ABSTRACT
This chapter links Judith Butler’s theory of gender with early theories in fan ftudies. It uses the combination to highlight a loophole in Butler’s theory, which explains that genders outside the binary can exist and be validated through community. It also uses this link to point out ways that early fan studies and dandom studies theories have been erasing queerness—while inadvertently celebrating transness. In fact, a deeper reading of these transphobic, binarist theories, uncovers a description of an entirely trans field, in which authors and characters celebrate having more than one gender on a wide scale. Anne Kustritz’s (2004) theory, originally intended to assert fans are heterosexual women, inadvertently implies even more: that the field of fan fiction itself is working to create nonbinary genders or gender expressions outside the gender binary. This paper proceeds to explain how such genders are not only celebrated and fantasized, but embodied and seen as attractive by others.
