Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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The author in the postinternet age: Fan works, authorial function, and the archive
No full textFifty years since Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, there still exists difficulty in framing the nature of interaction between commercial (professional) creators and fan (transformative) authors. In the postinternet age, the visibility of unsanctioned (or tacitly sanctioned) derivative fictional works has only increased, as have the number of commercial creators with experience in creating derivative works for a fan audience. It has therefore become necessary to interrogate whether the author has truly died in the Barthian sense, and if not, what role the construct of the author plays in today's popular mediascape. In an analysis of the Foucauldian author function (that is, the role discursively constructed authors play relative to their work) assessing both Euro-American and Japanese histories of fan practice, a move to a more open-source style of fan practice is evident. The author in an open-source fandom functions as a heuristic device through which fans may access and search the database, as well as a means of decentralizing commercial authority over media content
Rewriting the school story through racebending in the Harry Potter and Raven Cycle fandoms
No full textRacebending fan work has the potential to be a productive site of postcolonial critique. In a close analysis of two racebending young adult literature texts—the titular hero of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (1997–2007) and major character Ronan Lynch from Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle (2012–16)—fans' racebending of the primary characters permits postcolonial revision by challenging the predominantly white worlds they depict as well as recuperating the erasure of diaspora by other fans who insist Britishness and Irishness equate to whiteness. Racebending Harry and Ronan fan works center around queer romances: Harry with school rival Draco Malfoy and Ronan with his in-series boyfriend, Adam Parrish. Racebent Harry fan work, particularly work incorporating a queer romance with Draco, creates a space for fans to imagine alternative possibilities for the series beyond the heteronormative, hegemonic conclusion represented in Rowling's epilogue. Similarly, racebending Ronan offers a depiction of soft black masculinity and loving queer romance that subverts the common association of blackness with anger and aggression. By depicting two characters of color at the center of these queer schoolboy romances, fans disrupt the white homoeroticism and imperialism of the school story genre upon which both series draw
Death in Marvel
No full textA short overview of an informal survey conducted May 25–June 22, 2018, about fan reaction to character deaths in Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Navigating Catholicism and queerness in "Daredevil" fan works
No full textIn Daredevil (2015–18) fan works, fans confront the character of Daredevil, who is portrayed in the Netflix TV series of the same name as explicitly religious, namely Catholic. This means that fan works seeking to explore sexuality, especially same-sex sexuality, must confront Catholicism's prohibition on extramarital sex, including same-sex sexual relations. I examine how fan works use Daredevil as a site from which to examine and debate Catholicism and queerness
Borderland literature, female pleasure, and the slash fic phenomenon
No full textIn the discussion of media and borderlands theory, current scholarship primarily attends to investigating borderlands as metaphors for broader minority critique, where niche, representative publications resist hegemonic mass-market productions. However, scholarship has yet to formally extend the borderlands paradigm to slash fan fiction—that is, examining a subaltern where residents display a hybridity of opposing culture. Looking at slash and its predominantly female, often queer, writers through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of a borderlands offers insight into the values and motivations of writers and consumers in their production of fan fiction, not just within the microcosm of fandom but also pertaining to wider social and cultural transformations. This investigation considers the circumstances dictating female fan experience by examining the practical and contextual dimensions of fandom and illustrating how fan works differ ontologically, epistemologically, and functionally from mainstream productions, thus facilitating a critique on how fans construct and mobilize imaginary as means of negotiating the real social structures that otherwise limit their enjoyment of consumable media and the transformative works they create that nonetheless mirror the systems of marginalization found in the real world
How the Green Hornet became Chinese: Cross-racial mimicry and superhero localization in Hong Kong
No full textThe Green Hornet television series (1966–67), with Bruce Lee in the role of Kato, the Green Hornet's sidekick, was broadcast in Hong Kong in 1968. In subsequent decades, characters referencing the Green Hornet emerged repeatedly in Hong Kong popular culture, and instead of being Anglo-American like the original Hornet, they have all been ethnically Chinese. Scholarship suggests that fans of color are excluded from identifying with or performing white characters based on their racialization; however, this does not appear to be the case for Hong Kong fans. I apply the concept of colonial mimicry to argue that Hong Kong fans arrived at ethnically Chinese inhabiting the Green Hornet by exploiting Kato's partial inclusion as an Asian American and as a sidekick. In addition, as a colonial audience, Hong Kong fans were well positioned to poach from a transcultural text such as The Green Hornet, and make this cross-racial move
Considering eighteenth-century prophecy as transformative work
No full textThis article explores premodern prophecy as a form of transformative work with connections to contemporary fan fiction. This link is established in three ways: through the archontic nature of prophecy, through the prophet's self-insertion into the biblical text, and by viewing prophetic groups as textual communities marked by affective links to characters. These links are examined through a case study of two prophets, Richard Brothers (1757–1824) and Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), with the conflict between them reconceptualized as an affectively driven dispute over claims to character ownership. The article suggests that approaches from fan studies can offer useful perspectives for historians (and vice versa) while cautioning against overly arbitrary ahistorical comparisons between modern fandom and premodern groups
Transformative racism: The black body in fan works
No full textThis article examines the potential pitfalls with the depiction of black bodies in transformative fan works that do not actively consider and account for the history of racism directed toward black bodies throughout American mass media texts
Gendered Fairy Tale Heroics: Ginny Weasley in The Source
No full textThe Harry Potter fan fiction "The Source," by Luckyducky7, centers on Ginny Weasley. This fan fic attempts to carve out a narrative for Ginny Weasley that allows her to be a heroine. This close reading of "The Source" attempts to highlight how it succeeds and how it fails in completing this task. 
Hierarchy within female ACG fandom in China
No full textThis case study focuses on a Chinese female-oriented ACG fan community, 3n5b, with an eye to studying how this community creates a sense of exclusivity and hierarchy through the discourses of copyright infringement, fan labor, and quality membership. Through controlling the distribution of rare resources, 3n5b creates high demand for their manga scanlation, and this demand is translated to a highly restricted membership. Membership is valuable because it is closely related to individual member's social and cultural capital, as well as their access to forum resources. Well-behaved members can slowly gain entry into more restricted forums, while members who violate forum rules are punished with loss of forum status or even membership revocation. This hierarchy seeks to raise the forum's overall quality and to wall off unwanted members, but it also replicates offline power relations that inevitably place people of lower social status at a disadvantage