What Kinds of Women

Fan works are often particularly interested in the representation of minority and marginalized groups. Given the number of women involved in the creation of fan works (not to mention potential deficits of women involved in the canon source productions, such as T.V. shows), it is unsurprising that representations of women are frequently examined. Fan works often criticize representations of female characters that are underdeveloped, stereotyped, and non-essential to the narrative (making them disposable in a way male characters are often not). The tone, style, and approach of these fan works are widely varied, but they share common goals.

“The Bechdel Test”, by Frea_O, for example, is a semi-absurd fanfiction which breaks the fourth wall and points to the failure of the recent Avengers movie to pass the Bechdel test by having Tony Stark confront two of the female characters, Maria Hill and Natasha Romanov, with the fact that they have not had a conversation about something other than a man.This can be read not only as a critique of the canon source’s failure to pass the fairly simple Bechdel test, but also, given the dismissive way Hill and Romanov treat the test, as an indication that the test is a somewhat reductive or arbitrary measure of representations of women.

“Hermione Granger: Minister of Magic” by Icarus, from the Harry Potter fandom, has a similar light-hearted tone and plot, but the issue it raises—that of the lack of female leaders in the canon source—is treated more seriously. The story takes place post-series, and describes Hermione’s election to the post of Minister. Hermione says of her election “All I can think is what the hell took them so long to elect a female Minister of Magic! There have been great sorceresses in the past. Qualified witches. Half the founders of Hogwarts were women! What’s wrong with them?”, and the summary for the story reads “It only took thousands of years, Voldemort, a Wizarding war, and a major election scandal for a woman to finally come in third”. There are, in fact, several female Ministers of Magic in the canon source. However, the story can nevertheless be read as a reaction to the canon source, in which few female characters are presented as leaders (as opposed to male characters like Harry, Dumbledore, Voldemort and others).

In other cases, fan works dealing with the representation of women may be much darker. The extremely and intentionally disturbing fan vid “Women’s Work” by sockkpuppett and sisabet examines the treatment of women within the show Supernatural, drawing attention to the fact that female characters are frequently sexualized, victimized, portrayed as evil, and/or killed off.

While the show as a whole is violent, there is discrepancy between the treatment of male and female characters (for example, several of the recurring male characters are repeatedly saved or resurrected by God and angels). “Women’s Work” intentionally draws attention to the way the canon source represents women as stereotypes, often as love interests or motherly figures, and as disposable.

While the examples above explore general representations of women in the canon source, fan works may also challenge particular representations. When the BBC Sherlock episode “A Scandal in Belgravia” aired, there was immediate criticism of the representation of Irene Adler, who is ultimately outsmarted by, and then saved by, Sherlock Holmes. This criticism drew much of its strength from the fact that in her original incarnation in “A Scandal in Bohemia”, Irene Adler outsmarts and escapes Holmes. “A Case of Identity” by marysutherland is a fic which “rewrites” the ending of “A Scandal in Belgravia”. In this narrative, not only does Irene not need to be saved—she exclaims “Oh God…You’re doing your bloody rescuing damsels in distress act again, aren’t you?” when Sherlock interrupts her in the process of faking her own death—but it also denies that Sherlock ever outsmarted her in the first place. The story is largely a platform for Irene Adler to explain her side of events, while Holmes, seeing things from a view more in line with the canon source, is one step behind her.

All of the fan works above could potentially be classified as “feminist fan fiction” which “capably explores feminist concerns by drawing attention to the presentation of patriarchy in the source text and by re-presenting the canon based on a more explicitly woman-oriented worldview” (Leow 1.4). Certainly they all challenge representations of women, and, in addition, recenter the narrative on women and women’s voices.

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Wait, What Are We Talking About Here?

The “texts” that this paper explores are fan works, and can be defined as  “any work by a fan, or indeed by anyone other than the content owner(s), set in such a fictional world or using such pre-existing fictional characters” (Schwabach 8). These fan works can take multiple forms, including videos, music, art, and text, just as the canon sources that fan works draw from may be books, comics, movies, T.V. shows, video games, and other media. In fact, while fan works do not disregard medium entirely, they show an appropriately post-postmodern tendency towards the interdisciplinary, frequently shifting between mediums as a canon source is reinterpreted. This definition of fan works does exclude non-fictional fan discussion of the canon text (occasionally referred to as “meta” when it takes an essay-like form), but is still extremely broad, and may even trace its history to the practices of authors like Shakespeare, who “borrowed” heavily from their source texts.

However, the particular tradition of fan work that this paper examines “tend[s] to consciously identify with media fandom’s roots as developed in the 1970s and 1980s…An offshoot of organized science-fiction fandom, media fandom formed around (mostly female) creative engagements with Star Trek in the late 1960s” (Lothian, Busse, and Reid 105). These “media fandoms” have flourished on the Web, particularly with the tools provided by social media; while fan communities and fan works have considerable presences on platforms such as Tumblr and Livejournal, other sites are specifically devoted to fan works, such as fanfiction.net, or archiveofourown.org. Other sites or groups may be dedicated to the fan works of a particular fandom. The Web has made the production and distribution of fan work incredibly easy, and created a space where interaction, communication, and feedback on a broad scale happens almost effortlessly.

In both academic and popular discourse, fanfiction and fan works have two well-known features. The first is as “a space dominated by middle-class, educated, liberal, English-speaking, white North American women” (Lothian, Busse, and Reid 104). This is often closely tied to the prevalence of slash fanfiction. These examinations of fan works generally posit them as a permissive and exploratory space, although this idea may be expressed positively or negatively. Spaces in which fan works are produced are generally permissive, and advocate discussion and the use of warnings over censorship.

The second much-discussed feature of fan work is, of course, the question of copyright. The legal status of fan works “remains unclear”, partially sheltered by the non-commercial and often transformational nature of fan work (Schwabach 1). Legal prosecution of fan work is relatively rare, while various content owners of canon source material have widely different views on if, and what kinds of, fan work is acceptable. Ideas of what constitutes “plagiarism” or “stealing” occur both within and without fandom. On the other hand, ethical questions of what it is acceptable for a fan author to “do to” another’s characters are more removed from legal considerations and often echo questions of interpretation and critical theory, specifically those raised by reader response theory.

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Some Preliminary Remarks

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.

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