Tags on Archive of Our Own as genderfucked technology

Abstract

Tagging is a central part of Archive of Our Own's culture and infrastructure; while fans' use of the tags for dialogic and affective purposes has been studied, there has not been inquiry into how fans use tags to invite their peers to hold more imaginative, queerer relationships to the bodies implicated in their fan fiction. When fans engage the tags in this imaginative, queer manner, they embody and enact genderfuck, inviting themselves and their fellow fans into a world of potentiality and imagination rather than one bound to canon, binary, or expectation. Drawing on the intersection of queer/trans theory and fan studies, a theoretical slashing of queer/trans spatiotemporalities with fan spatiotemporalities reveals how fans' tagging practices invite each other to imagine gender and fannishness in ways that the creator of the tag might not even (be able to) conceive, pushing fans into queerer, fucked participatory practices. This leads to the tags becoming a genderfucked technology, a technology whose user fucks with the technology's (intended) performance via a disordering of spatiotemporality, imagination, and the body. Even when fans create classifying labels, they are free to construct and implement them however they choose; imagination and ambiguity become features of the classificatory technology, not relegated to the sidelines but included as classification on their own merits.