[1] This new volume by Brit Kelley sets out to analyze the practice and texts of fan fiction as a form of as "emotioned literacy." Emotioned literacy is the term Kelley uses to provide a sociological perspective on emotional engagement with texts that does not elide the role of the body, feeling, and sensation in literary practices. Kelley argues this is a tendency that theorists invested in Cartesian dualism and the masculinist elevation of the mind over the body have tended to fall prey to. Along the way, Kelley self-reflexively interrogates these ethics of online research methods as applied to fan fiction, eschewing a posture of rational academic discourse to investigate the researcher's own embodied investment in fan fiction and the fan fiction community.
[2] The perspective remains sociological because Kelley is concerned with emotion as a socioeconomic and interpersonal structure, investigating how the "objects of emotions circulate or are distributed across a social as well as a psychic field." Affect (a term Kelley returns to critically—see below) is generally understood as an effect of the circulation of objects and signs, which accumulate affective value in their movement, circulation, and exchange.
[3] Kelley takes a mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative approach, providing some rich demographic data on her fan participants as well as in-depth interviews and close analysis of fan-made texts in the body of the work. Kelley contends that academics have tended to skirt around the idea of loving fan fiction—indeed, of owning affective investment in it—due to the lingering stigma related to emotion or excessive closeness to texts. This book argues that emotional investment can and should work as a key part of a critical framework, and that its neglect is to the detriment of our studies.
[4] The epub edition, which I reviewed, is divided into six main chapters with an introduction, a conclusion, and an index. It comes with nineteen black and white figures and one table, with the figures comprising explanatory graphs and charts plus some pertinent screencaps from fan-made and professional media for illustrative purposes.
[5] In addition to providing an overview of the book, the introduction outlines a self-reflexive investigation of methods for ethical online research, taking into account the author's position as both a fan and a relatively privileged academic. There was much that I agreed with here as an academic and a fan, particularly the author's wise acknowledgement that, in eschewing a position of false objectivity, "I could assert myself as a full participant-observer, claiming that because I am a fan, I am free to both investigate and report on fan practices in whatever way I see fit. But this approach, too, ignores power. It falsely makes the assumption that those I research face no risks while eliding my position within a powerful institution—the academy" (9).
[6] Kelley's solution is not to seek permission for every text quoted, which the academic context reveals to a broader audience than the fan might initially intend, but instead to paraphrase, especially comments posted directly from fans to author. As a discourse analyst, this is less convincing to me as a solution. Are we not equally at risk of misrepresentation as of overexposure? I do agree with Kelley's contention that fan studies, at this point, requires situational, specific ethics rather than blanket policies. This idea is developed further in the first main chapter via the concept of an ethics of goodwill. Kelley argues that ethical research online starts from a "disposition of goodwill" toward participants, even and especially when we encounter material that challenges us. This goodwill ethics is understood through four principles: respect, reciprocity, transparency, and vulnerability. How these play out in practice will be situational. These principles are sound, and I agree with Kelley's situational perspective on their implantation. However, if respect involves "representing participants in ways they might represent themselves" (26), I would question again how paraphrasing fits into that—are we not assuming a position of objectivity via the interpretation we make in order to paraphrase? That is to say, in paraphrasing do we not claim a certain authority of knowledge over what a writer means and a position of objectivity on our ability to re-express it correctly?
[7] Chapter 2 concerns the "emotioned economies" of fan fiction. This persuasive analysis demonstrates a widespread movement of fan fiction communities toward what Kelley calls "platform logic"—the modes of labor and exchange common to platform capitalism (see Srnicek 2016)—and away from the logic of the gift that structured earlier communities. As media corporations become increasingly adept at monetizing fan labor—from simple clicks to complex cosplay—a cynical perspective would see the harnessing and remediation of these practices via sites like Twitter as purely exploitative. Kelley does not go so far—fans do, after all, derive pleasure and community from their engagement with corporate entities even if said entity is ultimately profiting from their work—but she maintains that fans need to maintain a somewhat gift-based culture in specific spaces. There is an interesting point here—whether due to its contexts of production, its tenuous relationship with copyright, or simply its text-heavy format, fan fiction may be less readily exploitable or commercially recuperable than other fan practices. We might be tempted to celebrate this as fan fiction somehow remaining more pure or less tainted by commercialism, but that would be oversimplistic. As Kelley points out, fan work has always been in negotiation with corporate entities, and with the coming-of-age of the "precariat" sector an increasing number of fans are managing to generate revenue from their emotioned fan labor. There are no doubt many studies to be done to on this subject alone, but I would have liked to see more discussion here on the specific relationship between fan practices as emotioned literacy and/or gift culture as well as fans' increasing need or will to make money from fan practice.
[8] Chapter 3 concerns fan fiction as a feminized and racialized practice. Kelley's significant contribution here is an investigation of the unmarked whiteness of fan culture: the way that race is never discussed except as a particular divergence, a point of interest around a specific character and/or fan. Yet "whiteness" as a discursive construct has its own hallmarks, which are often silent, Western-centrism, the predominance and elevation of Standard English, and tendencies to professionalization among them. Kelley explores how some fans write race into (or out of) their fan work, an area of fan studies that is still very unexplored. She also usefully incorporates survey data that demonstrate how fans identify with a much wider range of gender and sexual identities than simply "feminine/feminized." There is certainly more to be done here, but Kelley is to be credited for these insights into how perceptions of emotionality stick to some (constructions of) bodies more than others, even where these identities may not align with how fans perceive themselves.
[9] Chapter 4 explores the relationship of fan fiction writing to fans' familial structures via a broad definition of family that includes both biological and chosen connections. Again, this is a novel area of study, and she has produced some valuable insights into the variety of ways fans perceive their place in fandom. Interestingly, not all fans perceive fandom as a supportive or a familial community, preferring to share their writing and development as a writer with their biological families. Kelley connects this back to the logic of "platform fandom," which "pushes sharing, liking, and, due to call out culture on Twitter, for example, increased flaming as a way to draw the lines between supposedly morally 'bad' or 'good' behaviour." Other fan participants Kelley interviews do perceive themselves as part of a fandom family and express that this is a key part of their development as writers.
[10] This is certainly very valuable data, but we have to be careful not to reify an imagined vision of how fandom used to be (in the good old days of LiveJournal and Dreamwidth) against a posited lesser model of "how it is now" (after corporations ruined it). As Kelley acknowledges, fandom has always been in negotiation with industry, and fan fiction communities have never been universally supportive.
[11] Chapters 5 and 6 continue the investigation through textual analysis and interviews of how fans experience their emotioned writing practices, noting that although one participant experiences fandom more via an "organizing emotion" of love and pleasure, for another it is more a matter of craft, pride, and technical accomplishment. The latter seems to have more in common with how early writers on fan communities described fan participants, which may relate back to early fan studies' projects to legitimize fan work, but it would certainly be worth exploring how a change from gift logic to platform logic plays here. That is the one area I would like to see elaborated on more in these two chapters. However, Kelley provides valuable insights into a variety of fannish experiences, including one writer's renegotiation of her relationship with fan fiction after its association with a trauma in her life.
[12] The conclusion reflects on and develops the concept of emotioned literacy as explored throughout the text. Kelley defines it as a term "meant to reflect the agency of literacy practices, and the importance of body and mind in all learning and working," noting that whereas "emotioned literacy contains a key element of agency, it is also important to see how emotioned literacy is continuously shaped by and shaping a larger emotional system" (200). That emotional system comprises both interpersonal relationships and human–technology interaction. Although the more familiar theory of affect certainly informs this idea, the author deliberately privileges the term "emotion." Kelley purposely avoids "affect," a term she sees as more sterile and theoretically accepted, in order to push back against the denigration of emotion as less legitimate and more suspiciously feminine.
[13] This book certainly accomplishes its aim of introducing Kelley's theory of emotioned literacy as a theoretical lens, and this is a valuable contribution. It also provides some important discussion regarding the ethics of fan studies. As fandoms and the platforms they play (out) on are rapidly developing, changing, converging, and diverging, these aspects do indeed need to be addressed both situationally and reflexively. Highlighting the unspoken whiteness of fan studies is also important because as Kelley rightly observes, the default "invisibleness" of whiteness is still dominant in fandom and fan studies. Fan studies work analyzing race has been relegated to a specific or special interest rather than the criticism of a pervasive structure. What I would have liked to have seen is more integration of the respective internal and external structures discussed; for example, the chapters on emotional and familial structures could have been better integrated with those on platform capitalism. (I also thought the book raised many questions about how fan fiction as emotioned literacy relates to other forms of reading and writing. What is unique about it, if anything?)
[14] Nonetheless, this is a strong contribution to the existing literature on fan fiction and will be valuable to fan scholars, scholars of new media and digital literacies, and perhaps those studying literary pedagogy. I would recommend it for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses, with some crossover into general readership for readers interested in fan fiction specifically.