Fanfiction: O modelo autoral da escrita de ficção de fãs de produtos da indústria do entretenimento

Abstract

This work aims at analyzing and theoretically describing the specific authorship model built around the practice of writing fan fiction — fictional stories written by fans based off products from the entertainment industry and shared in online fan communities. To accomplish that, fan fiction is considered the basis of a specific discursive field, herein named “fanwriting”. The limits of such discursive field are established through categories originated from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and Dominique Maingueneau’s adaption of such theory to discursive studies. From there, techniques and principles of netnography were applied to develop the study. Netnography consists in a period of participatory observation in an online digital research field, followed by data analysis and corresponding theory elaboration. The selected research field is Nyah!Fanfiction, the second leading Brazilian online platform dedicated to the publishing of fan fiction texts. Besides that, some pages from Twitter and Facebook were used as secondary sources of data. To guide the analyses, categories from Michel Foucault’s approach to the authorship discussion were elected. Foucault describes the “author function” as being a function that belongs essentially to discourse, fundamentally distancing it from the view of the author as an individual. From that, the argumentation in this work is centered around the categories of authorial attribution, authorial appropriation of discourses, the building of the author figure, and the social status of the author. The analyses showed that the fanwriting field is characterized by a particular cultural and economic model, founded in the participatory culture, initially described by Henry Jenkins, and in a gift economy, a type of economic regime discussed by Giuseppe Cocco, Gilvan Vilarim, and others. Such reading leads to the conclusion that the fan fiction author figure does not exactly correspond to an individual but is rather a discursive function of an essentially collaborative building, which directly relates to the cultural and economic paradigm within which fan communities are developed. In such scenario, the authorial process is characterized by its open and collective nature, and by the multiple forms in which it is shared with the community, which contributes directly and indirectly to the texts through many mechanisms, some of which can only be verified within the fanwriting field, due to the nature of the social relations that can be observed in its interior. The authorship model of fanwriting is thus marked by complex discursive operations that, ultimately, allow fan writers to overcome the apparent conflict that exists between their borrowing of elements from source texts and the current notions of originality, creativity, and intellectual property.