Death and Rebirth in Queer Fandoms

Panel Rationale This panel takes up the conference theme “Reinvention” through a focus on changes occurring to fandoms, fan communities, and fan practices with regard to feminism and sexuality. Cultural and generational changes contribute to: ongoing shifts in the reception of feminist and queer media texts; the technology fans use to create, share, and find work; and attitudes toward other existing media canons. An individual fan’s lifestyle and lifecycle within fandoms is marked by a series of deaths and rebirths. Our papers interrogate reinvention in fandom and fan practices through a variety of methodological approaches. First, Bridget Kies looks at how, as new and more diverse canons become favored, “cancel culture” has contributed to the cultural death of LGBTQ media texts once considered groundbreaking. Kies finds tension in this ahistorical approach to queerness and the simultaneous reiteration of the power of fandoms. Next, Katherine Morrissey examines the digital platforms fans use to distribute fan works and their affordances. Morrissey interrogates the relationship between these platforms and ways different generations of fans organize fan works and conceptualize their desires. Finally, drawing on an autoethnographic account of her Baby-Sitters Club fandom, Megan Connor traces how long-term fandom deeply bound up in identity-making shifts alongside changes in identity. Specifically, Connor identifies strategies of retroactively queering a fan-text following her own coming out, especially alongside new entries to the canon and the growth of fan-created paratexts. Canceling Queerness: Historical Media and the Problem with ProgressBridget Kies When The L Word (2004-2009) premiered, it was hailed as groundbreaking but has since been met with criticism that it made too many “mistakes” with representation. Its announced revival in 2020 as The L Word: Generation Q was subsequently received with skepticism. The original series’ focus on affluent lesbians didn’t seem authentic to a wider spectrum of gender and sexual identities today. To allay concerns, the revival has included more BIPOC characters and trans actors. When The Boys in the Band (1970) was revived for Broadway and then turned into a feature film for Netflix in 2020, producers opted to keep some of the original script’s offensive language, justifying their choice as historically accurate. The different approaches to historical concerns taken by The L Word and The Boys in the Band demonstrate some of the key tensions with queer representation. This paper uses a broad understanding of “cancel culture” as a backlash toward and blackballing of that which is deemed offensive. Drawing on popular criticism, fan commentary, and social media posts, this paper shows how “cancelling” historical queer media creates a double-bind. Cancelling contributes to a larger cultural phenomenon in which queer history has been systematically erased. At the same time, fans who cancel historical media texts often turn their passions to contemporary media that moves beyond a gay/straight binary and is produced through the lived experience of its creative team. Thus, as queer media history is erased, greater possibilities for new forms of media queerness are opened up. From Sla/sh to #Ship: An Archive of Our Own and the Restructuring of Fan Networks Katherine E. Morrissey The not-for-profit website Archive of Our Own (AO3) has become a nexus for fans to write and read fanfiction. Launched in 2008, AO3 emerged when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were establishing themselves as major Web 2.0 platforms. AO3’s widespread adoption signals a shift in the visibility and organizational capacity of fan networks. These industrial and technological changes intersect with another change for fan practices: a move away from terms like “slash” and towards #ships. In the late 20th century, media fandoms used the term slash as an identity and a genre label for male/male content. Fans “slashed” beloved characters and self-identified as “slashers.” The term unified a subset of fans interested in sexy, romantic, male/male content across media fandoms. Today, same-gender pairings remain popular, but the word slash is falling out of use. Instead, many fans rely on pairings and “ships” to mark their fandoms and tag internet content. AO3’s interface and affordances helped enable this transition. However, AO3 and its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works, exist because slashers organized and advocated for themselves. Utilizing fan archives, posts, and websites from the past and present, I argue the move from slash to ships signals a fundamental change in how fan content is organized and how fans conceptualize sexuality, gender, and desire. However, it also marks the loss of an identity that once forged connections across fan networks and raises questions about the fragmentation of fans into ever smaller fandom silos. Kristy Sun, Mallory Rising: Fannish Identification and Rereading Queer Potential in The Baby-Sitters Club Megan Connor As a young girl, my obsession with The Baby-Sitters Club (BSC), a middle-grade book series about a group of girls and their adventures in baby-sitting reached such levels that I would casually talk about the characters as if they were my real life friends. My parents’ varying levels of concern about this behavior as I grew up has become a well-trod family anecdote. However, in recent years, my passion for the series has returned. I once again display my collection of 100+ thin pastel tomes and (attempt to) casually reference the series in conversation. This paper uses the mode of autoethnography to explore the differences between these two high-water marks in my BSC fandom―then and now―performing what Harrington and Bielby call a “life-course analysis.” I situate myself as part of a larger Millennial cohort of women (the target demographic of the series), while also identifying my specific positionality and preoccupations as a white, cisgender bisexual woman and feminist media studies scholar. I first provide context for my childhood fandom, identifying the ways the series was bound up in my identity-making process. I then focus on my selective rereading of the series after coming out as a queer woman―a significant identity shift. I identify fannish strategies of hunting for queer significance and suggest that such an identity change, like coming out, necessitates a shift in fan identity and behavior as well