Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction Pocket Publics

A highly generative work, Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction: Pocket Publics promises to revitalize the study of the fan fiction writing community with a wealth of original contributions, including a focus on ethnographic methodology and the link to insider ethnography as practiced in anthropology, the diversity of different approaches to sexuality in fan fiction, the discussion of how fans understand their work in relation to charges of piracy, the focus on the nature of fandom as a public, and so much more.

Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

A timely work of scholarship that addresses the complex ways that slash communities move between being public and invisible, seeking a pocket of creative freedom to imagine a world not yet imagined.

Ruth Behar, author of The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart

While there has been an explosion of fan studies scholarship in the last two decades, we haven't had an ethnography of fan fiction communities since the early 1990s. Kustritz's Pocket Publics rectifies that, documenting the generation of slash fans who built much of fandom's infrastructure and many of its community spaces, both on and off the internet. This generation has had an outsized impact on contemporary fan cultures, and Kustritz shows how these fans created an alternative and subcultural public sphere: a world of their own. A fascinating and engaging book.

Francesca Coppa, author of Vidding: A History