The Internet Fan Community of Harry Potter Books and Films: Case of Slash Fans

Anna Rogodzińska

English version of the article

Fandom slash is an online women community of fans of various texts of culture who interpret those texts according to the code of the community. That code relies on the knowledge of the work of canon and rules of interpretation that concentrate on a homoerotic relationship of male heroes of the canon. Those rules constitute a basis for new texts written by fans and for fans. Internet is treated here not as a homogeneous medium but as a set of social environments. The main question of this paper is how fans appropriate online environments such as websites and weblogs (Live Journal) as means for text distribution, communication and community development. The proposed methodology is an attempt to use ethnographic methods for online communities research through discourse and content analysis and participant observation.

KEYWORDS

fandom, fan communities, online communities, communities of practice, anthropology of the Internet, Internet ethnography