Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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Envisioning queer female fandom
No full textEditorial for "Queer female fandom," edited by Julie Levin Russo and Eve Ng, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 24 (June 15, 2017)
Bricolage and the culture of the margins in the romantic era and the digital age
No full textTumblr enables users to collate and share content. This modality hearkens back to the commonplace books and scrapbooks of the romantic era. The practices of Anglo-American fannish compilation have changed little from paper to pixel since the late eighteenth century; the materials available to the compiler change as fashions in art and media technologies develop, but the practices of combining and recombining these changing elements remain remarkably consistent. Textual response practices, such as collage, demonstrate an impetus to subvert or transcend the originary meaning of the texts, echoing Claude Lévi-Strauss's idea of bricolage in constructing meaning. The Tumblr microblogger and romantic-era commonplacer act as bricoleurs, working with mainstream cultural signs and signifiers to produce new meanings and possibilities for representation. The continuation of the same resistant reading practices across two centuries speaks to the practices' effectiveness in drawing out subsidiary themes from cultural texts. However, that the bricoleur communities are still thought to be dominated by young women and their objects of romantic interest, suggests that the main production and dissemination routes for narrative fiction is still dominated by men, thus foregrounding masculine perspectives and content. Young female consumers and authors remain culturally devalued and thus practice in the margins. The features of bricolage—that is, working with premade materials—speak to why and how dominant hierarchies of value are often replicated rather than challenged in the seemingly resistant creative spaces in which transformative works are shared
Copyright and Open Access
No full textEditorial for Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 25 (September 15, 2017)
Tumbling or stumbling? Misadventures with Tumblr in the fan studies classroom
No full textTeaching with Tumblr can be tricky, and here I explore some of the failures I've had with the social media site in my class. I argue that learning from pedagogical failure reveals important lapses in our own teaching. For the fan studies classroom, Tumblr illustrates the difficulty of balancing fandom and fan studies in the same class
Coming out on "Grey's Anatomy": Industry scandal, constructing a lesbian story line, and fan action
No full textThis analysis focuses on a series of industry scandals that created a need for and the development of a lesbian story line on Grey's Anatomy (ABC, 2005–), resulting in the creation of a lesbian-focused fan group dedicated to the lesbian pairing, Erica_Callie on LiveJournal. The resulting constructed representation portrays authentic lesbian and bisexual characters on mainstream broadcast television, promising inclusion to those who identify with these characters
"Twentieth-century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the 'Strand Magazine,' 1891–1930," by Jonathan Cranfield
No full textReview of Jonathan Cranfield, Twentieth-century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the "Strand Magazine," 1891–1930. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, hardcover, £75 (256p) ISBN 978-1474406758; e-book, £75, ISBN 978-1474406772
Theme park as interface to the wizarding (story) world of Harry Potter
No full textTheme parks such as Universal Orlando's Wizarding World of Harry Potter (WWoHP) offer material interfaces that engage multiple senses (touch, taste, and smell, as well as the sight and sound of more conventional narrative forms) to facilitate immersion in imaginary story worlds. They thus offer new aspects of both fan tourism and material fan practices to explore. Both fan studies and current scholarship on theme parks emphasize active participatory conceptions, countering oversimplifications and misrepresentations of both audiences and theme park visitors as passive spectators or consumers. Corporate-created and -controlled theme parks frame and market fan activities to encourage consumption. Yet fans often use merchandise as additional interfaces to participate actively and to facilitate immersion. For example, in WWoHP, interactive wands use technology to create specific physical "spell" effects in specific locations. Both wands and spells act as a synecdoche for the story world's magic, enabling immersion
Discourse is the new wank: A reflection on linguistic change in fandom
No full textA survey disseminated April 13–16, 2017, revealed statistically significant differences in the definitions of various slang terms found in old (LiveJournal-based) and new (Tumblr-based) fandom. This cultural and lexical shift is indicative of a generational gap between old and new fandom, influenced by imbroglios such as RaceFail '09 and the increasing acceptance of fandom into mainstream culture. As fandom demographics continue to change, so will its lexicon and culture
"Yes, the Evil Queen is Latina!": Racial dynamics of online femslash fandoms
No full textOnline media or participatory fandom has long been theorized as a unique creative and communicative space for women. Further, scholarly work has highlighted the possibility of it functioning as a space that is conducive to the articulation of queerness—both through transformative work and participant identity. However, this theorization has failed to account for the differential operations of these spaces when they are forced to deal with issues of race and racism. This essay argues that this is a significant blind spot as fannish spaces cannot but negotiate with the multiple loci of privilege and intersectional concerns that underpin their functioning. It therefore proposes a significant intervention in the study of the same, drawing our attention to the historically queer and oft-sidelined fannish spaces of femslash fandoms. This analysis seeks to locate the ways in which such queer spaces grapple with critiques of misogyny and homophobia in popular cultural texts and online spaces, as well as the problematics of race and racial identity within such spaces, focusing on the queer fan community built around the relationship of Regina Mills and Emma Swan, eponymously known as Swan Queen, in the television show Once Upon a Time (2011–)
Between text, paratext, and context: Queerbaiting and the contemporary media landscape
No full textI discuss the concept of queerbaiting as emergent from viewer readings of both textual and paratextual content at a particular juncture of LGBT media representation. While fan works as paratexts have attracted attention for their queered readings and narratives, there has been little scholarly consideration of how official paratexts that suggest or address queer readings, particularly promotional material and public commentary from producers, inform viewer engagement with media texts, and how they interact with contemporary conditions of media production and LGBT content. Examining F/F pairings from two television shows, Rizzoli & Isles (TNT, 2010–16) and The 100 (CW, 2014–), I propose a model that incorporates text, paratext, and the context of LGBT representation to account for how both noncanonical and canonically queer narratives can exemplify queerbaiting discourses, as well as where queer subtextual readings are positioned in this interpretative space. In addition, I highlight the historical contingency of queerbaiting in terms of shifts in producer/viewer interactions and the character of LGBT narratives in reshaping the contestation of media meaning making