Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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"Speculative blackness: The future of race in science fiction," by andré m. carrington
No full textReview of andré m. carrington. Speculative blackness: The future of race in science fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Hardcover, 25 (292p) ISBN 978-0816678969; e-book, $14.50 (2717KB), ASIN B01CTOJSOI
Race, storying, and restorying: What can we learn from black fans?
No full textTracing storytelling traditions from historic roots within Black cultures to contemporary fandom, this essay argues for more research and critique on the ways that today's Black fans engage in restorying, with implications for reader response theory, research in digital literacies, and Black studies
"Seeing fans: Representations of fandom in media and popular culture," edited by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth
No full textReview of Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth. Seeing fans: Representations of fandom in media and popular culture. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Hardcover ₤110 (336p) ISBN 978-1-5013-1845-0; paperback ₤28.99 ISBN 978-1-5013-3954-7; EPUB/MOBI ₤31.30 ISBN 978-1-5013-1846-7; PDF ₤31.30 ISBN 978-1-5013-1847-4
Big name fandom and the (inevitable) failure of Disflix
No full textBig name fans are those who have attained a level of recognition within a fan community without necessarily knowing each participant in the subculture and who have the power to influence how other fans in their community engage with the object of their shared fandom. Their niche celebrity status can be achieved through the range of knowledge, access, and official or exclusive information available to them, as well as the degree to which they produce their own media content. In the Disney fan community, big name fans are also sometimes known as lifestylers (lifestyle influencers), and their status is derived primarily from their social media celebrity. These fans document their frequent visits to the Disney parks and official Disney media events on social media, and they use their online platform to interact with their followers and share how they incorporate Disney into all aspects of their lives. Their microcelebrity status gives them power to shape and commodify what it means to be a Disney fan in the new media age through an emphasis on producing and sharing marketable personal brand content. This article seeks to understand the ways the influencer phenomenon has affected the Disney fan community and how this group of fans has shifted the practices, interactions, and habits associated with Disney fandom; it also addresses the limits of their impact among their peers
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," canonicity, and audience participation
No full textOne of the pervading threads in fandom studies is the metadiscursive tendency within fan works through which audience members engage with media in creative ways that frequently challenge the limited scope of the available canon. However, the challenge presented by active audiences whose desire to interpret and transform texts to accommodate their own desires is not a creation of the internet age, and the struggle over figurative ownership of genres, texts, and characters is a recurrent theme in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This romance explores the tensions arising from audience investment and participation in a canon that they demand suit their social, political, and emotional ends. Throughout the text, the romance pits Gawain against his canonical textual exploits, the romances read in both courts, and even the narrator's (and by extension the audience's) own heroic and epic expectations. Itself a text working within an existing corpus and reliant on audience familiarity with Arthurian canon for much of its humor and logic, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight highlights a familiar struggle over canonicity and legitimacy, suggesting the potential for interpretive frames arising from fandom studies to illuminate texts often excluded from its purview
Survival and migration patterns of Chinese online media fandoms
No full textChinese online media fandoms over the past two decades have been shaped and erased by natural website deaths and data loss, but also by governmental censorship, especially under the pressure of three major censorship campaigns that targeted pornographic and copyright-infringing publications. The preservation of this history, although necessary, also leads to ethical debates regarding exposing fandoms to censors
Fan fiction and ancient scribal cultures
No full textEditorial for guest-edited issue, “Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures,” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 31 (December 15, 2019)
Millennial fandom and the failures of "Switched at Birth"'s sexual assault education campaign
No full textSince the emergence in the 1970s of the ABC Afterschool Special series, networks have sought to distance themselves from the what critics saw as the crass, shallow spectacle of mainstream television. Indeed, contemporary teen programming increasingly rejects black-and-white messages and didacticism in favor of provoking discussion both within the text and online. How, then, do "very special episodes" play out in an age of social TV, online fan discussion, and culturally edgy teen programming? By exploring a 2015 sexual assault story arc on ABC Family's teen drama, <em>Switched at Birth</em> (2011–17), and the network's accompanying social media fan engagement, I argue that fan conversations on social media about divisive or sensitive topics have the potential to disrupt the educational messages within teen programming. ABC Family's #SwitchedAfterChat exemplifies the ways in which fan engagement strategies that fail to adequately support online conversations surrounding sensitive or controversial topics have the potential to thwart educational messaging and to shut down lines of conversation opened by the television text itself, not only in teen programming but in television storytelling more generally
Be him/have him: Brooker/Bowie
No full textReview of Will Brooker, Forever Stardust: David Bowie Across the Universe. London: I. B. Tauris, 2017, paperback, $17.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1784531423; and Being Bowie. Documentary film/audiovisual essay. Directed by Will Brooker, edited by Rebecca Hughes, 2016
"Please Like Me" and global TV flows
No full textThis case study examines the formal and informal distribution of Australian dramedy Please Like Me (2013–17) via the now-defunct American digital cable channel Pivot and via fan culture on Tumblr. The contrast between Pivot's failure to secure an audience and fans' success in circulating the show offers an insight into the continued shift in TV consumption and the complex relationship between distributors and viewers