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Alexandra Herzog (Regensburg):
"'Fanspeak' in Fanfiction Writing: The Power of the Word"
Abstract
“AH, E/B, Very OOC, lemons, Promised HEA.” These words and abbreviations comprise the summary fanfiction writer JandMsMommy provides for her online fanfiction story “Seven Day Weekend,” concisely informing her fan audience about the content of her text while excluding anyone unfamiliar with this ‘fanspeak.’
The term fanfiction describes non-commercial texts written by fans of a previously published meta-text, such as the Twilight-series. In these stories, familiar characters/settings/plot elements are used to create a textual archive in which the meta-text loses its traditional dominance. ‘Fanspeak’ as shown above is used extensively within the genre, occurring in various forms that bespeak the creativity and versatility of the writers.
In my presentation, I argue that fans use jargon both as a language barrier to enhance the sense of community among the fans and as a means to claim an insider and expert status. By employing jargon that remains cryptic to the uninitiated outsider, fans on the one hand engage in community-building that helps them to find a voice in the conflict for power between the original creators of the meta-text and the fanauthors. On the other hand, jargon allows fans to create a discourse of their own that plays a significant role in their self-fashioning as experts—both in the context of interpreting the meta-text and within the fannish community itself.
‘Fanspeak,’ I maintain in my paper, creates and demonstrates agency by functioning as a decisive strategy fans utilize to establish a clear dichotomy between fan and non-fan. A community of fannish experts resists the traditional hegemony of the original producer by excluding and undermining the instances of conventional interpretational sovereignty. Fans, as I maintain in the larger frame of my dissertation project, thus become powerful themselves: they shape culture and restructure the media industry.
The term fanfiction describes non-commercial texts written by fans of a previously published meta-text, such as the Twilight-series. In these stories, familiar characters/settings/plot elements are used to create a textual archive in which the meta-text loses its traditional dominance. ‘Fanspeak’ as shown above is used extensively within the genre, occurring in various forms that bespeak the creativity and versatility of the writers.
In my presentation, I argue that fans use jargon both as a language barrier to enhance the sense of community among the fans and as a means to claim an insider and expert status. By employing jargon that remains cryptic to the uninitiated outsider, fans on the one hand engage in community-building that helps them to find a voice in the conflict for power between the original creators of the meta-text and the fanauthors. On the other hand, jargon allows fans to create a discourse of their own that plays a significant role in their self-fashioning as experts—both in the context of interpreting the meta-text and within the fannish community itself.
‘Fanspeak,’ I maintain in my paper, creates and demonstrates agency by functioning as a decisive strategy fans utilize to establish a clear dichotomy between fan and non-fan. A community of fannish experts resists the traditional hegemony of the original producer by excluding and undermining the instances of conventional interpretational sovereignty. Fans, as I maintain in the larger frame of my dissertation project, thus become powerful themselves: they shape culture and restructure the media industry.
Bio
Alexandra Herzog is a doctoral student and project assistant at the Department for American Studies at the University of Regensburg. She completed her teachers’ exam in German and English in July 2010 and has since then been working on her dissertation on fanfiction and fannish textual strategies. In addition, she teaches at the University of Regensburg and does research on a DFG-project on Forefathers’ Day Orations 1770-1865. She studied at the University of Regensburg and the University of Kentucky in Lexington/USA and has been trained in literature and cultural studies with a strong focus on visual culture and memory studies. For two years, she assisted in editing the journal Amerikastudien/American Studies.