Mira El Achhab

For my ethnography project, I chose the UofT Fanfiction Club as my research site and over the course of the semester attended weekly meetings that I participated in and took notes on, interviewed two executives from the club, and read a number of works relating to fan studies and fandom ethnographies. From the beginning, I wanted to find a site somehow related to fanfiction due to my already existing interaction with the topic, as I’ve been reading fanfiction and taking part in online fandom for more than half of my life at this point, being a consistent interest for around eleven years now. In that time, I’ve been both witness and participant to a number of discourses and discussions in these circles, which have raised questions for me around the expected etiquette of fanfiction readers and writers, the appeal of morally dubious topics in fanfiction, and the function of these spaces as niches for marginalized people. Additionally, I was interested in exploring an in-person community that focused on fanfiction, as previously I’d only considered larger-scale fanfiction communities that exist in a digital context, on platforms such as Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. The common treatment of fanfiction in popular culture also played a minor part in my motivations. Fanfiction has long been treated as the frivolous hobby of obsessive and parasocial teenage girls, which has always annoyed me, and I wanted to present an exploration of a fanfiction space with a more admiring lens rather than a pathologized one. As my research went on, my ideas solidified into a more concrete exploration in my final paper of participatory culture and the cultural economy of fandom, the relevance of the academic context and knowledge of the club’s members in how fanfiction was treated and discussed, and the importance of active collaboration in fanfiction circles to continue sustaining them.