Porn bans, purges, and rebirths: the biopolitics of platform death in queer fandoms

Abstract

Queer transformative media fandoms have experienced multiple platform deaths due to “adult” content bans that remove queer content because it is considered “not safe for work” or pornographic. Such bans are biopolitically charged because they effectively regulate and erase queer sexualities and genders. Newer fan-created or moderated platforms such as Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Discord receive credit for rescuing queer fanworks and communities. These platforms are developed and used in direct response to content bans, and they therefore maintain a reputation for including queer people and their works. However, biopolitics continue to perpetuate marginalisation within newer fandom spaces because they ignore inequities that intersect with sexuality and gender. In particular, platforms like AO3 and Discord continue to perpetuate racism in fandom. Using data from interviews with queer fans and platforms’ features and policy statements, this paper traces how platform deaths and rebirths both respond to and perpetuate biopolitics throughout queer fandoms online.

Keywords:

• Queer
• transformative fandom
• biopower
• biopolitics
• Archive of Our Own
• Discord

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Here, “queer” is an umbrella term meant to encompass people who have non-normative genders (i.e., people who are not cisgender) and sexualities (i.e., people who are not heterosexual).

2 White feminism refers to a branch of (so-called) feminism that centers struggles of white and, often, cisgender, Western, and wealthy women while ignoring and/or diminishing oppressions faced by women of color, trans, poor, and/or non-Western people.

3 https://fanlore.org/wiki/Main_Page

4 CSS is a programming language.

5 “TERF” denotes a “trans exclusionary radical feminist.” While it is questionable to equate a TERF with feminism, a TERF is a person (typically a cisgender woman) who invalidates trans people’s (typically trans women’s) existence (see Burns, 2019).

6 Participants who moderate for AO3 noted that they could not provide specific answers to some of my questions about moderation, especially those related to how particular harassment cases are handled. They spoke more generally about these topics.

7 M/M is a category of fic that indicates a sexual and/or romantic relationship between men.

8 While racism is an everyday process in fandom communities, there are some major touchstone examples of racism in internet fandoms’ history. These include RaceFail ‘09, wherein white people attacked fans of color for speaking out about racist fandoms (see, https://fanlore.org/wiki/RaceFail_%2709); publication of and responses to the J2 Haiti fic, which used the 2010 Haitian earthquake as a backdrop for a slash fic that included racist portrayals of people of color (see, https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_J2_Haiti_Fic); and Te’s 2006 LJ post, “My Other Problem with Recent DC Events,” which chronicles racism in DC Universe-based fanfiction (http://thete1.livejournal.com).

9 This post was deleted and later re-posted, after being edited. The new version erased all comments and did not allow for new comments.

10 Though a discussion of alternative methods for handling harassment and classificatory inequities lies outside the scope of this paper, an excellent discussion of Design Justice’s (Costanza-Chock, 2020) relevance to these problems can be found in Blackwell et al. (2017).

11 Excerpts from this letter can be accessed at: https://fanlore.org/wiki/What_Everyone_Should_Know_About_Fanfiction.net

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diana Floegel

Diana Floegel, received their Ph.D. from the Rutgers School of Communication and Information. Their research applies queer theoretical lenses to sociotechnical phenomena including people’s information creation practices; the design and development of algorithmic systems; and equity issues in libraries.