Fan fiction

Fan fiction is a type of creative activity characterised by its relations of production. It is a literature produced by fans, and the subject of fan fiction is a production derived from primary sources which the fans do not possess.

Copyright laws and market interests, often corporate, prohibit fans from making money from this pursuit, and the lawful attacks by copyright owners defending their market interests can criminalise fan fiction writers and drive fan production underground even when fan fiction is distributed gratis. Out of a necessity to avoid such attacks, fan writers generally keep a low profile to their activities, and there is a common practice among fanficcers to include disclaimers in their stories, identifying the legitimate owners of the characters and/or settings about which they write.

From the perspective of lawmakers and market economics, the bulk of fan fiction exists, if it is perceived as existing at all, in the margins of cultural production, because it does not enter the market. The economic illegitimacy and cultural marginality of fan fiction keep fanficcers vulnerable, enabling the continued domination of the market by the people who control and legislate the ownership of cultural production, particularly widely-distributed, marketable popular cultural production (such as television and cinema, or the comic book industry).

Because men majoritarily control the market economics, fan fiction becomes an alternative, sometimes central area of cultural production for women. The production of a short story or novel, for instance, although it is labour-intensive, requires fewer and more accessible means than the production of a television show, or even of a fan-made movie, and can be carried out alone by isolated individuals. Women also create fannish communities, in which it is possible to exchange services such as beta-reading or mutual recommendations, criticism and appreciation, when they come into contact with each other as fans. Such services are not paid, because the end products will not earn money, and because this fandom may have little economic power, but they nonetheless enter into a form of remuneration in the exchange of cultural products.

Men also produce fan fiction, but because their relationship to the market is different from women's, under the patriarchal mode of production, their fannish endeavours do not share exactly the same characteristics. There is significant overlap between women's fannish networks and men's, but sexism necessarily colours the interactions between individuals and/or groups from each class.

There is also legitimate "fan fiction", that is, fan fiction derived from sources that have gone out of copyright, that have never entered into modern copyright law to begin with, or that are produced with the authorisation of the copyright owners. Examples of this are common, ranging from the use of mythic sources in literature, to the endless adaptions of Shakespeare, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to Star Wars and Star Trek tie-in novels. The last form, that of derivative work produced under the aegis of the copyright owners, can be called professional fan fiction.

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See also

• Fan
• Mary Sue
• Slash