Fanfiction and other fan works are flourishing in the contemporary context, and this has been accompanied by an increase in variety of form and content as well as quantity. Fanfiction represents an incredible output of text (and other media in the case of other fan works) that is widely discussed, interpreted, and criticized in discussions within the fan community. In contrast, scholarship on fan works as “texts” in their own right, rather than as a form or a community, is more or less in its infancy (one exception being Transformative Works and Cultures). This discrepancy most likely springs from fan works’ liminal legal and commercial status, from the almost exclusively digital status of fan work, and from the fact that the forms fan works take, and the communities around them, are fascinating in their own right (and must often be understood before fan works can be explored as a “text”).
This paper, much like fan works themselves, makes no generalized claims about the quality of fan works, just as it makes no generalized claims about the quality of novels, plays, poems, or, for that matter, academic scholarship; however, it is concerned with the content of fan works. Although fan works contain as much ethically questionable content as any form of communication made freely available to the public, fan works frequently display a concern with ethics which is very much in line with the ethics espoused by various theorists of the post-postmodern. These ethics are concerned with human rights, and, by extension, with media representations of issues related to human rights. Fan works engage with these representations in their canon source “text” not merely by critiquing them, but often also by actively “rewriting” them. These fan works are not limited by form, medium, style, or tone. Instead, what these fan works have in common is an ethical challenge to the canon source text, and, by extension, to a media which perpetuates certain representations and denies others.
Talking Back 