When Reception Becomes Production: the Fabrication of Gender in Fan Fiction

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 11. Fandom & Media Consumption

Abstract

Works in the sociology of culture have largely treated cultural production and reception as analytically distinct processes. This paper examines a previously unstudied form of cultural object - fan fiction – a form of writing through which audiences appropriate existing characters and narratives to create new stories, collapsing reception and production into a single act. While previous works have studied similar types of bottom-up, folk communities of cultural production, this paper focuses specifically on how meanings are reconstructed in this process. This project explores such alternative meaning-making through the lens of gender in the Harry Potter fan fiction, where a heteronormative cultural object is reimagined by a largely non-heterosexual audience. Comparing the seven-book original series with over 217,000 English-language fan fiction works using computational text analysis, I find a markedly different gender landscape in fan fiction: despite drawing on the same set of characters, characterization becomes more egalitarian, female characters gain greater agency, and the linguistic boundaries between masculinity and femininity blur considerably. Through exploring the meanings produced at the intersection of cultural production and reception, this paper shows how participatory audiences do not merely consume cultural objects but actively reconstruct their meanings - producing, in this case, a substantially less gendered cultural world than the one offered by the original text.

Author

• Candice Jiahui Yao, New York University