Queer Women's Fandoms : Across Screens, Borders, and Desires

Moving beyond restrictive definitions of both ‘queer’ and ‘female fandom,’ the volume offers an innovative framework for understanding fan cultures shaped by globalization, platformized digital life, and shifting LGBTQ+ politics.

Queer Women’s Fandoms: Across Screens, Borders, and Desires brings together new research that rethinks what queer women’s fandoms are and why they matter now. Fan communities where homoeroticism is created by, for, or about women have flourished across streaming platforms, social media, and transnational pop culture. Yet these cultures are still often treated as marginal—or explained through narrow frames that reduce them to national contexts, fixed identities, or supposedly “derivative” forms of fandom. Moving beyond restrictive definitions of both ‘queer’ and ‘female fandom,’ the volume offers an innovative framework for understanding fan cultures shaped by globalization, platformized digital life, and shifting LGBTQ+ politics. Drawing on digital media studies, television studies, celebrity and fan studies, visual and sound studies, lesbian and feminist scholarship, queer theory, and globalization studies, contributors trace how images, personas, desires, identities, and subjectivities are produced, negotiated, and contested in and through fandom. Case studies range across television, trans and queer celebrities, K-pop idols, platform influencers, anime productions, and gossip networks. Clear, ambitious, and globally attuned, this collection highlights the complexity of queer women’s fandoms today, laying theoretical and analytical grounds for future research. The book will be an important resource for researchers of gender, media and culture, as well as celebrity and fan studies and digital humanities. It was originally published as a special issue of Popular Communication.