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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Although fanfiction texts and archives have been lauded for their progressive politics regarding sexuality, they are subject to criticism for their handling of issues of race (Lothian & Stanfill). From the fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own I have assembled a corpus of 4000 texts written in response to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which alludes to the Transatlantic slave trade, and its televisual adaptation Black Sails, which foregrounds issues of queerness and enslavement. While approximately 90% of these texts are tagged as depicting a queer relationship, less than 5% are tagged as depicting race, racism or enslavement. The corpus will be analysed using the distant reading method of word embeddings combined with close reading to interrogate the ways in which queer themes are expanded upon while racial issues are minimised in the reinvention of this pirate story in novel, televisual and fanfiction forms. Prompted by Rukmini Pande’s observation that “[m]edia fandom spaces, theorized as inclusive and liberatory, are not immune to hierarchies structured by privilege” (58), I argue that digital fanfiction sites can inculcate biases, which are visible in the disjuncture between how texts are tagged and categorised, and the subtextual ideas that circulate within them.
REFERENCES
Lothian, Alexis, and Mel Stanfill. ‘An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure’. Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 36, Sept. 2021. journal.transformativeworks.org, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2119.
Pande, Rukmini. Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race. University of Iowa Press, 2018.
Recovering Racial and Queer Subtexts in Black Sails Fanfiction with Digital Methods
Although fanfiction texts and archives have been lauded for their progressive politics regarding sexuality, they are subject to criticism for their handling of issues of race (Lothian & Stanfill). From the fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own I have assembled a corpus of 4000 texts written in response to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which alludes to the Transatlantic slave trade, and its televisual adaptation Black Sails, which foregrounds issues of queerness and enslavement. While approximately 90% of these texts are tagged as depicting a queer relationship, less than 5% are tagged as depicting race, racism or enslavement. The corpus will be analysed using the distant reading method of word embeddings combined with close reading to interrogate the ways in which queer themes are expanded upon while racial issues are minimised in the reinvention of this pirate story in novel, televisual and fanfiction forms. Prompted by Rukmini Pande’s observation that “[m]edia fandom spaces, theorized as inclusive and liberatory, are not immune to hierarchies structured by privilege” (58), I argue that digital fanfiction sites can inculcate biases, which are visible in the disjuncture between how texts are tagged and categorised, and the subtextual ideas that circulate within them.
REFERENCES
Lothian, Alexis, and Mel Stanfill. ‘An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure’. Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 36, Sept. 2021. journal.transformativeworks.org, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2119.
Pande, Rukmini. Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race. University of Iowa Press, 2018.
Bio
Suzanne R Black (she/her) has recently completed a PhD in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in contemporary fiction, fanfiction, intertextuality, and queer and feminist theories. Her research is interdisciplinary and incorporates digital methods with literary studies. She has given papers at the conferences Fan Studies Network – North America, Fan Studies Network, Digital Humanities Summer School Conference and Colloquium and International Conference on Narrative, and has published work in Transformative Works and Cultures, FORUM, The American Reader and The Journal of Fandom Studies (forthcoming).