Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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“Queer transfigurations: Boys love media in Asia,” edited by James Welker
No full textJames Welker, Queer transfigurations: Boys love media in Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022, paperback, 68.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-8899-2
Institutionally appointed fan-athletes: The hegemonic performativity, commodification, and consumption of scholastic dance teams
No full textDance team practices, often situated in sports settings, blur the boundaries between affirmational and transformational fandoms through their performative registers. In scholastic settings, dance teams cheer and perform at sports games, compete in athletic association and/or corporate dance competitions, and attend other events on behalf of their schools. Aiming to perform support for their schools authentically, dance team members act as institutionally appointed fan-athletes. In this role, they are often commodified by their institutions and consumed by its wider fan body while adhering to idealized aesthetic and interpersonal expectations. Choreographically, dance team routines tend to appropriate Black popular dances while warping them to fit aesthetic ideals that valorize whiteness. Studying dance teams through critical ethnographic and dance studies methodologies then highlights how normative modes of performative appropriation can be used primarily to reinforce White supremacist and cis heteropatriarchal social structures even through purported modes of female empowerment
Navigating gender in censored Chinese A/B/O fiction
No full textThe "Alpha Beta Omega Dynamics" (Omegaverse or A/B/O) is a kink trope originating from Anglophone fandom that introduces unconventional sexual orientation and behavior. With its two features of explicit erotic content and male homosexuality, this trope must localize when it moves to Chinese society where censorship pervades. Zooming in on self-censorship on Jinjiang Literature City, the largest online literature platform based in mainland China, reveals that while explicit erotic content is strictly forbidden, male homosexuality is allowed. Two types of popular A/B/O fiction are analyzed using gender theory and close reading: those featuring male homosexuality and those featuring heterosexuality, both without explicit erotic content. The conclusion is that Chinese A/B/O fiction embodies the Omegaverse's transgressive potential in addressing gender issues and work as an important site for authors and readers to showcase and debate their visions of gender, challenging and transgressing the current heteronormative gender discourses in China
Daddy issues/daddy kink: Remixing masculine authority in Spider-Man fan fiction
No full textRecent Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) fan fiction featuring Peter Parker and Tony Stark remixes relationships with masculine authority figures barely present in the films and expands them into either platonic mentorship or sexual intimacy. Using a case study of ten fan fictions tagged "Peter Parker & Tony Stark" and ten fan fictions tagged "Peter Parker/Tony Stark" posted on Archive of Our Own (AO3), I incorporate close reading, distant reading, and metadata analysis to investigate how fans remix daddy issues depending on Peter and Tony's relationship. I conclude that platonic relationship fan fictions deviate from normative masculinity present in Western superhero media to provide a space for male characters to express their emotions and develop complex father-son dynamics. The romantic relationship fan fictions remix presentations of masculinity into sexual dominant and submissive power dynamics, conforming to performative masculine tropes present in Western superhero media. Examining two vastly different types of relationships between the same two characters in the same universe provides valuable insight into the specific ways fandoms remediate the source text to explore themes that are only briefly referenced in the source text
Japanese anime song fandom in crisis: Live music attendance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic
No full textI focus on Japanese anime song fandom during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing the changes in fans' live music attendance and their social relationships. Specifically, semistructured interviews were carried out with nineteen fans of anime song singer Nana Mizuki, all of whom had regularly attended her live music events before the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were recruited using snowball sampling; twelve of the interviews were conducted online. During the temporary cancellation of in-person live shows, fans of Nana Mizuki experienced a suspension of the everyday routines arranged for live music attendance. Some accumulated a desire for live music, whereas others experienced mental health struggles. Online streaming did not serve as an alternative to in-person shows because it was completely different from the form of participation that fans enjoyed before the pandemic. After the restart of in-person shows, fans' decisions (not) to attend them depended on their relationships with their family members, neighbors, and colleagues. Refraining from attending for a few years caused some fans to lose enthusiasm for fandom and close ties with fellow fans. While scholars of live music have studied the extent to which the COVID-19 crisis damaged the music industry, it was not only a crisis in the music industry but also a crisis in fans' everyday lives and fandom
"Pass it to your girlfriend!": A collaborative autoethnography of a friendship through women's sports fandom
No full textLike broader transformative fandom, women's sports spaces are constructed as queer and feminist despite structural anti-Black racism and reinforcement of neoliberal consumerism. Being queer women's sports fans involves embracing the love of the game and many of the players while grappling with troubling politics in both the sports and their fandoms. We use collaborative autoethnography to examine our friendship as a critical feminist sports scholar and a transformative fandom member who have formed a fandom of two around our love of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) and Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) in the United States, while feeling alienation from many other women's sports fans, including at live games and in women's sports real person fiction (RPF) spaces. Drawing on the works of Sara Ahmed and Rukmini Pande, a feminist/fandom killjoy approach is useful for negotiating such contradictions as fans, for cocreating fan practices together, and for articulating hopes for the future of women's sports
Detroit wants Ty Tyson: National and regional fandom and the 1934 NBC World Series radio broadcast
No full textI examine a 1934 fan campaign which collected over six hundred thousand signatures to get popular Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ty Tyson to handle the play-by-play for the World Series. The campaign shows how fans developed strong opinions about the best ways to broadcast sports, as well as how media industries have historically tried to capitalize on audiences' split identities as both regional and national listening audiences
Beyond the game: New perspectives on sports fandom:
No full textEditorial for "Sports Fandoms," guest edited by Jason Kido Lopez and Lori Kido Lopez, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 45 (March 15, 2025)
"Remember, love knows no boundaries and comes in many forms": The conceptualization of queerness within AI-generated fan works
No full textUsing the fandoms of Harry Potter, Supernatural (2005–2020), and Our Flag Means Death (2022–2023), we interrogate the sociotechnical system that underpins generative AI and potential biases toward queerness embedded in them. Given its historical ties to addressing cultural inequities, especially around queerness, fan fiction offers a critical space to examine the sociotechnical underpinnings of generative AI in producing fiction and as an extension of naming and making visible embodied identities. Through an exploration of how ChatGPT fabricates queer fan fiction, we identify not only the typologies of visible queerness imagined as possible within generative AI but equally what essentialist and normative ideologies remain rooted within technologies