Speaker
Description
Fiction is an inevitable product of imagining "the other," which is often a crucial first step to understanding and combatting oppression. Fictional media, then, can in turn be understood as a promising site of connection, understanding, and growth. Media about people different from us can be a particularly rich site of conceptualizing, imagining, and remediating our understand of marginalized identities. This can be especially true of media from cultures not our own, where cultural mores and expectations differ, and opportunities arise to discover and create new avenues of identification, and reimagine ourselves and others in novel ways. The deeper our love for something runs, the more likely that we may experience it as a part of our personal (and interpersonal) identity—seeing ourselves as a "fan" of that thing. This transformative power only multiplies when it extends to the creation of transformative works, as is often the case in fandoms, or communities of fans of fictional media. In this presentation, I will describe how my identity as a "fan" has interacted with other facets of my identity to produce rapid, deep, and often surprising change and growth; I will describe phenomena I have encountered arising from intra- and intercultual influence in fandom, and the smaller ways that I have witnessed love of fiction extend others' understanding; and I will invite participants to consider what they love, how that love may be inviting them to grow, and what opportunities they might find to extend that invitation to others.