Fan studies attracts scholars from a lot of different disciplines: media and film studies, literary study, anthropology, performance studies, classical studies, business, and even marketing. Another discipline that is usefully engaged with fan studies is religious studies: works include Rachel Barenblat’s “Fan fiction and midrash: Making meaning,” “Star Trek Fandom as a Religious Phenomenon,” by Michael Jindra, and the collection The Sacred in Fantastic Fandom: Essays on the Intersection of Religion and Pop Culture edited by Carole Cusack, John Morehead, and Venetia Robertson.
Today’s excerpt comes from Esther Brownsmith’s “‘I Wrote My Way Out”: Embodied Appropriation, Fan Fiction and the Book of Esther,” by Esther Brownsmith (The Bible & Critical Theory, 2023). In this article, Brownsmith applies what she calls “the fan fiction lens of ‘embodied appropriation’” to the book of Esther, making comparisons between it and fannish rewrites like Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. As she explains in her introduction:
I believe that fan fiction can provide a crucial model and lens for reading biblical and parabiblical texts—not just because the latter includes rewritten compositions, but because both are striving transformatively with their canons. This is certainly true in parabiblical texts like Jubilees, Joseph and Aseneth, and Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities), but also within the Hebrew Bible itself. Chronicles creatively retells the narratives of Samuel-Kings; Daniel reimagines the Ugaritic hero Dan’el as an exiled Jew in Babylon. But in my upcoming monograph, Queen of the Alternate Universe: The Book of Esther as Fan Fiction, I focus on this process as it manifests in the book of Esther. Just as Hamilton reflects on mythic figures like Washington and Jefferson from a racially marginalized perspective, so does the book of Esther reflect on Mesopotamian deities— Ishtar/Esther and Marduk/Mordecai—through a diasporic Jewish lens. Indeed, it neatly mirrors Hamilton in its fusion of mythic characters with a minoritized culture, using a familiar genre.
Brownsmith reads the Esther tale as “a performance of emotion, an embodiment of the the author’s own Jewish identity,” and as a transformative work by an engaged fan. Fandom and fan studies inspires Brownsmith’s thinking about the text:
[T]he comparison with fan fiction gives us a possible motive for why the ancient Jewish author would choose to write a Jewish story whose central characters are borrowed from Mesopotamian culture. The authors that Kelley examines are engaged in emotioned literacy: the process of writing that stems from their emotional and bodily identity, including their deep love for the source material. But as fan fiction scholars have said from the beginning, love is not the only emotion that fuels fan fiction authorship. For instance, Henry Jenkins described the dueling emotions of “fascination” and “frustration,” noting that frustration is what often fuels authors to go in and write a new text, instead of simply rereading an old one. Those fan authors thus become “active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.” (2013, 24) The corpus of Mesopotamian literature about Ishtar and Marduk was broad and pervasive; just as Israelite biblical texts reimagined Canaanite myths like the triumph over the chaotic sea, so did the author of Esther reimagine the Mesopotamian characters of their broader social sphere. And just as the fan author I mentioned earlier wrote about a Filipina protagonist like herself, so did the author of Esther project their own embodiment into the text through characters like Esther and Mordecai.