Archive of our own: uma análise bourdieusiana da fanfiction

Abstract

This work will analyze the phenomenon of fanfiction, a literacy practice developed by fans of entertainment industry products such as movies, series, bands, and singers, who recreate original works through transformative writing. Like any social space, the fanfiction community is permeated by disputes of interest and has its own way of functioning, which is learned and reproduced by the agents participating in this space. Fanfiction gains a distinctive shape through the internet, where these stories have become popular, being published on specific sites, also created by fans, for the free sharing of their productions. Thus, an analysis and description of the rules, values, and social orders created and reproduced through fanfiction was conducted, focusing on the largest fanfiction publication site, the Archive of Our Own. The theoretical framework used was Bourdieu's theory and its concepts of field, habitus, illusio, and symbolic capital, as operational categories in order to unravel the structuring of fanfiction and its institutions. The results of the analysis show that, despite its interrelationship with other fields, fanfiction has its own characteristics that differentiate it from other spaces of production – it has its own notions of authorship, social hierarchy and has developed a unique form of consumption-production through its system of tags and tropes – in which AO3 plays an important role in resistance to the processes of curtailing and commercializing fan stories.