ABSTRACT
This chapter builds upon the emotional economy described in Chapter 2 by considering how, within that economy of ever-circulating emotions, these emotions stick to some bodies more than others: namely, bodies coded as feminine, raced, lower classed, and queer (borrowing from Ahmed). The chapter then focuses on fan demographics by exploring a small survey of fan identities. These results demonstrate that the majority of fans do identify as white women from/within the U.S. and the U.K., but they also complicate how people self-identify in terms of race and ethnicity, as well as the typical view of the fanwriter as a straight white woman. For the majority of those studied, race was largely invisible to the white-identified writers. The chapter concludes by considering the experience of Thomas when she was shunned by almost the entire Harry Potter fanfiction community after she was accused of plagiarism. Thomas’ experience is compared to the typical conversations on plagiarism within online fanfiction. Ultimately, it is concluded that within the larger emotion economy of fandom, not all are equally accorded symbolic and cultural capital within this system, especially if they are coded as ‘other’, i.e. non-white, nonmale, and nonheteronormative.
