Writing Oneself into Someone Else’s Story
Experiments With Identity And Speculative Life Writing in Twilight Fan Fiction
Keywords:
fan fiction, self-insertion, life writing, gender, feminist discourse theoryAbstract
Fan fiction offers rich data to explore readers’ understanding of gendered discourses informing the narrative construction of fictional and real-life identities. This paper focuses on gender identity construction in self-insertion fan fiction texts – stories that involve avatars of fan writers – based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels. Self-insertion fan fiction stories can be considered a form of life writing where authors play with their identity in a virtual context in texts that mix documentary elements and fiction; a combination that is here termed as speculative life writing. While earlier studies have discussed self-insertion fan fiction as a potentially empowering form of resistance to conventional gendered discourses, or a space for (young) women to explore and play with their gendered and sexual identities, among fans themselves self-insertion fan fiction stories – especially stories involving ‘Mary Sues’, characters that are highly idealised versions of the author – are often ridiculed. By drawing on concepts from narrative theory, discursive psychology and feminist discourse theory, the paper examines female protagonists in selected self-insertion fanfics categorised as heterosexual romance and relates these representations to readers’ comments about the stories. While self- insertion fan fiction as speculative life writing allows for creatively experimenting with gendered identities, it is also conditioned by hegemonic gendered discourses and the norms of the particular online community.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2015 Fafnir

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Content in Fafnir is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0).
Beginning in November 2019, authors retain full copyright without restrictions. By publishing with Fafnir, authors grant a non-exclusive license to Fafnir to distribute the publisher’s version of the work, and give Fafnir permission to grant reprint and/or translation requests in accordance with our open-access policy and our Creative Commons license.
Prior to November 2019, copyright for all published material is held by Fafnir, but authors have full permission to use their work as they wish (i.e., self-archiving, reprint requests, using for other projects, etc.).
In both cases, re-use or re-posting of material published in Fafnir must acknowledge original publication and include a link to the publisher version.