In this essay, I reconsider the relationship between romance and pornography in fan fiction, proposing that fan fiction allows us to think about them as genres that are not only compatible but intimately connected. Although romance and porn have been popularly associated with women and men, respectively, fan fiction intersects them and reflects on both. Fan fiction might be part of a recent commercial diversification of pornography into the sexual practices of women, but it is also a new mode of popular romance fiction. Considering what fan fiction can tell us about the intimacy of romance and pornography, I place fan fiction in a history of literacy, popular culture, and the private self, concluding that pornography is structured in relation to the conventions of romance, and romance fiction is sustained by porn's ecstatic relationship to exposure. Fan fiction, belonging to the categories of both porn and romance and yet to neither, allows us to rethink their form, content, and significance.
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Pornography and romance share a number of common investments - in the power of a sex/gender system to determine practices (that is, both acts and identities), in moving a mass audience, and, although they approach them very differently, in interpersonal relationships. Fan fiction inherits the most criticized elements of both romance fiction and pornography as modes of popular culture, and where it does enter the public sphere, it is mostly seen as aesthetically inferior, morally dubious, or at best a curiosity. In different ways, romance fiction and pornography both emerged as genres that are in poor taste: as cheap literature/art, as predictable, as cultural forms that are presumed to have less value for being so predictably effective. Reading fan fiction might lead one to think that romance and pornography are not only historically contiguous and able to work together, but perhaps inseparable. (94-95)
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