Attendant to the comics, erotic, speculative fiction, and anthology works produced by the contemporary fan community known as furries, this dissertation presses toward the queerness of fandom with criticism both within and outside of fan studies. While scholarship to this day has worked to de-pathologize fans from being read as simply fanatics or worse, as furry shows, fandom continues to be freighted by hegemonic and heteronormative values. Accordingly, and reliant on the work of scholars including Carolyn Dinshaw, Kadji Amin, Hayden White, and Ramzi Fawaz, this dissertation looks at how fans’ numerous print publications evoke the plurality of fan attachments overlooked by dominant apparatuses.

Beginning with comics, Chapter One examines how fandom offered the space for newly-minted furry fans to imagine new futures and coalitions of care, haunted as they were by past and proceeding violence. To this end, I argue for fandom’s queerness, a frame of thought recognizing the numerous directions that fans take as part of their cultural work. In Chapter Two, I close-read writers Justine “Orrery” Tracer and Ko’s “The Witch of Whatcom County.” Published as a play on the Gothic horror in erotica anthology Heat, Volume 16, “The Witch” follows sensationalist journalist and magic fanatic Justine Lejeune on a documented interview with one Helen Cressida, or the narrative’s suggested monster and magic practitioner. In Justine coming to realize magic and fantasy’s existence, however, rather than sustain a perspective treating Helen and assistant Ren as monsters, the story evokes for readers how seemingly fanatic interests exceed determination due to their careful offerings. Chapter Three follows with another close-read of Mary E. Lowd’s Nexus Nine, a speculative fiction rewrite of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that considers attachment’s limiting power. My final chapter closes the dissertation with a look at furries’ print anthologies and fan-produced magazines, which I argue mediate fandom as heterogeneous via its material production outlets. My conclusion thus offers fan studies with the opportunity for new potential, extending conversations on what it is fans do that can only be read by the close, affective engagement fields still hesitate from.