Normalizing the Deviance: The Creation, Politics, and Consumption of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identities in Online Fan Communities

Abstract: Communities of fan producers have been creating and consuming works labeled deviant by both laypeople and academics for decades. Fan producers take the popular media they enjoy and rewrite it to fit their needs and desires. Online, these fan producers have found a new space to re-write what it means to be normative. These fan producers often write about slash, which depicts homosexual relationships as normal, and genderswap, which plays with the idea of gender by physically switching characters ’ sex. Understanding how norms are created within fan productions can help us understand how norms are created more broadly. Through content analysis, a series of interviews (n = 26), and a survey (n = 224), of fan producers directly, this study gains a better understand of these producers ’ motivations for producing fan works