Exploring collective storytelling, sexuality, and diversification in slash fanfiction

Fanfiction is one of the most elusive yet intriguing forms of new online literacy. Writers of fanfiction take existing source texts from a variety of media, including but not limited to TV shows, books, movies and web comics, and create amateur stories around the characters and universes from their chosen media. Slash fanfiction, a subgenre of fanfiction, involves largely female writers pairing together characters and writing about their fictional relationships, sometimes explicitly or romantically, but not always. In this thesis, I will analyze how slash fanfiction writers tell their stories collectively, how they introduce sexual and gender diversity and significantly alter the original source text in ways that the original author could not have imagined. Ultimately, I will explore trends within the slash fanfiction community, and how they relate to society as a whole.