Fanfiction as Cultural Activism: An Archive of Sexual Consent

We’re all fans, even if we’re not a fan of being called one. Whether we hurriedly text our friends about the plot-twist in the recently dropped Netflix series, keep notifications on for our favourite celebrities on social media, simply wait with bated breath for the newest movie set in the Harry Potter universe or buy cassettes in the digital age, each of us is a fan. Fandom goes beyond visual media in the form of television and movies, extending to music, sports, gaming, opera, and literature. The distinction between high and low culture can be seen being reproduced with reference to whether its fans would be referred to as fandom or aficionado, but the fact of being a fan remains. 

Fan studies scholars have toed the line of micro-level focus on individual fans and the focus on fandom as an imagined and imaginative community. The imaginative potential of fandom as a community has been maximised with the advent of online technology. Looking at fandom space as a field of inquiry enables us to see fanfiction as a form of cultural activism. 


By queering existing stories, fanfiction holds great potential in visibilising the LGBTQ community in a culture that habitually erases us, to create and make accessible new knowledges and to explore difficult issues. The culture talks to the fandom, and they talk back to the culture in its own language. Mainstream media, by not talking about sex while maintaining the centrality of romance, posits sex as a natural culmination of true love. Even when it isn’t showcased on the screen, the flowers falling into one another accord a sense of ‘something meant to happen’ to sex. Juxtaposed against this non-representation is the visualisation of sexual violence from a male gaze. Caught between these two extremes is the maintained silence on sexual consent.


On issues of sexual consent in particular, fanfiction is a form of cultural activism. While debates over whether kink has a space in pride parade gain momentum, fanfiction becomes a space for writers and readers to navigate questions around consent which have been rendered unspeakable. Erotic queer fanfiction comes to represent variations in relation to sexual activity in a story format drawing from personal experiences, theory and imagination. 


The circuits of knowledge production and circulation are distinct for fanfiction allowing for fans to live up to their full potential as active producers and meaning makers. Specifically for Archive Of Our Own, the elaborate tagging system allowing for codification of written works, alerts the reader of what the work encompasses, bringing in consent as heightened reader’s choice. Consent forms a core principle for the reader-writer interaction.


A persistent criticism for fanfiction has been the centrality accorded to romance. But it is this very focus on romance in queer terms that lends a transformative edge to fanfiction. Romance being central in fanfiction takes a route distinct from that taken by dominant media. The Found Family trope gives insight into queer platonic relationships, harnessing the collective imagination for support networks. The self-expressive cathartic quality of fanfiction ensures that apt representation of aromantic, asexual and genderqueer characters, who are almost invisibilised in mainstream media. The dilemmas faced by characters allow for exploration of the intersecting nature of oppressions and the spectral, flexible nature of gender identities and sexualities. 


In the interactions surrounding the practice of fanfiction, readers and writers come together to form a praxis of consent, manifesting their knowledges in the real world. In a way, they enable one to imagine a world without rape culture. Fanfiction, then, remains a crucial tool for developing our knowledge and understanding of consent. It continues to operate outside traditional knowledge production and validation structures. It builds on epistemologies rooted in lived experience and, at the same time, accounts for and challenges our society’s dominant ideas about sex. These kinds of new, marginalised and subjugated knowledges become accessible through creative production. By creating a script of queer love, many possibilities of love, romance and sex enter the realm of knowledge circulation. The reiterative nature of fanfiction, of building upon meanings allows for nuanced exploration of questions of consent. 


It is the clandestine nature of fanfiction that has allowed for sexual deviance to be explored. Mainstreaming fanfiction as cultural activism thus becomes a thorny issue. Moreover, the flipside to the unregulated circuits of circulation of fanfiction has been it being implicated in replicating structures of oppression through racist representations. Faced with the enormous task of evading censorship induced by moral panic while ensuring the safety of all communities, the cultural activism of writing fanfiction sustains itself through constant negotiation. The question of significance that arises is: Can the possibility of writing Bucky and Steve as partners, Villanelle and Eve with a Happy Ending, and pop music groups living together in queer platonic relationships in fiction hold a revolutionary promise? 

The answer can be found in the comments section of AO3, archiving the tangible significance transformative works in understanding themselves, their sexuality and sexual practices have held for individuals. 

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