From Saint to Bottom: Fan Fiction Ca Practică Queer

This paper aims to analyze fan fiction in order to highlight both its relevance within the context of contemporary Romanian literature and the ways in which queer literature emerges on digital platforms with subversive potential. Fan fiction—used to expand popular narrative universes or to reimagine canonical figures—operates beyond any classical regime of aesthetic or institutional validation. Moreover, queer fan fiction provides a counterweight to the tendencies of the contemporary Romanian literary landscape, which remains predominantly conservative. In this regard, drawing on the theory of the fourth regime of relevance, namely the participatory one, I propose to analyze the value of emergent narrative forms in Romanian literature. An early attempt to resignify the relationship between Mihai Eminescu and Ion Creangă through a queer lens can already be identified in Un bulgăre de humă [A Lump of Clay] (1990), signaling a latent openness within the canon to subversive reinterpretations that contemporary fan fiction further develops. This idea is continued in a selection of texts published on the platform Archive of Our Own (AO3). Thus, the case study will focus primarily on works tagged Ion Creangă/ Mihai Eminescu, in which the tension between canon and subversive becomes revealing for new queer literary practices.