Loving Fanfiction by Brit Kelley

Author:Brit Kelley [Kelley, Brit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Psychology, Emotions
ISBN: 9781000393965
Google: FbUmEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-05-30T01:03:00+00:00

Conclusion: whiteness as fandom/fandom as whiteness?

As many scholars have urged (Wanzo, 2015; Morimoto, 2018; Pande, 2018a, b; Seymour, 2018; Stanfill, 2018b; Warner, 2018; Woo, 2018), fan studies needs to explore fans of colour, as much as it needs to celebrate scholars of colour. This requires two approaches at once. First, as Woo (2018) argued, fan studies needs to expand into more varied fan practices that are more likely to include fans of colour. Second, as Morimoto argued at the 2019 Fan Studies Network conference in Portsmouth, U.K., we need to name whiteness in fandom—we need to be clear about what, exactly, is ‘white’ about fandom. In addition, as Woo (2018) also urged, we need to continue demographic studies to get a much better sense of the true representations of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, nationality, language, etc., in fandoms in order to better understand what fandom is.

In this chapter, I have attempted to answer the call in two ways: first, to consider the demographics of fans I have worked with, at least in a small way, and second, to begin to name the ways in which fans create, maintain, and recreate whiteness in their practices, especially when it comes to how they judge ‘good’ fanwriting. While I found that, in the case of my larger survey and my case studies that the majority of fans did, in fact, identify as white, Western—as in based in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., or Europe, and English-speaking (especially when it came to their fanreading and writing), it was also the case for not a few fanwriters that while their primary language was something other than English, they almost exclusively used English in their fan practices. There were very few fans who wrote in other languages, and often this was limited to a specific website, or if they were fans of a Far Eastern fandom such as anime. It’s worth noting that, in the latter case, Japanese media has developed cachet in Western fandom, and, thus, cannot be read in the same way that, say, writing fanfiction in Chinese or Spanish might be (see Larsen, 2018; Steinberg & dit Alban, 2018).

Beyond the demographics, I also found that, for many fans, ‘good’ writing was often described as being faithful to canon—a stance that is not only masculinised, but, I would now argue, white and middle class as well; as avoiding the use of the Mary Sue—an infantilising stance as much as it is misogynistic, white, and middle class; and, at its core, makes use of Standard Edited English (whether British or American), which is, according to multiple scholars in literacy and writing studies, both racist and classist (Rose, 1985; Smitherman, 1986; Lu, 1991; Royster, 1996; Smitherman et al., 2003; Alim et al., 2012; CCCC’s ‘This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!’ 2020). White fandom, then, seems to be defined by a highly controlled, masculinised, white, and middle-class conception of appropriate emotion and (emotive) language (Ahmed, 2015). Within white fandom, the

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