The museum that cannot survive. The virtual feminist museum and the attempts at preservation of women’s fan production

Abstract

This paper examines the history and the shape of contemporary fanfiction repositories. The notion of an archive – one that is often used to describe such spaces, and appears in their names – is contrasted with Griselda Pollock’s proposal of a virtual feminist museum. Though for decades there have been attempts at preserving fan fiction (mostly created by women, non-canonical and transgressive), the stories had been subjected to selection and censorship. With the disappearance of such practices, the repositories start to embody Pollock’s notion. At the same time, however, as the lack of censorship causes economic problems, the virtuality of such ‘museums’ no longer denotes their digital nature but their evanescence.