This month we’re bringing you a small taste of a Tech Forum presentation given by Jennifer Chen and Nikoo Sarraf from McGill University’s .txtlab. They took a deep dive into the differences between queer fanfiction and mainstream published works and shared some insights about what publishing can learn from their work.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
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Further reading/listening
Transcript
Ainsley Sparkes: Hello and welcome to this month’s episode of the BookNet Canada podcast. I’m your host, Ainsley Sparkes, Marketing & Communications Manager at BookNet.
This month we wanted to share some highlights from a recent Tech Forum presentation. Nikoo Sarraf and Jennifer Chen from .txtlab at McGill University delivered a presentation on the nature of queer fanfiction. They started this project with the aim “to understand what makes fanfiction so powerful and transformative, especially for young queer readers.”
They came up with lots of questions like “What literary characteristics differentiate fanfiction from mainstream fiction? How do these distinctions potentially make a difference in the effect that these texts have on readers, especially with respect to their identity formation? Is fanfiction more character-driven in comparison to the more plot-driven narrative style adopted by conventional literature?”
To answer these questions and more, Sarraf and Chen put together two data sets to compare: the fanfiction data comes from Archive of Our Own — which is a repository similar to Wattpad. This data set includes almost 14,000 randomly selected texts drawn equally from the top 15 fandoms on the site as of 2019 that were explicitly tagged as queer. The mainstream books data comes from 426 novels that were reviewed in The New York Times since 2002. (If you’re interested in learning more about their methodology, watch their presentation where they explain it in more depth than I’m covering here.)
I’ll let them explain a little bit about what they found:
Jennifer Chen: … the topics that are most disproportionately favoured by fanfiction are related to sex, emotions, and observation. While the topics are more prevalent in mainstream fiction concern family and career life.
A lot of intimate topics such as observation, pain, crying, and the body, are far more frequently mentioned in the fanfiction corpus. In particular, there seems to be a heavy emphasis on intimacy and body language in the fanfictions that is absent from mainstream fiction. And this creates a space where queerness is normalised and expansively explored.
It is important to point out that such intimacy is not only based on sexual contact, but it crucially encompasses a broad range of emotions as well. The published mainstream fiction is distinguished by its attention to more traditional public-facing activities such as school, work, and family. This attention to social spaces in mainstream fiction has the effect of maintaining the typical social taboos around the forms of human intimacy and sex.
Nikoo Sarraf: So here we have some of our main takeaways from our exploration of taboo topics. Showing that we were right in our hypothesis that fanfiction writers spend more time writing about taboo topics than mainstream writers do. To give a statistic from our work, fanfic is about six times more likely to write about sex and three times more likely to write about intimate emotions than mainstream fiction.
When looking at the results, it was immediately noticeable that there is a discrepancy in the subject matter covered by the authors of fanfic and the authors of mainstream texts. While we, of course, don't know with certainty why those mainstream authors rarely broach certain topics, and we don't mean to imply that they don't want to discuss certain topics, there could be many reasons for this. Perhaps there are limitations in corporate publishing or restrictions on the type of language that authors are able to use in order to appeal to certain audiences.
Another possibility could be that fanfiction writers are writing for a small group of readers who have already demonstrated an interest in a specific subject matter. In any case, it is evident that based on the results of the topic model, it's clear that fanfiction authors delve further into certain subject matter than popular fiction authors do.
This section also shows, as posited by Dan Fielding and other researchers, that fanfiction aims to fill the gaps left in mainstream media — specifically themes of intimacy and sex. As Fielding discovers through his work, engaging with this fanfiction material gives fans a space to dis-identify with the norms and celebrate queer narratives.
We also found that these results confirm that fanfiction presents a distinct queer information world in this case, one that consists of exploring sexuality, intimacy, vulnerability, which strongly differentiates it from mainstream fiction.
Jennifer: A lot of these ideas also come up in our second area of focus which is character centrism. We initially hypothesized that fanfiction would emphasize character relationships, resulting in stories that are more character-driven, rather than plot-driven. This is because fanfiction is premised on an engagement with existing characters and redeploying them in novel narrative settings.
Nikoo: We found that queer fanfiction is more character-centric than conventional literature. According to our tests, about 8.7% of the words in The New York Times books are character-centric, and about 9.9% of the words in fanfic are character-centric. This may seem like an inconsequential difference, but this equates to about 1,200 more character mentions in a novel-length book.
This data suggests that mainstream fiction centres more strongly around the plot lines or events in which characters are interacting with their immediate environments, while queer fanfiction tends to revolve more around interpersonal experiences.
Since fanfictions take place in worlds that have already been built by authors there's less focus on world-building and more focus on character building. This is important for young queer individuals as it normalizes queerness and presents more queer characters and relationships that young fans can relate to and learn from. As shown by previous work in this field, young queer fans rely on fanfiction to connect with their identities earlier in life.
What makes fanfiction unique is that it takes characters that readers already feel some degree of connection to, and then adds more depth and variation to these pre-existing relationships to connect them more deeply with readers who are seeking out less visible forms of human connection.
Through the fanfiction, the fans can read and write about their favourite characters exploring a level of emotional depth that they wish they would have seen explored in the original work, or explore a relationship between two characters that they would have liked to see play out in the original.
Ainsley: This is only a small look into the deep work that these two researchers shared with us. For the full picture, you can watch their whole presentation on the BookNet YouTube channel. Make sure to watch all the way to the end for the really interesting Q&A that follows their presentation.
Before we go, we’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada staff, board, partners, and our makeshift podcast studio, operate upon the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and Wendat indigenous peoples, the original nations of this land. We endorse the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry. And we hope that our work, including this podcast, helps to create an environment that supports that shift. We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
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