Sleeps With Monsters: In Defence of Fanfiction, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Trust Myself
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| Title: | Sleeps With Monsters: In Defence of Fanfiction, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Trust Myself |
| Creator: | Liz Bourke |
| Date(s): | January 5, 2016 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Sleeps With Monsters: In Defence of Fanfiction, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Trust Myself |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Sleeps With Monsters: In Defence of Fanfiction, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Trust Myself is a 2016 essay by Liz Bourke posted at Tor.
Some Topics Discussed
- fanfiction and shame
- femslash
- questioning
- self-realization
- the queering of conventionality
Excerpts
Many people have written a lot of things concerning fanfiction. Most of them have a wider appreciation of the history—and the breadth—of the form than I do. Fanfiction and fairytale exist on the same continuum, I remember reading somewhere: it’s all part of the human impulse to take the stories we hear and make them our own. And that makes a lot of sense.
It’s less difficult than it used to be to find mainstream narratives that feature, for example, QUILTBAG protagonists. But it is still far from common. Fanfiction lets people take stories that everyone knows—or at least that many people know—and make them into stories that reflect even more ranges of experience.
It’s fundamentally embarrassing—for me, at least—to set out to write a post about how a form of writing that is renowned for its explicit sensibilities, its shameless approach to sexuality, ended up helping me understand myself better. It seems laughable, unserious, that the terribly uncertain confused me who puzzled over definitions of gender and sexuality—nonbinary? cisgender? asexual? bisexual? queer?—with the distant bafflement of someone who thought that it couldn’t be personally relevant except as an abstract exercise (because what did it matter how one’s axis of attraction tilted if one was comfortably celibate?) should have found in the archives of that much-denigrated subset of literature the shock of self-recognition. The idea that it was all right to be confused, and also all right to appreciate shameless sensibility.
I used to be one of the people who sniffed at fanfic. (I was much more certain that good taste was an absolute quality, five or six or eight years ago. I might have been a bit more insufferable then, too.) It’s a bit odd to have come around to the utter and urgent conviction of its importance. As a set of communities of literary production that permit the re-imaginings of mainstream narratives; that permit—and encourage—playfulness and experimentation and the queering of conventionality. But also as something of personal importance.
I’m not saying that this personal development is all down to reading fanfiction. A lot of factors contributed. But fanfiction—okay, while I’m being honest, I’ll admit it was mostly femslash—played a significant part. And as long as mainstream narratives still uphold a default sort of protagonist, and a default sort of experience, fanfiction is going to stay important.
And on the evidence, a lot of people enjoy producing and consuming it.
You might ask, Why am I writing this? And the answer is: I used to think I was alone in my confusion and my uncertainty. I used to be ashamed.
I’m still embarrassed. Hi: here are some soft and vulnerable innards—but I got used to talking about depression and anxiety and medication and coping methods, and really, it shouldn’t be easier to talk about mental illness than not knowing where you fit, should it?