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A major component of many fan Web sites created by girls is fan ction. Fan ction is a common, long-standing feature of fandom in which fans write new stories using preexisting media characters and settings. The stories are neither sanctioned by the creators of the original text nor published for prot. For example, tween and teen girl fans of the television program Gilmore Girls have created what some call Trory fan ctionction related to two of the shows characters, Rory and Tristan. While these two teenage characters never engaged in a romantic relationship, Trory fan ction authors believe they should have, and have written their own romantic stories using the characters and settings of the program. Another aspect of creativity within girls fan culture is the publication of zines, notably fanzines. Zines are self-published documents on any of a variety of topics, such as music, television programs, politics, literary genres, celebrities, and so on. Zines may include articles, essays, poetry, or simply personal ramblings. Some of the earliest zines were actually fanzines produced either by fan clubs or by individual fans. While the science ction zine The Comet, published by a science ction fan club beginning in 1930, is generally considered to be the rst fanzine, the term itself was not coined until 1940. While many zines published by girls today are personal zines (perzines), many others are related to specic objects of fandom. Whether handwritten and photocopied, desktop published, or Webbased, fanzines are yet another means by which girls can actively engage in a broader, international network of other fans. Girl-Based Fan Culture. With the exception of teen idol magazines, none of these elements of girls fan culture are unique to girls. In fact, most began 60 or 70 years ago with science ction fans and continue today across a broad range of demographic groups. However, it is the combination of these elements along with the specic objects of fandom that contributes to a unique girl-based fan culture. While many aspects of girls fan culture are mass-marketed (magazines, boy bands, and so on), advances in technology have enabled girls to participate in a more active form of cultural production related to their fandom. Today, girls are appropriating or creating these cultural artifacts to create a fan culture that works for them. Further Reading
Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Lewis, Lisa A., ed. (1992). Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. New York: Routledge. Mazzarella, Sharon. (2005). Claiming a Space: The Cultural Economy of Teen Girl Fandom on the Web. In Sharon R. Mazzarella, ed. Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 141160. McRobbie, Angela. (1991). Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

SHARON R. MAZZARELLA
FAN FICTION. Fan ction is amateur ction based on the worlds and/or characters of preexisting texts. Most commonly, a fan ction text is based on a popular book, lm, or television show and published pseudonymously for consumption by a fan community. Fan ction is usually written by females (Jenkins 1992, p. 1) and is organized by the particular source text it uses, such as Star Trek, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings. It comprises a

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set of different subcommunities with overlapping memberships on the sites of publication. Sections for review provide opportunities for reader feedback. With the dominance of Internet-based fan ction, it is now harder to know the ages, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, family statuses, and sexual preferences of the writers, readers, and participants of fan ction. Women, Girls, and Fan Fiction. It has often been debated why it is mainly women who write fan ction, but it is clear that the Internet has led to a dramatic increase in the participation of girls. One major reason for this increase is the availability of the Internet as a creative outlet that can be accessed from within the domestic constraints of many girls lives; another is the community of engagement it provides with shared cultural forms. Fan ction is illegal in terms of its copyrighted source texts. However, legal action against fan ction very often makes reference to its supposed moral threat in terms of promoting pornography and of endangering minors, particularly girlsboth in what they circulate and how they circulate it. Fan ction communities are also concerned about this possible impact on minors. It is standard practice for both fan ction archives and individual stories to include a caveat that not only disclaims ownership of the source text but also warns readers about the presence of possibly inappropriate material and provides an age-based rating for the story in terms of its sexual and other adult content. The Internet allows domestic spaces to contact a wider world, as the novel did in previous centuries. While the use of the Internet by women has not inspired the same kind of consternation that was raised with novel writing and reading, anxiety about exposure to inappropriate material does appear in discussions of how girls use the Internet. When concern over fan ction is raised in the media, it is almost always with reference to its possible sexual content, and it is true that the dominant stylistic inuences on fan ction are romance ction and pornography. The fear that fan ction might be dangerous for girls assumes that they are interested in its romance and fantasy elements and will thus be, either unwittingly or eagerly, exposed to pornography. Within fan ction communities, however, fan ction is routinely distinguished from romance and porn. Fan ction scholarship usually also distinguishes fan ction from both romance and porn, but it does so in order to claim that porn (or erotic writing, depending on a scholars preference) injects subversive potential into the eld of romance. Categories of Fan Fiction. The three overarching genres for fan ction are generated by the communities themselves and explicitly categorize fan ction as being about sex and gender. These categories are het, meaning stories featuring heterosexual relationships; slash, meaning stories featuring same-sex relationships (although in most communities slash means relationships between men, and lesbian stories are called femslash); and gen, which is variously dened but in practice means stories that are not predominantly based on romantic relationships and are thus neither het nor slash. While slash is very important to the histories of some fandoms (such as the British television series Dr. Who) and to the present practices of others (such as Harry Potter), most Internet-based fan ction in the most popular fandoms is het. Under these general categories fall a range of more particular genres, like angst, for melodrama centered on a single character, and drabble, for a 100-word story. Alongside the disclaimer and the rating, almost every fan ction story is preceded by a pairing, which identies the romantic or sexual couples in the story (sometimes more than one couple) or, for gen stories, names the character or characters on which the story centers. In fan ction, pairing and rating function as more important distinctions

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than genre categories (such as comedy or angst) and are also the standard search categories for fan ction archives. The most spectacular subcommunities within most fan ction communities are formed around pairings. Pairings are the opposite of the phenomenon called shipping. Ships (short for relationships) support certain pairings, usually at the expense of others and with passionate antagonism towards pairings that would disrupt their own. Girls and Fan Fiction. The participation of girls in fan ction is characterized by a range of tendencies. Some describe the demographics of fandoms and subcommunities; for example, it is clear that the Harry Potter fandom and Harry-Ginny shipping within that fandom are populated more by younger girls than many other fandoms or fan ction subcommunities. But other tendencies characterizing girls engagement in fan ction are not so clearly a reection of demographics as of dominant perceptions of girlhood. Within and without fan ction communities there is a perception that certain genres, writing styles, and reading practices are more likely to be preferred and performed by girls and that some are even girlish no matter who performs them. The most prominent examples of this are known as Mary Sue, a dismissive term used to identify a character or story that is excessively idealized and clich. The actual Mary Sue is an original characterthat is, one not part of the source text or so drastically changed from the source text as to be unrecognizable and is judged to be a wish-fullling projection of the authors own self. Writing Mary Sue stories is widely dismissed as immaturethe work of a girl not yet able to write fantasies that would be of interest to others. Fan ction requires a continual assessment of the relationship between fantasy and reality as it is established by both the source text and the experiences of community members. Canon is the name for material faithful to the source text and thus also identies the agreed framework through which writers and readers experiences are translated for other members of the fan ction community. Because it connects the diverse backgrounds and locations of community members, canon forms a common ground for the community, and despite allowances for interpretation, no narrative or characterization can be bad fan ction if it is canon. Canon is also, however, used to identify its opposite: those things that are not really canon and are therefore more or less fanon. Fanon material is not faithful to the source text but is widely used and thus recognizable. Because fanon is less tied to knowledge of the source text or to effective original writing, it is also associated with the immature experimentalism often thought to characterize the writing and reading of young fan ction writers. Neither what counts as fanon nor what characters are considered Mary Sue is a constant for any fandom. Therefore, such internal dismissals often say more about the idea of girlhood that fan ction draws from the world outside than about what girls objectively do in fandoms. However, the attraction of girls to fan ction is clearly an attraction not so much to images of themselves as to the creative and communal opportunities that fan ction brings into their personal spaces. Thus fan ction emphasizes the self-assessment, self-representation, and peer relations that are central to girl culture more broadly. See also Fan Culture Further Reading
Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson, eds. (2006). Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

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Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Kustritz, Anne. (2003). Slashing the Romance Narrative. Journal of American Culture 26, no. 3, 371385. Lamb, Patricia Frazier, and Diana L. Veith. (1986). Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines. In Donald Palumbo, ed. Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 235255. Penley, Constance. (1997). NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America. London: Verso.

CATHERINE DRISCOLL
FAT GIRL. Being an overweight or obese girl in contemporary culture can be viewed as a health concern, but, more important in girl culture, it has profound social consequences. The designation fat girl is a derogatory one in Western culture. For many young girls fat is a four-letter word, meaning that it is as offensive as the more familiar obscenities. Current societal standards of beauty in North America emphasize the importance of thinness, which drives many young girls to desire and attempt to develop an impossibly thin body shape. If the thin ideal has not already proven harmful and unrealistic, it is becoming so with the current obesity epidemic sweeping North America. In 2005 the American Obesity Association reported that approximately 30 percent of children (age 611) and adolescents (age 1219) are overweight (dened as having a Body Mass Index, or BMI, in the 85th percentile or higher) and over 15 percent are obese (with a BMI in the 95th percentile or higher). Despite the increasing health concerns associated with excess weight (particularly in childhood), the discrepancy between actual body weight and the media standards of thinness leads many girls to believe that their bodies are simply unacceptable. Stigmatization of Fat Girls. Stigmatization of overweight and obese girls is common in North America. Although body size is tied to many factors, such as genetics and metabolism, many believe that ones body weight is simply a matter of self-control. This belief, coupled with the pervasive notion that thinness is the only way to achieve beauty and success, gives rise to the idea that being fat is a marker of laziness, meanness, stupidity, and sloppiness. Within their social worlds, obese girls can face stigmatization from peers, educators, health professionals, and even family members. Negative attitudes toward overweight and obese people are seen in children as young as 3 years of age and increase during early childhood when cultural norms rst become understood and internalized. As a result, young girls who are overweight or obese often experience a host of social and psychological consequences. By adolescence, many overweight girls experience some form of social isolation. Being overweight is often a barrier to being accepted into girls friendship circles, and even with friends around, body shape and size inuence a girls position in her social network. Overweight adolescent girls are less likely to report having a best friend, feel more socially isolated, and are often located on the periphery of their social networks. However, greater participation in school sports and other activities may mitigate this social isolation. Weight bias also extends to romantic relationships, particularly affecting young girls entering the dating world. Overweight and obese girls are more likely to have never dated and less likely to have a boyfriend than their slimmer peers. Very high proportions of overweight adolescent girls report being targets of weightrelated teasing, jokes, and derogatory name calling, particularly in elementary and middle

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