Politicizing Texts

(I'm not sure what the post is for this week, but a few students have posted. So I'm just going to talk about a couple of the articles.)

I agree that fan fiction is a space that allows for societal views and political messages to emerge, sometimes. Some fans, I believe, simply write what they think is "cool" or continuations/elaborations on well-developed story ideas. But, sometimes a crafty writer partakes in the fan fiction and uses the story already formed (through comics or series or what have you) and uses that space as a forum for his/her sociopolitical ideas about what the text does or could mean in a larger sense. This speaks to Sedgwick's conception of reading as for both "fascination and love." With fascination, fans might play with, reconceptualize existing material into new forms or with layers of subtextual meanings. With love, fans might continue existing stories or expand on minor characters. Also, this seems to relate to Charvat's remark about the "great literary bloom" (in the Romantic Fiction article) whereby readers developed a thirst for book-length reading. In this new media form and transtextuality, queering allows for a space of great reader appetite and audience participation because of how queering, by definition, takes an idea and deviates from the norm, or expected, or conventional. The question that these discussions have raised for me is - what about queering texts outside of fan fiction? We've seemed to have linked them in class, as do some articles, and I'm not sure if they have to be. To queer a text it seems there must first be an original text, and we've established it's more than derivational work, so it is fan work?