Cybergirls in Trouble? Fan Fiction as a Discursive Space for Interrogating Gender and Sexuality

2008 ◽  
pp. 156-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sirpa Leppänen
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Discursive Space

scholarly journals Queerly imagining Super Girl in an alternate world: The fannish worlding in FSCN femslash romance

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing (Jamie) Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Writing Strategy ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

A globally formatted, Idol-style, reality singing contest produced by a Chinese provincial TV station, Super Girl (SG; Hunan Satellite TV, 2004–2006) received staggeringly huge commercial success nationwide. It only allowed female participants and featured a large number of gender-defying finalists. This article explores femslash fan fiction published and circulated on feise chaonü (FSCN), one of the most popular Mainland Chinese femslash fandoms of 2006 SG participants. The lesbian romance depicted in FSCN fan fiction is inspired by and further articulates the intentionally "queered" content of SG. However, these lesbian stories are often narrated within culturally distant, fictional settings, such as Western, futuristic, or historical backdrops. My reading of FSCN femslash fan fiction explores how and why this prevailing, yet self-contradictory, femslash writing strategy helps the fans to queerly construct an "alternate world" that enacts, facilitates, or legitimizes Chinese lesbianism. I reveal the underlying ways in which this FSCN worlding practice ambiguously appropriates and ridicules contemporary Chinese female gender- and sexuality-related norms and ideals. Ultimately, I argue that the "worlded" contexts and plotlines of queer fantasy in FSCN femslash can be construed as active fannish responses to and negotiations with the realities and histories of Chinese lesbian-related public cultures.

scholarly journals Text mining, Hermione Granger, and fan fiction: What's in a name?

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Leigh Rowe ◽  
Tolonda Henderson ◽  
Tianyu Wang
Keyword(s):  
Text Mining ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Specific Reading ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fiction Writers

When fans rewrite characters, how do they engage that character's identity and the social constructions around it? Fan fiction writers resist, replicate, and create oppressive social systems by changing characters between published and fan texts. As such, fan studies scholars have long been interested in how fans construct characters, an interest that has often been paired with readings of race, gender, and sexuality. Digital humanities can help confirm and nuance extant fan studies scholarship around specific characters popular in fan fiction. We used Word2Vec software to mine the text of 450 pieces of fan fiction based on J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. By focusing on the depiction of Hermione Granger in both Rowling's novels and Harry Potter fan fiction, we tested how text mining character names can reveal properties closely tied to a specific character through the relationships between the target name and other characters. Analysis via Word2Vec found that "Hermione" is used grammatically and contextually differently in the books (in which she is most like Harry and Ron) than in our fan fiction corpus (in which she is most like other girls/women). This difference suggests that these fans have a specific reading of Hermione that is communally understood even if Rowling's diction offers a different reading.

scholarly journals Homophobia, heteronormativity, and slash fan fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
April S. Callis
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Slash Fan Fiction

I analyze the relationship between homophobia/heteronormativity and slash fan fiction. Through reading and coding almost 6,000 pages of Kirk/Spock fan fiction written from 1978 to 2014, I illuminate shifts in how normative gender and sexuality are portrayed by K/S authors. Writers of K/S, while ostensibly writing about the 23rd century, consciously or unconsciously include cultural norms from the 20th and 21st centuries. Thus, slash becomes a lens through which readers can view a decrease in both homophobia and heteronormativity in US culture over the past several decades.

scholarly journals Bound princes and monogamy warnings: Harry Potter, slash, and queer performance in LiveJournal communities

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darlene Rose Hampton
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Patriarchal Culture ◽  
Social Conditioning ◽  
The World ◽  
Queer Performance ◽  
Mode Of Production

Media fans often refer to their texts, practices, productions, and selves as works in progress—unfinished, in-between, and transformative. This article applies theoretical models of performance to the fannish practice of crafting slash fan fiction within LiveJournal communities. By examining the content and form of the fiction itself, its mode of production, and fannish interactions, this paper discusses fan practices as opportunities for media fans to engage in individual and collective performances that negotiate hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality. These negotiations often illustrate a disconnect between social conditioning and female desire in heteronormative and patriarchal culture, and demonstrate the utility of theories of performance in studying individual and collective fannish engagement with texts as a means of intervening in the world.

Retrospective feelings of difference based on gender and sexuality among emerging adults.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-39
Author(s):  
Kyle A. Simon ◽  
Cassandra P. Vázquez ◽  
Samuel T. Bruun ◽  
Rachel H. Farr
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Adults ◽  
Gender And Sexuality

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Criss-Cross: Identity and Transformation in Re-reading Billy Elliot

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies, but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neo-liberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film's perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society's wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film's subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film's opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character.

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