REMEDIATING REALITY IN REAL PERSON SLASH FAN FICTION By KAYLEY THOMAS A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 Kayley Thomas 2 To the fans 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my chair, Richard Burt, and my reader, Anastasia Ulanowicz, for their interest in my research and their continual support. I would also like to thank my family and friends for their encouragement and for knowing when to let me work and when to drag me away for my own good. I extend my gratitude to the fans whose passion and creativity never ceases to inspire me; my thanks especially go out to those who participated in my research and supported this project. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 8 2 CELEBRITY AND PARA-SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS ............................................. 16 3 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE, THE NARRATIVE DATABASE, AND REMEDIATION ....................................................................................................... 25 4 CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................................... 32 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................... 34 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ............................................................................................ 36 5 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts REMEDIATING REALITY IN REAL PERSON SLASH FAN FICTION By Kayley Thomas December 2010 Chair: Richard Burt Major: English Previously taboo in fandom, real person slash fan fiction has seen a surge in popularity in the last few years. This change correlates with the influx of new media and internet information culture that has enabled fans’ para-social relationships with celebrities to increase in depth and intensity. In a proliferation of information access through web sites like YouTube® and LiveJournal®, a feeling (or illusion) of intimacy and immersion in the relationship is achieved through increasing opportunities for participation in and appropriation of media. The online real person slash fan fiction community functions as a community of collective intelligence, creating from a community database of information a folkloristic narrative (fanlore) that works to create at once a hypermediated and immediate experience with the actors as individuals and as characters. The experience of reading a real person slash story promises an erasure of mediation; the fans are now in presence of the thing represented, and more so, the characters are under their control. The fan fiction writers and readers work to build a coherent narrative from the fragments of celebrity media, ascribing a reality and identity to an otherwise fractured object. In order to do so, the fan must continue to contribute to and draw from the fanlore database of knowledge, but the goal of a cogent reality 6 appears to only be achievable through what is ultimately a text narrative. Real person slash fan fiction becomes, in essence, reverse remediation, a return to text in response to multiple media, though its creation is itself impossible without that very media; the fan fiction must always bear the media’s traces and remain in dialogue with it. 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “Jared, your fangirls. Fangirls, I believe you already know Jared. Better than he knows himself.” So reads the summary description for “Common Knowledge,” a work of fan fiction by Elucreh in which actor Jared Padalecki of the television series Supernatural comes to realize his love for co-star Jensen Ackles through his discovery of and participation in the show’s fandom. Overhearing fans discussing “J2” at a fan convention, Jared begins to research and unravel the phenomena of real person slash (RPS) on the internet, finding a vast network of information and stories cataloging and constructing a relationship between the two men through fan videos and recollections of conventions and appearances at other events, interviews and articles, and other sources. He learns that the romantic pairing of Jared and Jensen together is denoted in typical slash fan fiction fashion as Jared/Jensen (or Jensen/Jared) and is commonly referred to by fans as J2 (or J-squared); slash is a subgenre of fan fiction that features a romantic or sexual relationship between two men; and slash about Jared and Jensen are a part of a larger genre known as real person fan fiction (RPF), stories written by fans about actors, musicians, and other public figures. Elucreh’s highly self-reflective story adeptly models the community in which such stories are written and read, drawing attention to the desire to know the celebrity, as well as a focus upon the celebrity’s own self-awareness. Whether Jared and Jensen appear in fan fiction as the actors we know them as (such as in “Common Knowledge”) or as alternate universe (AU) versions of themselves – what the writer perceives that Jared and Jensen might be like if Jared were a struggling artist or Jensen were born in nineteenth century Japan (AUs are a popular RPS subgenre) – often the core of the 8 stories center upon conceptions and constructions of identity. “Common Knowledge” highlights in particular the practice of collecting and sharing information as a part of that construction. This lies at the heart of the real person slash community, each member bringing to their reading and their writing a set of “common knowledge” about Jared and Jensen garnered not only from official interviews or personal experience but from the community’s collective knowledge of a wide array of information and experiences. This intelligence is extrapolated, interpreted, and integrated into works of fan fiction, which then become a part of the community’s collective knowledge as well; when Jared begins to write stories of his own in “Common Knowledge,” they are informed not by firsthand of “official” experiences or data – either of his own personally or from “official” sources – but by fan conversations sharing information and interpretations, as well as from other stories. Fan fiction by fellow members of the community become sources of the celebrity’s identity and interiority that inspire future reconstruction. That Elucreh’s Jared must not only seek out information on the internet to understand the J2 community but must also engage in the community as an active participant in internet technologies through research, discussion, and publishing points to an integral element of RPS study: not a focus upon the sexual politics of slash, as many critics have previously addressed, but an exploration of the technology and processes of narrative and identity construction. The majority of academic work on fan fiction has been devoted to slash, beginning in the late 1980s with a focus primarily on Star Trek slash; Kirk/Spock is believed to be the first slash pairing. Slash fan fiction are fan stories in which presumably heteronormative characters, most often male, are refigured in a fantasy 9 space of homoerotic experience and identification. Most often their heterosexuality is initially maintained, with the development of a new sexual identification dependent upon – and strangely enough, often limited to – their specific attraction to each other. It is the love and/or sexual desire between the chosen two characters than the fan is interested in cultivating; in addition to fulfilling a sexual fantasy, the resulting fan fiction then serves as a means to shed insight into the interior lives of the characters that the source text seemingly cannot offer in its heteronormative characterizations. RPS adopts a similar goal, with much less stable source texts to draw from and a different level of identity construction at stake. In RPS stories, real people – but most often celebrities, historical figures, or other popular public personalities – are perceived as a text to be read and reconstructed for the fan’s purposes, just as with the appropriation of fictional characters. Whereas slash fan fiction itself can be traced to the 1960s with the popularity of the Kirk/Spock pairing in Star Trek fandom, with slash communities growing ever since, the same has not been the case with RPS. According to Fan History, a few RPS stories did appear during this time with Star Trek actors as their focus, but they were met with suspicion, criticism, and scorn and were quickly hidden away (“ActorFic”). In a variety of fandoms up until the 21st century, most RPS was discouraged or forbidden in fan spaces, perceived as invasions of privacy. Though there were certainly exceptions, RPS was unable to break the surface of the larger fan fiction culture until 2001 with The Lord of the Rings fandom (“ActorFic”). Notably, this was a media property that received a considerable amount of major media and fan attention, arising alongside an increasingly active and accessible internet culture. 10 The RPS taboo still lingers, but with decreasing regularity. Most objections, again, have centered on issues of privacy and consent,