Fan labour as mnemonic labour: Theorising memory work and queer world-making

Abstract

When queer characters are erased or denied closure on screen, fans mobilise not only for representation but to reconfigure memory and rehearse queer world‑making. This article develops the concept of mnemonic fan labour, theorising it as queer fan practices through which grief, endurance and creativity contest heteronormative rhythms of media storytelling, as exemplified by collective activist interventions. Drawing on memory studies, queer theory and fan studies scholarship, I foreground queer fandom as a potent site of vernacular memory‑making. A tripartite framework is developed to theorise queer fandom as mnemonic labour: (1) chrono‑affective labour, manifested through collective endurance in waiting rituals that anchor fans in global queer histories of resilience; (2) transmedia‑memetic labour, exemplifying remediation as fans remix tropes and circulate hybrid archives of memory across platforms and cultures; and (3) speculative labour, exemplifying pre-mediation, as fan‑made alternative endings and utopian world‑making rehearse futures beyond unsatisfying narrative closures. These modalities are exemplified in the ‘YaoTing’ fandom of the long-running Taigi soap opera Sè-kan-tsîng (世間情; 2013–2015). Through a digital ethnography and qualitative analysis of 3199 fan‑generated threads posted between 2014 and 2015 on PTT, Taiwan’s largest online forum, the article traces how audiences enact mnemonic practices to resist queer erasure and forge new queer memories. Therefore, theorising fan labour as mnemonic labour opens imaginative pathways towards queer belonging and futures. The article theorises that fans’ mnemonic labour emerges as radical world‑making: a queer memory practice reclaiming time, remaking genre and rendering queer life liveable, again and anew.

Keywords

communicative remembering queer fandom LGBTQ representation queer archives queer media queer temporality sapphic media speculative future women loving women (WLW)

Introduction

When a queer character is written out of a narrative series, fans rarely accept this in silence. Instead, they campaign relentlessly for their return. Across fandoms, such mobilisations have been met with mixed outcomes, but their significance lies beyond entertainment. This article argues that these collective efforts function as acts of queer memory‑making driven by the accumulated trauma of consuming media marked by unsatisfying closures and sudden erasures of queer characters. I contend that such fan labour does more than demand representation: it actively reconfigures memory and disrupts heteronormative rhythms. I therefore foreground queer fan labour as a mnemonic practice that makes history, makes memory and makes future, through which past, present and future are continually reconfigured as part of queer cultural presence.

The aforementioned dynamic exemplifies a broader pattern in global media cultures where queer representation remains a site of contested visibility. LGBTQ+ characters are often made memorable to queer audiences through suffering, constrained desire, unsatisfying closures or sudden erasures through death. These recurring patterns signal harmful representation, which has been widely discussed in existing literature (Bridges, 2018; Waggoner, 2018). Importantly, these patterns also reveal broader regimes of queer memory, referring to mediated and contested configurations of remembrance shaped by media production logics, situated televisual genre conventions and the global circulation of queer storytelling. By placing queer memory at the forefront of the discussion, this article argues that fan labour must be understood as a mnemonic practice that both responds to and reshapes these regimes.

This article is situated at the intersection of queer studies, memory studies and fan studies scholarship. Drawing from scholarship on cultural memory (Erll, 2008; Radstone and Hodgkin, 2003a), queer affect (Cvetkovich, 2003; Love, 2007), fan labour (De Kosnik, 2013; Stanfill and Condis, 2014) and feminist archival methodologies that treat fan writing as epistemic inquiry (Pester, 2017), I conceptualise fandom as a site of mnemonic and vernacular ‘memory work’ crucial for queer world-making and speculative future-making. By framing fandom as such, I highlight fan practices as both communicative and habitual activities through which audiences articulate memories and engage with queer cultural and media pasts and futures (Pentzold et al., 2023).

Cultural memory studies emphasise that memory is something people ‘do’, rather than merely ‘have’, shifting the focus to ‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’ where memory is not an object of linear, canonical narratives but a dynamic, constructed and often mediated process of archives (Erll, 2016: 101). Queer studies scholars challenge the heteronormative ‘official’ memory by focusing on protest history, activist experience, performative art and personal collections, highlighting the political and affective possibilities of queer memory (Cvetkovich, 2003; Muñoz, 2009). In parallel, queer temporality research stresses how queer practices disrupt linear, heteronormative time and generate alternative rhythms of past, present and future (Freeman, 2010; Halberstam, 2005). Together, these works showcase how collective remembrance furnishes queer identity and culture. Nonetheless, the everyday, affective labour through which mediated queer desire is archived, circulated and reassembled has largely been overlooked. Here, the recent focus on fan labour in fan studies can offer new insights. Building on fans’ participatory and creative practices, recent work has begun to theorise fans as active agents of queer history and memory politics (Potts et al., 2018; Turner-Kilburn, 2022). Yet, conversations thus far have remained limited in scope, often neglecting how fan practices operate as sustained mnemonic labour and intersect with temporality matters. Fan labour, I argue, both archives queer cultural presence and actively queers time and futures.

This article bridges these gaps by conceptualising fandom as a site of queer memory-making, using fan engagements with the Taigi¹ soap opera Sè-kan-tsîng (hereafter, SKT; 世間情; Mandarin romanisation: Shìjiānqíng; English title: Ordinary Love) (2013–2015) in Taiwan as a generative site of theorisation. There are two interconnected research questions: how does queer fandom operate as a site for the formation, circulation and reassembly of global queer memory? In what ways does the interplay of queer media memories shape mnemonic fan labour and speculative trajectories towards liveable queer futures? I identify three fan labour modalities that contribute to queer memory work: (1) chrono-affective, (2) transmedia-memetic and (3) speculative. Together, they show how queer fandom functions as a generative site for queer memory formation, circulation and rearticulation.

Memory, archives of queer feeling and fan labour

Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin (2003b) define regimes of memory as discursive configurations that describe the external operations of memory rather than its essence or ontology. These configurations are articulated through figurations that complicate neighbouring regimes such as history, subjectivity and media representation. Echoing this view, Kendall R Phillips and G Mitchell Reyes (2011) propose the term memoryscape to describe memory as a complex, multifaceted and ever-shifting terrain.

Within queer scholarship, memory is understood as more than a static recollection: it is an inherently disruptive force. Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (2011: 14) argue for the ‘queerness’ of memory in its temporal disobedience, collapsing past and future into the affective present. Queer memory hence emerges as an affective assemblage mapped against official historiographies, normative identity formations and dominant representational codes. This mapping frequently brings to the fore so-called ‘unhappy affects’, such as trauma, shame, familial rejection, violence, loneliness and isolation (Blackman, 2011: 185). Crucially, these feelings are not pathologised as individual failings but recognised as emergent from systemic structures of oppression (Cvetkovich, 2003).

Queer cultural memory scholarship shifts attention towards alternative archives, referring to informal and intimate collections that resist institutional authority. Scholars turn to personal letters, photographs, activist narratives, zines, artworks and even digital mapping platforms to uncover new constellations of queer remembering (Castiglia and Reed, 2011; Watson et al., 2024). These affective archives function as repositories of emotion that convey queer existence’s texture and intensity. Rather than static storage, they operate as mnemonic technologies: mediating between lived experience and collective history, shaping how memory is performed, sustained and circulated (Pentzold et al., 2023). Queer temporality scholarship has also interrogated how non-normative lives and desires unfold outside linear progress narratives, emphasising delay, repetition and alternative rhythms (Freeman, 2010; Halberstam, 2005). These insights resonate with memory studies by showing how queer communities reconfigure the past–future relationship. Yet, while temporality has been theorised in relation to queer identity and affect, its intersection with fan labour as a mnemonic practice remains underexplored. Concomitantly, scholarly explorations of queer archives remain predominantly Western and Anglophone in orientation, with limited engagement from other cultural and geographical contexts. Despite the growing interest in how the personal and ephemeral might be archived beyond conventional institutions, much related work has overlooked the global circulation of queer media and the vernacular practices that shape memory outside of Euro‑American settings.

Recently, intersectional and global perspectives have begun to reshape the contours of queer memory studies. In Argentina, Santiago Joaquín Insausti and Pablo Ben (2023) interrogate how whiteness and hegemonic racial logics influence the formation of queer memory, while Niranjana Ganesan and Bhuvaneswari Gopalakrishnan (2025) examine South Asian trans memoirs to reconstruct transgender assemblages within the Global South. Despite this promising shift, a major gap persists: even emerging works seldom theorise how queer communities engage with mediated representations, and they do not account for the vibrant cultural artefacts and everyday practices that arise from these engagements, both online and offline. This gap underscores the need to situate queer memory in alternative archives and temporalities, and in the mediated repertoires through which fans and communities actively construct, circulate and contest queer cultural presence. To address this lacuna, I turn to fan studies, where participatory media cultures increasingly function as sites of grassroots memory work. The proposal is that recent literature on fan labour can be expanded by theorising these practices as forms of mnemonic labour – that is, engaged, affective acts through which fans contest/reconfigure/creatively regenerate discursive queerness memories.

Early fan studies celebrate participatory and creative practices, such as fanfiction, fanart and remix videos, as forms of textual poaching (Jenkins, 1992). Only more recently have scholars begun to frame these outputs as memory work practices. Liza Potts et al. (2018), for instance, show how social and political movements intersect with fandom to produce collective memories in shared spaces. At the same time, online platforms such as Archive of Our Own (AO3),² Tumblr, YouTube and discussion forums have emerged as ‘rogue archives’, maintained by amateurs, fans and volunteers beyond the reach of institutional control (De Kosnik, 2016: 2). These sites challenge archival gatekeeping and democratise access to marginalised queer histories. For example, the ‘Clexa’ fandom for the Lexa/Clarke³ pairing in The 100 (2014–2020) exemplifies this potential: its campaigns and fundraising efforts memorialised Lexa’s death and forged transnational solidarities that inscribed new layers of queer memory (Bourdaa, 2018).

Nonetheless, fan-established ‘rogue archives’ on corporate‑owned platforms or commercially hosted servers remain fragile, as their records are subject to corporate extractivism or technical maintenance (Nielsen, 2024). With the exception of AO3, many of these spaces are corporate‑owned and risk being monetised, turning suffering records into commodities preserved only as long as they generate revenue (Caswell, 2024). Maintaining such archives also depends on fans’ unpaid labour and, at times, their own financial resources. This reliance on voluntary and uncompensated work connects directly to broader debates on fan labour. Fan labour scholarship theorises fans’ creative and voluntary practices as unpaid or ‘free’ labour that generates substantial cultural and economic value for media industries, artists and fan communities (De Kosnik, 2013; Stanfill and Condis, 2014). This literature maps a diverse array of practices, including fans’ user-generated content as promotional material (Jones, 2014; Stanfill, 2019); translation in transcultural fandoms (Cruz et al., 2021; Evans, 2019); fan subtitling as informal distribution (Hills, 2017; Lee, 2012); archivists and historians curating repositories of fan texts (Einwächter, 2015; Stevens and Webber, 2022); community labour spanning technical, managerial and routine tasks (Sun, 2020); the precarity of monetised fandom (Ge, 2025); and engagements with technologies such as generative AI to automate or augment creative work (Li and Pang, 2024; Tang and Liu, 2025).

Despite the expansive mapping of fan labour, its mnemonic dimensions in queer contexts have started being explored only recently. Sneha Kumar (2021) shows how the fandom of Carmilla (2014–2016), a Canadian web series, cultivates affinity spaces and an ‘archive of lesbian feelings’ through femslash fanfiction on AO3. Ellie Turner-Kilburn (2022) explores how fans of the film Carol (2015) use fictional representation to shape queer female histories, emphasising storytelling not as a pursuit of historical ‘accuracy’ but as a mode of weaving memory through sensuality, connection and visibility. Building on these insights, I argue that memes, fanfiction, subtitling and so on constitute collective mnemonic labour: practices that embody fictional bodies, reimagine queer visibility across time and stitch personal and shared experiences into durable memory networks. Transnational media flows further animate this mnemonic and speculative work. Ting Guo and Jonathan Evans (2020), for instance, illustrate how Chinese fansubbing of Carol sparked cultural interventions in domestic debates, fostered community bonds and linked local queer histories to global currents. Such acts of translation and annotation bind disparate queer pasts into shared memory ecologies, enacting Michael Rothberg’s (2009) concept of ‘multidirectional memory’.

Building on these debates, this article theorises mnemonic labour as a form of resistance towards cultural centralisation, and it situates local narratives within a global archive. Through these practices, fan communities navigate the interplay between global media circulation and situated memory formations, expanding and complicating the scope of mnemonic labour.

Soap opera as queer archives

This study draws on the fandom surrounding ‘YaoTing’, the name given to an initially marginal sapphic couple in Taiwan’s Taigi soap opera SKT (2013–2015). There is the need at this point to outline the genre conventions of Taigi 8PM serials. SKT belongs to the genre of ‘Taigi 8PM serials’,⁴ defined by its predominant use of Taigi dialogue with Mandarin subtitles, unlike most prime-time dramas in Taiwan, which use Mandarin. That is, it is a soap opera intended for the Taigi-speaking mass audience. Emerging after the lifting of martial law in the late 1980s, the genre responded to elite Mandarin-centric broadcasting policies imposed by the settler-colonial Kuomintang regime. Known for their long runs, Taigi 8PM serials air on weekdays at 8 pm, with episodes typically lasting one to two-and-a-half hours. Early narratives of the genre centred on farming village life and family conflicts, particularly between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law, and by the early 2000s storylines had gradually shifted towards urban settings, business rivalries and elaborate romantic entanglements (Zhou, 2012: 3–6). Hallmarks of the format include sensational plot twists and over‑the‑top dramatics, earning the reputation of sagouxie (灑狗血; lit. ‘sprinkling dog’s blood’), a term used to describe melodramatic, cliché‑filled plots marked by emotional excess.

Owing to its weekday airtime volume, Taigi 8PM serials usually run on a rolling production-broadcast cycle, meaning episodes are filmed while earlier ones air. These serials by and large target the older, Taigi-speaking audience. At the same time, starting in the 2000s, they began attracting younger viewers, many of whom do not speak Taigi, and since then, networks have increasingly catered to this younger Mandarin-speaking demographic, tapping into the real-time commentary, speculation and critique that emerge on forums and social media (Zhou, 2012) about and related to them. Despite low production budgets and uneven set designs, seasoned actors in these serials are renowned for delivering emotionally nuanced performances, such as through restrained facial expressions and monologues crafted to be listened to rather than watched.

Feminist and queer media scholarship has long identified soap opera’s moral contradictions. While its emotional excess often reinforces patriarchal and heteronormative logics, it can also enable moral subversion. Soap opera studies show how female characters may momentarily disrupt dominant values, even if they are later punished or redeemed (Gledhill, 1997; Nochimson, 1992; Sifuentes, 2014). Crucially, the emotional excess and aesthetic conventions also harbour queer potential, offering moments in which non-normative desire and identity slip through the cracks of an otherwise rigid moral universe (Goldberg, 2016). Taiwan’s Taigi 8PM serials operate similarly, their emotionally charged narratives and multi‑strand plotting allowing for queer possibility.

Within this genre, SKT is a prominent example. Broadcast on SET Taiwan, SKT aired 437 episodes, totalling 1200 hours, from 2013 to 2015 (Yang, 2015). Its over-the-top style and outrageous plotlines, including rejuvenation fantasies (huichun; 回春), cosplay sequences and visible production blunders, propelled the show to viral prominence. During its original broadcast, it consistently ranked among the most-discussed topics online, attracting high engagement across social media platforms (Daily View TW, 2014).

Much of SKT’s viral prominence stemmed from the YaoTing storyline, which, amplified by fan practices, became the focal point of its popular reception. The YaoTing couple comprises one woman who is the wife and another who is the mistress of the same man; the two women fall in love, sparking intense public attention and widespread discussion across news outlets and social media. Initially introduced as a peripheral subplot, YaoTing was woven into the broader narrative of SKT, which traces the lives of six university friend protagonists as their relationships unravel amid ambition, family feuds and forbidden romances. One of the six protagonists, Siao-Ting Chiang (江曉婷; hereafter Ting), born out of wedlock into the powerful Hsieh family, becomes the unwitting mistress of her university professor, Professor Jhong. His wife, Si-Yao Fang (方思瑤; hereafter Yao), a prominent surgeon, discovers the affair and, under the guise of friendship, begins surveilling Ting. After a decade abroad, Yao and Jhong return to Taiwan. Unbeknownst to Yao, at the same time that hers and Ting’s friendship deepens, Ting resumes the affair with Jhong. When Yao learns that Ting is pregnant with twins from her affair with Jhong, their rivalry gives way to a defiant love that positions them against Jhong’s vindictive schemes and the Hsieh clan’s efforts to control Ting’s fate. Together, Yao and Ting resist societal taboos and forge an enduring bond (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

An overview of the key developments in YaoTing’s story within Sè-kan-tsîng (SKT). Source: Figure created by the author.

Initially a marginal subplot, YaoTing subsequently gained importance owing to fan demand, signalling fan practices demanding more YaoTing content as a political-activist act. This fan mobilisation did not remain symbolic; producers and scriptwriters demonstrably responded to these demands, adjusting airtime and narrative arcs in line with audience pressure. This sociopolitical backdrop illuminates the intensity of queer fandom and fan labour surrounding the YaoTing couple, which will be analysed in later sections. The broadcast of SKT also coincided with mounting civic momentum and backlash for marriage equality in Taiwan (see Ho, 2019; Wang and Sun, 2023), underscoring how the genre capitalises on current affairs to sustain viewership. Importantly, SKT is not the first Taigi 8PM serial to include queer characters, but it is the first to centre a protagonist in a ‘confirmed’ queer relationship.

Research method: Digital ethnography of queer audience activism

As TV networks monitor online fan discussions to inform the scripts and storylines of their Taigi 8PM serials, fans have cultivated a vibrant debate culture on PTT, Taiwan’s largest online bulletin-board system. Dubbed the ‘Taiwanese Reddit’, PTT hosts over 100,000 concurrent users across topic-specific boards and remains central to Taiwan’s civil society (Chang et al., 2021). Unlike niche queer platforms, PTT is a mainstream, general‑audience public forum that has long shaped national public opinion. Its scale and visibility mean that fan debates about SKT’s 8PM storyline unfolded not in a marginal space but in one of the country’s most widely used digital commons. This distinction underscores that queer fans were exerting activist pressure on a mainstream media production, with consequences for broader Taiwanese society rather than only within LGBTQ+ subcultures. In terms of platform affordance, PTT features up-voting (tui; 推) and down-voting (xu; 噓) mechanisms akin to likes and dislikes, offering a push-to-talk interface for real-time engagement during sporting events, election results and live-commentary television threads (Live文; Liang et al., 2017).

This study focuses on two PTT boards, ‘SET’ and ‘The_L_Word’, which operate similarly to Reddit subreddits. SET hosts live-commentary threads for Sanlih TV dramas, including its 8PM serials, while The_L_Word, originally dedicated to the American series The L Word (2004–2009), now centres on queer women’s media. Until Episode 74 of SKT (aired 5 March 2014), live-commentary threads appeared exclusively on SET. The migration of queer fans originally active in the SET PTT board to The_L_Word was driven by: (1) a 14-day posting restriction on SET that excluded many new queer fans and (2) the desire for a space where the YaoTing queer storyline could take centre stage. Fans’ activism migration from a mainstream board connected to SKT’s 8 pm broadcast in SET to The_L_Word shows how queer fans created a dedicated space for SKT. This situates YaoTing fandom as both embedded in mainstream reception and simultaneously building queer counterpublics.

In total, I collected and analysed 3199 threads: SET’s live-commentary threads spanning Episodes 43 to 74 (n = 32) and The_L_Word threads posted between 5 March 2014 and 15 August 2015, categorised as live commentary (n = 288), fan creations (n = 1779), discussion (n = 905), farewell threads for YaoTing at SKT’s end (n = 43) and campaigns and fan gatherings (n = 152; see Table 1).⁵ These categories were established through my own qualitative content analysis, supplemented by the board’s built‑in PTT categorisation labels on The_L_Word. Although the data dates back over a decade, usernames are kept confidential, citations are paraphrased and findings are presented primarily in aggregate form. In accordance with fan studies ethics (Busse, 2017; Li and Pang, 2025b), links to individual discussion threads or fanfiction have been omitted to safeguard participant anonymity within queer fandom spaces.

Table 1.

Thread types on PTT’s The_L_Word board.

Category	Count	Details
Live commentary	288	Threads covering Episodes 74 to 437, with 13 episodes lacking live-commentary threads.
Fans’ creations	1779	Includes fanfictions, fanvids, parodies, ‘NC-18 night-time’ stories and screenshot edits.
Discussion	905	Reflections, plot predictions, updates from actors’ social media and coverage of fan events organised by the television network.
Farewell to YaoTing	43	A campaign inviting fan essays to bid farewell to the characters towards the end of the show.
Campaigns and fan gatherings	152	Fan-led initiatives from March 2014 to July 2015. Activities spanned creative submissions, symbolic card exchanges, petitions and charitable events. Many bridged online and offline spaces, including themed meetups, visual campaigns directed at Sanlih TV, participation in Taipei Pride and official fan engagements facilitated by the TV network.

Using a digital ethnography design (Hine, 2015; Pink et al., 2016), this study views PTT discussions as temporal traces – from weekday live-commentary rituals to weekend rerun debates and creative expressions – that collectively retrieve and construct memory. While Tom Boellstorff et al. (2012: 82–83) emphasise participant observation and contemporaneous fieldnotes as central to virtual ethnographies, my engagement with PTT was initially as a fan rather than as a researcher. I therefore did not generate fieldnotes at the time of participation but treated archived posts as cultural artefacts that embody the lived rhythms and affective practices of fandom. This digital ethnography extends beyond treating posts as mere content, situating them as culturally embedded performances of memory. Within this ethnographic frame, I apply qualitative content analysis to identify key themes (Vaismoradi and Snelgrove, 2019) and critical discourse analysis to explore how fans’ language negotiates and shapes queer memory (Fairclough, 2003; Van Dijk, 2015).

As an aca-fan and long-time follower of queer (especially sapphic) content in East Asian screen media (Busse and Hellekson, 2012; Jenkins, 2011), I first joined PTT as an audience member and later as a researcher, positioning myself as both an insider (i.e. sharing the affective rhythms of anticipation and collective commentary) and an interpretive witness (i.e. translating the practices into scholarly analysis attentive to their social and emotional textures, highlighting moments of queer possibility). This reflexive stance acknowledges my dual investments: participating in fan rituals while also interpreting them as cultural texts. In this context, queer possibility refers to the spaces that fans create for imagining and sustaining non‑heteronormative futures – moments when commentary, creativity and communal presence gesture towards alternative modes of belonging. By tracing live-thread interactions and their creative afterlives, this study shows how fans collectively produce queer memory and negotiate queer futures. I theorise here that queer fan labour functions as mnemonic practice and activist intervention, echoing scholarship on fan activism that highlights how participatory practices can mobilise civic engagement and cultural change (Brough and Shresthova, 2012; Li, 2012). In this case, participation in mainstream platforms like PTT directly shapes the reception of Taigi 8PM serials and contributes to broader social change.

Conceptualising modalities of mnemonic fan labour

My conceptualisation of mnemonic fan labour builds on Daniele Salerno’s (2025) notion of ‘activist mnemonic labour’. In ‘Memoryscapes of liberation’, Salerno (2025) illustrates how Argentinian LGBTQ+ activist groups in the 1960s and 1970s wove narratives of historical oppression, resistance and transnational metaphors (e.g. ‘coming out of the closet’) into what he terms ‘memoryscapes’: shared mental landscapes that transcend local divisions by adapting transnational queer memory. According to Salerno (2025), this labour does more than preserve past struggles; it actively projects queer futures, collapsing past, present and future into a dynamic affective archive that mobilised collective action.

Extending Salerno’s (2025) framework and past fan labour literature, I define mnemonic fan labour in digital fandoms as an extension of this activist work, now carried out through various fan practices. Especially in contexts beyond the West where local queer representation is limited, fan communities serve as curators of marginalised queer narratives (De Kosnik, 2016), gathering and circulating media memories, affects and artifacts across online platforms. Although Taiwan is often regarded as relatively progressive regarding queer politics in Asia and has produced various queer media, queer representation in prime‑time television on both Mandarin‑ and Taigi‑language channels remains extremely limited.⁶ Through engagement with queer memory across temporal and geographical registers, fans do more than celebrate or preserve moments of representation; they also generate living archives that entwine grief, joy, longing and resistance into speculative templates for queer futurity.

Not all fan communication constitutes mnemonic labour; instead, it arises when fans explicitly retrieve, remediate or archive past events, or when they mobilise platform affordances for future recall. For example, some comments in ‘Live Commentary’ threads (Table 1) are spontaneous reactions to a broadcast and do not themselves constitute memory work. They become mnemonic only when fans articulate reasons of waiting and enduring while hoping for a better future, or when later cited, archived or re‑assembled as part of collective remembering. This distinction also clarifies how mnemonic fan labour aligns with established concepts in memory studies: remediation explains how fans re‑present past tropes and texts (Erll and Rigney, 2009), while pre-mediation illuminates how they anticipate and rehearse possible futures (Grusin, 2010). With this distinction in place, I now turn to the three modalities of mnemonic fan labour: chrono‑affective, transmedia‑memetic and speculative.

Chrono-affective: Waiting and enduring

The chrono-affective dimension of mnemonic fan labour foregrounds the intertwined temporal and emotional investments that fans make when they delay gratification and cultivate resilience. Chrono-affective labour refers to the sustained work of waiting, anticipating and emotionally engaging with media texts across narrative lulls, uncertain plot turns and irregular release schedules; it captures how time and affect circulate as labour within fan communities. By devoting hours to episodes, cliffhangers and promotional teasers, fans perform a distinctive form of patience, shaping collective memory and being connected to transnational queer histories of trauma and perseverance.

As aforementioned, early episodes hinted that Yao and Ting’s relationship exceeded mere friendship, something that was speculated by fans on the SET PTT board. YaoTing’s romantic bond was ‘confirmed’ in Episode 43, when Ting finally discovered Yao’s identity as Jhong’s wife. Unable to sever their connection, they decide to live together: Yao commits to helping Ting break up with Jhong, and Ting promises to help Yao pursue divorce. In subsequent episodes, online fan support surged across social media, with news outlets praising the ‘groundbreaking’ portrayal in SKT as it was not a Mandarin-language idol series but an ‘older-adult’ Taigi-language 8PM serial. YaoTing enjoyed notable airtime, including an iconic on-screen kiss (Episode 65), their coming-out journeys to family members (including Yao’s son with Jhong) and Yao’s proposal to Ting in front of Ting’s de facto mother. All this unfolded under the threat of Jhong’s relentless revenge schemes, adding danger to their love.

Following a stretch of joyful YaoTing moments, Episode 74 delivered the first ‘tragic’ turn: Yao was pushed overboard by an unknown assailant and declared dead. Panic rippled across the fandom as live-commentary threads on SET lit up with speculation. Some users opened a separate live-commentary thread on PTT’s The_L_Word board to focus solely on YaoTing. During subsequent episodes, queer fans campaigned actively by posting demands on commentary threads and the network’s official Facebook page for Yao’s return. These demands embodied qiaowan (敲碗), Mandarin slang in Taiwan that means ‘to tap one’s rice bowl’, which is a literal gesture of hunger signifying viewers’ craving for more. Ting was then coerced into marrying Jhong, until Yao’s dramatic return in Episode 77. Yao’s interruption of the forced heterosexual wedding was hailed as a queer love triumph. Fans were overjoyed since their qiaowan efforts had borne fruit, a moment that illustrates how fan activism directly steered the plot, evidencing the fandom’s capacity to intervene in production decisions and narrative direction. This responsiveness was later corroborated by a SKT screenwriter in an interview on a fan‑run online radio station hosted by the administrator of The_L_Word, who noted that while YaoTing was deliberately written as a lesbian subplot, its expanded airtime was a direct consequence of fan activism and unexpected audience demand (esasin, 2015). This change within a mainstream Taigi‑language serial on a prime‑time platform underscores how chrono‑affective labour can exceed the boundaries of queer niches: it directly supported the activist dimension of mnemonic labour, demonstrating that sustained fan practices can alter mainstream televisual production and expand the visibility of queer storylines.

While fans’ activist intervention marked a rare moment of triumph, the victory was short-lived. In Episode 117, another ominous sign appeared: Yao left for Africa on a volunteer medical mission, leaving Ting and their newborn twins in Taiwan. Soon after, fans (and Ting) were hit with the dreaded news that Yao had gone missing in a local military conflict. In Episode 120, Ting received Yao’s belongings, suggesting again that she had died. Meanwhile, the show shifted direction: new characters emerged, a male suitor pursued Ting and her family pressured her towards marriage. Once again, fans engaged in qiaowan. In Episode 124, Yao was revealed to be alive but blinded; unwilling to burden Ting, she withdrew and cared for her from a distance. This arc devolved into a loop: Yao relinquishing love, Ting searching for Yao, family pushing Ting towards heteronormativity. After numerous twists, Yao and Ting reconciled in Episode 218, marking the end of this prolonged ‘dark period’, as it was called by fans.

Yao’s second apparent death and the looping narrative transformed fans’ anticipation into an endurance practice. From Episode 74 onwards, queer fans on The_L_Word board sustained their engagement through daily live-commentary threads: opening each one with recaps, reflections, encouragement, embedded poetry, short fanfiction or humorous takes on unfolding events. Despite YaoTing’s minimal screen time, the weekday ritual of composing and engaging with live-commentary threads became a repetitive, creative practice, where each time-stamped entry actively sustained fandom momentum. Waiting itself became an affective stance, as anticipation for each new post deepened communal bonds and reinforced collective memory. Through this steady rhythm, fans did not just archive the past but also ritualised memory in real time, transforming patience into perpetual creation and ensuring that both the narrative and a sense of belonging endured. Live-commentary threads, along with weekday discussions outside broadcast hours, turned waiting from passive anticipation into structured, collective labour. They became a form of ‘communicative remembering’ (Pentzold et al., 2023), with each post serving as a temporal anchor, an intentional act of documentation stitching together episode airings into an ongoing narrative tapestry. Fuelled by weekday broadcast rhythms, this habitual media practice instilled a disciplined cadence: tuning in to the live broadcast, logging on to PTT, posting and chatting in commentary threads and archiving screenshots/quotations. Fans here built an evolving archive of affective waiting, co-created across dispersed bodies and digital interfaces, and it grew daily into a shared space of recollection.

This communicative remembering sustained fans’ attachment to the YaoTing fandom and its community, as well as illuminating the fan labour of waiting. To endure the boredom, fans invested significant time (i.e. sitting by their televisions for two-and-a-half hours each evening, five days a week) just to catch a few seconds of Yao or Ting or hear their names mentioned. Fans ridiculed SKT’s relentless heterosexual melodrama through wordplay, hijacking its Mandarin title Shi Jian Qing (世間情) and the phrase ‘This Is Adultery’ (是姦情), which are homophones in Mandarin. This homophonic twist skewered the show’s parade of heterosexual affairs and its near-total omission of YaoTing moments.

Fans’ sustained viewing, which mingled longing with satire, marked a significant temporal investment. Mel Stanfill (2019: 88) discusses fans’ affective investment of time in queuing for freebies at Comic Con,⁷ noting that time is fandom’s investment cost. Differently, YaoTing fans devoted time not for immediate material rewards but for a persistent anticipation they found too compelling to abandon. They refused to ‘leave the queue’ for a potentially happier queer future, both in SKT’s diegesis and their own. This participatory waiting collapsed private longing into public archives, where ordinary viewers became archivists, theorists and world-builders in tandem. The time-shared rooting for YaoTing generated affective co-experience and temporary holding (Anucha et al., 2021).

This labour of waiting, despite fans’ awareness of its potential futility (e.g. YaoTing could never reunite), embodies an endurance of ‘as yet unfinishedness’, a term Sara Wasson (2021) uses in reference to the AIDS epidemic as a painful, exhausting, long-term labour. Chrono-affective labour hinges on waiting as an active, creative and distinctly queer practice, charged with both hope and frustration. Rather than passive endurance, waiting becomes a site of memory-making and possibility, where the very slowness of the daily two-and-a-half-hour episodes creates openings for fans to inscribe meaning, sustain desire and forge community. This mnemonic fan labour modality does more than cultivate patience: it nurtures a queer sense of time that values both the labour and the promise embedded in waiting. Through collective endurance, fans transform temporal scarcity into generative memory work, turning each daily broadcast into a serialised act of communal remembering, queer affirmation and speculative collaboration. Chrono‑affective labour operates here across temporal registers: reclaiming the past through mnemonic endurance while opening towards speculative futures, weaving the waiting rhythms into broader practices of transmedia‑memetic labour and queer world‑making.

Transmedia-memetic: Remixing affective memory regimes across cultural contexts

The chrono-affective labour of waiting gives rise to compassion, care, creativity and inventiveness (Anucha et al., 2021). Fans’ creativity is both a matter of textual productivity and a resistance to canons (Hills, 2013). Through a temporal lens, I introduce the concept of transmedia-memetic labour to articulate how sustained affective engagement underwrites memory-infused creative interventions. This concept foregrounds how fans actively mine disparate genre memories to celebrate and reconfigure their affective contours. Transmedia-memetic fan labour captures the participatory process by which fans draw on premedial memory schemas, understood as shared narrative and affective templates formed through prior encounters with genre conventions and storyworlds (e.g. the tragic or unsatisfying storytelling of queer narratives in both Anglophone and Taiwanese sapphic media). These schemas carry forward possibilities for queer remembrance and reinterpretation as fans translate them across media and use memetic replication to assemble evolving collective memory archives. As I show later through Richard Grusin’s (2010) notion of premediation, these mnemonic practices are not only retrospective but also anticipatory, shaping orientations towards possible futures.

Transmedia‑memetic labour exemplifies remediation, understood here as the re‑presentation of past stories in new media forms that give them renewed cultural life (Erll and Rigney, 2009). Fans’ remixing of tropes and reworking of endings re‑mediate earlier texts, drawing on available media technologies and representational patterns to generate hybrid archives of queer memory. In this sense, remediation situates fan practices as diachronic intermediality, continually re‑realising cultural memory across platforms and over time, as stories, tropes and representations are re‑mediated in new formats and contexts.

Memory and media studies research clarifies the theoretical scaffolding of this process. Memory studies have theorised mediated remembering as an inherently premedial and remediated process, where cultural schemata originating in one medium prefigure and are transcribed into successive media forms (Erll, 2017). Media studies on memetic practice similarly show how memes, as replicable, mutable units of cultural information, are circulated, adapted and co-authored by participatory audiences, forging dynamic solidarities through shared in-jokes and emotional registers across digital platforms (Milner, 2016). Transmedia-memetic labour thus illuminates the fan-driven work of extracting and redeploying memory schemas to replicate, transform and propagate queer memory tropes.

This labour is exemplified in fans’ persistent efforts to preserve the YaoTing relationship, which can be captured in the slogan ‘YaoTing may endure heartbreak and suffering but mustn’t be twisted or torn apart’ (yaoting ke nue buke wai buke chai; 瑤婷可虐不可歪不可拆),⁸ repeated across live commentary threads. This slogan acknowledges the melodramatic logic of prime-time serials (i.e. protagonists suffer), while the call to resist distortion safeguards the couple’s core identities and sexualities from being reshaped (e.g. ‘reverted’ into heterosexual plotlines). This stance is rooted in queer memory: viewers have long seen queer women erased, killed off or stripped of their original personalities to serve sensational twists. Fans brace for emotional hardship yet refuse erasure. Their chrono-affective labour reveals how on-screen torment wounds YaoTing and the fandom, a pain that is often self-mocked in discussion threads. This yearning, while forward-looking in its hope for narrative development, is also deeply backward-looking. It reflects a hallmark of contemporary queer experience as entangled with residual shame, self-hatred, despair and loneliness drawn from past queer suffering (Love, 2007).

In the ‘Fans’ creative works’ threads, where participants share fan art and fan fiction, fans draw on a patchwork of genre memories: from the ‘bury your gays’ trope haunting US television to the often desexualised yet affectively resonant bonds between women in Japanese yuri manga and dramas (Yeung, 2017).⁹ Fans’ conversations frequently weave together the emotional logic of tragic lesbian demises in American screen media with fond recollections of queer visibility in The L Word (2004–2009),¹⁰ the death troupes in The 100 (2014–2020) and the tender ambiguity of female intimacy in Japanese yuri. These influences are repackaged into new cross-cultural narratives that challenge dominant memory regimes.

For instance, fanfiction writers juxtapose the popular fandom pairing of female doctors from the Japanese drama Doctor X: Surgeon Michiko Daimon (2012–2021)¹¹ and Code Blue (2008–2018)¹² with the canonical queer bond between Sameen Shaw and Root in the US series Person of Interest (2011–2016).¹³ These are used as mnemonic anchors to build an original revenge arc around Ting’s conflict with Jhong. In this way, transmedia-memetic labour unfolds as a cyclical choreography of retrieval, reconfiguration and recirculation. It begins with an excavation of diverse queer media archives to unearth narrative fragments and emotional cues rich in mnemonic potential; then remixes these materials into creative expressions such as video clips, fanfiction and discussion threads; and finally recirculates them across platforms to cultivate new affective memory regimes.

This fan labour modality demands deep genre literacy, cross-cultural empathy and an attunement to how mediated queer memories persist through disparate forms. Rather than relying on the umbrella of ‘transnational fandom’, transmedia-memetic labour foregrounds the specific mechanics of mnemonic production, as memes, tropes and narrative schemas are appropriated, mutated and transmitted across geographical and platform boundaries. Fans’ remixing practices generate new ‘memoryscapes’, referring to hybrid archives that resist the authority of any single tradition in determining queer affect.

Within these dynamic networks, past and present media converge to script speculative futures where tragic endings are rewritten and queer love flourishes. This labour blends cultural curation with imaginative reconstruction, intertwining global genre memories into ever-evolving communal archives. YaoTing fans channel personal queer memories and emotional intensities into a collective mnemonic archive, crafting imagined futures from shared grief and longing. Through transmedia-memetic mnemonic labour, fans enact a queer memorial poetics that activates memory across genres, cultures and platforms, stretching beyond the bounds of any single text.

Speculative: Queer world-making and the dilemma of queer representation

Through transmedia‑memetic labour, fans transform archival traces into platforms for imagining futures, a transition that leads directly into the speculative dimension of queer world‑making. The mnemonic fan labour modality of speculative world‑making extends this trajectory by projecting fan archives into imagined futures. Through fanfiction’s fix-it plots, alternative timelines, art collages and other artefacts, fans forge cognitive ‘pre-memories’ that rehearse scenarios of queer belonging, resistance and flourishing in worlds yet unwritten.

Speculative labour resonates with Grusin’s (2010) notion of premediation, which emphasises how media both forecast events and actively shape affective orientations towards possible futures. Rather than offering predictions, premediation delivers multiplies scenarios and cultivates anticipatory moods that help audiences rehearse alternatives and mitigate the threat of traumatic outcomes (Grusin, 2010: 46). In this sense, fans’ speculative endings and utopian world‑making enact a felt immediacy of futurity, collapsing the boundary between present and future into an affective horizon of queer possibility.

While fan studies frequently celebrate creative outputs, fewer engage with its temporal dimensions. The notion of speculative world-making fills this gap by transforming archival traces into utopian rehearsal spaces that defy official textual boundaries. Queer theory foregrounds the stakes of such future-orientated memory work. José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) concept of queer futurity roots radical hope in the ‘not-yet’, framing world-making as a form of political imagination. Castiglia and Reed (2011) theorise reparative remembering as a utopian act, inventing new social arrangements through memory. Applied to fan labour, these insights illustrate how emotional endurance and intertextual remixing become generative tools for queer future-making, specifically through the enactment of possibilities that dominant televisual logics habitually deny.

This labour emerges through engagement with the constraints of lived realities and screen representation. It can be observed in threads categorised as ‘Discussion’ and ‘Farewell to YaoTing’, where fans analysed and praised the YaoTing storyline, especially the early episodes before Yao’s ‘accident’ in Africa, for its realistic portrayal of queer couples’ struggles: exclusion from medical decision-making and insurance coverage prior to Taiwan’s 2019 marriage equality legislation, and the persistence of institutional and familial rejection. Still, the series also hints at transformative potentials. Unlike the habitual infidelity of straight couples in prime-time dramas, YaoTing’s unwavering fidelity offers a counternarrative (Chu, 2016), while Ting’s grandmother’s wholehearted acceptance subverts assumptions about generational resistance to LGBTQ+ relationships. Fans celebrated a clever kinship workaround introduced in Episode 113: when Ting’s cousin vacillated between calling Yao tangjiefu (husband of paternal older adult female cousin, 堂姐夫) or tangsao (wife of paternal older adult male cousin, 堂嫂), they coined the term tangsao-tangjiefu, transforming linguistic uncertainty into playful affirmation. This naming innovation conjures a hopeful queer future rooted in Taiwan’s local kinship logics.

These cycles of retrieval, remix and circulation broaden the community’s mnemonic repertoire while asserting a refusal to accept disappearance. Importantly, speculative world‑making is not confined to local kinship innovations but unfolds through global queer media flows. The YaoTing fandom illustrates this vividly: the PTT board for lesbian media, titled ‘The_L_Word’ after the American series, began as a site of reception but evolved into a generic space for queer women’s media. Here, fans mobilised references ranging from US examples (e.g. The L Word and the Shaw/Root ship in Person of Interest) to Japanese dramas and Taiwanese local television (e.g. Forbidden Love [2001], the first local series with a lesbian protagonist). This breadth demonstrates how fans navigate global queer media flows to construct new queer memory and redress the representational traumas of earlier depictions.

Speculative mnemonic labour takes hold when official closure falls flat. Although transmedia-memetic interventions offer playful creativity, the persistence of chrono-affective labour reveals fans’ deeper longing for a canonically positive, joyful ending. After 18 months of anticipating YaoTing moments, through Jhong’s interruption of their same-sex wedding and blackmail related to their being seen kissing, among other dramas, the final episode of SKT (Episode 437) staged a mass wedding for every couple, yet conspicuously sidelined YaoTing. Fans felt ‘cheated’, ‘misled’ and ‘speechless’, since the preview of the upcoming 8PM serial overtook their affective investment.

The absence of death might appear a fan victory, since YaoTing did not end in tragedy and death, but the ending left many unsatisfied. Here lies a central dilemma: fans crave affirmative representations and the dramatic intensity that ensures queer visibility. Nonetheless, television production treats ‘happily ever after’ as narrative termination. Once a couple reaches a joyful resolution, their arc is considered complete and their presence is then sidelined, written out or erased, severing visibility and ongoing narrative space. This impasse exposes the limitations of queer representation in serialised television, along with the constraints faced by fans who resist narrative death but cannot conjure fulfilment within existing formal boundaries. It calls for expanded narrative frameworks that sustain queer joy without resorting to erasure or crisis.

This tension fuels both mnemonic endurance and speculative invention. Fans return to archives they painstakingly built – rewatching fanvids, rereading live commentary and re-engaging with fanfiction – not simply for nostalgia but as acts of resistive remembrance. They mobilise traces from other queer texts, writing essays to memorialise YaoTing and cement the solidarity formed during the show’s ‘dark period’. These cycles of retrieval, remix and circulation broaden the community’s mnemonic repertoire while refusing to accept disappearance. Simultaneously, fans imagine sequels, wedding scenes and domestic bliss beneath cherry blossoms, all serving as acts of speculative creation asserting their right to narrate queer futures on their own terms.

In the confluence of endurance and invention, fans enact a speculative practice of hope and care. Feminist theorists remind us that world-making is an act of solidarity, a refusal of crisis and absence (Haraway, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Sara Ahmed’s (2010: 222) call to put the ‘hap’ back into ‘happiness’ reinforces this orientation, opening queer futures shaped by contingency, joy and frustration. By weaving pre-memories of queer intimacy with dissatisfaction over unresolved endings, fans resist narrative foreclosure and cultivate an ethics of sustained queer joy. Their imaginings challenge mainstream televisual logics, insisting that queer lives merit celebration and dramatic presence on screen and beyond.

In sum, these practices demonstrate how mnemonic fan labour operates across temporal registers (i.e. retrieving the past, sustaining the present and projecting futures) so that endurance, remix and speculation remain inseparably linked. This dynamic clarifies how fans mobilise communication into activist mnemonic labour (Salerno, 2025), collapsing past, present and future into a living archive orientated towards change. By grounding transmedia‑memetic labour in remediation and speculative labour in premediation, the framework avoids terminological clutter and situates fan practices within established debates in memory and media studies.

Conclusion

This article theorises fandom as a site of mnemonic labour, as a generative terrain of communicative remembering in which fans retrieve, reconfigure and reconstruct queer memory through vernacular, affective practices. Fan labour operates simultaneously as resistance to erasure and as speculative world‑making, queering the very structures of narrative time and televisual memory.

Queer representation in SKT must be read in relation to its fans’ participatory memory‑making practices, whose labour reshaped both the visibility of queer women’s storylines and the temporal rhythms of the soap opera itself: the increase in the queer subplot’s airtime was a direct result of fans’ activist intervention. Drawing across memory studies, queer theory and fan studies, I argue that fan communities enact mnemonic labour through three interconnected modalities (chrono-affective, transmedia-memetic and speculative) that sustain queer memory work and imagine futures otherwise foreclosed by dominant heteronormative media regimes. Crucially, fan commentaries only become mnemonic labour when orientated towards remembering or anticipating, such as retrieving past tropes through remediation or rehearsing futures.

Fans here emerge as active memory-makers whose temporal, affective and participatory investments reshape how queerness is represented and remembered across global media landscapes. By centring an ethos of ‘it is now’, demanding present-tense intimacy over deferred promises, this article advances a politics of queer memory anchored in urgency, survival and speculation. The tripartite framework developed herein elaborates how mnemonic fan labour operates within serialised televisual rhythms and genre norms. Chrono-affective labour positions waiting – through live-thread commentary, cliffhanger endurance and time-stamped rituals – as a form of collective remembrance that links fandom temporality with queer perseverance histories. Transmedia-memetic labour exemplifies remediation, as fans remix affective tropes across platforms / cultural contexts, constructing hybrid ‘memoryscapes’ that resist singular, nationalist archives. Speculative labour resonates with pre-mediation, as fan-made alternative endings, fix-it plots and visual reimagining rehearse scenarios of queer joy and belonging, activating Muñoz’s (2009) queer futurity and extending Salerno’s (2025) activist mnemonic labour into everyday world-making.

This tripartite framework invites application across genres, platforms and geographies. The online fandom of YaoTing, discussed as an empirical illustration, demonstrates how everyday fan practices enact resistance to representational erasure not by escaping memory regimes but by creatively rewriting them. As queer media creators increasingly engage communal memory work as a source of narrative innovation, the promise of more joyful representation begins to emerge.¹⁴

This article eventually theorises queer fan labour as mnemonic labour: making history, memory and future. Recognising fan labour as mnemonic labour for queer memory opens imaginative futures of queer belonging. Mnemonic labour is therefore not merely reactive but speculative, performative and world-making: a radical form of memory work that reclaims time, remakes genre and renders queer life liveable, again and anew.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the then Sociology Department at Lancaster University for granting sabbatical leave that enabled the completion of this research. I would like to thank Naomi Jacobs and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

ORCID iD

Eva Cheuk-Yin Li

Ethical approval and informed consent statement

Ethical approval for this study was granted by the Research Ethics Committee at Lancaster University (Reference: FASSLUMS-2024-4853-RECR-2), with data analysis undertaken during the author’s affiliation there.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Eva Cheuk-Yin Li is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Screen Industries at King’s College London, UK. Trained in sociology and qualitative research methods, her work investigates the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnational fandom in contemporary media cultures. Her research spans media and cultural studies, fandom studies and queer Asian studies, with a focus on how communities negotiate identity, meaning and inequality through media. Her work has appeared in edited volumes, encyclopaedias and journals including Media, Culture & Society; European Journal of Cultural Studies; Sexualities; Crime, Media & Culture; and East Asian Journal of Popular Culture.

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