Those of us who came of age fannishly in late twentieth-century Western media fandom grew up fannishly in a paradigm wherein fandom as practiced by boys and men tends to mean consuming, collecting, and indexing, whereas fandom as practiced by girls and women tends to mean interpretive and transformative storytelling (fan fiction, fan vids, fan art, and so on). The classical (male-authored) midrashic tradition disrupts that gender binary somewhat, though midrashic texts written by women in the late twentieth century and beyond are even more firmly akin to late twentieth-century media fandom in their centering of (so-called) feminine concerns such as emotion, relationship, internal motivation, and connection.
Barenblat, Rachel. “Gender, Voice, and Canon.” In “Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures,” edited by Frauke Uhlenbruch and Sonja Ammann, special issue,Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 31. https://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1589.