SALON: Close Literary Analysis of Fanfiction as Trauma Text
The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (eds. Busse and Hellekson) from 2014 collected studies of fanfiction as literary artifacts, and 2017’s The Fanfiction Reader (ed. Coppa) developed this idea further, collecting fanworks as well as a critical introduction to each of its “folk tales.” The development of literary techniques as a dominant fan studies method has been inevitably stymied, however, in many ways by the overwhelming body of text—not only of the fanworks themselves, but the source material from which they originate, as well as their subcultural and counterpublic contexts. But fanfiction offers uniquely intimate literary examples of personal writing, and, in the case of “trauma texts”—semi-autobiographical works that combine life writing and memoir with the political, social, and emotional context of characters’ trauma—it also creates works that use the extant canon to draw from and elaborate upon writers’ personal experiences. Of relevance are contemporary fandom wars over the appropriateness of “darkfic” and other traumatic texts touching on issues of violence and sexuality. As diverse as the authors and instances of these trauma texts may be, they are also policed or silenced according to questions of who gets to write autobiographically, and under what conditions; how do the power relations of race, gender, and disability, for example, matter to the ethics of telling trauma? How do trauma texts reflect their positionality of their authors as much as their characters? What are the advantages and disadvantages of telling trauma via the vehicle of another’s story? This salon examines specific examples of fanfiction as trauma text—contemporary, historical, personal, political—and explore ways in which this form provides a unique space for the literary exploration of trauma, including what Whitlock and Douglas call “the ethics of testimony and witnessing, the commodification of traumatic story, and [the] politics of recognition” (2009) for both the wider field of trauma texts, and fanfiction itself.
Participants: JSA Lowe (University of Houston), Lucy Baker (Texas A&M University), Maria Alberto (University of Utah), Giovana Santana Carlos, Linda Howell (University of North Florida), Dean Leetal (Tel Aviv University), Lauren Rouse (University of Central Florida) (Effie Sapuridis & Cait Coker, moderators)
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