I think therefore I ship: language, gender, and food as rhetorical practices in BL fanfiction

Abstract

Fanfiction serves as a site of linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural engagement. In this project, I use Burke's dramatistic pentad to analyse how fanfic authors work as "double-agents" in their story creation. I consider linguistic, embodied, and cultural/food rhetorics in fanfictions for the Chinese drama The Untamed, also known as Chén Qíng Lìng (CQL). This drama is a live-action adaptation in a group of canons consisting of many remixes: the original metatext is a webnovel written by 墨香铜臭 Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù; other adaptations include a donghua (animated series), manhua (graphic novel series), audio drama, two spin-off live-action movies, and manga. Fanfiction authors must consider the expectations of a diverse global audience who has differing levels of familiarity and sensitivity to the nuances of the canon material. Wolfgang Iser believes that it is the "gaps, the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader that give rise to communication in the reading process." Fanfiction can subvert these gaps as the community is able to be interactive with each other. Fandom studies is a continuously evolving space as new material is released and adapted/remixed. Henry Jenkins, Jungmin Kwon, and Suresh Canagarajah provide some key frameworks for my analysis of the CQL fandom's development. Henry Jenkins informs us of the participatory culture that influences fandom culture as well as transmedia storytelling. Kwon works with straight female fans of MLM texts and offers insights into how the BL media movement has developed. Suresh Canagarajah highlights how meaning-making develops, in particular with translingual practices; this is most apt due to the multicultural, multilingual practices that the assumed Western writers adopt in the MDZS/CQL fandom. As this project explores, fanfiction writers collaborate in complex rhetorical spaces defined by multiple entry points, multiple cultural contexts, and, in the case of this project, multiple canons. These combine to create specific vocabularies and systems within given fanfiction communities. Chapter One focuses on how fanfic authors of assumed Western backgrounds adopt translingual practices and evolve the meaning-making of the fandom's shared vocabulary. This chapter integrates Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" alongside Suresh Canagarajah’s concept of "translingualism" to unpack the way that a danmei lexicon develops in the fandom. Through my interviews with fanfic authors, I unpack some of the choices authors make, alongside a more quantitative analysis of Orphan_Account fanfics, to consider how choices in language communicate literacies and authorities in fandom spaces. Chapter Two addresses fanfic authors' use of sexual and gender dynamics and modes of expression. In exploring embodied rhetorics, I focus on how gender is codified within the canon text and how the protagonist, Wei Wuxian, counters the coding given to him as the designated "female" of the relationship, in addition to interpreting what happens when fanfic writers play around with gender by switching canon dynamics. In this way, fanfic serves as a space for play with how bodies are manipulated through narratives. I incorporate some discussion of how widespread fan-canons (fanons) participate in both coding Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji and in generating critical discourses around binary coding and characterisations. Chapter Three concerns diasporic narratives and food rhetorics. I consider the use of modern food cultures as an example of subjectivity and self-insertion which allows writers to incorporate various markers of culture and authority. Diasporic fic writers promote themselves as agents of authority in this scene, often completely rewriting the canon through modernised contexts. The multiplicity and meaning of the canon is viewed through the way fanfic authors have decided to address "food as a love language" in their writing, demonstrating various expertise in platform and cultural familiarity. These three chapters establish a framework for understanding fanfiction as more than derivative work, and instead as a site of linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural engagement. In examining CQL's fandom through the three lenses, the project puts fanfic authors as active participants in meaning-making, to negotiate canon and community norms within the discourse community.