From Creative Sovereignty to Ethical Fracture: Gendered Containment in Digital Horror Fandom

0.1 Abstract
This article examines how participants occupying feminine positionalities in digital horror fandoms sustain ethical narrative practice within platform accelerated environments saturated by symbolic violence and circulating affect. Drawing on five years of immersive multimodal performative netnography across X, Wattpad, Tumblr, and Archive of Our Own, it analyses collaborative horror micropublics centred on slasher and villain figures including Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Candyman.

Findings demonstrate that these participants disproportionately perform feminised affective labour, the unrecognised infrastructural work of emotional regulation, ethical containment, and relational calibration through which scenes of monstrous intimacy are rendered survivable. The article introduces three interlinked concepts. Feminised affective labour names this gendered economy of care. Violent Erotic Reorientation describes reparative reconfigurations of monstrous masculinity through grammars of waiting, restraint, attunement, negotiated proximity, and withdrawal. Ethical Violent Reorientation identifies the misrecognition of vulnerability as stimulus for escalation, restoring canonical slasher power dynamics under erotic cover. Ethical Fracture designates the structural threshold at which feminised affective labour becomes unsustainable, producing silence, withdrawal, deletion, and narrative collapse.

Platform architectures privilege escalation, immediacy, and visibility, converting relational care into extractable spectacle and eroding the temporal and affective conditions required for ethical containment. Feminine creative sovereignty therefore emerges as fragile and conditional, persisting only through contraction and refusal. By reframing disappearance as feminist knowledge production rather than failure, the article challenges celebratory models of participatory culture and relocates agency from expressive freedom to precarious ethical endurance within platformed horror fandoms.

1.0 Introduction
[1.1] Digital horror fandoms thrive in environments saturated with fear, desire, and symbolic violence. Yet fan studies has frequently framed these spaces as sites of expressive freedom, creative agency, and participatory empowerment (Jenkins 1992, 2006; Hills 2002). Such celebratory accounts obscure the labour conditions through which volatile micropublics are rendered narratively coherent and ethically survivable. Collaborative horror cultures centred on slasher and villain figures such as Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Candyman do not endure through creativity alone. They persist through continual relational intervention, in which participants occupying feminine positionalities disproportionately perform the infrastructural work of emotional pacing, ethical containment, and narrative calibration.

[1.2] This uneven distribution of ethical responsibility is structurally gendered. Feminist theory demonstrates that cultural participation is shaped by regimes of expectation rather than autonomous choice. Butler’s performativity framework reveals identity as emerging through reiterated acts constrained by norms of recognisability (Butler 1990). Ahmed’s theory of affective economies shows how emotions circulate across bodies, texts, and technologies, orienting subjects toward particular relations while rendering others precarious (Ahmed 2004). McRobbie further exposes how women’s creative work is intensified and naturalised as care rather than recognised as labour (McRobbie 2009). Ethical narrative practice in horror fandom is therefore not voluntary devotion but feminised affective labour enacted under conditions of obligation.

[1.3] This article asks: How do participants occupying feminine positionalities sustain ethical narrative practice in platform-accelerated, affectively saturated horror environments? What relational grammars enable scenes of monstrous intimacy to remain survivable? And why does this labour fracture under conditions of algorithmic escalation and relational extraction?

[1.4] To address these questions, I draw on five years of immersive multimodal performative netnography conducted between 2019 and 2024 across Archive of Our Own, Wattpad, Tumblr, and X. The study integrates macro-level prevalence mapping of approximately 17,979 slasher works, meso-level tag and engagement ecology analysis, and micro-level coding of anonymised Jason Voorhees exemplars, alongside thick autoethnographic data generated through sustained participation as an aca-fan author. This multi-scalar design allows the study to trace how ethical labour circulates simultaneously through metadata, narrative grammars, and embodied exhaustion.

[1.5] The analysis reframes digital horror fandom as a gendered labour economy rather than a domain of unqualified agency. While convergence scholarship has illuminated the pleasures of textual poaching and communal world building (Jenkins 1992, 2006; Hills 2002), it has not conceptualised participation itself as a site of extraction, nor disappearance as epistemic practice. By treating silence, withdrawal, deletion, and narrative collapse as patterned structural outcomes rather than individual shortcomings, this article relocates creative sovereignty from expressive autonomy to precarious ethical endurance.

[1.6] These labour dynamics unfold within infrastructures that actively undermine their sustainability. Platforms do not neutrally host participation but reorganise it through architectures that privilege speed, intensity, and visibility. boyd’s concept of networked publics demonstrates how persistence, scalability, and context collapse expose emotional performances to unintended audiences (boyd 2011). Gillespie shows how moderation systems encode normative values into regimes of visibility (Gillespie 2018). van Dijck conceptualises platforms as connective media that restructure participation through commercial architectures of dependency and extraction (van Dijck 2013), while Burgess and Green demonstrate how engagement metrics privilege affective escalation over ethical pacing (Burgess and Green 2009).

[1.7] Within horror micropublics, these dynamics convert relational care into monetisable spectacle. Feminised affective labour becomes increasingly responsible for repairing narrative drift generated by algorithmic acceleration, yet is denied the temporal and relational conditions required for endurance. Ethical Fracture designates the structural threshold at which this labour becomes unsustainable, producing silence, withdrawal, deletion, and narrative collapse not as anomalies but as predictable consequences of participation within economies of escalation. Feminine creative sovereignty therefore emerges as fragile and conditional, persisting only through contraction, refusal, and embodied withdrawal.