Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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Cuteness, friendship, and identity in the brony community
No full textI examine the practices of fan productivity and gender negotiation in brony fandom, the community of primarily college-age men who are fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010–). I examine the contours of brony textual and material practices, noting how productivity within the fandom plays a role in the negotiation of identity and community ethos. I also consider the implications of cuteness in the fandom and discuss how this aesthetic and its corresponding narrative have led to the development of a unique discursive mode among bronies, which I term the discourse of friendship. Drawing on Matthew Gutmann's theory of contradictory consciousness, I argue that the discourse of friendship is an innovative framework that encourages new ways of taking part in existing social institutions that destabilize hegemonic masculinity
The selling of a story: Sherlock's Victorian excursion
No full textThe BBC's Sherlock (2010–) has from its beginning played with canon and audience response. Its alternate universe episode in Victorian England reaches an apex of metatextuality with consideration of its role as both commercial entity and participant in popular culture
Creative choices and fan practices in the transformation of theme park space
No full textThis article describes and interprets fan activities within the theme park space related to a particular fan object. It examines an evolving paradigm wherein the role of theme park visitors is changed. Rather than being perceived as observers of spectacles, they can participate and interact with the environment in new ways. An example of this is Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom (2012), an interactive role-playing quest and collector card game at Disney's Magic Kingdom Park in Florida. Fans participate in a variety of practices that have dynamically redefined theme park activities. Together, management, designers, and fans have cocreated and reconstructed the theme park experience as one of exploration and participation. Despite multiple levels of control, fans will likewise persist in engagement with activities (in park and online) that help shape and interrogate the theme park space
Valuing queer identity in Monster High doll fandom
No full textAccording to Mattel, Monster High dolls topped 1.3 billion in annual revenue plummeted for the fourth quarter in a row. Monster High's recent ad campaign claims, "We are monsters. We are proud." Race, ethnicity, and disability are coded into the dolls as selling points. The allure of Monster High is, in part, that political identity and the celebration of difference become consumable. The female body, the racialized body, and the disabled body have long been coded as monstrous. Monster High reclaims this label, queering it. Using Jack Halberstam's work on children's culture and Richard Berger's and Rosalind Hanmer's work on fandom, this article explores the queer potential of Monster High. Fans rewrite the Mattel narrative through fan fiction, repainting the dolls, and embodying them through virtual avatars, makeup, and costume play. These fan practices both queer the dolls' identity politics and create communities of interest that act as safe spaces for expressing queer identity and generating fan activism. These fan practices have also influenced Mattel's branding of the dolls, specifically with the recent inclusion of activism campaigns such as WeStopHate and The Kind Campaign into the Monster High Webisodes and Web site. By exploring the queer politics of Monster High fandom, this paper explains how that queering generates social change
Performing as video game players in Let's Plays
No full textThis article examines the fan practice of Let's Plays—video recordings that video game players create of themselves playing that include live commentary or riffing. I argue that the riffing accompanying game play footage in Let's Plays highlights how players play idiosyncratically by constructing and performing game-playing personalities. These videos emphasize the performative nature of video game players as fans who actively negotiate with the video games that they play through presentations of individual playing styles and experiences. I show that in accounting for how and why they play the way that they do, Let's Players demonstrate what I suggest are various modes of playing in which players can engage with video games generally. Consequently, creating, sharing, and discussing Let's Plays can render visible a wider diversity of game-playing identities, experiences, and styles
"Oresteia" as transformative work
No full textRobert Icke's transformative adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia updates its themes and gives it a profound emotional urgency
"Fandom at the crossroads" and "Fangasm!," by Lynn K. Zubernis and Katherine Larsen
No full textReview of Lynn S. Zubernis and Katherine Larsen. Fandom at the crossroads: Celebration, shame and fan/producer relationships. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Hardcover, 24.99 ISBN 978-1443841405; and Lynn S. Zubernis and Katherine Larsen. Fangasm! Supernatural fangirls. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. Paperback 17.48 (6732 KB) ASIN B00F5S6IIK
"Millennial fandom: Television audiences in the transmedia age," by Louisa Ellen Stein
No full textReview of Louisa Ellen Stein, Millennial fandom: Television audiences in the transmedia age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015, paperback, 24, ISBN 978-1609383565
The role of affect in fan fiction
No full textIn this article, I argue for greater consideration of the role of affect in fan fiction when comparing it with literary forms from antiquity. Fan fiction uses an affective hermeneutics—knowing through feeling—and as a literary form it is inextricable from the fannish discourses that produce it. Yuletide letters—story requests in the annual fan fiction gift exchange for historical RPF—show how fan fiction readers and writers frame knowledge of history in terms of affect in order to fill the gaps in the past
Versions of Homer: Translation, fan fiction, and other transformative rewriting
No full textThis article posits a paradigm of transformative work that includes translation, adaptation, and fan fiction using the Homeric epics as a case study. A chronological discussion of translations, other literary rewritings, and fan fiction distinguishes each as belonging to its respective cultural system while participating in a common form of transformative rewriting. Such a close look at the distinctive ways that Homer has been rewritten throughout history helps us to make a scholarly distinction between the work of fan writers and the work of rewriters like Vergil and Alexander Pope. At the same time, discussing the ways in which the forms of their rewritings are similar gives a scholarly basis for arguing that fan fiction participates in the discourse of serious interpretive literature