I read this yesterday and it's really made me look at my experiences. I consider myself a newcomer to fandom since I only started writing (and to a lesser degree reading) fan fiction a little over a year ago yet when I think about it I've really been involved for years in the world of comic book collectors and film geeks though it was never defined as fandom per say. As a teenaged comic book fanatic in the late 1980's I often found myself as the "token girl", the only female in the room yet this was never an issue for me. Because I was overweight and sexually attracted to women it was easy for me to be regarded as "one of the boys". I seemed to have more in common with them then with women. Yet at the same time it does seem like there was something different about my approach to comics-- I was more interested in interpersonal dynamics then action. With the exception of Batman I preferred titles that focused on superhero teams- X-men, New Mutants, Teen Titans, the Legion of Superheroes- over series focusing on individuals. I also had to have an element of identification with a character to get really into them. Further, I did a lot of drawing at the time and a lot of my art was pin-up/cheesecake pictures of my favorite super heroines (Catwoman, Psylocke, Magick from New Mutants). Many of the male fans were actually uncomfortable with my overt sexual interest in these characters. While they might be attracted to them, they seemed to separate their devotion to a series from personal or sexual interest in its characters whereas I never did. I can't help wondering if this was something personal or gendered. As for fan fiction in a lot of ways I do see it as being in part of a larger feminist/queer tradition of revising and reclaim mainstream material. When started writing fan fiction my models were Angela Carter's and Anne Sexton's dark fairy tales, the skewed revisions of The Wizard of Oz by Geoff Ryman and Gregory Maguire and even Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. I saw fan fiction as a neat way to analysis books, movies and comics books as well as exploring my own psycho/sexual issues. Of course I've come to realize that even in the female dominated world of fan fiction I'm still a bit of an odd girl out (more so in the anime fandoms then Harry Potter) because of my aversion to popular OTP's, fluffy romance and SQUEE!!!!! (and of course my love of minor and obscure characters, rape, incest and overt pessimism). This in mind I do think that the ideal sort of fandom would combine male and female perspective and energy-- emotion and pretension, personal identification and a certain degree of analytical distance (my worst experiences in the world of female-centered fan fiction have been the result of me "desecrating" a favorite character or pairing. Identification is one thing but nobody should be that invested in a fictional character).