Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
Not a member yet
852 research outputs found
Sort by
Fandom and the early years of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society (1924–45)
No full textLondon's Gilbert and Sullivan Society (founded 1924 and documented in the Gilbert and Sullivan Journal) is a remarkable example of a collection of fan practices flourishing in the decades leading up to World War II. Despite many differences between Gilbert and Sullivan fandom and many subsequent movements, much that would become familiar in more recent fandom, is already manifest even in the society's earliest years, including costume fandom, fan fiction, text analysis, member quizzes and competitions, critical and adoring reviews of new productions, and star meet-and-greets, all shared by an ever-growing community of enthusiasts seeking reenchantment
Young women and fan fiction: Motives, reading practices, and reader types
No full textAn investigation of the motives and reading practices of fan fiction among female university students aged eighteen to twenty-five in Moscow was conducted via a quantitative survey of 178 participants. The research examined sociodemographic characteristics, reading habits, and motivational drivers, offering an expanded classification of motives informed by existing literature and participant responses. Key motives included fandom engagement, hobby/entertainment, emotional escapism, imagination development, and skill improvement in writing fan fiction. Reading practices encompassed frequency, text length, content rating, category preferences, and community engagement levels. Notably, although respondents demonstrated high consumption rates—favoring fandom-based maxi-length texts with mature themes—their interaction with fan fiction communities remained limited. The study also identified novel motives such as aesthetic appreciation of writing styles and language acquisition through fan fiction. Findings revealed nuanced connections between reading motives, practices, and sociodemographics, contributing to a deeper understanding of fan fiction as both a cultural phenomenon and a digital literacy tool. The results challenge universal assumptions about fan fiction consumption by highlighting culturally specific patterns among Russian readers
The fading of the elves: Techno-volunteerism and the disappearance of Tolkien fan fiction archives
No full textThe online Tolkien fandom has historically supported dozens of fan-run community fan fiction archives, but recent years have seen a sudden loss of most of those remaining. While platform preferences account for some loss, eroding technology and the invisibility of archivists' and developers' work are areas that can be addressed to preserve existing fan cultures
Our Shakespeare, ourselves: The pleasures (and pitfalls) of fannish reading
No full textSo much of what we think we know about William Shakespeare as a person is, at worst, untrue, and at best, merely unproveable. How do we get from this string of documentary lacunae to the central figure of the Western literary canon, and what can that journey reveal about different modes of reading and engagement? The answer, I argue, lies in what Anna Wilson calls "fannish hermeneutics"—in essence, a mode of affective reading that emphasizes an emotional connection to the text, thus operating in contrast to the manner of reading favored by academic institutions, and which can tell us far more about the reader than about Shakespeare. While I certainly do not propose to elevate one reading mode over the other—after all, at their worst, one reeks of pedantry and the other gave us the authorship controversy—I explore how readings of Shakespeare's sonnets reflect different forms of fannish engagement and hermeneutics
"One day longer, one day stronger": Online platforms, fan support and the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes
No full textThe 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes were widely supported by fans at fan events like conventions and on online platforms. I discuss how this opened up larger questions about the relevance of fan labor for the industry and blurred lines between creators and fans, and why scholars of fan studies (and beyond) are directly impacted by the strikes' outcome
Baldwin, Shakespeare, whiteness, and (anti)fandom: "What's love got to do with it?"
No full textShakespeare's racial whiteness is not always positioned in the frame. It is not always acknowledged, publicly or critically, especially the powerful effects of that whiteness, which cannot be separated from the man. When acafans, fans, and antifans evade engagement with whiteness (and race, broadly speaking), much gets lost with respect to holistic knowledge production. One solution is to engage always—with a critical eye that is constructive and not reductive—how whiteness is constantly at work
Platforming the past: Nostalgia, video games, and A Hat in Time
No full textResearch on nostalgia has shown how media texts can promote ideological visions of the past. The 2017 3D platformer video game A Hat in Time (AHIT) is a case study in this nostalgic construction of values in a contemporary, postmodern, convergence-culture context. The game's marketing and text discursively and materially construct AHIT as a continuation of video games from the 1990s and early 2000s in a way that creates a communal nostalgia. Fans have also used the game itself as a platform by creating a library of more than five thousand modifications, or mods, many of which are based on 1990s and 2000s texts; these mods allow the game to serve as a platform for postmodern remixes of nostalgic texts. AHIT shows how contemporary convergence culture and media platforms allow for communal, customizable nostalgia
"It's not your tumblr": Commentary-style tagging practices in fandom communities
No full textTagging practices on online platforms prioritize descriptive elements that contribute to information discovery. As a secondary tagging practice, commentary tags expand the functionality of online tagging to incorporate creative and expressive elements that initially seem to contribute little to information discovery systems. These tags have gained popularity, particularly within online fan communities and their preferred platforms, such as the social media blogging site Tumblr. Although popularized on Tumblr, commentary-style tags have become a recognizable fandom practice across platforms that host fan communities, including the fan work repository platform Archive of Our Own. Examining fan use of commentary tags provides insight into how such tagging practices could broaden information discovery to incorporate elements of creator expression and deepen user engagement with information resources
Fandom and the ethics of world-making: Building spaces for belonging on BobaBoard
No full textBobaBoard is an in-development social media platform for media fans who are striving to create a space of belonging and acceptance for what its founder describes as a "niche group of weirdos." This emerging community is creating a protected space where media fans can explore and share their sexualities through both an anonymity-first design and a core ethos of anticensorship. However, these goals are not simple or easy to implement, and there are both affordances and limitations to BobaBoard's approach. Through digital ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews, I found that the strategies and innovations through which tensions surrounding anonymity and (anti)censorship are negotiated illustrate emerging community ethics around the cocreation of fan spaces and the exploration of sexual fantasy in these spaces. These community ethics, or the ethics of world-making, demonstrate the possibilities of collaboratively creating protected spaces for sharing desire and sexuality
The universal law of Shakespitation: Pushing and pulling against Shakespearean gravitas:
No full textDespite a growing awareness that positivism is not an ideal epistemological approach and that even in circumstances where it is useful, it is always partially illusory, the notion of refusing the idea of inherent worth in an author of Shakespeare's cultural mass often leads to scholarly paroxysms. The only aspects of Shakespeare that are truly inherent to Shakespeare are his role as a tool for colonialism and white supremacy. However, using Shakespeare as a curricular tool to teach this history of violence, creation of meaning through art, and conflicting representations of humanity leads to clutched pearls and white supremacist ideologies coded as arguments for timeless values and transcendental humanity. One role of antifandom is to critique and push back against this authorship reification, and engaging in this conversation with antifandom is necessary not only for the future scholarship of Shakespeare but also for the future relevance of Shakespeare to the world