Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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852 research outputs found
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A true sista: Exploring intraracial fantagonisms among Black women fans of Scandal
No full textI explore the complexities of Black women's fan practices and their affective and disaffective engagements with each other. Operating under the pseudonym katrinapavela, I examine the emergence of "fantagonisms" within the Black women's fandom, a term coined by Derek Johnson to describe tensions within fan communities. I explore the influence of race, education, class, and cultural taste on Black women's disaffection with certain media content. Through a critical analysis of the ideological tensions and conflicts within the Black women's fandom, I provide a nuanced understanding of intraracial fantagonisms and the ways in which Black women negotiate their identities within popular culture. Examining disaffection within Black women's Scandal (2012–18) fandom on platforms like Tumblr sheds light on the varied and contested relationships between fans and media content
"Vidding: A history" by Francesca Coppa
No full textFrancesca Coppa, Vidding: A History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022, paperback $29.95 (257 pp) ISBN 978-0-472-03852-7; ePub/pdf/online free (257 pp) ISBN 978-0-472-90259-0
"Imagine a place:" Power and intimacy in fandoms on Discord
No full textWith over 300 million users, the voice, video, and text chat application Discord has been steadily emerging as a dominant site of fan communities and practices. As the platform continues to grow and to court audiences beyond the site's gaming origins, fans have flocked to the site. To critically consider how fandom has developed on Discord, we analyze how power structures and intimacies between and across fandoms are constructed across three levels on the platform. At the smallest scale, rules, roles, and fan practices within individual Discord servers afford the explicit hierarchization of fans and the regulation of fan discourses. Next, Discord's subscription services encourage economic and cultural competition across and between servers of the same fan text. Finally, fan practices and discourses stretch across the entire Discord platform, connecting seemingly disparate fandoms through a variety of fan activities. By examining how fan practices and the platform's affordances constitute power structures and intimacies across these three levels, we provide a primer on the affordances and critical sites of inquiry on the ever-expanding Discord platform
The differences between author’s notes on FanFiction.net and AO3
No full textThis article presents the quantitative differences in the content of author's notes, treated as an act of communication, in Polish Harry Potter fan fiction on FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own. It shows the influence that additional communication mediums and tagging systems have on the fan fiction, as well as on users' habits, story length, the visibility of archive tools, and rules
Citational Shakespearean performances as racialized antifandom in Netflix's The Crown
No full textFandom is often theorized as a vital praxis that expands agency across the permeable borderland between creatives and consumers, making consumers into creatives and critics who transform and complicate notions of an authoritative textual source such as Shakespeare's canon. Such potential for leveled authority—in which the Shakespearean text, its performance history, editorial interventions, adaptations, and appropriations sit side-by-side with user reimaginations—opens vistas of opportunity to puncture the enduring status of Shakespeare's canon as exclusively white. However, the radical potential of fandom's extreme accessibility can spark an antifandom that polices, among other factors, the whiteness of Shakespeare and Shakespearean fan communities. Three episodes of the Netflix heritage drama The Crown (2016–2023) typify the antifandom that sutures Shakespearean authority to the British monarchy by means of citational performance, reenactments of scenes from Shakespeare that in each case appear at moments of crisis regarding the ruler and the nation
Fan studies in Latin America: A call to arms
No full textWe introduce the particularities of fan studies in Latin American cultures, including previous studies from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, to encourage scholars to do their own work in the field and join the Fan Studies Network—Latin America
"The privilege of play," by Aaron Trammell
No full textAaron Trammell, The privilege of play. New York: New York University Press, 2023, paperback $30.00 (240p), ISBN 978-1479818402
Boys’ love in the Chinese platformization of cultural production
No full textBoys' Love (BL), a subculture centered around same-sex male romances and eroticism, has become increasingly integrated into mainstream commercial culture in China. However, the genre explores homosexuality and pornography, which are considered taboos in China. BL has thus become situated at the intersection of the economic ambition of digital giants and the authorities' increasingly ideological control. I discuss the position of BL in Tencent's pan-entertainment ecosystem to highlight the results of platformization and the impact of the vague framework of platform governance
Fandom image-making and the fan gaze in transnational K-pop fan cam culture
No full textDuring the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, K-pop Twitter community used fan cams as a tool to hijack racist Twitter hashtags and sought to reinvent the image of K-pop fans as progressive racism fighters. Situating the phenomenon within the fan cam's history of commercialization in South Korea reveals a transnational link between K-pop fan communities in South Korea and North America and shows how it can be related to discussions on transcultural fandom
Leveraging community support and platform affordances on a path to more active participation: A study of online fan fiction communities
No full textThe success of online communities is driven by continuous active community participation, but motivating silent members (lurkers) to participate might push them faster than they are prepared for and demand extra labor from active members. This article explores user participation in online fan fiction communities through empirical interviews of once-silent but now-active members, demonstrating how such platforms afford lurking as a legitimate mode of participation and provide affordances for users to participate at their own pace. We propose a theory of incidental mentorship, where active users become role models within a supportive community and motivate lurkers to participate without doing additional work