The Rowling Path
Fanfiction, or fan-generated stories related to popular books, movies and tv shows, is a site of possibilities. Due to a general lack of censorship that exists on the internet, writers are allowed to publish anything they want with the option of maintaining anonymity. There are many aspects of fanfiction that make it an important topic for exploration regarding performance and gender. “Fanfiction has a predominantly female authorship and readership base,” explain Milli and Bamman in their analysis of fanfiction (2050). In addition to this, fanfiction has often been a site for exploring homosexual pairings that did not exist or were not expanded upon in the “canon,” or original, literature. In approaching the archive, I intend to answer the question: how does fanfiction engage in performance that can help generate empowering identities for adolescent girls through female characters and queer representation? (Faires, 2018)
To begin this journey, I propose a working classification system.
To be classified as fanfiction a work must be:
1. Derived in some way from already existing content.
2. Created by someone who identifies as a “fan” and perceives their own work as a fan work.
3. Be written for a community of other fans.
It is worth noting that the third point is flexible. While the community aspect of fanfiction is important, the definition of community is intentionally vague. In my previous example, my friend and I still engaged in fan production even though the “community” was just the two of us. Throughout this project, there are many terms and phrases that may be unfamiliar. This is due to the communal aspect of fanfiction. Communities create their own language for describing their practices. I will define unfamiliar terms as best I can through the notes function of Scalar.
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