1. This essay is written as a performance. Like “Sextext,” it is a (semi)fictive, first-person narrative account. Operating from the assumption that subjectivity is fluid, multiple, and constructed, the authors of this essay adopt an “I” voice, and perform both the narrator and Mary Sue identities as collectively theirs.

2. Burke's view of how literature and other forms of discourse such as film and television function as equipments for living has been widely studied by communication scholars. See, for instance, Brummett; Lair; Ott; and Ott and Bonnstetter.

3. On this point see Collins; Markowitz; and Molesworth.

4. For a similar approach, see Langellier.

5. In as much as Mary Sue characters are proxies for the authors who write them, Mary Sues bear some similarities to the avatars created in online video games like Second Life. But since authors of Mary Sue fanfic write the whole story, they have far more control over what happens to them than the clients who create residents (i.e., avatars) in the virtual world of Second Life do.

6. Although scholars agree that the vast majority of fan fiction is authored by women, male versions of Mary Sue characters do exist, including “Gary Stu,” “Marty Stu,” “Maurice Stu,” “Murry Sue,” and the like. Pflieger surmises the reason that no single name for male Mary Sue characters exists may be because “more attention has been [paid] to the female character than to the male, perhaps because male characters are expected to embody the ideals of perfection associated with the character, so the fact that they do isn't noteworthy; perhaps because the dearth of admirable female characters in the source material makes admirable original female characters stand out all the more.”

7. Virginia Keft-Kennedy contends that violent male/male slash “engenders a gaze that … explicitly enacts a cooptation of male homosexuality into women's socio-sexual economy of desire” (74).

8. I have omitted all online authors’ names to preserve their privacy. For bibliographic purposes, I refer to all online authors either of Mary Sue fiction or who use an online handle as “Fan Writer.”

9. The Official Mary Sue Society Avatar Appreciation Site is no longer accessible, though other web pages addressing Mary Sue still link to and/or reference the site.

10. Cixous cites Jean Genet and James Joyce as examples of men who perform feminine writing (Sarup 123).

11. That authors (re)write the codes of beauty and femininity is evident in other Mary Sue fan fiction as well. In a Knight Rider (1982–85) fanfic, for instance, the Mary Sue Cara Knight, daughter of canon character Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff), has noticeable burn marks on her face, marks that were acquired before she met the canon characters (Fan Writer #3). In a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fanfic, the Mary Sue character has straight black hair and chubby cheeks (Fan Writer #4).

12. Kristeva's implementation of the term semiotic differs markedly from its traditional use in structural linguistics. For her, the semiotic refers not to the science or life of signs, but to the primary drive energies that inform abjection and the constitution of the subject.

13. While Kristeva does not specifically subscribe to notion of écriture féminine, “what she does have is a theory of marginality, subversion and dissidence …. Kristeva argues that there are … forms of signification which cannot be contained by the rational structure of the symbolic order and which therefore threaten its sovereignty and have been relegated to the margins of discourse” (Sarup 123).

14. Kristeva saw this occurring in the writings of Joyce, Mallarmé, and Artaud. “These men,” explains Ann Rosalind Jones, “reexperience such jouissances subconsciously and set them into play by constructing texts against the rules and regularities of conventional language” (371).