Reading the Romance of Fan Cultural Production: Music Videos of a Television Lesbian Couple

摘要

This paper considers fan music videos centering on Bianca and Lena, characters on the American daytime soap opera All My Children from 2003-2004. Though their romance was canonical, for many fans the videos provide more satisfying narratives than the show's episodes and hence illustrate how fans invested in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) characters and storylines renegotiate the texts of popular media. Yet while fan cultures have often been discussed as sites of counter-hegemonic energy for queer representation, they may also be quite conventional around love, sex, and relationships. In this vein, the Bianca/Lena videos generally drew on dominant discourses of monogamous romantic love that figure in the normative mainstreaming of certain forms of queer identity over others. Discussion of the music videos in this paper situates them in relation to audience creativity and queer fandom more broadly, and illuminates the significance of fan cultural production with respect to the contours and stakes of queer representation.