Multilingual Fanfic

Fan studies scholarship commonly frames fan communities as spaces of creative freedom: both freedom to expand under-defined spaces within a fandom, and freedom to explore fantasies and identities whose expression is curtailed in the real world. In this project, our goal is to draw attention to the ways in which the “freedom” of fan-spaces is contextual, shaped by language; real-world culture, politics, and law; and the technical and taxonomic constraints of individual online spaces, using the Harry Potter fandom, one of the largest worldwide. This project examines how the affordances and conventions of three archives (Italian efpfanfic.net, Russian ficbook.net, and primarily-English fanfiction.net and AO3), and the languages and cultures of their writers, have contributed to differences ranging from rating and genre to warnings, characters, and pairings.