Textual poachers and the civic imagination: A qualitative study of the fan reception of Disney’s Mulan (1998) on Pinterest

This article investigates the reception of Disney’s Mulan (1998) by fans with a queer taste. Adopting a qualitative method, it collects queer ‘fanarts’ based on Mulan from the social media platform Pinterest and analyses the data in the critical contexts of fandom and queer studies. The analysis shows that fan writers ‘poach’ characters from the film, rewriting them as queer for entertainment, fulfilment of creative desires, enhancement of self-identification and subversion of heterosexuality. This article suggests that these fanarts are the products of Mulan fans’ civic imagination for a non-heteronormative world immune to homophobia and misogyny. This imagination comprises two underlying discursive practices: disarticulating heteronormativity and rearticulating the film in the light of queerness as a social force. Enlightened by the Mulan fandom, this article concludes by reflecting on how to increase the real-world political effectiveness of fans’ civic imagination.