Female-centered fan fiction as homoaffection in fan communities

Authors

  • Ria Narai University of Wollongong, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.01014

Keywords:

Community, Female fandom, Femslash, Gift economy

Abstract

In the scholarship of fan studies, a lot has been said about why female fan communities enjoy writing about male characters and relationships in fan fiction. In contrast, there has been a dearth of research into female fan communities that are centered around female characters and their relationships with each other. Here I examine the heretofore unnamed female-centered fan fiction genre of homoaffection fic through a close reading of examples chosen from the Star Trek fandom. I show how this fan fictional genre reworks the masculine narratives of the television series and movies in order to define female experience and demonstrate the way in which this in turn creates female communities in both the world of the fic and our own world.

Author Biography

Ria Narai, University of Wollongong, Australia

Undergraduate at UOW, in my final year of a BA, majoring in English Literature and Creative Writing.
Lexa as a haloed saint, with social media icons surrounding her

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Published

2017-06-15

Issue

Vol. 24 (2017)

Section

Praxis

License

TWC Nos. 25 onward are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC by 4.0). For an explanation of the journal's reasoning, see the TWC editorial Copyright and Open Access. TWC Nos. 1 through 24 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, with TWC, not the author, retaining copyright.

Presses whose policies require written permission for reproduction should contact the TWC Editor; such permission is routinely given for no fee.