Today we conclude Fujoshi Week (sad!) with Allegra Rosenberg, a fujo and journalist who once wrote 400,000 words of fan fiction. Next week we’ll move on. Unless something happens over the weekend …
FUJOSHI WEEK
Allegra Rosenberg Literally Wrote the Book on Fan Studies
She’s a scholar, a gentlewoman, and a fujo from way back.
Allegra Rosenberg is writing a book on the history of fandom in the West that starts at the dawn of mass culture, touches on Byron, picks up again circa Beatlemania, and goes through today. She recently wrote a piece on her Substack, “The Toxic Airborne Fujo Event,” that analyzes how Heated Rivalry has activated a large number of people who have never been in a fandom before and don’t know how to behave. But also, what even is “fandom?” Per Allegra, “fandom, as a personal and communal experience, is indeed an altered mental state. It’s a kind of lingering limerence, an ongoing low-level elevation from the everyday which sometimes heightens all the way into the kind of enjoyable madness that other people do drugs in order to access on demand, but fans can induce merely by engaging with their fandom object of choice.” When I read that, I knew I had to interrogate Allegra further. When I tracked her down, she was on a ship headed from Antarctica to New Zealand (she has a lot going on).
Tell me more about your book and how you came to be writing about fandom.
In 2010, when I was 13 or 14 years old,, I joined Tumblr, and it was all either uphill or downhill from there, depending on how you look at it. I was a big Dr. Who fan. I launched a YouTube channel. Fast-forward a bunch of years, I’m into a lot of different fandoms and my YouTube channel helps get me into college. I went to USC, which is where Henry Jenkins teaches. I became really interested in fan studies as an academic field and analyzing how this subculture came to be: Why is it that, when I love something, there are certain things that I do to perform that love in a community online or IRL? I came to New York and started grad school in 2020, and I became connected to this awesome guy named Ryan Broderick, who runs a newsletter called Garbage Day. I noticed that he was one of the only people writing about fandom online in a way that felt smart and measured and took it seriously as a component of the cultural sphere. But I would also often issue him corrections over DMs and be like, “Hey, you got this little thing wrong about fandom.” And eventually, he was just like, “Do you want to write a fandom column for me?” And that caught the attention of an editor who helped me find my agent. I’ve been working really hard on this book, and it’s coming out next year from Norton.
Are you writing from a historic framework, or is each chapter sort of like a case study of a specific fandom?
It’s roughly chronological. It’s definitely kind of a pop history, but there’s a fair bit of research from secondary sources. There’s a lot of celebrity histories out there, and there’s a lot of pop-culture histories, but no one has really done a fandom history. It requires weaving together all these different kinds of cultural history. You need to understand the basics of the history of celebrity in order to get to the basics of the history of fandom. The first half of the book is mostly about the 19th century, early 20th – that’s where I say that Byron was the Matty Healy of his day – and then the back half gets into what I would say is the true rise of modern fandom, which I would say starts between sci-fi fandom and popular-music fandom. And those two things intertwining together is what gives us the fandom culture we have today, at least in the West.
What was your reaction to Alex’s fujoshi article?
I was skeptical, as I always am about this kind of coverage. But then as soon as he started getting into the history and talking about Star Trek and there were some fan-lore links in there, I was like, Okay, he did the research. And he brought in Casey McQuiston, an old Tumblr mutual of mine. So yeah, I was vibing, I was grooving. There was that one paragraph that was suggesting that maybe we’re all on the same side. And I think that’s something that I’ve been saying for a while and that I appreciate being acknowledged.
But then there was backlash, and you were posting through it.
It was kind of upsetting to see because I span these two worlds. I am a fujo, and I’m also a journalist. I felt like a lot of the people up in arms about this article don’t understand the function of a journalist. My friend pointed out that the fic that he’d linked had more hits than Alex’s article will probably ever get. People see a glossy website and magazine, and they think it’s like Fox News or something like that. A consensus that I saw is that writing about women, writing about fans like this opens them up for harassment. It’s like, Who do you think is reading this? It’s just a thousand other gay people in New York.
There’s a widespread misconception that the media is this inherently predatory, exploitative thing. While that can be true, in this case I don’t think it was. I leaped in and defended journalism, which is sort of dying anyway. People have to write about what is going on with culture in the world. That’s their job. It’s my job. So I got pretty defensive.
At the same time, I’m empathetic to people who feel exposed, especially since owning that you enjoy MLM content is a pretty personal thing. I mean, I’m the queen of oversharing online and I still feel vulnerable admitting this.
The way you express yourself sexually and creatively at the same time is intimate. People in the fan-fiction-writing side of fandom don’t always want to acknowledge that they’re participating in a sexual subculture. So it’s a very, very fraught subject, one that I think was treated with dignity by Alex’s article, but many other people didn’t because maybe they felt attacked.
And fandom is very fond of seeing itself under threat because of the evolutionary knowledge that’s been passed down through generations of fans from times like in the 1990s, when fandom genuinely was under threat and there were cease-and-desists issued by Warner Bros. and Anne Rice and a lot of these corporations and individual creators who were for whatever reason against fan works and against, specifically, fandom content online. These were just growing pains in terms of internet fandom, and we’ve kind of moved past that. So when people online are freaking out — like, I saw someone saying about the article, “This is manufacturing consent to ban fan fiction.” What? What does that even mean? Or people are saying this is going to cause companies to ban fanfiction. People have an idea of what fandom is in relation to cultural producers that is about 20 years out of date, but that’s because it was such a huge deal back in the ‘90s and early 2000s.
When I was first talking to fanfic authors, I had this moment of being like, Oh, have I done my life wrong? I could have had a totally different relationship to writing and it could have been this totally free form of playful creative expression for me. And instead, I was always, like a dumbass, having it be part of my professional identity and only having one identity as a writer. If only I had realized that there was a different way to go about this!
As everyone who discovered fandom through Heated Rivalry has demonstrated, there are still people out there whose creative lives and communities fandom, and slash fandom in particular, could hugely benefit. And if they’re not hearing about it, they’re going to go through life not finding this other creative world that exists.
Do you write fan fiction?
I have written enormous amounts of fan fiction in my life. I don’t write any currently because I’m working on a book and I don’t have anything that’s activating me in that way. In 2020, I think I wrote 400,000 words of fan fiction. This year I haven’t written any.
So when you say that nothing is really activating you right now, do you mean that you are marked safe from the contagion that is Heated Rivalry?
I like the show, but I only watched it one time. I have certain things that I want out of a show that are going to make me want to write and want to engage with the fandom. While I thought the show was good, I’m more excited about maybe writing and reading fanfiction for the new Game of Thrones show, for example, because I like it when they don’t kiss on the show and I can make them kiss in my writing. Also – this is a very me thing – in Heated Rivalry, they’re beautiful, hot young men, great to look at on the screen. For me, I like to write about, how shall I say, weirder, crustier, more horrible individuals. These guys are pretty toned, and I need some decrepitude, maybe. They need to be weirder. They need to be in some horrible fantasy situation or trapped in a dungeon. I could trap them in a dungeon somewhere, but the thought of doing that does not personally excite me.
Whereas I’m like, Yeah.
For me, it’s more generative in a nonfiction way. It’s such an amazing way to watch the culture move.
Maybe I am actually a little bit too lost in the sauce to see it clearly at this point.
No, I mean, I’m so happy for you and for everybody else who is super into it. I’m just happy when people who have never been into slash discover that they’re into slash. For me, welcoming people to the sisterhood, that’s a great feeling. And I’m so hyped about Heated Rivalry being one of these gateways to fandom for people.
Click Your Way Out
Feed Me but make it literal: Emily Sundberg’s Grub Street diet.
Yerin Ha is the breakout star of this season of Bridgerton.
The ICE agents who detained a Columbia student yesterday (she’s free now, thanks to Zohran) gained entry to a Columbia residential building by claiming they were searching for a missing child.
How those Love Story sets captured ’90s New York so perfectly.
Good-bye to all that (boobs).
Did you know SNL doesn’t air until 11:30 p.m.? That’s so late! I’m gonna need to nap.
Love this! By Allegra’s mom.