Moby-Dick from Below: Fans, Fictions, and Ship Theory

Abstract: Much like Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) has had a prolific posthumous career, especially when it comes to online slash fiction. That so many queer communities “ship” Moby-Dick promises new insight into what Melville studies might offer to fan studies (and vice versa). To “ship” is to explore romantic or sexual relations that may be latent, repressed, or otherwise only insinuated in a text. But despite writers’ and audiences’ indefatigable energy, most Moby-Dick fanfiction survives in partial or unfinished versions—in abandoned blogs, incomplete works-in-progress, and otherwise jettisoned projects. I argue that it is precisely the transience of these texts that lends them their significance. Focusing on three fragmented collections (the Tumblr blog, The Queequeg Diaries , and slash fiction from AdultFanFiction.org and FanFiction.net ), I consider sexual and textual subcultures not intended to endure. These ephemeral queer counterpublics mark the limits of what I call “ship theory,” or a mode of participatory consumption that flourishes in fleeting contact. To “ship” what happens aboard Melville’s queer ship gestures toward the fragile ephemerality of queer counterpublics. These ribald archives of desire reveal the radical experiments in gender and sexuality that only short-lived shipping can produce.