University of Colorado at Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Cinda Gillilan (Ph.D. ’99) Web Author, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Ga.)

Dissertation Title Zine Fanz, Zine Fiction, Zine Fandom: Exchanging the Mundane for the Woman- Centered World

Committee Janice Peck, Chair Stewart M. Hoover David Slayden Joyce Nielsen (Sociology) Bryan Taylor (Communication)

Abstract This dissertation is the result of a number of years' work that I have done with television zine fans—women who produce and consume fiction (which they write) based on various television series within the community of zine fandom. This work is presented in three major sections, each building upon existing scholarship in order to develop a more complex picture of fans, their community, and their fiction as it exists within larger socio- cultural conditions. Part one examines who television zine fans actually are. This includes a survey-based demographic profile, a discussion of the possibility of a zine fan standpoint, and an analysis of how members construct their community and their identities as fans. The picture uncovered suggests that these women belong to a specific, homogeneous cohort for the most part, and therefore might be reacting to particular historical and social forces.

Fan identities are tightly bound up with the activities and individuals they engage with within fandom. In part two, the actual "space" fans construct for themselves ("fandom") and their activities within this space are examined. This section employs participant observation of the zine fan community, fan comments, and fan interviews to illustrate how fandom itself functions as a woman-centered "sacred" space, or in Victor Turners' (1979) terms, a liminoid. Zine fan culture is most visible at weekend gatherings called "cons". These conventions occur throughout the year in cities across the country, and the space created at these gatherings constitutes its own separate "world" for the participants where they can escape the day to day or "mundane" world, exchanging it for a woman- centered one.

In the final section I explore the fan fiction in order to demonstrate how members construct woman-centered fiction that supports the values and norms of the community, even though their stories are based on pairs of male television heroes. This fiction is able to transport fans back into the fandom liminoid, a shift that can occur in the process of reading and writing, but it also arises from the use of liminality as a central theme in the fiction itself. Fan fiction is the focal point that mediates between the individual members of fandom and the larger fan community outside of group settings. By reading and writing fan fiction, individual fans enter the sacred space of fandom and reaffirm their membership in that community. Understanding how these issues are resolved addresses the horizontal dimension of fandom--its consumption, uses, and function—within the context of the vertical dimension of fandom--the broader issues of ideology, power, and politics.