How Fanfic Helps Black Women Create The Stories TV Still Can’t Provide
How Fanfic Helps Black Women Create The Stories TV Still Can’t Provide
Fanfiction as a byproduct of one art form (a TV show, a book, a film, and so on) is perhaps one of the purest “consequences” in pop culture: While Star Trek fanfic is the modern jump-off point for modern analyses (and Kirk/Spock remains the gold standard of slashfic, i.e. fanfiction with characters of the same sex), it existed in decades prior. Its purpose is simple: If you love it, write (more of) it. Necessarily derivative, it is nevertheless a distinct art form in its own right, and interestingly, it is a movement overwhelmingly crewed by women.
Fanfiction’s function as a creative outlet – as pleasure for pleasure’s sake – is the one unchanging feature of the art form. Modern fanfic writers do it because they are among the savviest of pop culture consumers out there: They understand the tropes, the constraints, and even the industry process. These writers exist to broaden and further furnish the universes of their fandoms.
This moment feels like a feverish high point of expanded diversity on screen: People of colour (and black women in particular) have been enjoying an increase in both visibility and variety on television. It makes sense that the explosion of (Richonne) joy that catapulted me back into the waters of fanfiction coincides with an explosion in fanfiction starring black female characters and written by black women. But we are still dealing in partially built worlds – even the likes of Shonda, Issa, and Michaela Coel (in the UK) can only do so much – so it is still up to black fangirls to build up the remaining parts of their missing worlds (and the characters who inhabit them) in fanfiction.
In these stories, black women get to be more than just platonic friends and trusted advisers. They are more than just cogs in the wheel to keep the story moving, and they get to sin and come back from it, with rich and complex redemption arcs. They also get to be playful and fun, and flawed. Importantly, they also get to self-define their sexiness, and are uncomplicatedly desired without harking to either hyper- or de-sexualisation. In these small ways, fanfiction (especially as written by black women and girls) is the perfect vessel to advance the much-needed view that black women’s lives are more complex than films and television would have us believe. In the larger picture, these fics are acts of radical self-love and self-determination.
Reblogging because this bears repeating.