"What unholy Chart is this?!": Paratextual intertextuality in Gentleman Jack fan posts of scholarship on Anne Lister. Issue 4 (18th November 2022) - Ng, Eve
Abstract: While intersections of scholarship and fandom have previously been discussed in terms of the scholar-as-fan, rather less theorized is the converse situation, where nonacademic fans draw on scholarly research and remake it as fan-circulated content. Gentleman Jack (BBC/HBO, 2019-present), a television series based on a real person, Anne Lister, about whom there is an existing body of scholarship, provides examples of this phenomenon, with fans excerpting text from biographical sources and extracting and remaking a dissertation's diagram of Lister's relationships with various women. This essay analyzes these fan texts as paratexts associated with the primary Gentleman Jack text, situating them within research that recognizes the increased significance of paratextual commentary to the reception of contemporary media texts. The fan posts also demonstrate distinctive forms of intertextuality that interweave the content of the show, scholarly research on Lister, and references to other popular media representations of lesbians. At the level of LGBTQ representation, enthusiasm amongst many queer viewers for Gentleman Jack and Lister reflect the rarity of having a lesbian lead in a well-budgeted, prestige television series. Furthermore, given the dearth of lesbians in academic historical accounts, the fan-generated texts discussed in this essay demonstrate how hybrid forms of popular media-academic scholarship fan posts also counter lesbian underrepresentation with respect to scholarly discourse.