When the White Knight is a Woman: An Intertextual Analysis of Antagonism in a Female-Oriented Fandom

Abstract

This study is an analysis of how members of a women's online community, the fanfiction fandom for the Twilight book series, come to identify certain users as participating in what they refer to as ‘whiteknighting.’ While the community borrows the term from male-dominated spaces, in which a whiteknighter is typically a male user who defends a female user to curry her favor, in this community, whiteknighting is best understood as an intertextual discourse process in which the impression of an overly-vehement defense is created by the way the interaction unfolds. Combining analytical frameworks from Tannen (2006) and Agha (2005), I show how the impression of the whiteknighter as defensive is co-created by both her contribution and others' uptake of it. The entextualization of instances of whiteknighting enables members to signal to others that a given participant is an outsider, allowing the group to perceive themselves as cooperating even as they police the bounds of their community of practice. This work provides further evidence for women's distinctive online discourse practices and argues for the value of combining multiple approaches to understand them.