Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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What if academic publishing worked like fan publishing? Imagining the Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own
No full textResearchers, universities, and academic libraries develop a range of tools and platforms to make scholarship more accessible. What could these scholarly communications and open access projects learn from examples set by fandom and fan activists, for example, the fan works platform Archive of Our Own (AO3)? This conceptual paper, the result of a brainstorming session by scholars and librarians, proposes that a Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own should excel at making scholarly knowledge production into a visibly, enthusiastically collective endeavor that recognizes many kinds of contributions beyond the publication of traditional research papers
Taylor Swift, remediating the self, and nostalgic girlhood in tween music fandom
No full textAs traditional album sales decline, music artists have turned to deluxe editions and store exclusives to entice their fan bases into buying not just physical copies but multiple copies of the same record. In attempting to engage with a young and increasingly digital audience—many of whom do not even own devices on which to play physical copies of music—Taylor Swift has chosen to use emotional rhetoric to transpose her aura into a desire for the tangible. Swift brings fans along with her on a journey into her own past, reigniting interest in earlier forms of media and capitalizing on a tween ideal of bedroom culture. In creating deluxe versions of her album Lover (2019) with scanned copies of her teen diary entries alongside blank journal pages for fans, Swift encourages a melding of fan and star in a moment of adolescent expression. With this production, Swift attempts to create physical objects of emotion, to reinforce girl culture as brand, and to bring value back to the nondigital album. Swift creates purposeful space in her own narrative for fans to insert themselves and plug in their understanding of her star text, further aligning herself and the fan in a sort of metafandom
I also eat the straights: Male heterosexual fandoms writing LGBTQ+ media history in Japan
No full textI explore the transformative works of Inmu Fandoms, heterosexual Japanese fans of gay pornography. The aim is to understand the practices and expressions of Inmu that mobilize a wide range of gay manga, movies, and even video games to generate their own cultures, religion, language, and history. Critical insight is given regarding the stakes of this queering practice on the preservation and erasure of Japanese LGBT media history. Careful attention is paid to both textual and discursive elements to question the praxis of so-called Inmu theory and history within the spectrum of Japanese Fan Studies
"Fanvids: Television, women, and home media re-use," by E. Charlotte Stevens
No full textReview of E. Charlotte Stevens, Fanvids: Television, women, and home media re-use. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020, hardcover, €113 (278p), ISBN 978-9462985865
Filling the gap: An exploration into the theories and methods used in fan studies
No full textInterdisciplinarity involves the interaction, combination, and integration of theories, concepts, and methods across different disciplines—and fan studies is commonly seen as an interdisciplinary field of research. This contribution sheds light on the question of interdisciplinarity by investigating contemporary notions of theory and methods used in two discipline-related scholarly journals through a metadata analysis of the keywords as well as a content analysis of fifty randomly selected abstracts in order to investigate the dominant theoretical approaches and methods used in the field of fan studies
Information-seeking behaviors of young adult readers of fiction and fan fiction
No full textUnderstanding the differences in how young adult readers search for fiction and fan fiction to read and their preferred search methods may allow libraries to better serve this population by providing the kinds of information that these readers desire to know prior to reading a creative work
Framing the Covid-19 pandemic's impacts on fan conventions
No full textSome initial findings are presented from a media monitoring project on the Covid-19 pandemic's impacts on comic cons and other fan events during 2020. We analyzed a sample of 77 items from a corpus of 813 articles, identifying story lines and themes that framed this moment of upheaval and uncertainty
Fans, play knowledge, and playful history management
No full textThree empirical case studies with an interest in character toys—Barbie dolls, Star Wars action figures, and Forest Families figurines—provide insight into the practices of prime players of contemporary toy cultures focusing on their activities as fans and historians of particular toy brands. Adult toy fans preserve and produce new play knowledge as they remember, recreate, and replay historical narratives of the objects of their fandom. Play knowledge, a relevant resource in current toy fandoms, helps describe the diverse ways fans act as historians through playful history management, thus contributing to existing research on fans' strategies to preserve play
Binding fan fiction and reexamining book production models
No full textBinding fan fiction into books is an increasingly popular phenomenon that follows in the footsteps of twentieth-century fanzines and challenges the current perception of fic as an exclusively digital form. Fan binders complicate book historical notions of bookmaking as a commercially driven enterprise by infusing it with affective connotations that rearrange the book production model of Robert Darnton's communication circuit. The notion of a fan fiction communication circuit extends Darnton's model to account for the noncommercial, reciprocal practices of fan fiction production. Members of Renegade Bindery, a community of fan binders on Discord, provide testimony regarding their philosophy, technique, and motivation that paints a complex picture of contemporary private bookbinding practices that construes value for printed works through affective labor rather than commercial return