In Dr. Carman Fung’s GSWS course “Queer Fandoms” (GSWS 319), students explore the ways in which internet fandoms shape, transform, and queer mainstream media. For their creative projects, students write fan-fiction and create fan-videos in a way that reflects on the relationship between technological affordance and sexual cultures.
Blog posts created by Queer Fandoms students:
Queer fandoms: The Marauders fandom
By Mika Manning
A sub-fandom of Harry Potter, the Marauders fandom surrounds a fictional group of young wizards who were students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The group consists of Remus Lupin (Moony), Peter Pettigrew (Wormtail), Sirius Black (Padfoot), and James Potter (Prongs). These characters exist in the timeline before the events involving the major protagonist of the series, Harry Potter. James Potter is the father of Harry; Sirius is his godfather and Lupin is his third year Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. During their time at Hogwarts the group was infamous for being mischievous and called themselves the Marauders.
Marauders slash fiction began with the pairing and textual poaching of Remus Lupin and Sirius Black in 2003. Fans dubbed the relationship Wolfstar, and have since generated 37,000 fics on AO3 surrounding the pairing. The ship itself comes from JK Rowling’s possible queering of the characters beginning with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and ending in with Sirius Black’s death in Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix. Many queer fans read into the subtext between these two characters and hoped at the time that the pair would become canon.
Today, the Marauders fandom uses Remus and Sirius to express their desire for queer relationships and communities. Through slash fiction, the fandom has been able to build alternative spaces within the wizarding world where individuals are presented with the ability to queer the Harry Potter text. Marauders era fanfiction also serves as a blank slate for many fans and the materials produced may vary according to their interpretation. Moreover, the affordance of TikTok has allowed for a further queering of the characters through a popular fic surrounding the Marauders era called All the Young Dudes and this has created a surge of younger Gen Z Marauders fans.
In GSWS 319, we theorised that fan activities can help individuals in discovering and creating their queer identities. Studying the Marauders fandom and making this video essay helped me understand and visualise how this theory can be true. Please enjoy my video essay chronicling Marauders fan activity from 1999 to 2023. I hope that it can provide an understanding of the importance of fandom in the development of one’s queer identity and how the collective queering of a text can be a beautiful and freeing way to engage with and build online queer communities.
Student Biography
Mika Manning is a fourth-year student studying for her BA with a major in Art, Performance and Cinema Studies and a minor in Humanities. She has always been interested in society and culture and has been into fandom since 2014.