chapter 7
Gazing, initiating, desiring Alternative constructions of agency and sex in Twifics Malin Isaksson & Maria Lindgren Leavenworth
Twilight (the novels, films, and associated materials) has gathered an enormous fan following. Fans can be more or less active in their engagement with this text world, or canon, to use fan fiction vernacular. Fan fiction, the term today denoting Internet-published stories with clear ties to the canon, demonstrate amateur authors’ desires to appropriate characters, events, and plotlines to varying degrees. Most fan fiction, or fanfic, in some way alters the original story, for example, by extending the plot by describing events set before or after the canon’s story arc, or developing minor characters and events. Some fanfic appropriations represent rather more radical re-workings of the canon and illustrate tendencies to question themes, structures, and characterizations. Within the Twilight fandom, fan fictions are frequently referred to as Twifics, and the online sites that archive these stories are among the fastest growing.1 With publishing and feedback options available to anyone with Internet access, and with archives expanding on an hourly basis, it is impossible to make general claims about Twific. The seven stories examined here (from fanfiction.net, the largest collective site, and twilighted.net, which focuses exclusively on Twific) are rather used to illustrate tendencies within current textual production. In the first section of this chapter we consider two fanfics – Invitation by socact2 and Fearless by shawn-n-belle – that exemplify perspectival shifts that enable an alternative understanding 127