Talking by letter: the hidden history of female media fans on the 1990s internet

Abstract

Women in the early 1990s went online for the first time and brought media fandom with them. Drawing on oral history interviews conducted with fans in 2012, this article describes the ways in which women’s burgeoning participation in internet spaces both defied and reinculcated pre-existing gendered divides in computing. Women used the new affordances of the internet to create and to augment social relationships with far-flung like-minded fans and to forge new communities devoted to their particular interests, especially via self-hosted mailing lists. They also established web archives devoted to preserving and maintaining their own fan production and history. However, the technical constraints of mailing lists and early archives drove fans to third-party journal sites in increasing numbers after the year 1999, setting up conflicts between fans and site owners with fans at the disadvantage. Nonetheless, the legacy of the first media fans online primed the expansion of fandom and especially fan fiction after the year 2000, to the extent that the internet is now understood to be for fan fiction.

Keywords:

• Fandom
• fan fiction
• internet history
• mailing lists
• online archives
• online platforms

Acknowledgement

Research for the Fan Fiction and Internet Memory project was supported by grants from the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Committee on Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Transcripts of all the interviews are available at the University of Iowa Libraries.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Horbinski

Andrea Horbinski holds a PhD in modern Japanese history with a designated emphasis in new media from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, “Manga's Global Century,” is a history of Japanese comics from 1905 to 1989. She served on the Board of Directors of the Organization for Transformative Works from 2012 to 2015, and was elected to the Board of Directors of the Ada Initiative as Secretary from 2015 to 2017. On Twitter she is @horbinski.