Agency and self expression: Fan writing as life writing

Title

Agency and self expression: Fan writing as life writing

Creator

Abraham R.E.

Description

Fans, fandoms and fan activities have been part of every culture from time immemorial. Homers epics, Platos work all could be considered in a broad sense as belonging to the larger domain of fan activity or fan art as they are termed in modern day parlance. This paper examines India Forums a digital fan community based in India for audiences and fans of Indian television soaps/serials and attempts to understand how fanfiction and fan activities within this forum acts as means of self-expression and enable its fans to develop a sense of agency that is indigenous to the space in itself. This community is predominantly populated by women or gender anonymous and function as a space that allow fans to construct their own voices, identities and thereby agency, which is most often restricted to that space alone. The fans though not subaltern, in the technical sense of the term, as they belong to the urban space, have access to a computer and can read, write and speak English although not fluently, are still urban middle-class women who have been spoken for and never spoken themselves; and India Forums enable these unheard voices to be heard. This reading analyses the dynamics of this agential space, the politics of this agency and argues that all fan writing within this space functions as life writing within a hypertextual metaconversational paradigm which is not necessarily reflective of traditional forms of life writing using notions of revisionist Freudian psychoanalysis and paradigms of life writing. AesthetixMS 2021. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License

Source

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol-13, No. 2, pp. 1-13.

Date

2021-01-01

Publisher

Aesthetics Media Services

Subject

Fandoms; Fanfiction; Hindi TV soaps; Hypertextuality; Life writing; Psychoanalysis; Self-expression

Coverage

Abraham R.E., Christ University, Bengaluru, India

Rights

All Open Access; Gold Open Access

Relation

ISSN: 9752935

Format

Online

Language

English

Type

Article

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.21659/RUPKATHA.V13N2.47

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