The Fan Fiction Studies Reader

11. Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance

11 WritingBodiesinSpace Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance Francesca Coppa Introduction I explore a relatively simple proposition: that fan fiction develops in response to dramatic rather than literary modes of storytelling and can therefore be seen to fulfill performative rather than literary criteria. This may seem obvious, as the writing of fan fiction is most strongly and specifically associated with the nearly forty-year-old phenomenon of media fandom,1 which is to say, the organized subculture that celebrates, analyzes, and negotiates with stories told through the mass (mainly televisual) media, and whose crossroads has long been the annual MediaWest convention held since 1981 in Lansing, Michigan. But the importance of media fan fiction being written in response to dramatic rather than literary storytelling has been overlooked for at least two reasons; first, that fan fiction is itself a textual enterprise, made of letters and words and sentences written on a page (or, more likely these days, a screen), and it therefore seems sensible to treat it as a literary rather than an essentially dramatic form; and second, that media fandom has its origins in science fiction fandom, which is a heavily textual genre. Media fandom spun off from science fiction fandom as a direct result of the original Star Trek television series (1966–1969),2 and although fans and scholars have catalogued many similarities (in fannish organization, jargon, and interests; even today, most media fans maintain a strong interest in science fiction and fantasy) and differences (most strikingly in terms of gender, but also in attitudes toward profit and professionalization) between the two fannish cultures, the impact of the switch in genre from prose to drama is rarely Francesca Coppa 219 discussed or even noticed. But whereas fans of literary science fiction often take to writing “original” science fiction themselves, fans of mass media write fan fiction—which, I submit, is more a kind of theatre than a kind of prose. In making this claim, I should note that I am defining fan fiction narrowly as creative material featuring characters that have previously appeared in works whose copyright is held by others. Although the creative expansion of extant fictional worlds is an age-old practice, by restricting the term fan fiction to reworkings of currently copyrighted material, I effectively limit the definition not just to the modern era of copyright, but to the even more recent era of active intellectual property rights enforcement. Although fans themselves often seek continuities between their art-making practices and those with a much longer history (Laura M. Hale starts her History of Fan Fic timeline with “0220 The Chinese invent paper”),3 this conflation of folk and fan cultures may blur important distinctions between them, not least of which is the relatively recent legal idea that stories can be owned. It is only when storytelling becomes industrialized—or, to draw upon Richard Ohmann’s definition of mass culture, produced at a distance by a relatively small number of specialists—that fan fiction begins to make sense as a category , because only then are “fans” distinguished from Ohmann’s distant “specialists,” just as amateurs are differentiated from professionals (1996, 14; and see Garber 2001). The line between amateur and professional writing is both sharply defined and frequently crossed in science fiction fandom, because science fiction is a literature itself written by fans of the genre; to be an amateur science fiction writer is therefore merely a step on the way to becoming a professional science fiction writer, and professional writers still go to conventions to hobnob. From this perspective, the professional is superior to the amateur, who is serving a kind of apprenticeship. Conversely, MediaWest prides itself on being a convention run by fans and for fans, without any paid guests (professional authors, actors, or producers), and fan fiction writers tend to be defiantly amateur in the sense of writing precisely what they want for love alone. In this schema, to be a professional is to write at the command of others for money. There are exceptions to this in creators like Joss Whedon or Aaron Sorkin, who are seen as relatively fannish auteurs trying to make personal shows within the confines of the industry. However, fans mostly shake their heads in bemusement at television shows that can’t keep track of basic continuity , or films that miss obvious dramatic opportunities; it’s understood 220 chapter 11 that this is the by...