Fourth wall

The Fourth Wall is the theoretical construct that permits actors on a stage to not see and interact with the audience. It is a wall, invisible to the audience, but visible to the stage performers (and the wall they often seem to strike poses towards and direct their vocied internal monologues to). It is part of the suspension of disbelief.

"Breaking the Fourth Wall" refers, narrowly, to moments in which the performer acknowledges or even addresses the audience directly. More broadly, it refers to self-referentiality within works, or recognition of a work's fictionality. This is sometimes called "metafiction". While the term comes from theater and drama, it may be applied to nondramatic works, e.g., prose.

SF and the fourth wall

Experimental fiction is often SFnal in form, and given to breaches of the fourth wall. The SF community ("fandom"), itself, builds on SFal worlds with costume play, fanfiction, and other participatory endeavors. This participatory audience engages SF through costume play, fanfiction, amateur creations, crossovers, retellings, building-upon, and derivative works.

Fandom then overlaps between SF studies and the professional creators of SF -- writers, directors, programmers -- many of whom begin, or end, as fans.

Feminism and the fourth wall

Applied to feminism, the fourth wall suggests the ways in which we participants in the world blindly accept the assumptions we're given. Feminism and other critical analysis permits us to break the fourth wall and address the assumptions.

Wikis inherently break the fourth wall by encouraging the reader not just to read but to edit, and sometimes the text invitingly says, "hey you, click here, and edit me."

Applied to the FSFwiki, the fourth wall is suggestive of the air of neutrality which Wikipedia attempts to take. In Wikipedia, it's a more or less open process, permitting users to breach the fourth wall as needed to view the discussion on the "talk pages" and the history of any page. (Although the complexity of wikipedia and its dispute resolution processes is creating a de facto obscurity through complexity.) Because FSFwiki is both feminist and SFnal, we are integrating the User:pages into People categories as appropriate (see Category:FSFwikians).

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References

See wikipedia for more

• fourth wall
• list of fiction that breaks the fourth wall

Examples in FSF

• Xena: Warrior Princess fourth season episode, "Déjà Vu All Over Again"