Queer women’s fandoms : new global perspectives

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of queer women’s fan communities worldwide. Yet there remains a paucity of research on queer women-centered fan cultures. To fill this gap, this introduction to the special issue “Queer Women’s Fandoms: New Global Perspectives” proposes a revised model to comprehend, theorize, and critique today’s queer women-concerned fannish discourses increasingly complicated by entangled processes of globalization and digitization. We problematize the identity-based approaches, geographical-bounded focuses, and disciplinary axioms that dominate existing queer women’s fandom scholarship. Our proposition of queer women’s fandoms as a critical field of inquiry emphasizes the plural forms and potentialities of fan cultures concerning female homoeroticism, as well as their relations to local and global LGBTQ+ politics. Together with the issue contributors, we offer fresh research possibilities to interrogate intertwining sociocultural, technological, and economic-political transformations implicated in various queer women’s imaginaries, spaces, and communities concerning gender, sexuality, and desire.

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