The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age
Stub: This is a total braindump! Feel free to rearrange and sort things out. |
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So it bears saying: this book is a labor of love. None of the writers,myself included, were paid for their words or their work, aside from the old zine standard of “trib” (contributor’s) copies. Any profits that this book generates will be donated to the Organization for Transformative Works, which built and maintains the Archive of Our Own. All of these stories were previously posted on the internet and, as far as I know, remain there, free to whoever wants to read them: a gift to the community. We all of us in this book put it together because we’re proud of fanfiction writing and want to give “newbies”—teachers and students especially—a curated col- lection, a place to start. We did it for love, for free—a cynic would say “for nothing,”— but, to adopt Viviana Zelizer’s terminology,42 our work and
our creativity aren’t worthless. They’re priceless
Works Chosen
The Communications Officer’s Tale
Rheanna, Lunch and Other Obscenities - Star Trek
The story I have included here, Rheanna’s “Lunch and Other Obscenities” (2009), shares characteristics with all of the above stories: it’s a story about two professional women and also features a culture clash. A Star Trek reboot story (that is, a story from the 2009 Star Trek film directed by J. J. Abrams), it tells the story of Uhura’s first days at Starfleet Academy, and in particular, of the culture clash she experiences with her roommate, Gaila, who hails from the planet Orion....
While Star Trek is beloved by fans for its attempts to be racially and sexually progressive—the original series featured television’s first interracial kiss, for example, and many Trek storylines are thinly disguised allegories of racial difference—it hasn’t always hit the mark, particularly in terms of gender and sexuality. “Lunch and Other Obscenities” treats its themes of sexual and racial difference with intelligence and sensitivity, putting the Nairobi-born, Swahili-speaking Uhura at the center of the story and making its central relationship that of two female friends. Virginia Woolf once suggested that it would be radical to read a book in which “Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together . . .”—that is, a book in which women are friends (rather than rivals or mere vehicles for exposition) and engaged in meaningful work. More recently, Alison Bechdel articulated what has come to be called the Bechdel test: does a story feature two women who talk to each other about something other than a man? “Lunch and Other Obscenities” succeeds on these terms: it’s a story in which Uhura likes Gaila, and Gaila likes Uhura, and they share a Starfleet Academy dorm room together.
It is also a story that might make you question your own attitudes about sex. Many people, encountering fanfiction for the first time, wonder why so much of it is erotic. Anne Jamison, in Fic, gives a pretty good answer: a lot of fanfiction questions mainstream assumptions about gender, sexuality, and desire. But writing erotic fanfiction is also a wonderful game. The fanfiction community might be the first place where a woman is encouraged to enjoy her sexual fantasies and praised for the dirtiness of her imagination. Writing and reading fanfiction is a social, communal activity, and considering how much shame is still attached to the expression of female sexual desire (what’s so funny about it?), the creation of shared erotic fantasies is still radical. We lose our shame together. We enter a sex-positive culture together.
Many of us were a little shocked when we first encountered sexually explicit fanfiction, just like Uhura was a little shocked to stumble on Gaila enjoying herself so unapologetically. But we’re not shocked anymore.
page 20-23
The FBI Agent’s Tale
Pares, The Sad Ballad of Mary Sue’s Blues
The Slayer’s Tale
The Super Man’s Tale
Koi, Three Fairy Tales of Smallville
The Dwarf’s Tale
Brancher, They Say of the Elves
The Pop Star’s Tale
The Spymaster’s Tale
The Wizard’s Tales
The Companions’ Tale
kaydee falls, The Pond Continuum
The Detective’s Tale
The Demon Hunter’s Tales
Glockgal, Supernatural, aka The Boys in Arizona
Supernatural: Fanservice Sequel
The Billionaire Superhero’s Tale
AlchemyAlice, When they finally come to destroy the earth (they’ll have to go through you first)
The Stormtrooper’s Tale
LullabyKnell, The Story of Finn
Further Reading
From book
"1992: Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers (Routledge, 1992), Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women (University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 1992), and Constance Penley’s “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture” (in Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg et al. Routledge, 1992), which she later expanded in her book NASA/Trek (Verso, 1997) "While there were several important articles on fanfiction in the fol- lowing years (notably Rebecca Tushnet’s 1997 “Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law,” and Sara Gwenllian Jones’s 2002 article “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters,” in Screen), as well as several monographs tracing fanfiction and particular communities of fan- fiction writers (e.g., Sheenagh Pugh’s The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, 2005; Rhiannon Bury’s 2005 Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online), a second generation of fanfiction scholars came of age with the publication of Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (McFarland, 2006); this group, which includes Busse and Hellekson, Catherine Driscoll, Abi- gail DeKosnik, Louisa Stein, Deborah Kaplan, and others, including my- self, was largely comprised of female scholars who were also active and self-identified fans. Many of us went on to found or publish in the open- access journal Transformative Works and Cultures, which is dedicated to the study of fanworks and fan culture, and which has nurtured a new wave of scholars, including Alexis Lothian, Anne Kustritz, Bethan Jones, Cath- erine Tosenberger, Mel Stanfill, Juli Parrish, and others. Fanfiction has also become a central case study in digital culture and the law; see, for instance, David Roh’s book Illegal Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and Aaron Schwabach’s Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and In- tellectual Property Protection (Ashgate, 2011)."
Fan Essays
- Joanna Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, authors of the 1975 book Star Trek Lives! with its famous concluding chapter: “Do-It-Yourself Star Trek—the Fan Fiction,” Patricia Frazer Lamb
- Diane Veith, who wrote the 1985 essay “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines” and
- Joanna Russ, whose “Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love”
- The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (Iowa, 2014)"