1. Introduction
[1.1] On a particular Good Omens fan fiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fan tags Crowley's bodily configuration with the following: "Crowley has a choose-your-own-adventure book in her pants." Across a variety of fandoms, fans tag the characters they write about with similar tags, leaving it up to the reader and embracing an ambiguous embodiment and imagination of gender. This is an example of what I call a "genderfucked tag"—a tag that is intentionally and invitationally ambiguous with regards to body and gender such that the user fucks with the intended classificatory purpose of the tagging system.
[1.2] Though genderfuck has a history in fan fiction communities and fan studies (Busse and Lothian 2009; Neville 2018; Duggan 2023), I draw here from the gender studies incarnation of the term. Using the gender studies definition, we can understand genderfuck to be a destabilizing relationship between symbolism, sex, and gender that fucks with how we recognize gender and sexuality (Reich 1992). As such, when fans perform invitational ambiguity and fluidity of gender and body for each other in the tags of their fan fiction, we can understand their practices as a genderfucking of the tags, resulting in the tag becoming a genderfucked technology. Fans genderfuck a tag when they (1) fuck with the body's relationship to the tag through (2) a queering/transing/fanning of space/time that (3) explicitly or implicitly invites other fans to do the same via their imagination. In doing so, fans refuse a fixed or canonical incarnation of the body, instead giving their fellow fans the time and space to imagine what the body could look like.
[1.3] In this article, I examine what genderfucking the tags looks like in Good Omens and The Witcher fandoms (though this phenomenon is observable in others as well). I argue that when these fans genderfuck the tags, they open themselves up to futurities and possibilities of gender, body, and fandom, simultaneously and through each other. The result is a disruptive use of the tags that fucks their intended classificatory use and invites fellow fans to imagine their relationship to gender and body in queer, undefined ways. Through intentional and invitational ambiguity and fluidity, fans prioritize imagination and ambiguity as features of their tags. Instead of relegating them to the sidelines, these fans include them as the classification on their own merits.
[1.4] In what follows, I define how tagging functions on AO3, exploring its sociotechnical meanings within fan communities and situate genderfucked technology as a practice. I explore time, space, and genderfuck as they are understood within queer, gender, and fan studies. Then, I offer a definition of genderfucked technology and explicate the practice via character and self-insert tags. Finally, I reflect on what genderfucked tags might tell us about fandom's transformative nature more broadly and the potential of fannish-technical interventions.
2. Tags on AO3
[2.1] AO3 is a fan work repository and archive that anyone can register to post on; though the platform mainly hosts fan works in the form of textual fan fiction, it also hosts fan art, videos, games, and other works (Price 2019), as well as variations of fan fiction like podfic (fan fiction read aloud) (Riley 2024). As of May 2025, the platform hosted over 15 million fan works (https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/31735). The tagging infrastructure is one of its most influential and well-known features. Tags are part of a user-entered, curated folksonomy: "a system of tag synonyms and tag relationships that addresses some of the major shortcomings of a pure, unregulated folksonomy" (Bullard 2014, 47). When deciding how to tag their work, a fan can choose from predefined canonical tags that have been approved by volunteers called wranglers who match noncanonical and canonical tags to create semiconsistent terminology. Fans can also create their own free-form tags, which a tag wrangler might then ascribe to a canonical tag (Price and Robinson 2021). When doing so, wranglers "try to follow the original tagger's meaning and intent as closely as possible" (Price and Robinson 2021, 338) and often feel that their wrangling is a way of giving back to the fandom community (Price 2019). This is in part because the first guiding principle for wranglers is that wrangling approaches are user-centric: "In all things, we are guided by what the users do, not what we might wish they would do" (https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/16). The introduction to wrangling guidelines even includes a paragraph addressing fan-users of the Archive, emphasizing that "wranglers can't change the tags you choose for your works and bookmarks!" (https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2). As a result of this system, tagging becomes a crucial finding aid that is "far more granular and far more numerous in scope" than the system found in an institution like a library (Price 2019, 24).
[2.2] This curated folksonomic approach to tagging also creates a particular kind of sociality possible within the tags, where fans can use the tags for purposes other than classification, description, or search viability. For instance, Ludi Price (2019) developed a tag taxonomy that types tags under seven main types, with subtypes for nearly every main type. Though many of these tag types are primarily for classificatory purposes, tag types like opinion, self-reference, or play and performance are more dialogic and affective in nature. Other scholars have similarly argued this point, suggesting that Tumblr-style and commentary-style tags serve a number of purposes on AO3 beyond mere search or discovery. These kinds of tags tend to be more sentence-like, use personal pronouns, and contain more information; they address readers directly and often rely on their relationship to other tags (Gursoy et al. 2018). In particular, they might contextualize and qualify descriptive tags, manage reader expectations, or give the reader a glimpse into the writing process (Kennedy 2024). As such, particular forms of literacy are required to navigate the complex tagging system with what Fabienne Silberstein-Bamford (2024) calls rhizomatic reading, where metadata serves as the connection between millions of stories and users use it to navigate seamlessly between stories they may not have otherwise encountered.
[2.3] This reader-directed sociality also creates a dynamic between author and reader where tags can serve as a way to draw in similarly minded fans and alert them to the contents of the work. In these cases, tags function as both warning and advertising, where "rather than wanting uncertainty and surprise, [fans] like to know the shape of the story ahead of time, so they can enjoy the particular way it plays out" (Busse 2017, 203). Kimberly Kennedy (2024, ¶ 5.8) notes that these kinds of commentary-style tags can "softly introduce concepts" in the fan fiction—for instance, using a tag like "background violence" as opposed to the canonical "Violence" tag "qualifies and de-emphasizes" the presence of violence while still advertising and warning users about its presence in the story. As such, tags serve as a curated folksonomic infrastructure and a symbolic, conversational, and expressive part of fandom culture; this is central to how fans interact with fan fiction and each other on AO3.
3. Case studies, methods, and ethics
[3.1] For the purposes of this article, I consider the Good Omens and The Witcher fandoms' tagging practices on AO3 (note 1). Though this phenomenon is observable in other fandoms, I use Good Omens and The Witcher due to my own familiarity with their source material and conventions, as well as the fact that they are both fantasy television series with a history of various transmedia dating back to the early 1990s. Briefly, in Good Omens, angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley must save humanity from the end of the world after misplacing Satan's son just over a decade ago. The second season of the television show takes place after Aziraphale and Crowley have saved humanity and explores their history and dynamic in more detail. The Witcher follows Geralt of Rivia on his journeys as a Witcher, a supernatural monster hunter, accompanied by other characters such as Jaskier, a human bard companion. It is also important to note that Good Omens has canonically gender-fluid main characters in the television show, while The Witcher does not. Additionally, both franchises have roughly similar amounts of fan fiction on AO3 when tagged under their respective "All Media Types" tags, with Good Omens around 57,000 and The Witcher around 51,000 works, though this shifts some when tagging individual properties in the franchise (for instance, individually selecting "Good Omens [TV]" returns 80,000 works whereas "The Witcher [TV]" returns nearly 25,000 works and "The Witcher [Video Game]" returns just under 13,000).
[3.2] Importantly, I do not focus here on the texts. I focus my analytical energy only on the tags. Inspired by previous work debating AO3's feminist or trans technological potential that considers the platform design, I am interested in what a critical queer and trans approach to the tags can tell us about fans. For instance, the folksonomic tagging structure has often been cited as a successful example of feminist design due to the embeddedness of participation, pluralism, and advocacy on the platform (Fiesler et al. 2016). Other work on trans technologies emphasizes the role that design plays as a mediator between trans people and technology (Haimson 2025) and argues that AO3 cannot be a trans technology due to the Organization for Transformative Works' nonprofit model (Haimson et al. 2021). While this previous work has considered the design values and principles of AO3 as a platform—including but not limited to its tagging system—I am interested in how fans might imbue a particular technology on the platform with certain affordances that designers could not through an imaginative use of the technology in question. This practice is present in much of fannish history, such as with fans' use of LiveJournal, where the platform "was not built for any of the things fandom did with it" (Fiesler quoted in Schwedel 2018); its incarnation here is interesting given that AO3 is made by fans, for fans, and speaks to the broader potential of fannish transformations of technology. In this case, that technology is the tag and the folksonomic system. This is why I focus on the tags and not the texts.
[3.3] Owing to my interest in what fans do with the tags and how they create a shared sense of the body and imagination through their doing, I follow the theoretical commitment to analyzing how users "perceive, articulate, and ultimately define the technocultural space in which they operate and exist" (Brock 2018, 1016) outlined in critical technocultural discourse analysis. As such, for each fandom, I identified several key tags that often feature elements of genderfuck. For instance, in the Good Omens fandom, the canonical tag "Crowley's Genitals Are Not Specified" frequently has variations that perform genderfuck to fellow fans whereas in The Witcher fandom, variations of the canonical "Trans Jaskier" tag and its accompanying commentary-style tags perform the same function. After identifying a corpus of fan fiction with relevant tags, I selected tags that indicated neutrality, fluidity, or ambiguity in their description of body or gender. I considered how these tags worked to create a particular understanding of the body and the reader and/or author's role in constructing it. I considered the tags that explicitly or implicitly offered readers an invitation to imagine the body on their own terms via the neutrality, fluidity, or ambiguity through a queer/trans lens. As a result, I ended with a collection of tags that used the folksonomic structure in such a way to cultivate a particular understanding of the body, which I understand through the theoretical lens of genderfuck and queer/fan spatiotemporalities.
[3.4] The kinds of tags analyzed in this article are not widely used in their fandoms, present in dozens rather than hundreds or thousands in the fandoms analyzed; additionally, the works these tags are on are not the most popular works in their fandoms, though there is a sizeable range of engagement. In the Good Omens fandom, the works referenced in this article range from hits (i.e., views) as low as the 400s to nearly 12,000 hits; in The Witcher fandom, works referenced range from hits in the high 100s to 9,500.
[3.5] Additionally, to prioritize fan protection and anonymity, I do not directly cite fans whose tags I reference in this article. Many queer/trans fans experience harassment in fandom, especially from fans who are explicitly against queering canon (McInroy et al. 2022); considering my focus, I am especially cognizant of the need for fan anonymity and do not provide potentially identifying information beyond the tags.
4. Situating and defining genderfucked technology
[4.1] Important to situating genderfucked technology is the relationship and interactions between technology, body, and spatiotemporality. In this section, I explore the intersections between queer spatiotemporalities, fandom spatiotemporalities, and trans fandom, particularly as all three pertain to fan fiction and the body. Then, I outline how a genderfucked technology comes into existence through slashing—referring to a simultaneous creation of a romantic pairing in the fandom sense and a destruction of hierarchy in the violent sense—of queer and fan spatiotemporalities that leads to a more imaginative relationship to the body.
[4.2] Queer time and space are models of temporality and spatiality that resist institutional frames associated with the family, heteronormativity, and reproduction, instead embracing nonnormative logics of community and spatiotemporal activity informed by queer counterpublics which create new understandings of time and space (Halberstam 2005). These institutional frames are chrononormative, meaning that time "binds" the flesh and body to maximize productivity via temporal regulation, a technique through which "institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts" (Freeman 2010, 3). Queer times and spaces, then, are disruptive to chrononormative institutions and norms. On these disruptions, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row (2022) writes that a temporal disruption "jostles us out of the settledness of the given world while also opening up the possibility of other kinds of flows or forces of affect" (401). Velocity, which Row defines as speed with a directional component, becomes useful for thinking about the intertwining of queer temporality and affect, as it allows us to consider the incremental and directional effects of temporal disruptions.
[4.3] Row's (2022) understanding of temporal disruptions, a velocious journey that jostles the world's settledness, is in many ways similar to how some scholars conceptualize transformative fandom's relationship to dominant media industries. Similarly to Row's conceptualization of how queer time disrupts cisheterosexual time via affect, Abigail De Kosnik (2016) argues that fan time disrupts media time through affect and repetition. While media time is mandated by dominant cultural industries, sales cycles, and production, interested in upholding the strict temporal regulation of media, fan time casts doubt on media time in favor of fannish production and a rejection of chrononormativities, rooted in pleasure and repetition rather than productivity and progression. In this way, we can understand both queer and fan spatiotemporal practices as velocious disruptions to dominant, normative spatiotemporalities.
[4.4] This velocious disruption can be seen in the relationship between trans fandom and the body in fan fiction more broadly. De Kosnik (2016) argues that the works fans create and post online are composed bodies that fans make and maneuver in digital spaces; in particular, internet fan fiction is a body medium, which mediates between physical bodies that are remote from one another. Transfic, which Jonathan A. Rose (2020) defines as a kind of fan fiction that creates trans representations by imagining fictionalized trans narratives based on existing texts, might also then be understood as a body medium; Rose argues that if we view "fanfiction as a practice in which the body and its representation are particularly relevant for meaning-making processes, then the question that follows is how fannish narratives engage with trans bodies" (27). Transfic, then, comes to be a kind of disruption into the chrononormative, as it engages with the lived experiences of trans people in a way unique to the practice. In his work on transmasculine fans' engagement with Teen Wolf, Ari Page (2023, ¶ 2.6) similarly argues for transfic as a self-narrative tool, arguing that "fiction is the means through which autobiography is created…[as] the marginalized fan projects parts of themselves onto a different body in order to imagine it otherwise." Transfic cultivates digital trans spaces and narratives in a resistant and communal manner.
[4.5] Transfic, however, is not synonymous with genderfuck, the term I take up in this article. Within fan communities, this is sometimes understood as a practice in fan fiction that "uses science fiction and fantasy tropes to alter and reimagine characters' sexed and gendered bodies…[to] highlight multidimensional intersections of sex, gender, desire, and embodiment" (Busse and Lothian 2009, 105–106). As a genre, genderfuck stories "both undermine and reinforce cisnormative notions of gender, and depending on how they are written and received, may be perceived by trans readers as either reparative or damaging texts" (Duggan 2023, ¶ 3.3); this is a critical distinction, but the contemporary fandom understanding of genderfuck is not the term I take up here. Instead, for my purposes, I draw on a gender studies incarnation of the term, which June L. Reich (1992) defines as a conceptualization of the relationship between symbolism, sex, and gender that "structures meaning in a symbol-performance matrix that crosses through sex and gender and destabilizes the boundaries of my recognition of sex, gender, and sexual practice" (113). In other words, a genderfucked embodiment is a drag performance that considers the binary and might toy with it but ultimately moves past it; it is "the destabilizing of gender as an analytic category, though it is not, necessarily, the signal of the end of gender" (Reich 1992, 125). Similarly to the fan fiction practice, there is a (re)imagination of the body and embodiment as categories.
[4.6] Following this understanding, a genderfucked technology is one whose user fucks with the technology's (intended) performance via a multiplex slashing of spatiotemporality, imagination, and body. Though I borrow the term "slash" from fandom's lexicon, I repurpose it here to indicate a dual creation and destruction. Just as fans slash characters together to create a romantic pairing, genderfucking a technology creates a romantic, imaginative resonance—for instance, a pairing of fan and queer temporalities that engage the body in a repetitive, nonlinear manner. However, my invocation of slash here is also meant to highlight the potentially violent nature of such a resonance, what happens when chrononormative binds are slashed. I borrow here from Rox Samer's and Marquis Bey's invocations of slash, understood as an "affective cutting of knowledge [that] interrupts models of histories and modes of representation" (Samer 2019, 552) and a severance of hierarchal connotations, where hierarchies and glorified values are "fractured by the slash, negated by the interruption" (Bey 2022, 92). In other words, the slashing inherent in genderfucking a technology cuts into knowledges and models and severs hierarchical connotations around knowledge and being but also creates a new resonance of imaginative embodiment.
[4.7] In slashing to create a genderfucked technology, a user (1) fucks with the technology's space/time through (2) a certain spatio/temporal disruption, (3) achieved through an imaginative disordering of the body's relationship to the technology in question. In this case, a tag becomes a genderfucked technology on AO3 when a fan (1) fucks with the body's relationship to the tag—for the character(s) and/or the reader—through (2) a queering/transing/fanning of space/time, that (3) explicitly or implicitly invites other fans to do the same via their imagination.
[4.8] Fans' use of the tags to subvert the purpose of classification in the name of imaginations beyond their own is what makes it genderfucked. Put differently: the technology requires a kind of subversive or otherwise disruptive action from its user(s)—genderfuck—in order to become properly genderfucked. Rose (2020) writes that it is possible to visualize what transing a space might look like in the paratexts of a fan fiction, "where comments are made, questions asked and explanations given" (33). With genderfuck in the tags, there is a similar paratextual phenomenon; however, what distinguishes a genderfucked tag from a transed paratext is the intentional and invitational ambiguity. Though Busse (2017) argues that tags can serve to eliminate uncertainty and surprise, a genderfucked tag intentionally revels in both and places the imaginative potential in the reader's head and hands rather than in the author's. This invitational ambiguity in the tags is what makes a tag genderfucked.
5. "Crowley has a choose-your-own-adventure book in her pants": Genderfucked tags of characters
[5.1] Fans can tag trans characters in a number of ways due to AO3's wrangling infrastructure. For instance, for a show with a canonical trans character, a fan may include "Character's Name" and "Canonical Trans Character" as separate tags, or may not include a tag indicating the character's transness at all. However, for characters who are not canonically trans but made trans, genderqueer, or otherwise genderfucked, fans often create tags that establish the character as trans within the fan work. For instance, when The Witcher fans write the show's resident bard Jaskier as trans, they may tag him as "Trans Jaskier." Transness modifies in these cases, because the tags are primarily descriptive; often, though, commentary-style tags provide the rationalization for this basic "Trans Jaskier" tag, creating a more conversational, affective, and reader-directed tag.
[5.2] When transing or otherwise genderqueering characters that are not canonically trans, some fans will include a tag rationalizing transness into the background of the work, positioning it as ordinary within the world of the fan fiction and as a mere matter of fact among fans. Such tags frame transness as inherent to the work, even if it never shows up in the narrative. For instance, one fan tags their work with "Trans Jaskier" and follows it up with "Not relevant to the plot but it's important to me that you know that Jaskier is trans, Like just assume all my Jaskiers are trans" (meaning, in other works of theirs, readers should still assume Jaskier is trans). On another fan fiction, a fan tags "it's not plot relevant at all, i just like [Jaskier] and i'm trans so i made him trans too"; and another, "Geralt is nb [nonbinary], not relevant to the story, but you should know."
[5.3] In tagging transness as matter of fact and ordinary, fans are practicing what Erving Goffman (1956) calls dramaturgical circumspection—"[exercising] foresight and design in determining in advance how best to stage a show" (218) to keep up impressions of ordinariness; the circumspect performer addresses presentation according to the "character of the props and tasks" (224) that they use to perform. For these fans, this means using the free creation of tags—the props—to set a performance of an ordinary, self-evident, rationalized transness. Similarly, knowing their communal obligation to tag their works—the tasks—fans use freely created tags to create a narrative and conversation among fans that places transness in the forefront instead of merely in the background, even as they establish its relevance in the plot as potentially minute; "all my Jaskiers are trans" is a powerful statement to apply to all of one's works. Even if it never comes up, it forces fans to contend with and imagine the presence of transness in the work, to destabilize what it means for the body to be visible. Tagging one's work in this way therefore positions transness as ordinary in fandom more generally, pushing fans to disrupt previously held notions of gender and push them toward a more permeable, questioning, and queered path that rejects the notion of cisheterosexual and/or media chrononormativity—it is a velocious slashing at norms of visibility that rely on linear performances of embodiment.
[5.4] This slashing disrupts classification at the level of AO3's infrastructure; these tags momentarily turn AO3 into what Mel Y. Chen (2010) calls an everywhere archive (or a discursive, viral archive), where "identities are not pre-set. They are live, constructed, presentist, futurist, real…They are not archived reliably and so they must be concocted again and again" (206). Fan time, much like the everywhere archive, requires returning to the fannish object "again and again"; De Kosnik (2016) argues that fan archives, in addition to preserving fannish works, also preserve fan time itself through this ability to return, which allows fan time to be variant and undecided at the communal level, instead decided entirely by individual fans (158). At the intersection of the everywhere archive's viral, continuous (re)making of identity and the fan archive's individual, (un)ordinary returning to the fannish text, we see heightened speculation about the possibilities of the future and a distancing from the canon of the past (Chen 2010). These tags focus on speculation of what could be and futurity of (representations of) the body, moving away from the media canon. As such, we can imagine "it's not plot relevant at all, i just like him and i'm trans so i made him trans too" as disrupting media and cisheterosexual time in the archive, incrementally questioning and queering the body's visibility and inviting other fans to imagine such disruptions in other works through this destabilization. "so i made him trans too" offers a self-evident reading of transness in the fan fiction, an individual decision about the body's relationship to cisheterosexual and media spatiotemporality at the level of AO3's tags that foregrounds fan time through its dual enactment with queer time.
[5.5] When fans use tags like "jaskier is trans again because fuck u i said so," it is an assertion of individual agency against normative and hegemonic forces that suggest such an interpretation is wrong, unnecessary, or heretical. Transness is self-evident, continuous ("jaskier is trans again, assume all my Jaskiers are trans"), and disruptively ordinary because "i said so," flaunting disregard for the canon or binary.
[5.6] Fans' disregard for canon or binary sets up a destabilization of traditional linear storytelling in favor of queer and fannish tools. Fans destabilize linearity, instead reveling in the slashing of queer/fan spatiotemporalities and encouraging others to enact what Lucy Neville (2018) calls a genderfucked gaze via their tags. Neville builds on Reich's understanding of genderfuck, writing that the quasi-drag performance can manifest as a gaze, whereby the imagination of gay sex—even by straight women—is a queer act that embodies genderfuck, as desire and the gaze consider the binary but move past it into an imaginative self that is not bound by corporeal experiences of gender or sexuality. Imagination, often with the assistance of an erotic text, produces a genderfucked experience of the body. This genderfucked gaze is located within the individual's imagination and experience of gender and sexuality. However, the fans genderfucking the tags are doing so in a way that is communicative and reader-directed, as evidenced above. As such, these fans are not merely enacting a genderfucked gaze; they are enacting and inviting other fans to hold a choose-your-own-adventure book gaze, whereby fans invite each other to imagine the bodies relevant to the work in ways that the creator of the tag could not conceive. This idea borrows phrasing from one tag in the Good Omens fandom—"Crowley has a choose-your-own-adventure book in her pants." Though this tag is especially evocative for my purposes, it is only one example of a recurring phenomenon.
[5.7] Though many fans do choose to explicitly tag a (trans) character's body (particularly sex organs, but not only), fans that do not often encourage their fellow fans to use their imagination. Examples of this include the aforementioned "Crowley has a choose-your-own-adventure book in her pants," as well as: "Crowley has whatever genital configuration you want to imagine," "I don't even know what genitals Crowley has in this and that says sth [something] given this is porn," "Crowley has whatever you prefer," "Crowley Has Whatever You Want Him to Have," "Crowley's effort [a canonical term for genitalia in Good Omens] is left to interpretation," "aziraphale does not have genitalia today," "aziraphale can have whatever," "Aziraphale has any Effort you like," "Aziraphale has whatever you want to imagine," and "it is unknown what it is [sic] aziraphale's pants actually so project upon him as you wish." These tags are wrangled into "Crowley's Genitals Are Not Specified" and "Aziraphale's Genitals Are Not Specified," respectively, but these reader-directed tags produce a sociality among fans beyond mere nonspecification. They are, above all else, invitational and encouraging of imagination. Good Omens has canonically genderqueer characters, but this is also observable in other fandoms that do not have these characters; in The Witcher fandom, similar tags tell fans "He [Geralt] could be read as transmasc/nb it's up to interpretation" or "arguably nonbinary Geralt." Everything can be imagined, argued, and fucked with. Even as fans create classifying labels, they are free to construct and implement them however they want (and they can choose to ignore them altogether). Imagination and ambiguity are features, not relegated to the sidelines but included as the classification on their own merits.
[5.8] Fans use tags to invite their peers to an understanding of the relationship between body, sexuality, and gender that is not fixed, but rather a choose-your-own-adventure book, up to interpretation, able to be projected upon by fans. The importance of these tags for genderfuck is not just that they occupy unclear or otherwise ambiguous or arguable territory—it is that fans are invited to imagine in ways not even the creator of the tag might conceive. This is what enacts the choose-your-own-adventure book gaze and genderfucks the tags, not just the mere ambiguity. Fans (1) destabilize conceptions of visibility and linearity of the body in the tag's classification, through (2) a quasi-drag performance at the intersection of queer/trans/fan time, that (3) explicitly invites other fans to choose their own adventure via their imagination and experience of the character's body.
6. "The only pronoun used for reader is 'you'": Genderfucked tags of self-inserts
[6.1] Some tags indicate an ability to project one's experience of the body into the narrative. For instance, one fan tagged their work with "i just like him and i'm trans so i made him trans too" and another tagged their work with "it is unknown what it is [sic] aziraphale's pants actually so project upon him as you wish." These tags make clear the relationship between the fan's body and the imagination required to genderfuck the tag. However, there is another kind of tag that highlights this relationship between projection and genderfucked embodiment that implicates the fan directly: self-insert tags.
[6.2] Self-insert fan fiction refers to works that include "the presence of *a* self within fanfiction texts" (Sapuridis and Alberto 2022, 2), such as Mary Sue, imagines, your/name (y/n), and xReader—self-insert and its variations demarcate and then deliberately traverse boundaries between text/reader or personal desire/canon "in ways that go beyond merely allowing the reader to add subjectivity to the text [and instead] actively encourage and require it" (Sapuridis and Alberto 2022, 2–3). Effie Sapuridis and Maria Alberto's work on this genre as a digital technology of the self concludes with a question of what an analysis of tagging self-insert could reveal about the practice and fans who engage with it. Though this article is not an exploration of tagging self-insert specifically, I am equally interested in what particular practices in tagging self-insert reveal about fans engaging in it. For my purposes, I am interested in fans who leave the reader/self's gender/body up to interpretation and who invite their readers to interpret gender/body on their own terms.
[6.3] Tags that specify typical attributes of a reader/self character tend to be wrangled into broader tags (though this is not always the case). For instance, one fan tags their work with "Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Reader," which is then made a synonym of "Gender-Neutral Pronouns." Similarly, within the Good Omens fandom, for instance, "Crowley/Gender Neutral Reader" is a synonym of "Crowley/Reader." In The Witcher fandom, a number of tags are made synonymous with "Geralt of Rivia/Reader," such as "geralt/fem reader" or "Geralt of Rivia/Black Female Reader." In general, in cases where the reader's gender (or any other attribute) is unspecified in the original "X/Reader" tag, tags like "Female Reader" or "she/they pronouns for reader" accompany a broader "X/Reader" tag to provide more information on the gender of the reader, queer/trans or not. As such, more expressive, reader-directed tags tend to remain free-form, untethered to a canonical or synonymous tag in order to provide more specific and desired information. These conventions vary across fandoms, but this basic understanding is sufficient for our purposes.
[6.4] Fans genderfuck these expressive tags when they make them invitational. Within the Good Omens fandom, for instance, fans tag their works with tags such as "reader can be any gender" or "reader-insert can be any race or gender so you can fully immerse yourself." Similarly, in The Witcher fandom, fans tag their works with "trying to keep it vague so anyone can insert themselves," "i try my best not to put pronouns so anyone can read them," and "It's [the fan fiction] Marked as Het[erosexual] But The Only Pronoun used For Reader Is 'You.' These tags are often for immersion or, as alluded to in the previous section, for readers to project themselves into the self in the narrative. This is an example of what Sapuridis and Alberto (2022) refer to as the palimpsestuous self in self-insert where fans open up the possibilities for knowing the self. These tags also often express an active attempt at care in inviting their fellow fans into an experience of the self—"trying to keep it vague," "i try my best." There is an attempt in the tags to demonstrate the affective responsibility a fan feels to another so they can fully immerse themselves, fucking the functional performance of the tags' classification and creating an imaginative relationship to embodied performance as De Kosnik (2016) suggests.
[6.5] Whether this imaginative relationship is fully achievable in the fan fiction is another matter that differs from the author's intent, however. As Sapuridis and Alberto (2022) note, the default descriptions of many self-insert characters have characteristics that alienate certain fans (e.g., describing pin straight blonde hair makes it clear that the reader is likely coded as white, even if the writer did not intend for them to be, what the authors define as slippages). In their work, the majority of the stories analyzed revolved around cisgender, neurotypical, able-bodied female characters, and the most recurring slippage across all of the self-insert works they analyzed implied whiteness. I highlight this here not to suggest that the fans I quote are doing this (though it is certainly possible) but to note that the affective responsibility expressed in a tag may not align with the fan fiction's content itself. Additionally, fans use the tags on AO3 to circumvent the uncertainty in a general "Reader" ag in a way that goes against the ambiguity a genderfucked tag would prioritize; across a number of fandoms, for instance, fans modify the "Reader" tag in a number of ways, including tagging their work with "Black Reader-Insert," "Asian Reader-Insert," "Filipino Self-Insert," or "Mexican Reader-Insert," to name a few tags under the "Reader-Insert" metatag. Nonetheless, the fact that fans use the tag in this imaginative way—as an affective, invitational expression—is a point worthy of consideration, even if the narrative does not match their aims. The genderfucked technology in this case is the tag. The genderfucked tag demonstrates an invitation; whether such invitations are represented in the text is another matter. Future inquiry into the invitational ambiguity and imagination present in genderfucked tags should explore the potential relationship between the ambiguity of gender/body in tandem with the explicit stating of race/ethnicity in other cases.
[6.6] Some fans shift the choose-your-own-adventure book gaze past the realm of the imaginative and into a tangible disruption of AO3's relationship to code, body, and space. For instance, one fan in the Good Omens fandom tags their work with the following: "she/her/hers used for reader, if you prefer other pronouns i highly recommend the interactive fics extension." InteractiveFics is a free browser extension that self-insert fans can use to replace the y/n indicator with a different value (generally a name, but the value could be anything) (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/interactivefics/); this particular fan also used it to create a more pleasurable reading experience when reading reader-insert fan fiction by replacing pronouns to their liking and comfort. This particular tag (1) fucks with the body's relationship to the tag in suggesting changes to the body (of the text) through (2) a queering/transing on the level of the code that (3) explicitly invites other fans to not only imagine a different embodiment of self but to use another technology (of the self) to interrupt the performance of AO3.
[6.7] These are examples of genderfucking and transgressing code/space, understood as "when software and the spatiality of everyday life become mutually constituted…[and] a dyadic relationship exists between code and spatiality" (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 16). Daniel G. Cockayne and Lizzie Richardson (2019) argue that in queering code/space, we should emphasize transgressive movement that "involves disorientating and chaotic space-times that demonstrate how queerness is not always everywhere progressive…Queer acts of being in-between constitute the dislocations of space that might yet assume more orderly coordinates" (1649). Their invocation of queering code/space as not always everywhere progressive is reminiscent of what some scholars have said of fan fiction's gay and nonnormative yet not queer status (Stanfill 2024). However, this invitation to imagining a palimpsestuous self in self-insert tags is a transgressive movement that is queer-as-in-progressive and –transgressive because the tag refuses to transfix a particular incarnation of the body in space—or, when it does, it offers a way to fuck with the space at the level of code/coding, as with InteractiveFics and assigned she/her pronouns.
[6.8] Drawing out the double meaning inherent in "The Only Pronoun for Reader Is 'You,'" the possibilities for knowing the self are chaotic and unfixed, intentionally invitational and imaginative, fluidly moving about in space and untethered to a particular mapping of gender or the body. Classification on AO3 seeks to fix a point in space for searchability, however fluid, folksonomic, or feminist the journey to that space is; in refusing to map out the space the body occupies, in leaving it intentionally nomadic, genderfucked tags in self-insert consider the binary but move past it, inviting fans to embody the body however they want, placing the pleasure of identification or embodiment fully in the hands of the reader, even—and especially—if the fan author has a different conceptualization.
[6.9] As Reich (1992) suggests of genderfuck, genderfucked technologies do not mark the end of gender but rather a severe destabilization and disordering of it. These fans tag in ways to refuse a singular gender for a palimpsestuous you but do not refuse the experiences of gender or embodiment at the level of the individual, instead encouraging imaginative embodiments via their tags. Gender is certainly a technology that codes sociospatiality, as Cockayne and Richardson (2019) write of sexuality, but these fans genderfuck both the tag and gender in their refusal to code it into their tags. In genderfucking one technology, tags, fans genderfuck another—gender itself.
7. Genderfucked technologies as directional disruption
[7.1] To suggest that all fans genderfuck tags would be a bold claim; as the numbers in the methods section suggest, I would suggest the majority of fans are not genderfucking the tags. However, I still believe that this is a useful framework because the practice is an incremental effect of a spatiotemporal disruption. As Row (2022) suggests, there is a velocity to this disruption; if velocity is speed with direction, I am interested in where this new direction could take us. Fans' genderfucking of the tag creates the body—of a character or their self—as a site of transformation; this is why slashing queer/trans spatiotemporality and fan temporality is such a potent experience, and it is why I am interested in the direction these fans are headed, even if they are nowhere close to being the majority.
[7.2] It is not just that fans are tagging in fan spatiotemporalities, returning over and over, refusing linearity, and creating fan and archival spaces that resist dominant media industries' cycles. Nor is it just that fans are tagging in queer/trans spatiotemporalities, treating the body as a quasi-drag performance and resisting particular sociotemporal binds or sociospatial codings. They are tagging and acting at the intersection of these spatiotemporalities, inviting each other into more imaginative and permeable understandings of the body through a slashing of queer, trans, and fan understandings. The tagger refuses a fixed incarnation of the body, instead inviting their fellow fans into the time and space to imagine it and slash at the canonical, chrononormative versions of it fixed in space or canon.
[7.3] The fucked use of the classification function of tags and their invitational-imaginative sociality disrupts the performance of the tags for queer/trans/fannish ends such that by the time a fan interacts with the genderfucked tag, they can understand it as an invitation to imagination, a call to action, and feel that their adventure is actually in their hands and heads, not in those of their fellow fans. It is this choose-your-own-adventure book approach to fandom and gender, simultaneously, that slashes at the ties that weld the linear body together to create a new romantic vision of the body.
[7.4] Genderfucking a technology is a transformative, romantic, and velocious violence, one that pulls on historical trends of transformation in fannish communities. Though transformation of a work or technology is not itself a new phenomenon (Fiesler, quoted in Schwedel 2018), this transformation is compelling for its rejection of a predetermined or transfixed use of the tag in favor of an invitation to imagination and uncertainty. Even outside of fannish spaces, however, the practice seems particularly well suited to the current political moment; genderfucking technology in the name of invitation, imagination, and nonlinearity is potent in resisting canonical—state, corporate—incarnations of the body. Even if these disruptions are only an incremental jostling, genderfucking a technology to resist hegemonic code and design and to instead imaginatively disorder the body's relationship to the spatiotemporality of technologies is transformative. Genderfuckery is a tool of imagination to take us beyond encoded spatiotemporalities, inviting us to choose our own adventures in unfamiliar and undefined directions.
8. Acknowledgments
[8.1] Many thanks to Rye Gentleman, whose enthusiasm, support, and feedback were crucial to earlier drafts of this article, as well as to participants of Fan Studies Network North America 2024, whose questions and feedback helped flesh out the spatial dimensions of genderfucked technology.