Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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On defining "yuri"
No full textThe term yuri, referring to lesbian-themed Japanese animation and comics, is both descriptive and divisive, shaped by creators and industry and by different audiences within fandom. The story of yuri is the story of a genre driven forward and backward between conflicting requirements and heterogeneous audiences
The surface of women
No full textThis essay examines the range of gender designations, particularly those referring to women (as a class), within the research I conducted on genderswap fan work. The survey I did as part of that research had 295 participants, who were provided a short-answer field to explain their gender identity. The vast majority can be considered as being in the class of "women," but the ways in which they define themselves offer a significant expansion to the surface that "women" can be conceived to cover
"In all my experience I cannot recall any more singular and interesting study"
No full textEditorial for "Sherlock Holmes Fandom, Sherlockiana, and the Great Game," edited by Betsy Rosenblatt and Roberta Pearson, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 23 (March 15, 2017)
Polyphony on Tumblr: Reading the hate blog as pastiche
No full textTumblr accounts dedicated to criticizing or mocking a text and fandom pose an interpretive challenge. Far from a straightforward display of antifandom, what we find here is a comic pastiche of fragments enabled by the postmodern flatness of the medium. With reference to a group of blogs positioned as antithetical to BBC's Sherlock (2010–), I suggest we can read these pastiches as critique without authority—as a polyphonic surface that undermines both claims to discursive dominance and the dominance of mass media cultural icons
Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies" as reclamatory fan work
No full textIn what ways can medieval texts be looked at as fan works? How might the rhetorical tools of fan studies or affect theory aid in further understanding of these texts? Likewise, can we use medieval understandings of literary production to look at modern fan works in order to complicate our contemporary ideas of authorship? Here I consider how Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cité des Dames) can be read as a reclamatory fan work addressing issues of representation and gender within both the texts it responds to and the larger culture within which the work is situated. Moreover, contextualizing de Pizan's work as fan work can help fan scholars by locating fan studies within a broader literary history. By reframing these earlier works of literature as part of a longer history of women's writing that also involves the works being done today within modalities of fan writing, and by reconsidering fan works as part of a historical continuum of women's writing, we, much as de Pizan herself did, create a theoretical space that historicizes, contextualizes, and indeed valorizes women writers of both fannish and nonfannish works
"The great detective,"by Zach Dundas; "Gender and the modern Sherlock Holmes," edited by Nadine Farghaly; and "Sherlock Holmes," edited by Alex Werner
No full textReview of: Zach Dundas. The Great Detective: The amazing rise and immortal life of Sherlock Holmes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, hardcover, 15.95 (2378 KB), ISBN 978-0-544-22020-1, ASIN B00LZ7GP6U. Nadine Farghaly, ed. Gender and the modern Sherlock Holmes: Essays on film and television adaptations since 2009. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015, paperback, 9.99 (3353 KB), ISBN 978-1-4766-2281-1, ASIN B019WQQEY8. Alex Werner, ed. Sherlock Holmes: The man who never lived and will never die. London: Ebury Press, 2014, hardcover, £25 (256p), ISBN 978-0-09-195872-5, e-book £12.99, ISBN 978-1-47-350264-2
Transformative (h)activism: Breast cancer awareness and the "World of Warcraft" Running of the Gnomes
No full textPlayers of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) are accustomed to a transformative culture that appropriates off-line events and personas into virtual-world representations inside of the game. Following this culture, players have transformed an off-line event—the Race for the Cure, to benefit breast cancer charities—into an online event called the Running of the Gnomes with parameters and participation properties appropriate for the virtual world. This transformative event is a disruptive form of civil disobedience including elements of hacktivism. Though the event conforms to the game's culture and rules, the mass collective action of the Running of the Gnomes disrupts the player experience by flooding the game's chat boxes with messages about an off-line concern (breast cancer) and also disrupts the game itself by crashing the server through the sheer volume of player participation. This disruption is embraced as an integral part of the event and is one of the primary causes for the event's success as a fundraising activity
"Boys love manga and beyond: History, culture, and community in Japan," edited by Mark McLelland et al.
No full textReview of Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, editors. Boys love manga and beyond: History, culture, and community in Japan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015, paperback, $30 (304p) ISBN 978-1496807762
Rereading Superman as a trans f/man
No full textWhile a noteworthy body of scholarship exists that "queers" the superhero, few attempts have been made to "trans" such famous comic book characters. I offer an introduction to trans identities via my own personal narrative and a cursory example of trans reading practices within the fields of comics and fandom studies. Writing as a trans f/m (fan and man), I set out to trans superheroes and also to rethink the temporal space of boyhood, which is typically positioned as the supposed beginning of one's manhood and one's passion for comic book heroes. As an example of this reading strategy, I offer a reinterpretation of the Superman origin story that explicitly highlights the hero's own innate transness
Fan labor, speculative fiction, and video game lore in the "Bloodborne" community
No full textThis essay engages fans of the PlayStation 4 video game Bloodborne (FromSoftware, 2015), focusing on the ways in which fans of the game craft its abstract lore into new threads of narrative via online texts and videos, and a related controversy pertaining to the originality and authorship of those media texts that fans share as records of their lore hunts