Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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852 research outputs found
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Green milk: The environmental eatymologies of Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge
No full textRecent scholarship in media studies has explored the physical experiences of popular culture such as theme parks and fan food. Although these studies emphasize the materiality of media, they have not adequately addressed the environmental implications. Analyzing Galaxy's Edge food in conjunction with food scenes from the Skywalker Saga films makes the alimentary symbolism of the Star Wars franchise more apparent, with food revealing how characters are embedded in their environments. Galaxy's Edge food recreations exemplify how fans imbibe, ingest, and incorporate elements of Star Wars narratives in diverse ways. By foregrounding the individual body of the fan, Galaxy's Edge food demonstrates how material fan practices can creatively transform corporatized popular culture. Expanding textuality within transmedia studies allows for the narrative potential of things (such as bodies, food, and places), paving a path toward more ecocritical approaches in fan studies
“What did they smell like?”: Fans creating intimacy through smell and odor
No full textTraditionally, fan studies have relied on two primary senses when examining the ways in which fans engage with fandom: sight and sound. Given this limited perception, recent attempts have been made to expand the literature to a larger array of senses. The following paper offers a new lens to study fandom by marrying fan studies with scholarship on smell to explore a common fan question: What did he/she/they smell like? Despite its relative frequency in fandom, the topic of smell and smelling is often looked down upon, considered transgressive, or dismissed as unimportant. This paper unpacks fans' interest in odor through three main themes. The first examines the reasons behind the perception of smell as a pathology and its relationship to the conceptualization of the so-called bad fan. The second theme explores questions of morality concerning smell and smelling, with a particular focus on 2021's Showergate controversy. The third discusses the positive role of smell in building a sense of intimacy between fans and celebrities and contributing to the fans' cultural capital
What is an anti? Exploring a key term and contemporary debates
No full textThe term "anti" has come into wide use in fandom over the past few years, but it has not been subject to much scholarly attention. This roundtable brings together a group of thinkers (Alexis Lothian, stitch, Anne Jamison, and Sneha Kumar) with expertise in different facets of this complex phenomenon to explore what is happening with the anti—as well as the opposite side of these debates, known as the anti-anti or proshipper—and what it all means, thereby providing some context for those unfamiliar with these debates and further spurring scholarly attention
"The republic of games: Textual culture between old books and new media," by Elyse Graham
No full textReview of Elyse Graham, The republic of games: Textual culture between old books and new media. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2018, paperback, $24.95 (176p), ISBN 9780773553392
Fandom histories
No full textEditorial for "Fandom Histories," edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby S. Waysdorf, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37 (March 15, 2022)
The experience economy during Covid-19: Virtual activations at Comic-Con@Home
No full textI examine how industry and fans reassessed the value of TV promotion in the form of activations—branded pop-up in-person experiences that promise immersion into storyworlds—as they transformed into online events during Comic-Con@Home in 2020 and 2021. I highlight the industry's expansion of first-party data collection from and tracking of fans in virtual activations
YouTube fandom names in channel communities and branding
No full textThe YouTube channels Good Mythical Morning, grav3yardgirl, and the Vlogbrothers are analyzed to understand the function of fandom names on the platform. The selected YouTubers explain that their named fandoms create a sense of community on their channels. However, YouTube celebrities attempt to assert control over the narrative of their fan groups and encourage viewers to perceive them in a particular way. This control often relates to how content creators use the names to brand their channels and sell merchandise. Names of fan groups emphasize communal relationships but also perform a prominent business function. Understanding how the demonyms try to balance these different motivations reveals that the commercialization of fandom is embedded in everyday social media practices and the relationship between online celebrities and fans
Affirmational canons and transformative literature: Notes on teaching with fandom
No full textInstructors who use fan studies in the classroom are likely to make use of transformative works and theories. The remix classroom offers a way to read against popular interpretations of mainstream texts. In the process, teaching with fandom—not to mention fandom itself—is often presented specifically as a salve to prescriptive readings of texts. Yet fan practices are often imagined by mainstream culture as being uniquely affirmational—a particularly enthusiastic form of close reading that emphasizes and rewards deference to an authorial voice. In this sense, the way media and popular culture understand fandom is as an extension of how students are often taught to read texts: via a formalistic, New Critical approach that centers authoritative criticism. Students who interact with fan texts but do not see themselves as fans feel this way, just as students often fail to recognize themselves as critical readers because expertise has been made into a form of gatekeeping
Students as fan, or Reinvention and repurposing in first-year writing classrooms
No full textI performed a study of two first-year writing classrooms and their interactions that used a fan fiction–based pedagogy. Rather than using fan fiction as class texts, this pedagogy used the fan fiction practices of reinventing and repurposing to help students better understand themselves and their community. This was done to position the students as fans themselves. Students were challenged to act as a fan would as they moved through myriad overlapping fan fiction and composition studies practices. I include descriptions of major assignments, examples of student writing, and reflections on both the successes and struggles within this classroom
Cinema audience immersion in story worlds through "ouen-jouei"
No full textIn Japan, ouen-jouei (cheer screening) events permit novel forms of audience participation, with screened events allowing cheering, glowstick waving, and cosplaying. Fans immerse themselves in story worlds by physically performing at such ouen-jouei events. Ouen-jouei audience members become immersed in the film's story world through a process of negotiation between their physical state as a spectator and their imagined self as a story world character, as is demonstrated by ouen-jouei events associated with the 2016 Japanese animated film King of Prism. Theories associated with audience studies, media studies, and fan tourism are deployed to analyze this novel form of cinema audience immersion. It is impossible to physically integrate audience members and a film's story world, so fans' inner experiences become the primary concern