where is the line between fandom & obsession?

my latest story for Vogue

I am a full-time freelance writer and paid subscriptions to this newsletter allow me to continue to do work like this, as well as pay an editor to help me with them. You can upgrade here:

You can now purchase Out of Your League merch! If you’re in the Boston area, come see me next Wednesday, April 9th, at JustBook-ish, the new book cafe in Dorchester (they now have beer and wine, too!). I’ll be chatting about Hail Mary and women’s football at 6pm.

---

This week, I published a story for Vogue about the increase in harassment and stalking behavior that women athletes are facing as their profiles and visibility rise. This has been written about before but something I felt was important to add to the piece was a queer lens, particularly concerning fandom that surrounds young basketball players like Paige Bueckers, Azzi Fudd, and Kate Martin. I wrote:

Especially among Gen Z fans, TikTok and Tumblr have become flooded with fan accounts and fan edits of popular college basketball players or WNBA stars. The attention can be especially intense from queer fans, who tend to see greater LGBTQ+ representation in women’s sports than in broader popular culture.

“When you’re in a minority community and the representation always feels inadequate, whoever arises either as openly queer or is attributed that identity by fans, those people become disproportionately important to queer fandoms,” explains Eve Ng, an associate professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Ohio University. “Certain fandoms around these queer imagined relationships have an intensity and obsessiveness that often exceeds straight ‘shippers.’”

And while I touch on it in the article, I want to deepen that discussion here, particularly as it relates to shipping real people, as opposed to characters from a work of fiction (think: Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss (ship name: “Kaylor”) or Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson (ship name: “Larry”)). This practice is known as Real Person Fiction (RPF), and the ethics of it are hotly debated within the fanfiction world itself.