Textual orientation

“Worlds. . .[of] Contingent Possibilities”: Genderqueer and Trans Adolescents Reading Fan Fiction

“….exchange” (p. 9; see also Jenkins 2006). Recent work has also drawn attention to the assumed whiteness of fans (Thomas 2019; Wanzo 2015) and the implied straightness of fans (Brennan 2014; Russo 2013, 2018). Such critiques demonstrate that we must “expand the range of familiar identity categories explored in the field” to “intervene in an already controversial, inevitably political endeavour involving emotion, identity, culture, and community” (Click and Scott 2018, 4, 3).…”

“…Some scholars have used queer theory as a framework for understanding the interactions between women in fan fiction communities (Lackner et al 2006; Lothian et al 2007), considered how writers use fan fiction to question hetero-/homonormativity (Duggan 2017; Lackner et al 2006), or demonstrated how fan fiction makes visible queer reading practices (Brennan 2019; Duggan 2017, 2019; Tosenberger 2008a, 2008b). Particularly in the last decade, scholars have begun to explore the queer identities of fans and the characters they write (Brennan 2014, 2019; Busse and Lothian 2018; Driscoll 2006; Duggan 2017, 2019; Lothian et al 2007; McClellan 2014; McInroy and Craig 2018; Russo 2013; 2018; Tosenberger 2008a, 2008b; Willis 2006, 2016), and scholars increasingly agree that “the fantasies of gender mobility and sexual freedom apparently played out in fan fiction may be really manifest” in fan fiction communities (Driscoll 2006, 86).…”

“…However, the growing number of studies examining queer individuals and communities in fandom focus mainly on the sexually queer (Brennan 2014, 2019; Lackner et al 2006; Russo 2013, 2018), likely because queer theory sometimes privileges “homosexual ways of differing from heterosocial norms, and an antipathy (or at least an unthinking blindness) toward other modes of queer difference” (Stryker 2006, 7). Nonetheless, McInroy and Craig’s (2018, 184) survey of queer youths’ online activities and identities found that young people who participated in fandom were more likely to be queer, to have discovered this earlier in their lives, and to have nonbinary or trans gender presentations than queer youth who did not participate in fandom.…”