Embodiment in Femslash Fan Fiction: Actors, Audiences and ‘Scribbling Women’
Fan fiction is writing by fans that takes characters from an established, copyrighted film, TV show, book, game etc. and imagines alternative narratives for those characters. In this paper, I will be talking about femslash fan fiction, a subgenre which focuses on romantic and sexual pairings of female characters, and particularly on the central role of embodiment to the genre. As Francesca Coppa has argued, the fabric of fan fiction is woven from the material bodies that write it, read it and move through it. From the actors’ bodies that animate the fiction (the shared knowledge of which fuels the relationship between the fan writer and her audience), to the marginalised bodies turning to fan fiction to see themselves and their desires play out in mainstream Hollywood narratives, to the predominantly female bodies producing and directing what Coppa calls ‘a living theatre in the mind’ for her readers, fan writing is a decidedly embodied artwork. I will look at two examples of Telanu’s The Devil Wears Prada fan fiction to show how embodiment in femslash (female-female) fan fiction defines its audience’s relationship with the stories it tells. While ‘Nice Girls Don’t’, an eroticised retelling of the film aligns closely with the setting of the original, ‘The Lily and the Crown’ reimagines the two main characters of the film in a story of space pirates. Yet both stories centrally rely on the reader’s shared knowledge of the bodies of Meryl Streep (Miranda Priestley) and Anne Hathaway (Andy Sachs). By analysing these works as literary texts, rather than digital objects outside the scope of traditional literary scholarship, I aim to show how the future of English Literature can incorporate an expanding and increasingly inclusive tide of digital fiction that has much to tell us about the interplay between text, reader, writer and the body.