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"Textual glory holes" : genre and community in fan kink memes

“Textual Glory Holes” examines a particular online fan community called a kink meme, in which fans exchange sexually-charged fanfiction as gifts. In this essay, I argue that, not only does the genre of fanfiction help to create and sustain the concept of kink, but that kink as a category is an interpellation of, experimentation with, and performance of the eroticism of genre in fanfiction. Furthermore, the kink meme community constitutes itself by performing this fannish erotics for each other in fiction and in sexualized feedback, resulting in a community that embraces the pleasures of this performance but sometimes distances itself from the power and political implications of the performance. Moments when fans do not distance themselves from this erotics of genre—one of unearthing and understanding diverse and diffuse pleasures—hold the potential to become what Audre Lorde calls “creative energy empowered,” a shared pleasure that can “lessen the threat of difference.” / text

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/ETD-UT-2010-05-1027
Date12 November 2010
CreatorsWall, Mary Amanda, 1985-
Source SetsUniversity of Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typethesis
Formatapplication/pdf

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