Queer Women's Fandoms
Across Screens, Borders, and Desires
Eve Ng editor Jamie J Zhao editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:14th Jul '26
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Queer Women’s Fandoms: Across Screens, Borders, and Desires brings together new research that rethinks what queer women’s fandoms are and why they matter now.
Fan communities where homoeroticism is created by, for, or about women have flourished across streaming platforms, social media, and transnational pop culture. Yet these cultures are still often treated as marginal—or explained through narrow frames that reduce them to national contexts, fixed identities, or supposedly “derivative” forms of fandom. Moving beyond restrictive definitions of both ‘queer’ and ‘female fandom,’ the volume offers an innovative framework for understanding fan cultures shaped by globalization, platformized digital life, and shifting LGBTQ+ politics. Drawing on digital media studies, television studies, celebrity and fan studies, visual and sound studies, lesbian and feminist scholarship, queer theory, and globalization studies, contributors trace how images, personas, desires, identities, and subjectivities are produced, negotiated, and contested in and through fandom. Case studies range across television, trans and queer celebrities, K-pop idols, platform influencers, anime productions, and gossip networks. Clear, ambitious, and globally attuned, this collection highlights the complexity of queer women’s fandoms today, laying theoretical and analytical grounds for future research.
The book will be an important resource for researchers of gender, media and culture, as well as celebrity and fan studies and digital humanities. It was originally published as a special issue of Popular Communication.
“An excellent collection whose warrior nuns, sapphic K-pop fans, and queered older sisters expand fan and audience studies’ scope in exciting and important ways. Refreshingly transnational, its meticulous, richly-detailed case studies and superb introduction by Zhao and Ng model big tent, big stakes work.”
Jonathan Gray, University of Wisconsin – Madison, co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World.
“Ng and Zhao are at the vanguard of a new wave of scholarship on “sapphic” fan formations. Queer Women’s Fandoms: Across Screens, Borders, and Desires deftly navigates the double binds that have delayed a truly intersectional approach to these complex communities. The essays in this volume (and its valuable introduction) refuse to atomize gender, sexuality, region/nation, theory and politics, resulting in nuanced analyses that will delight readers interested in media representation and participatory audiences within a transcultural frame.”
Julie Levin Russo, The Evergreen State College, author of numerous articles on queer women's fandoms
"It is a timely and compelling anthology that centers queer women’s fandoms through rich, globally diverse case studies, rectifying their longstanding marginalization and opening exciting new avenues for research in fan and queer studies."
Ling Yang, Associate Professor at Xiamen University, PR China, ranked as the World's Top 2% most-cited scientist (in literary studies) 2023 by Stanford University.
"Queer Women’s Fandoms: Across Screens, Borders, and Desires offers a singularly nuanced understanding of how female homoeroticism, desire, and solidarity operate across geo-cultural boundaries. Its focus on troubling heretofore celebratory scholarship of queer women’s fandom and engage with such contradictory phenomena as the co-optation of queer fan labor, reproduction of transphobic discourse in queer women’s spaces, and the entanglement of fan communities with digital capitalism and state censorship make this book essential reading for scholars of not only media fandom, but gender, sexuality, and globalization writ large."
Lori Morimoto, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies, Temple University Japan - Kyoto Campus
ISBN: 9781041344308
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 410g
124 pages