scholarly journals "The epic love story of Sam and Dean": Supernatural, queer readings, and the romance of incestuous fan fiction

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Tosenberger
Keyword(s):  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Slash Fan Fiction

This article examines incestuous slash fan fiction produced for the CW television series Supernatural. I argue that "Wincest" fan fiction is best understood not as perverse, oppositional resistance to a heterosexual, nonincestuous show, but an expression of readings that are suggested and supported by the text itself. I examine the literary, cultural, and folkloric discourses of incest and queerness invoked by the series, paying special attention to Romanticism, the Gothic, and horror as underliers to those discourses, and how those genres inform both the series and the fan fiction. I discuss a number of Wincest stories in detail, focusing upon how these stories build upon thematic elements within the series. In conclusion, I argue that the most resistive aspect of Wincest fan fiction is that it gives the main characters a lasting happiness that the series eternally defers.

Confronting Enterprise Slash Fan Fiction

Extrapolation ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kylie Lee
Keyword(s):  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Slash Fan Fiction

scholarly journals When the Author Owns the World

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-978
Author(s):  
Steven D. Jamar ◽  
Christen B’anca Glenn
Keyword(s):  
Pop Culture ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Television Series ◽  
The World ◽  
Original Works

Fan fiction is amateur writing that imaginatively reinvents a work in pop culture while maintaining the identifiable aspects of the preexisting work. Fans of various books, films, and television series write their own versions of the stories and post them online in fan fiction communities. Fan fiction as practiced today is a way for fans to creatively express themselves and become integrated into the story and world they love. The stories range from highly derivative works, where relatively few plot points are changed, to entirely new plot lines using the same world and characters of the original, underlying work. Some provide backstories about existing characters, and some are more in the nature of sequels. Some are quite original works more in the nature of “inspired by” than “derived from.”

Consciousness-Raising in a Child Abuse Flame War over Fan Fiction

2012 ◽  
Vol 144 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-26
Author(s):  
Rebecca Walker
Keyword(s):  
Child Abuse ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Personal Stories ◽  
L Word

A flame war over depictions of child abuse in a fan fiction competition based on The L Word television series (Showtime, 2004–09) provided an opportunity for feminists and others to deliberate over the issue of child abuse. Various tactics were used, including storytelling and the narration of intimate and personal stories of abuse, as well as more confrontational and personally derisive tactics. The flame war revealed taken-for-granted assumptions in a forum based on a lesbian-centred series.

scholarly journals "Let's get those Winchesters pregnant": Male pregnancy in Supernatural fan fiction

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Berit Åström
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Male Pregnancy ◽  
Gender And Genre

This article investigates mpreg slash fiction—same-sex relationships featuring male pregnancy—based on the television series Supernatural, looking at issues of gender and genre. It has been argued that slash writing is a highly subversive and resisting activity, appropriating someone else's characters and rewriting the romance script to suit different tastes than those prescribed by patriarchy. Yet fan fic texts are very diverse and it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw any general conclusions from them. The theme of male pregnancy has the potential to produce narratives that challenge our notions of gender, identity, sexual and social practices, as well as parenthood. Although the fan fiction I have analyzed all deals with these notions in various ways, the focus lies elsewhere. The authors of the texts focus more on exploring Sam and Dean as fathers and homemakers, on writing about family life, with all its traditional trappings. When the authors bring pregnancy into the equation, they draw on narrative and social conventions that follow this experience, resulting in conventional stories set in a very unconventional universe.

scholarly journals From Slash Fan Fiction to Crip Fan Fiction: What Role Does Disability Have in Fandom?

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-95
Author(s):  
Derek Newman-Stille
Keyword(s):  
Social Power ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Heterosexual Couples ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Love Relationships ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Do So ◽  
Slash Fan Fiction

Slash fiction is perceived by scholars like Henry Jenkins as capable of presenting a counterhegemonic message that critically questions and disrupts power structures in the production of fiction. Slash fiction presents a critical queering of characters, disrupting the heterocentrism of canonical fiction. Slash fiction is a creation of fan fiction where canonically heterosexual couples are paired with one another in love relationships, allowing for an imagined queer potential.  Even though slash, with its queering of relationships would seem to be a doorway into empowerment for disability fiction - replacing one oppressed identity (queer) for another (disability), many of the conventions of slash, mixed with the overwhelming social power of stereotypes around disability serve to further replicate patterns of oppression upon disabled characters. One of the conventions of slash fiction is the need to make canonically straight male characters more vulnerable, more willing to explore their vulnerability in relationships. This vulnerability allows for male protagonists to disrupt the rigid boundaries of patriarchal, heterosexist constructions of masculinity by making the characters more open to vulnerabilities, which tend to be constructed as threats to the construction of patriarchal masculinity. Because of disability’s cultural association with vulnerability in the cultural imagination, disablement is often utilized by slash fiction authors as a means of achieving vulnerability of the characters in a slash fiction relationship. These relationships are often referred to as “Hurt/Comfort” or “H/C” and often depend on the assumption that disablement represents a weakening of the disabled character, problematically representing disability as weakness.  Through an examination of the association between slash and disability on the popular fan fiction site Archive of Our Own, this paper illustrates that although slash fiction has the potential to represent a liberatory counterhegemonic text, it fails to do so where disability is concerned and relies on tropes and assumptions about disability in order to ‘queer’ hegemonic texts. 

scholarly journals "Kinda like the folklore of its day": Supernatural, fairy tales, and ostension

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Tosenberger
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Folk Narrative ◽  
Folk Narratives

This essay considers the use of folklore in the television series Supernatural: the show does not simply retell folk narratives, but performs them both diegetically and metatextually in a process known as ostension. In the process of performance, main characters Sam and Dean often research and analyze the stories themselves, and perform portions of the folk narrative in order to bring about a resolution. This essay focuses upon episode 3.05 "Bedtime Stories," which does not simply depict the folk narrative genre of fairy tales, but also directly engages with the discourse surrounding fairy tales in popular culture; in particular, the episode reproduces widespread understandings of fairy tales as a gendered genre. The essay concludes with a discussion of fan fiction that uses fairy tales, seeing it as a transformative response to Supernatural's own transformation of folk narratives.

scholarly journals The creation of football slash fan fiction

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abby Waysdorf
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
European Football ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Real Person ◽  
High Level ◽  
Slash Fan Fiction

Although sports fandom and fan fiction are often thought of as different worlds, in the contemporary media environment, this is not the case. Sport is a popular source text for fan fiction, and high-level European football, one of the world's most watched sports, has long had an online fan fiction presence. In a study of the LiveJournal community Footballslash over the 2011–12 European football season, I investigate what makes football a suitable source text for fan fiction, especially slash fan fiction; what fan fiction authors are doing with football; and what this suggests about how football and fan fiction are used in the present day. I present a new understanding of football as a media text to be transformed as well as provide an in-depth look into how this type of real person slash is developed and thought of by its practitioners. In doing so, I show what happens when fandoms and fan practices converge in the 21st century.

scholarly journals Whodology: Encountering Doctor Who fan fiction through the portals of play studies and ludology

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles William Hoge
Keyword(s):  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
Doctor Who ◽  
Television Series

The fan fiction that is inspired by the textual world of both the original and new series of Doctor Who seems to provide a paratextual world of its own that produces a fascinatingly multidirectional relationship with the narratives that inspire it. Specifically, an interrogation of the intersections of these two worlds yields compelling evidence that the textual world of the new incarnation of the television series is aware of the concerns that tend to be generated by the writers of fan fiction and has adapted its own world to accommodate, or at least acknowledge, many of those concerns. If the writing of Doctor Who fan fiction can be productively read as play and as a creative, ludic engagement, how might the heuristic of ludology be employed as a means to encounter these texts and the playful relationship they create with the textual world from which their content is inspired?

scholarly journals Homophobia, heteronormativity, and slash fan fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
April S. Callis
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Slash Fan Fiction

I analyze the relationship between homophobia/heteronormativity and slash fan fiction. Through reading and coding almost 6,000 pages of Kirk/Spock fan fiction written from 1978 to 2014, I illuminate shifts in how normative gender and sexuality are portrayed by K/S authors. Writers of K/S, while ostensibly writing about the 23rd century, consciously or unconsciously include cultural norms from the 20th and 21st centuries. Thus, slash becomes a lens through which readers can view a decrease in both homophobia and heteronormativity in US culture over the past several decades.

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