Pregnant Teen Wolf: The border wars of mpreg fics

Abstract

Despite its reputation as a controversial fan fiction trope, mpreg (short for male pregnancy) provides new opportunities for narratives centered around reproduction and family-making, especially queer family-making. This phenomenon is perhaps best seen in the fan fiction for the MTV series Teen Wolf, which aired from 2011 to 2017. Within these works, mpreg expands whom male pregnancy is able to represent. As these new opportunities for representation increase, however, diverse audiences have responded by stressing their own stakes in the representational claims afforded through the trope. Mapping these tensions onto a framework of cultural border wars, a concept coined by Jack Halberstam nearly twenty-five years ago, not only sheds new light on the continued conflicts that arise from divergent feminist, queer, and trans readings as they shift onto new media platforms but also offers a means of working with (and not against) these tensions.