As Nikoo Sarraf and Jennifer Chen from McGill University's .txtlab write in their introduction to their 2021 report, queer fans: the difference that queer fanfiction makes, "fanfiction is a powerful and transformative form of writing that provides a safe space for youth to explore their gender and sexuality, knowing that they are part of a larger community." Sarraf and Chen will join Tech Forum to share insights from their research: revealing the stylistic qualities of queer fanfiction that allow readers to form strong attachments with the material and showing how queer fanfiction authors approach content from a place of emotional vulnerability, explore taboo topics, and offer character-focused storytelling. By comparing queer fanfic with books published in the mainstream, Sarraf and Chen will highlight how fanfiction normalizes intimacy and emotional vulnerability for sexual and gender minority youth. Link to presentation video: https://youtu.be/2NFLA5h1Ddg Presented by BookNet Canada on March, 10, 2022 with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.

1. The Nature of Queer
Fanfiction
Nikoo Sarraf & Jennifer Chen

2. Introduction
Who Are We?
We (Jennifer Chen and Nikoo Sarraf) are two student researchers at McGill University. “Queer
Fans” is a project that we conducted as part of McGill .txtlab under Professor Andrew Piper.

3. Introduction
Why Fanfiction?
● Fanfiction is a powerful and transformative form of writing that provides
a safe space for youth to explore their gender and sexuality
○ Part of a larger community
● Researchers have discovered that fanfiction is useful to sexual and
gender minority youth (SGMYs)
○ Providing a sense of belonging
○ Helping young readers come to terms with their own sexuality
○ Exposure to a community where they are able to explore their
identities
● Fandom-participating youth are more active online daily and reach
established identity milestones earlier than non-fandom participating
peers
○ “Without fandom, I wouldn’t have found who I was.”
Logo for AO3: Online
repository for fanfiction
contributed by users

4. Existing Literature
Fielding, D. M. (2020). Queernormativity: norms, values, and practices in social
justice fandom. Sexualities, 23(7), 1135–1154.
“Queernormativity emphasizes the power to make anything queer, including the
concept of normal itself. Queernormativity asks scholars and theorists to closely
examine the ways actual queer people imagine and produce different
worlds—worlds resplendent with queer culture; which praise queer conceptions of
family, love, and sex; and where queer is just as normal as straight and straight is
just as problematic as queer.”

5. Floegel, D. (2020). “Write the story you want to read”: world-queering through
slash fanfiction creation. Journal of Documentation, 76(4), 785–805.
Floegel constructed the concept of world-queering, an exercise practiced in
fanfiction writing in which the authors reorient content to be more in line with their
own identity and to fill the gaps that they find in the media. Many participants in
Floegel’s study reported that they “find themes in slash fanfiction that allow them to
explore and develop their identities”
Existing Literature

6. Research Questions
1. What literary characteristics differentiate fanfiction from mainstream fiction?
2. How do those distinctions potentially make a difference in the effect that these
texts have on readers, especially with respect to their identity formation?
3. What potential effects does the greater emphasis on intimacy and sex have for
sexual and gender minorities?
4. Is fanfiction more character-driven in comparison to the more plot-driven
narrative style adopted by conventional literature?
5. Do fanfic authors feel more comfortable exploring vulnerable topics? How
does the range of emotion explored in fanfiction compare to that of
mainstream books?

7. Terminology
1. SGMY - Sexual and Gender Minority Youth
2. Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) - a platform for building Python programs to work with
human language data
3. Stop words - words that most systems and search engines avoid in order to save time and
space while processing data; for example: ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’
4. Corpus - a collection of written texts; for example, our ‘FanFic corpus’ is all of the fanfiction
texts that we used in our project
5. Lemmatization - grouping together all forms of a word so they can be analyzed as a single
item; for example, ‘drink’, ‘drinking’, and ‘drank’ would all be grouped together under the same
word ‘drink’
6. Bigrams and trigrams - a group of 2 or 3 consecutive written units, in our case either (subject,
verb) or (subject, verb, object) of a sentence
7. Bootstrap sampling - a method that involves drawing sample date repeatedly with
replacement

8. Data Overview
Data Set Texts Average length Total words
FanFic 13,827 3,574 49,413,594
NYT 426 100,399 42,769,877
● Fanfic
○ Drawn equally from the top 15 fandoms on AO3 as of 2019
○ Restricted to a length between 2,000 and 10,000 words
○ Tagged as either M/M or F/F
● NYT
○ Novels reviewed by the New York Times since 2002
○ Random selection of popular, mainstream fiction

9. Methods

10. 1) Taboo Topics
Hypothesis:
● Fanfic authors are more open to using “taboo” language
Methodology:
Topic Model
● Python NLTK to filter out stop words and Spacy to lemmatize corpus
● MALLET software to extract topics that recur across both corpuses
● Find the likelihood of each topic occuring in fanfic or NYT texts
● Evaluate the disproportionality of interest in subject matter in one dataset over
the other

11. Topic Modeling

12. Topic Probability Across Dataset

13. Topic Probabilities: Most Fanfic Skewed to Most NYT Skewed

14. Taboo Topics: Conclusions
● Fanfiction writers are much more comfortable exploring topics which tend to
be “off-limits” to mainstream fiction writers
● Sites such as AO3 (Archive of Our Own) where readers find fanfiction enable
anyone and everyone to put their work online
● “Unprofessional” platforms such as AO3 offers authors full freedom over
subject matter of their work, and authors often remain anonymous

15. Taboo Topics: Conclusions
● Could have to do with the limitations of corporate publishing
● Published authors may want to appeal to a wider audience, which deters them
from exploring more explicit topics in their narratives

16. Taboo Topics: Conclusions
● These results support Dan Fielding’s findings that fanfiction aims to fill the
gaps left in mainstream media
● Our work shows that a gap definitely exists when it comes to topics such as:
○ Bodies/emotions
○ Touching
○ Observation
○ Sex
● Following Diana Floegel’s “queer information world” theory, there is an
emphasis on intimacy and body language in the fanfictions, creating a space
where queerness is normalized and expansively explored.

17. 2) Character Centrism
Hypothesis:
● Fanfictions emphasize character relations, while NYT bestsellers are more
heavily plot-driven
Methodology:
Character centrism by character mentions
1. Ran BookNLP
2. Count number of words with ‘ner’ tag PERSON and third-person pronoun
words
3. Evaluate the disproportionality of interest in subject matter in one dataset over
the other

18. BookNLP Tokens

19. Results: Character Mentions
● 8.7% of the words in NYT books are character-centric
● 9.9% of the words in fanfic are character-centric
● Although this may seem inconsequential, this equates to about 1,200 more
character mentions in a novel-length work

20. Character Centrism: Conclusions
● Results suggest that mainstream fiction centres more strongly around
‘plotlines’ while queer fanfic tends to revolve more around interpersonal
experiences.
● Since fanfictions take place in worlds that have already been built by
authors, there is less focus on world-building and more focus on
character-building.
● This normalizes queerness and presents characters that young fans can
relate to and learn from.

21. Character Centrism: Conclusions
● What makes fanfiction unique is that it takes characters that readers already
feel some degree of connection to and adds more depth and variation to
connect even more to readers.
● Takes already beloved characters and adds an emotional depth or a new
layer of identity that they would have loved to see in the original.
● Brings back Diana Floegel’s concept of world queering.

22. 3) Emotional Vulnerability
Hypothesis:
● SMGYs are drawn to fanfiction because the subject matter is distinctively
designed to connect with readers on a deeper, emotional level
Methodology:
Events Analysis
● Event: Action undertaken by an agent
● Identify bigrams of form (‘Person,’ ‘verb’) and trigrams of the form (‘Person,’
‘verb,’ ‘object’)
● Separate analysis of “supersense” events, which aggregates verbs and objects
into broader categories (ex. “communication”)
● Log-likelihood ratio testing

23. Sample Bigram/Trigram Events

24. Sample Bigram/Trigram Events

25. Events Most Skewed Towards NYT Dataset

26. Events Most Skewed Towards FanFic Dataset

27. Supersense Events Most Skewed Towards Fanfic Dataset

28. Supersense Events Most Skewed Towards NYT Dataset

29. Emotional Vulnerability: Conclusions
● The supersense bigram most heavily skewed towards fanfiction is (‘Person’,
‘B-verb.body’), which would encompass events such as (‘Person’, ‘sigh’), (‘Person’,
‘smile’), (‘Person’, ‘smirk’), (‘Person’, ‘groan’)
● Fanfic actions all communicate emotion from one character to another
● Some of the fanfiction-skewed events have sexual undertones and convey intimacy
and demonstration of vulnerability

30. Emotional Vulnerability: Conclusions
● Mainstream fiction indicates an interest in public-facing social institutions such
as family, business, and careers (e.g. “lawyer”, “police,” “soldier”)
● Rather than reinforce public norms, fanfic provides alternative spaces of
feeling

31. Emotional Vulnerability: Conclusions
● Showing the vulnerable side of characters constructs a layer of realism within
the narratives that makes the queer information world feel familiar for SGMYs
● Reading about the feelings and internal thoughts of “re-constructed” fanfiction
characters provides a sense of relatability for SGMYs
● A qualitative observation: In relation to Fielding’s queernormativity, the high
degree of intimate communication between fanfic characters normalizes
feelings of insecurity, sadness, and vulnerability for LGBTQ+ youth

32. Concluding Remarks
● Clearly, young LGBTQ+ people are drawn towards fanfiction
● Previous research reports that fanfiction communities provide unique feelings
of belonging and support for young readers.
● Our work corroborates the work done by Dan Fielding, Diana Floegel and
other authors by offering more analytical insight into the works of fanfiction
themselves.

33. Concluding Remarks
● Our data suggests that fanfiction writers are creating a separate world for the
LGBTQ+ community
● The fanfictions thus further explore topics that are absent from traditional
media, such as more intimate forms of romance, or interactions where
characters open up about their insecurities and vulnerabilities
● Honing in on these experiences is useful to readers in their formative years
because they can see themselves in the stories and read about themes that
are absent from the mainstream fiction they may be reading

34. Concluding Remarks
● We find that fanfiction represents a distinct “queer information world”
consisting of the exploration of sexuality, intimacy, and vulnerability.
● Fielding’s findings prove that young fans seek to find representation and view
fanfiction as a way to combat the marginalization they feel as members of an
often ostracized community.
● Our hope with this project is to help break down the stigmatization of fanfiction
that comes from literary systems of value predicated on hierarchical social
norms and instead highlight the social value that creative work like fanfiction
offers to the world.

35. We should keep an open mind about the fact that the presence of
“stigmatized” topics in published literature is not necessarily bad;
enabling youth to learn about their feelings and sexualities is incredibly
important
There appears to be a sizable market for fiction centered around
LGBTQ+ characters, yet a lack of publications that are being produced
to fulfill this demand
Implications

36. We must avoid the mindset that fanfiction writing of of “lower grade”
than published work; fanfiction authors and their work should be
celebrated and brought to light
There is no one-size-fits-all model for “good fiction”
Diversity in the publishing world is needed if we want to achieve
complete queernormativity
Implications

37. 1. Does the web-based nature of fanfiction affect its popularity?
2. How do the queer information worlds crafted by fanfiction authors differ from
those created within mainstream published fictions that also focus on LGBTQ+
romances?
3. To what extent is the connection that SGMYs feel with fanfiction characters
reliant on the fact that readers are already familiar with aforementioned
characters? In other words, would our arguments still hold for informally
published writing on sites such as Wattpad that are fully original?
Future Research Questions

38. Thank you for listening!
Questions?
Nikoo Sarraf & Jennifer Chen