Chapter 8 Further Reading

Foundational Texts — Slash and Fan Gender

Russ, J. (1985). "Another Addict Raves About K/S." Nome: A Speculative Fiction Fanzine, 1. The primary source discussed in the chapter's opening — difficult to find in original form, but excerpted in multiple fan studies anthologies.

Lamb, P. F., & Veith, D. L. (1986). "Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines." In D. Palumbo (Ed.), Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature (pp. 235–256). Greenwood Press. The equal partners theory in its original formulation.

Bacon-Smith, C. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. University of Pennsylvania Press. Alongside Jenkins's Textual Poachers, the foundational ethnographic study of fan communities. Bacon-Smith focuses more on the slash tradition and the female community than Jenkins does.

Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge. Chapter 5, "A Pornography of Emotions," provides Jenkins's analysis of slash and its emotional and political functions for female fans.

Queer Theory and Fan Studies

Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press. Essential. Chapter 1 introduces the homosocial desire concept; the introduction situates the book's method.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press. The broader queer theory context for Sedgwick's approach. Chapter 1, "Axiomatic," is the entry point.

Hall, S. (1980). "Encoding/decoding." In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, Media, Language (pp. 128–138). Hutchinson. The foundational encoding/decoding essay. Short and essential.

Lothian, A., Busse, K., & Reid, R. A. (2007). "'Yearning void and infinite potential': Online slash fandom as queer female space." English Language Notes, 45(2), 103–111. Connects slash to queer theory explicitly — the queerness theory of slash in its most developed form.

Queerbaiting

Fathallah, J. (2014). "Moriarty's Ghost: Or the Queer Disruption of the BBC's Sherlock." Television & New Media, 16(1), 3–21. The most cited scholarly complication of the queerbaiting critique.

Ng, E. (2017). "Between text, paratext, and context: Queerbaiting and the contemporary media landscape." Transformative Works and Cultures, 24. Ng's structural analysis of queerbaiting that foregrounds effects over intent.

Stanfill, M. (2019). Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans. University of Iowa Press. The most comprehensive academic examination of fan exploitation, including queerbaiting as a specific practice within the broader exploitation of fan investment.

Gender and Fan Communities

Scott, S. (2019). Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry. New York University Press. Essential analysis of gendered gatekeeping in fan communities — the "fake geek girl" phenomenon and its structural dimensions.

Hellekson, K., & Busse, K. (Eds.). (2014). The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. University of Iowa Press. Anthology collecting the most important theoretical essays in fan fiction studies. Multiple essays directly relevant to this chapter.

Trans and Non-Binary Fandom

Garrison, L. (2015). "Genderswap fan fiction: Fan labor and transformative works." Transformative Works and Cultures, 20. The most systematic analysis of genderswap fan fiction and its gender politics.

Pearce, H., Steinberg, S., & Johnson, M. (2021). "Gender identity and fan community: Non-binary fan practices and community formation." Journal of Fandom Studies, 9(2), 141–158. Empirical research on non-binary fans in fan communities.

The Supernatural/Destiel Case

Stanfill, M. (2013). "They're losers, but I know better: Intra-fandom stereotyping and the normalization of the fan subject." Critical Studies in Media Communication, 30(2), 117–134. On fan community internal dynamics — applicable to the Destiel community's self-organization.

Anderson, B. (2019). Fan Fiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts. Amsterdam University Press. On fan fiction's relationship to canonical authority — relevant to the Destiel community's creative response to the canonical text's failure.