1. Why do they hate you, Mary Sue
Why do they hate you, Mary Sue?: The gendered politics of online fanfiction
Dr. Brittany Kelley | King’s College London
ALISE Gender Issues SIG Webinar
Friday, 10 November 2017

2. What is fanfiction?
Definition:
An example:
Fanfiction is a practice where a fan takes the plot features, characters, and settings from a favored text, like Harry Potter or The X-Files, and s/he uses those features to write her/his own stories about that text.
You can find it at: Fanfiction.net, Live Journal, and Archive of Our Own, etc.

3. The Mary Sue "Re-creating the Adolescent Self: Mary Sue."
(Section title, Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women 94)
"'Mary Sue' stories, as the fans call them, are utterly reviled, even though such stories are often the first story that a fan will write. A 'Mary Sue' is any story where a young, bright, gorgeous new ensign (usually a transparent stand-in for the author) falls head over heels for Kirk or Spock." (Constance Penley, NASA/TREK 141).

5. The Mary Sue Disliked / denigrated by fan communities for being:
Shallow
Too perfect
Self-serving
Dismissed because feminized
Except: Often very productive and even transformative for fans.

6. Fanwriters are suspiciously “feminine”
“If the comic fan and the psychotic fan are usually portrayed as masculine, although frequently as de-gendered, asexual, or impotent, the eroticized fan is almost always female." (Jenkins, 1992, p. 15).

7. Fandom as ‘women’s writing’
‘When women in fandom write about women they are talking to each other about themselves in the symbolic language of their literature. With their efforts they pass through stages of their own development as individuals, from the superteen Mary Sue who lingers in the consciousness even of middle-aged matrons who have steadfastly refused to let go of the active agent of their prepubescent years (or fantasies), to the matriarch struggling for dignity against a society that pressures the family into systems of oppression. Few of the stories about women seem to postulate institutional dignity or equal status for women, but in the fan fiction the fan women talk about their struggle for dignity in their relationships’ (Bacon-Smith, 1992, p. 112).

8. Mary Sue v. James Bond?

9. Fanfic as ‘écriture feminine’?
"Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement" (Cixous 875).

10. Fem!Harry Fanfiction.net hosts 93 Fem!Harry communities
Miss Potter is one popular subcommunity or C2 for Fem!Harry
Founded July 2005 by BF110C4
Hosts 1,830 stories
Has 1,208 followers

12. Hyperproductive Super-Masculine Dude!

13. Writing the body, Writing desire
Woman, perhaps, needs to "[live] her desire" (Irigaray 323) as more than "an attempt to possess at long last the equivalent of the male sex organ" (Irigaray 323).

14. Lady Hallen’s An Avalanche
Published April 25
Fem!Harry crossover story mixing Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings
Stars female Harry ‘Heather’ or ‘Feather’
Hermione
Luna
Draco
The characters leave England for another dimension, where they quickly become involved in another battle against ultimate evil.
This story re-bodies Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings universe.

15. Femininity/masculinity in An Avalanche
'I know,' she cried out, real tears stinging her cheeks. 'I'm likely to get myself killed, but who would teach a girl? I'm doing the best I can!’ The encampment turned slightly awkward. The young man was on the receiving end of many irritated glances, but no one spoke to reprimand him. A series of arguments later and she ended up in the company of a rough riding group of men. They set a harsh pace and looked at her with respect when she did not complain of the lack of comforts. (Lady Hallen An Avalanche, my emphasis)

16. Performing ‘weak’ femininity
"Heather knew she was making stories in her mind to stay in character, and she allowed the story to become her. The righteous female anger swept through her. She was young enough—and short enough—to act out the adolescent angst. Besides, these men felt like old souls" (Lady Hallen An Avalanche, my emphasis).

17. Performativity
“’Becoming' a gender is a laborious process of becoming naturalized, which requires a differentiation of bodily pleasures and parts on the basis of gendered meanings….In other words, some parts of the body become conceivable foci of pleasure precisely because they correspond to a normative ideal of a gender-specific body" (Butler, 1990, p. 95).

18. Slash fics as sex for resistance…
“Slash” fics are stories that portray LGB(TQ) relationships—usually male-male.
Harry Potter-Draco Malfoy or HP/DM is most popular in Harry Potter fanfic.
FF.net hosts 50 subcommunities for this pairing.
One version = “mpreg,” where male character gets pregnant.

19. Our Baby by jessica499499
Was [Harry] ashamed that their child might look like him? Like a Malfoy? Like his father [Lucius]? Harry loved Draco for himself, not his looks. But did that mean that his looks repulsed Harry? He'd made love to Harry before and he'd never felt insecure about his appearance. (jessica Our Baby).

20. Our Baby continued
"You see Harry, when a muggle male chooses a male mate, they have to adopt.” Draco leaned closer and nibbled on Harry's ear gently. “But when a pureblood chooses a male mate things are a little different.” “...How so?” Harry muttered as Draco moved to nip at his neck. Draco smiled against Harry's skin. “Well, when a pureblood male claims a mate and he and his mate wish simultaneously during love making…” Draco kissed Harry softly on the lips as he stared at his beloved. “….They can have children too.” Harry's eyes shone with such happiness and love at that moment it was breath taking. “Really Draco? We can have little ones too?!” Draco laughed sweetly in relief. “As many as you want Love.” Draco could practically see Harry's eyes glaze over as he imagined Draco heavy with his child. (jessica Our Baby, emphasis in original)

21. Sex = Gender?
"Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which 'sexed nature' or 'a natural sex' is produced and established as 'prediscursive,' prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts" (Butler, 1990, p. 10).
"The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy" (Butler, 1990, p. 43).

22. “What about love?”
Considering the role of emotion in gendering online fanfiction.

23. Emotion as an Ideological and Rhetorical System
"I do not want to think about emotionality as a characteristic of bodies, whether individual or collective. In fact, I want to reflect on the processes whereby 'being emotional' comes to be seen as a characteristic of some bodies and not others, in the first place. In order to do this, we need to consider how emotions operate to 'make' and 'shape' bodies as forms of action, which also involve orientations towards others" (Ahmed, 2004, p. 4).

24. Emotion as “embodied meaning-making” (Wetherell)
“I see affective practice as a moment of recruitment and often synchronous assembling of multimodal resources, including, most crucially, body states. It is the participation of the emoting body that makes an assemblage an example of affect rather than an example of some other kind of social practice. I agree with Ahmed that this assembling and recruiting is onto-formative, meaning that it constitutes subjects and objects….Affective practice in this way sets up relations between subjects and objects through their intertwined formations and constitutions. But we also need to locate affect, not in the ether, or in endless and mysterious circulations, but in actual bodies and social actors, negotiating, making decisions, evaluating, communicating, inferring and relating” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 159, my emphasis)

25. Emotion as Embodied and Ideological
"Body states are always situated and always taking place in the midst of some activity, and the medium in which they are situated is culturally and socially constituted" (Wetherell, 2012, p. 42).

26. The embodied-emotional is key

27. The feminized fan or ‘women’s stuff’
“'Get a life, will you people?’” (Shatner, quoted in Jenkins, 1992, p. 10).
“‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’” (Shatner, quoted in Jenkins, 1992, p.10).

28. What should we do?
We learn in and through our bodies and our emotions.
Therefore, we have to admit the emotional and the bodily – the “feminine”—if we want to understand how we learn, identify, and then do in the world.