One Direction: Teenage Sexuality In Star Trekker Fandom

One Direction, a boy-band comprised of five members, was formed in 2010, and has garnered millions of fans since its inception. With a majority female fanbase, the band is commonly written about in online fictional stories. During high school, teenage girls commonly feel that their sexuality is being repressed, and it was during this time that I discovered One Direction, and subsequently, fanfiction. A New York Times article explains that, “…for young people trying to figure out the thorny world of sexuality, the boy band can serve as a sort of palette, a way to safely work out the boundaries of love and lust,” (Johnston). In this paper, I will argue that the One Direction fandom utilizes poaching to help cultivate comfort in teenage sexuality,

In 1988, Henry Jenkins studied Star Trek fans, and their participation in the Trekker fandom through textual poaching. He defines fandom as “the ability to transform personal reaction into social interaction [and] spectator culture into participatory culture” (Jenkins 88). The fans create a shared community by responding to the original texts and emphasizing a shared identity (88). One way fans create this identity is by participating in a replay culture, which can eventually lead to films achieving cult status. A replay culture is created when fans find meaning and pleasure in frequently rewatching a film, and memorizing it’s various scenes, characters, and dialogue (Klinger 3-4). Another way fandoms emphasize their shared identity is through poaching, which is a practice where-in fans take fragmented pieces of a source material and reassemble them into a different storyline that better fits their experiences. One Direction fans, or ‘Directioners’, commonly practice this technique by utilizing their perceived reality of the band members’ lives as the source material for fanfiction. Women prefer to access fandom-related sexually explicit material through these written works, while men prefer more visual methods, such as fanart (Anisimowicz & O’Sullivan 830). I will be exploring the effect that reading sexually explicit fanfiction has on young women. Fanfiction is an

The fandom once again poaches the musicians’ lives, but changes their sexuality for the purpose of the story. Popularized as ‘slash’ fiction, these storylines tend to revolve around a non-canon romantic relationship between two of the band members. The most popularized slash relationship in the One Direction fandom is between Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, collectively nicknamed ‘Larry Stylinson’. There are over 31,000 of these stories on the popular fanfiction website, Archive of Our Own, and many of them required hours of research into the band, sex, and various other topics by the authors. One of the most popular Larry Stylinson works, Escapade, features Harry as an escort, and consequently entails a lot of sexual scenes. It would be extremely difficult to write the explicit sex scenes found in fanfiction without the author being comfortable in their sexuality, and a lot of the time that comfort comes from reading other slash works and familiarizing themselves with that type of