The Homosocial Nature of Fanfic Communities
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| Title: | The Homosocial Nature of Fanfic Communities |
| Creator: | Kristina |
| Date(s): | March 4, 2003 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fanfiction, slash |
| External Links: | The Homosocial Nature of Fanfic Communities, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Homosocial Nature of Fanfic Communities is an essay by Kristina.
It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.
Excerpts
In a recent Genders article, Gayle Wald suggests in her discussion of fan appropriations of pop music culture that “girl-consumers …use boy bands … in intensely personal, individually empowering, and occasionally unsanctioned ways.” One of the examples she gives is the use of “boy-band fan practices to mediate intimate relationships between and among girls.” Reading this, I was wondering whether such homosocial bonds, created over shared attraction to celebrities or media characters, could provide a model that fits slash fan practices as well. After all, am I actually imagining making love to the celebrity or even being him? Possibly on some level, but, personally, I imagine most of these celebrities to be pretty boring; I also do not really want to inhabit their lives. Similarly, the characters in mediafic are much more interesting than their real life counterparts (would anyone choose an evening talking to David Boreanaz over conversing with Angel?); moreover, their fictitious characterization is usually more interesting than the way they are represented on TV. How many of us got into a show via the fic only to be slightly disappointed that the TV characters were much less interesting than the ones we’d grown to love in their fanfic versions? And I’m not talking about messing with the canon as much as the loving creation of depth that is simply impossible to present on screen.
Much has been written and repeated about the appeals of slash to women; much is being said about the nature of fanfic communities and the central importance of its collective and communal spirit. What I seem to be suggesting here is that the female community may be charged erotically not only in relation to our male fantasy and identificatory objects, but also in the imaginary and imaginative relation between reader and writer and among the women within a given fan community. In this ultimate act of agency we transforms the male characters into our personal—intellectual and emotional—dress-up dolls and use them as masturbatory fantasies for an ever-widening female circle jerk.