“We, the Fans”: Power in the Democratic Archive of Fanfiction

365 Pages·2016·2.34 MB·English

“We, the Fans”:
Power in the Democratic Archive of Fanfiction

Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde
der Fakultät für Sprach-, Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften der Universität Regensburg

vorgelegt von

Alexandra Herzog
aus Oberviechtach/Regensburg
2014

Regensburg, 2014
Herzog, Alexandra

Die Arbeit wurde im Jahr 2014 von der
Fakultät für Sprach-, Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften
der Universität Regensburg als Dissertation angenommen.
“We, the Fans”:
Power in the Democratic Archive of Fanfiction

Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde
der Fakultät für Sprach-, Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften der Universität Regensburg

vorgelegt von

Alexandra Herzog
aus Oberviechtach/Regensburg
2014

Regensburg, 2014
Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Udo J. Hebel
Gutachterin: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nassim W. Balestrini, M.A.
“What makes a story work? Is it the plot, the characters, the text? The subtext?
And who gives a story meaning? Is it the writer? Or you?
Tonight, I thought I would tell you a little story and let you decide.”

Metatron, the Scribe of God
Supernatural, 9x18 “Meta Fiction”
For my family
Contents
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ i
1. “We, the Fans”: The Democratic Potential of Fanfiction ................................................. 1
2. Agency in the Democratic Archive: Theories of Power in Fanfiction ............................ 14
2.1 Approaching the Notion of ‘Power’ in Fannish Texts ............................................... 14
2.2 Deriving the Story Tree by Dialogic Intertextual Poaching: Theories of Fanfiction
1992-2015 .................................................................................................................. 24
2.2.1 “like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write”: Fanfiction
between the Derivative and the Participatory ....................................................... 28
2.2.2 The Fanfiction Story-Tree: A Metaphor for the Authority of the Meta-Text ....... 39
2.2.3 The Power and Limits of Dialogic Intertextuality in Fanfiction ........................... 44
2.3 Repositioning Fanfiction: The Genre as a Democratic Archive ................................ 60
3. The Agency of the Fanauthor: A Strategic Transaction of Power in the Fan-Text ......... 72
3.1 Studying Fanfiction: The Opportunities and Challenges within Fan-Texts .............. 72
3.2 The Powerful Author: Strategies of Author Construction in Author’s Notes ........... 88
3.2.1 The “Death of the Author” in the Archive of Fannish Production...................... 102
3.2.2 “it’s my story and I said so”: An Apotheosis of Fannish Authorship ................. 112
3.2.3 “We, the fans”—The Power of the Collective Author: Writing in the Digital
Age ...................................................................................................................... 127
3.2.4 “I’m here to reveal the true story to you”: Fanfiction Writing as a Collaborative
Practice of Dead Geniuses................................................................................... 141
3.3 Fanspeak: Establishing Agency via “unclear acronyms and lots of punctuation” .. 145
3.3.1 The Power of the Masses: Fannish Jargon as a Strategy of Community-
Building ............................................................................................................... 164
3.3.2 The Fan Expert: Fanspeak as a Marker of Status ................................................ 184
3.3.3 “An Instrument of Power”: Fanspeak as Cultural and Linguistic Capital .......... 203
3.4 “Well, I had this plan to buy them…”: Fannish Agency in Story and Paratext....... 206
4. Supernatural—Fanfiction ‘transplanted to the screen’: Fannish Agency in a Democratic
Revolution of Making TV ............................................................................................. 228
4.1 “truly partnered with the fans”: Studying Supernatural and Its Fandom ................ 228
4.2 The “only show to integrate its own fanbase into its universe”: The Representation of
Fanfiction in the Meta-Text of Supernatural ........................................................... 247
4.3 The Creative Team and the Fans: An Ongoing Dialogue ........................................ 290
4.4 Indicative of a New Balance of Power? Supernatural’s Participatory Approach to
Making TV ............................................................................................................... 303
5. The Agency of the Fanauthor and the Power of Fanfiction: Restructuring the Media
Landscape via Democratic Intervention ........................................................................ 310

Works Cited ....................................................................................................................... 323
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, my profound gratitude belongs to Prof. Dr. Udo J. Hebel, who
has not only greatly supported me during my work on this dissertation with indispensable
advice and feedback, valuable guidance, and constant encouragement, but who was
absolutely essential in making me become interested in American Studies many years ago.
Often, I remember his lectures I attended in my first semesters here at the university of
Regensburg and in particular his Hauptseminar “U.S.-American Political and Cultural
Icons” of 2006/2007, which made me discover the joys of the discipline and which,
eventually, set me on the course of joining the department as a SHK and later as a research
assistant. If it had not been for him, I can well say I would never have tackled the task of
writing a dissertation. More than paving the way or giving me the chance to do it in the
first place, he was the one who guided me over rough patches and showed me that he
trusted I would eventually finish.
Another word of special gratitude belongs to my second advisor Univ.-Prof. Dr.
Nassim Balestrini, M.A., whose advice and support have been crucial to my research and
who has always taken the time to listen, to encourage, and to help. It means a lot to me to
have had her as an ‘office neighbor’ for all but the very last two months of this project and
I value our informal early morning meetings that made me keep up my spirits, provided
constructive insights, and left me with many ideas of how to continue writing.
Moreover, I would like to thank all members (past and present) of the American
Studies department at the University of Regensburg for everything they have contributed
to my dissertation project over the years—from words of encouragement to constructive
feedback, both in my many presentations in our “Recent Research” seminar or in the quasi
infamous hallway. Everyone has been nothing but supportive and I appreciate the time
they have taken out of their busy schedules to discuss my research, to advise me, and to
inspire me. A special word of gratitude goes here to Dr. Susanne Leikam, who has been so
incredibly kind as to help me out at all times, to encourage me to go on, and to take me for
a cup of coffee when I thought I was at my wits’ end. I also want to thank PD Dr. Ingrid
Gessner for her great help and our invaluable (former) office managers Elisabeth Biebl
and Petra Bruer-von-Tippelskirch, who have done everything to make work flow as
smooth as possible, have always provided support, and have been instrumental in creating
an utmost pleasant work environment.
i
Last but not least, I would like to extend my gratitude to all organizations,
departments, and venues who have granted me financial and institutional support, thus
helping me to work on my project, develop it, and to meet like-minded scholars.
Particularly, I am indebted to the Koordinationsstelle Chancengleichheit & Familie of the
University of Regensburg, which awarded me with a Promotionsabschlussstipendium in
the frame of the Programm zur Realisierung der Chancengleichheit für Frauen in
Forschung und Lehre. In addition, I would like to thank the Bavarian American Academy
for having been able to participate in their Fourth International Summer Academy
Democratic Cultures, Past and Present: Perspectives from Washington, D.C. in 2012,
which was a wonderful venue to discuss my dissertation with other young Americanists,
and the Programm zur Förderung des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses der Fakultät für
Sprach-, Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften for having enabled me to travel to (inter-)
national conferences, where I had opportunity to present my project and receive important
feedback from scholars I would never have met otherwise. In this frame, I would also like
to extend my sincerest thanks to the editorial staffs of the journals Transformative Works
and Cultures (TWC) and COPAS: Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies,
who provided much appreciated suggestions and support in publishing some of my early
research and have thus proven very beneficial to my larger project.
Most of all, however, I would like to thank my family and friends, who have been
at my side for all those years and without whom I could not have written any of the
following. It was their unfaltering support I could always rely on. Thank you, Veronika,
Susanne, Doris, Heidi, Christina, Catharina, Paul, Sarah, Alexander and Leonhard! Thank
you, Mum and Christopher! And thank you, Dad!

“For the Quest is achieved, and now all is over. I am glad you are here with me.
Here at the end of all things, Sam.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.
ii
1. “We, the Fans”: The Democratic Potential of Fanfiction

“What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create
and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It’s like a
living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each
writer’s reality bouncing off another’s and maybe even melding together to form
a whole new creation. [...] I find that fandom can be extremely creative because
we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them new life
over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can
change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a
character and make him charming and sweet or coldblooded and cruel. We can
give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their
original creation. We have given ourselves license to do whatever we want and
it’s very liberating. […] If a story moves or amuses us, we share it; if it bothers
us, we write a sequel; if it disturbs us, we may even re-write it! We also
continually recreate the characters to fit our images of them or to explore a new
idea. We have the power and that’s a very strong siren. If we want to explore an
issue or see a particular scenario, all we have to do is sit down and write it.”

Kim Bannister qtd. in Jenkins, “Reading” 140; also cf. Green,
Jenkins, and Jenkins 86

In a few words, Kim Bannister1 encapsulates the upheavals fanfiction writing has
brought to traditional concepts of authorship, text, and the relation between writers and
their readers—or, phrased differently, the revolution fanfiction writing initiated in a media
landscape that used to rely on its productions functioning as a “narcotic where messages
are injected into the mass audience as if from a hypodermic syringe” (Abercrombie and
Longhurst 5). “We have the power,” says Kim Bannister, a fanfiction writer herself, and
emphasizes that it has been fans like her who have brought about the “liberating” change:
“We have given ourselves license to do whatever we want” (my emphasis). Independent
from forces outside of fandom and disrupting conventional notions of fans that would
position them as passive devotees (cf. Jenkins, Textual Poachers 9-15), fannish writers use
their own agency—the “freedom we have allowed ourselves”—to release stories and
characters from what they style to be the “single life of their original creation” and to
“give them an infinite, ever-changing life.” In short, as this dissertation shows, they
transform the one-dimensional and uniform published text attributed to a single authorial
entity into a multi-dimensional and multi-voiced textual archive, whose virtually infinite

1 Throughout this dissertation, (screen) names of fans are cited as given by them, regardless of
whether they seem to resemble an English-language first and last name or if they are creative amalgamations
of words, letters, and/or numbers such as, for example, Phee-Nyx-1244.
1