How to Write House… Mpreg Fan Fiction and Concepts of Bodies, Gender and Family

Fan Studies have recently manifested as a field within cultural studies. Tracing back to the 1970s, one widely covered topic is fan fiction. These fan-written texts featuring the established characters of a given source text have mostly been studied in relation to a very specific question: Why do so many women write homoerotic (pornographic) texts (e.g. Jenkins 1992; Jones 2002; Penley 1992, 2014)? The focus, however, has firmly remained on authors’ motives and has not been extended to the texts themselves. This motivated my focus on the actual stories and their characteristics. Additionally, I conduct a qualitative content analysis across fandoms, which to my knowledge has not been done either. Specifically, my study focuses on male pregnancy stories in the fandoms of Star Trek and Supernatural. I discuss elements of what I call the “Mpreg formula” in relation to the best-liked stories from both fandoms on the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3). Furthermore, I analyze concepts of gender, bodies and depictions of family regarding the element of male pregnancy. I argue that despite rather traditional settings, the stories in my study negotiate these rigid gender roles and comment critically on hegemonic source texts. Moreover, they have the potential to queer pregnancy as well as the traditionally masculine bodies of the characters.