Judith Fathallah

Explores how fan fiction both challenges and reinscribes the authority of white men—both as main characters and often as authors, sometimes at the same time, since that’s how hegemony works. Unsurprisingly, fandom often does a better job of questioning maleness than whiteness; likewise, fans of sources like Game of Thrones often accept the premises of rule by divine right/force because it supports the stories they want to tell, even if those stories are about challenging gender roles. Sherlock and SPN are her other main texts—she focuses on genderswap/mpreg in Sherlock and differing constructions of author/fan/God in uses of Chuck and Becky in SPN. In complicating earlier views such as ‘slash offers an idealized version of what masculinity could be if it were emotionally open,’ she points out that, in her experience as a woman “raised partly or wholly according to Eastern social norms … strong and demonstrative same-sex bonds are a very condition of masculinity and sociality in general.”… (más)