Investigating structural articulations of power in information creation: a constructivist grounded theory of queer-created fanfiction
Creators: name: Floegel, Diana
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: This dissertation is a constructivist grounded theory study of queer fans and their overlapping interactions with fanfiction texts, online platforms, and each other. Informed by queer theory, assemblage theory, and other perspectives from Library and Information Science (LIS), Media Studies, Fan Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies, I describe how structural power dynamics both shape and are shaped by inequities within information creation and associated online ecosystems. Findings and their implications address current limitations to both LIS and Fan Studies, especially in terms of the disciplines’ individualized and techno-utopian fallacies. I use constructivist grounded theory to qualitatively analyze and triangulate data from four sources: semi-structured interviews with 25 queer fanfiction authors located around the world, participants’ fanfiction texts, sociomaterial features of online platforms used for fanwork like Archive of Our Own (AO3), and platform policy statements. Analysis exposes complex sociotechnical assemblages that consist of people, technologies, and institutions involved in fandom. In explicating assemblages, I describe how marginalized people express agency via creative practices while they remain constrained by intersecting biopolitical inequities related to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Findings suggest that tensions between agency and oppression are expressed in three domains: transforming bodies and feelings; forming community vs. forming cliques; and governing platforms and people. When participants read and write fanfiction, they transform normative canonical media in order to include queer embodiments and affects. These practices are reflected in fanfiction texts as well as platforms’ taxonomic systems. Participants specifically include information about queer bodies and queer sex in their texts, and tags on fanfiction archives often describe affects, or how a work of fanfiction may make a reader feel. However, data from participants of color, trans participants, and asexual participants demonstrate that fandom is regulated by whiteness and homonormativity. Transformative potentials in fandom are limited along biopolitical lines: the bodies and affects instantiated within fanfiction texts and platforms’ taxonomies are often the most normative within these queer spaces, while less normative standpoints are policed.Similar power dynamics extend to conceptions of forming community. Stark racial divides exist among participants: while white participants find community in fandom, participants of color are Othered. Further, complex “attention economies” develop in fandom. Though literature often frames fandoms as free of capitalistic dynamics, fans perform a great deal of labor to gain attention for themselves and their works. Despite the work a fan may perform to receive attention, logics of who and what become popular tend to reify normative racialized and gendered power dynamics so that marginalized fans are left out of arrangements that they refer to as “cliques” rather than communities. Participants describe debates over what is defined as “inappropriate” or “not safe for work” (NSFW) in fanwork. What is considered NSFW, and how platforms design ways in which people can avoid potentially upsetting fanfiction, are tied to historical constructions of biopower in fandom. For example, platform policies exist to moderate sexually explicit content, but not racist content; what is sexually explicit is also contested. Fans’ experiences are shaped by these policies. Platforms and their moderators afford white and cisgender fans more protection than trans fans and fans of color, who are often harassed when they share their experiences, and then held individually responsible for preventing people from harassing them. At the same time, moderators on platforms like AO3 are volunteers, and they describe their positions as callings or avocations rather than mere jobs or volunteer positions. Moderators’ perspectives mask both the labor they perform as well as the inequities they reify.The structural power dynamics described in this dissertation are transferable to other online contexts and populations, and they demonstrate that “information creation” exceeds a practice or suite of practices. Structural power dynamics cannot be eradicated via small-scale platform or behavioral changes because they reflect ingrained social inequities. To conclude this dissertation, I suggest that researchers work with marginalized fans in order to develop potential ways in which to de-construct biopolitics and progress toward equity in online spaces. I recommend three theoretical directions that future work may adopt in order to meet these aims: a) drawing on critical race theory, affect theory, and Black feminist epistemology, I recommend that future researchers center anger as a productive and informative emotion; b) drawing on queer theory, I recommend that future researchers reconsider and explore the myriad ways in which fandoms have failed despite their queer veneers; c) drawing on critical race theory’s intersection with socio-technical futurities, I recommend that scholars use community-based methods to imagine more just futures that do not follow normative or seemingly inevitable scripts for technology design and use.