Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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Building bridges: Papers from the FanLIS 2021 symposium
No full textThis editorial gives background and context on FanLIS, a symposium series and research project run by CityLIS, Department of Library and Information Science at City, University of London, which seeks to explore the liminal spaces between fandom, fan studies, and Library and Information Science (LIS). It also introduces papers from the inaugural FanLIS symposium, which took place online on May 20, 2021
"Fandom, now in color: A collection of voices," edited by Rukmini Pande
No full textReview of Rukmini Pande, editor, Fandom, now in color: A collection of voices. Ames: University of Iowa Press, 2020, paperback, 75, ISBN 978-1609387297
Digital archives, fandom histories, and the reproduction of the hegemony of play
No full textFan-made videos documenting the history of video games are growing in popularity on social media platforms like YouTube. These histories help fans imagine their communities by telling stories about who belongs and what modes of fandom are accepted. The fan archives that fan-historians draw from when constructing and narrating history thus play an important role in determining who can and cannot be represented in fan histories. As a case study of a fan-made history video about League of Legends (2009) makes clear, the archive of game play footage that League of Legends fans use to create their history videos contributes to the writing of histories that imagine a fan community devoid of women, people of color, and others who have historically been marginalized within gaming culture. On commercial platforms like YouTube, fan archives are powerfully shaped not only by fans and fan culture but also by the computer algorithms that process, organize, and present information. The algorithmic curation of League of Legends' game play footage archive presents an image of the game’s fandom in which women and people of color are invisible—an invisibility reproduced and reified as fans use the archive to write histories of their community
Fan binding as a method of fan work preservation
No full textEfforts in fan work preservation have increased in recent years, both from fan collaboration with institutional archival collections and through fan-run digital archives. Physical archival projects aimed at fan works generally limit their scope to fanzines from the mid- to late 1900s and fandom memorabilia like fan convention programs. Digital preservation in online archives allows for more comprehensive preservation of fan fiction, but fandom's history of content loss online as a result of takedowns, shutdowns, and regulation exemplifies the risks of letting fan fiction exist solely online. Fan binding, the practice of transforming fan fiction into physical books, offers another possible method of preserving fan fiction in the long term. Renegade Bindery, a community of fan binders on the online messaging platform Discord, provides a way to study how these bound fan fictions could fit into the current framework of fan work preservation efforts. Analysis of Renegade Bindery provides insight into fan binder practices and motivations, and permits theorization of how the practice of fan binding could contribute to broader efforts to preserve fan works and fandom culture
Roller Coaster Dream: A Chinese roller coaster enthusiast community
No full textRoller Coaster Dream, a Chinese roller coaster enthusiast club, is a good example of an emerging fanbase in a rapidly developing theme park market
The limits of Comic-Con’s exclusivity
No full textThis essay considers the interplay between exclusivity and access growing out of Comic-Con’s history, its pivot online during the pandemic, and the organization’s plans for the future
Creative versus technical work in virtual series
No full textWhen a group of fan volunteers created StillFlying.net, a site that hosted Virtual Firefly (VFF), a continuation of the Fox 2002–3 series Firefly, they organized their labor in a way that mirrored actual television production crews, dividing contributors into those with above-the-line creative titles like head writer and those with below-the-line technical titles like art director. By mapping industry hierarchies onto themselves, the VFF community reproduced problematic distinctions between creative and technical work, isolating the site's technical/infrastructural contributors from collaborative support
Fanon Bernie Sanders: Political real person fan fiction and the construction of a candidate
No full textWriters of Bernie Sanders fan fiction incorporate elements of both canon and fanon in their characterization. Canon elements largely reflect the mediated reality of the senator and showcase the impact of media-produced narratives on followers. Writers incorporate fanon elements as a manner of altering unsatisfying realities and participating in communities in which they are not typically welcomed, such as politics. Engaging in writing political real person fiction enables fans to envision altered realities and gain a greater understanding of politics, a phenomenon which was especially evident during the unpredictable 2016 election season
Femslash fandom and the cultivation of white queer genealogies: Longing for histories, reading for futures
No full textThe recent surge in fan activity around historical figures like Emily Dickinson and Anne Lister reveals an ongoing desire for and investment in cultivating queer histories as a way of addressing the harms of erasure. This popular recovery project, however, reproduces existing hierarchies insofar as it most commonly makes wealthy, white histories legible, leaving others unclaimed and unrecognized. Despite these current tendencies, I offer "too close reading" as a fan-inflected scholarly methodology that holds the possibility of helping readers better recognize less overt forms of queerness across media and in the archives