Earlier this year I was a guest on the excellent fandom-centric podcast, Fansplaining, when I was invited to talk to Elizabeth and Flourish about LGBTQ+ young adult fiction. As my conversations often do, we turned to works produced in fandom communities. During that conversation, I expressed thoughts on the unfettered nature of fanfiction and in my typically predominantly fandom-positive Utopian idealism, offered my perspectives on the importance of keeping fandom a free space – something I have talked about previously in my post On Selling and Silencing Fanfiction.
A brief diversion into the ‘commodity of kudos’ has been niggling at me since that discussion, and as my academic research leads me to explore in more depth the impact of capitalism on virtual communities, I have been forced to evaluate and interrogate some of the earlier ideas around fandom I espoused in that podcast. Specifically, I have been giving a lot of thought to the notion of fanfiction as a 'free' enterprise.
A brief diversion into the ‘commodity of kudos’ has been niggling at me since that discussion, and as my academic research leads me to explore in more depth the impact of capitalism on virtual communities, I have been forced to evaluate and interrogate some of the earlier ideas around fandom I espoused in that podcast. Specifically, I have been giving a lot of thought to the notion of fanfiction as a 'free' enterprise.