A mixed bag of essays about gender, audience reception (both affirmational and anti-fannish, but not much on fan creations), and the differences between books and movies. Catherine Driscoll makes the excellent point that “feminizing the object of desire in girl culture is in no way equivalent to desexualizing it.” Matt Hills discusses how other fandoms reacted to/policed Twilight fans in gendered and depressing ways, while Twilight’s official productions often pathologized “ordinary” fans right back while insisting that Twilight fans were awesome. He suggests that official texts surrounding the movies served a pedagogical function: teaching fans what kinds of fannishness were appropriate. Sarah Wagenseller Goletz also focuses on anti-fans, noting that the reason that Meyer uses so many cliches and Mary Sue-isms (thus triggering revulsion among the anti-fans) is that they work, and then pointing out that

[b]ecause we know, for instance, that Meyer believes Bella constitutes a slate blank enough for readers to ‘easily step into her shoes,’ Meyer’s priileged classes instantly become visible by showing us what she thinks of as invisible. Unsurprisingly, they are traits about herself that we can assume she takes for granted: white, female, middle-class, heterosexual, America, Judeo-Christian, etc…. The fan, then, is the intended reader who either does not know or does not care what ideologies construct her, while the anti-fan is the intended reader who does know, and resists, but, because she will never be able to throw off completely that which constructs her, remains vulnerable to manipulation of the powerful triggers of those ideologies.

I was particularly intrigued by her argument that Bella and Edward were so effective because Meyer split Mary Sue in two, “funnel[ing] each of Mary Sue’s two primary objectives—author insertion and wish-fulfillment—individually into Bella and Edward, respectively.” This makes Twilight the story of two sides of a single being “meeting and attempting to reunite into the whole character they were meant to be,” tapping into primal yearning for integration in readers as well. ( )