Revision: synthesis of related research

(The original version of this post can be found here.)

Academic studies of fanfiction seem to have come a bit behind studies of fandom in general. Henry Jenkins, one of the biggest names in fandom studies, has spent a good deal of his career trying to legitimize the study of fan practices as a fan himself, and has seen the field come a long way; originally, even academics writing sympathetic audience ethnographies did so from a strictly outsider viewpoint, trying to remain separate from the fans themselves and often introducing significant misconceptions and errors to their work because of this perspective. As the existence of the fan-as-academic and academic-as-fan have become accepted, however, fandom studies itself has become more accepted as a worthwhile field of study, opening up opportunities for close study of fandoms and fan practices by the fans themselves.

Fanfiction has generally been included in these studies of fan practices, but it seems that actual study of fanfiction by itself has largely happened in recent years--and even then, studies of fanfiction may be playing catch-up with studies of general fan practices in that little has been written from an insider's perspective. Studies of fanfiction seem to take either a cultural/sociological or an educational approach, often blending the two. Rebecca Black's work is fairly representative in this case--"Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction," from Lankshear and Knobel's A New Literacies Sampler, is one of at least two articles she has written about the role of fanfiction in English language learners' developing English-language skills, and other studies that focus on the young age of many fanwriters emphasize the skills that these writers can gain through writing about something they enjoy in a relaxed environment. Henry Jenkins, too, has devoted an entire book-length report (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century) to the use of new literacies and the media in education, making reference to fanfiction only in this context.

Other studies of fanfiction tend to look at what this fan practice says about the communities and individuals who participate in it and how these fans use fanfic to explore their own identities; Angela Thomas' "Blurring the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction" is one such example, focusing on the young authors in question and the ways in which they collaborate to write their stories. Other articles examine fanfiction from the perspective of gender studies, thanks to the popularity of slash (male/male) and femmeslash (female/female) fiction in fandom.

However, such studies often fail to examine the actual content of the stories and their actual place in the fan community, largely because of this outsider perspective--it's difficult to ascertain a text's place in a community with which one isn't intimately familiar. Chander and Sunder's "Everyone's a Superhero," for instance, recasts the Mary Sue character type as an empowering voice of social dissension. Given that a Mary Sue is a cliched, one-dimensional, and generally perfect character inserted by the author (or, at times, a canon character twisted out of character using these characteristics), often as wish-fulfillment, it should be easy to see why the fan community in general derides these sorts of characters, and while Chander and Sunder acknowledge this view, they use the Mary Sue as essentially a feminist model rather than examining why the community holds this view--and in doing so they introduce a number of inaccuracies of their own that reveal what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the fan community, if this extremely unusual view of Mary Sues didn't already work to alienate that community. While significantly older, Felder and Scodari's "Creating a Pocket Universe" creates a similar effect, examining X-Files fans and casting "Shippers" (fans devoted to a particular relationship in a fandom) in that community as a marginal subgroup somewhat antagonistic and resistant to the creators of the show...a rather odd stance to take, given that shippers exist in every fandom, most fans are shippers to one degree or another, and the ship in question (Scully/Mulder) was not only about as mainstream as you can get, it was also likely shared by a significant portion of the show's fanbase, even if only the "Shipper" segment was vocal about it.

Jenkins, even if he doesn't devote as much space as I might like to fanfiction, sums up these difficulties very well. He began writing about fandom just as academics were discovering it, so he experienced fandom studies as both a fan and an academic, which created a rather uncomfortable position for him: "Historically, academics had abused that power [imbalance between fans and those who studied them], constructing exotic and self-serving representations of fans. Even many of the most sympathetic audience ethnographers signaled their distance from the communities they described. I did not have the option of distancing myself from the fan community. What I knew about fandom I knew from the inside out." From the opposite perspective, too, "fans have often been hypercritical of academics because of their sloppiness with the details that are so central to fan interpretation."

Fandom studies have come far, particularly as the field has become more open to insider interpretations; what it lacks is much in the way of similar treatment toward fanfiction. The few articles that take a critical insider approach tend to be from popular magazines and newspapers rather than academic journals, such as Young's "The Fan Fiction Phenomena," written by a self-professed Xena fanwriter. She describes the frustration of "the high crap-to-quality ratio" and the genuine danger that "inexperienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story," noting that reviewers on fanfiction.net will often compliment a writer simply for having good grammar and spelling since those qualities are so uncommon there--but her article is a brief overview, not an in-depth study.


References:
Black, Rebecca. "Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction." A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 115-136.

Chander, Anupam and Madhavi Sunder. "Everyone's a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of "Mary Sue" Fan Fiction as Fair Use." California Law Review 95.2 (2007): 597-626.

Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

---. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009.

Scodari, Christine and Jenna Felder. "Creating a pocket universe: "Shippers," fan fiction, and The X-Files online." Communication Studies 51.3 (2000): 238-258.

Thomas, Angela. "Blurring and Breaking Through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction." A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 137-165.

Young, Cathy. "The Fan Fiction Phenomena." Reason 38.9 (2007): 14-15.