This thesis uses ethnographic research into online media fandom, focusing on self-reflexive
analytical documents that fans call meta, to investigate longstanding questions
about the nature of virtual community. It argues that virtual documents should be seen
as complete and complex interactions in their original form and as social contexts in
their own right, and presents a new approach to ethnographic methodology and ethics
suited to working in this context. Fans have incorporated various technologies into the
infrastructure that constitutes their community, and these have had various effects on
the structure and substance of fannish documents and interactions – and on the
character of the community as a whole. The stability and visibility of the digital archive
is an important feature of virtual community – one that makes fandom more visible,
accessible, and historically grounded for both old and new members.
This research also deals with conflict, not as a necessarily divisive force but as a
natural and important part of how communities evolve and how members negotiate
and articulate what their community should be. It discusses fanfiction as a
controversial and sometimes problematic genre, and considers trigger warnings as the
solution fans have developed to protect vulnerable members of their community from
potentially harmful content (such as rape). It also examines conflict with outside
authorities, like creators and the administrators who control the virtual spaces that fans
inhabit. These conflicts illuminate creativity and feminism as fannish values,
presenting fandom as a community that embraces sex-positive female sexuality. More
importantly, they suggest that the creation and maintenance of a ‘safe space’ where all
members feel respected and comfortable is a key feature of online community. In
addition, fannish storytelling (particularly the creation of what fans call fanon) is part
of the production of local knowledge, of boundary mechanisms that mark and separate
members of the community from outsiders. These stories as part of the process by
which fans position themselves within the broader community – and in so doing, locate
themselves within smaller cohorts of fans who affirm and support aspects of their
personal experiences and marginalised identities (e.g. as women, members of the
LGBTQIA+ community, or people of colour) through the reorientation and
appropriation of story