Brotherly Love: Remaking Homosociality and Masculinity in Fan Fiction

Studies on fan fiction have traditionally employed ethnographic or literary methods to study the activities of fans. Since the 1980s scholars have focused particularly on slash fiction as unique and subversive, but this has been at the cost of devaluing other genres of fan fiction as less critical of the status-quo. By studying a sample of fan fiction which encompasses a variety of genres, and analyzing the sample using mixed methods of content analysis and textual analysis, similarities between genres emerge, as well as a breadth of both critical and uncritical treatments of the construction of masculinity.