check. Cher sings, "What if the world was crazy and we were sane?"…”

“…12 Even though many fannish labors of love are performed by men, there tends to be a split, where often traditionally male-dominated fan activities move to create secure monetary remuneration and traditionally female-dominated ones do not. 13 This becomes all the more important at a time when mainstream culture embraces, supports, and encourages fannish endeavors-as long as they remain controllable. The new geek hierarchy of positive (white, male, straight, intellectual, apolitical) and negative (person of color, female, queer, embodied, political) fan identities creates legal and economic chasms that these essays here explore.…”