Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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"Online games, social narratives," by Esther MacCallum-Stewart
No full textBook review of Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Online games, social narratives. New York: Routledge, 2014. Hardcover, $115.68 (208p) ISBN 978-0-415-89190-5
Mimetic fandom and one-sixth-scale action figures
No full textWithin material practices that emphasize reproduction, customizers often extrapolate, creating new material to fill in gaps. Bricolage transforms mass-produced items into individualized creative works by improving the perceived accuracy of licensed merchandise or by recycling and repurposing items to achieve realistic and imaginative results. Customization's material fan practices reproduce items in order to create transformative narratives. After duplicating a beloved fan object's definitive appearance, clothing, and/or accessories in one-sixth scale, customizers often pose and photograph action figures in recreations of iconic scenes. Other images and photostories use miniature reproductions of material objects to rework existing media texts and characters or to tell completely original narratives. Images also disrupt and deconstruct the valorization of accuracy. Living rooms, pets, and other aspects of everyday life intrude into photographs of accurately reproduced items and characters. Figures in photostories may be made to break character. Such transformative moments call attention to the toys' status as toys and to the constructed nature of poses, dioramas, and narratives
The creation of football slash fan fiction
No full textAlthough sports fandom and fan fiction are often thought of as different worlds, in the contemporary media environment, this is not the case. Sport is a popular source text for fan fiction, and high-level European football, one of the world's most watched sports, has long had an online fan fiction presence. In a study of the LiveJournal community Footballslash over the 2011–12 European football season, I investigate what makes football a suitable source text for fan fiction, especially slash fan fiction; what fan fiction authors are doing with football; and what this suggests about how football and fan fiction are used in the present day. I present a new understanding of football as a media text to be transformed as well as provide an in-depth look into how this type of real person slash is developed and thought of by its practitioners. In doing so, I show what happens when fandoms and fan practices converge in the 21st century
Springsteen fans, #bruceleeds, and the tweeting of locality
No full textThis article presents a case study of one Springsteen-affiliated hashtag, #bruceleeds, which emerged from the Springsteen fan community to organize tweets about Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's July 24, 2013, concert at First Direct Arena in Leeds, England. A grounded theory analysis of #bruceleeds tweets from before the start of the Leeds concert shows significant interaction among fans and local businesses. By using the concert-specific hashtag #bruceleeds, fans and others who used the hashtag co-create an emerging concert experience grounded in a physical space. Drawing on theories on social interactions, classification systems, and mapping, I suggest that the #bruceleeds hashtag facilitates the metaphorical representation of a physical space—in this case, Leeds, England—and the emergence of a complex system sharing features of an information ecology consisting of fans, local businesses, civic organizations, and the technologies they use
Self-representation in literary fandom: Women's leisure reader selfies as postfeminist performance
No full textIn social media communities dedicated to women's leisure reading and literary fandom, images of women engaged in the act of reading circulate prominently. These images—created and uploaded to fan sites by the fans themselves—have recurring characteristics: the woman often holds a leather-bound book, wears romanticized, neo-Victorian dress, and has exaggeratedly feminine, sexualized features. These representations are not of actual members of the community but rather fictive, collected, circulated, and commented upon in a communal act of identity construction. This gendered visual representation of the literate self provides a performance of a double movement in postfeminist culture: a broadcasting of discourses that is empowering (participatory digital cultural production around literature) and yet promotes a cultural context for reinforcement of conventional gender norms. To demonstrate this double movement, I utilize a case study of these self-representational fan images, collected over a year on a Facebook group page for fans of 19th-century British literature and filmic adaptations. These images and their circulation are then analyzed via a two-pronged double movement theoretical framework. First, feminist media scholarship helps explain the empowering aspects of the new media creation of the reader selfie. Second, gender performance uncovers how these repeated sexualized images of women readers reentrench conventional, hyperfeminine, and sexualized gender roles. Double movement takes place in contemporary women leisure readers' lives, and the media-led postfeminist cultural movement offers a depoliticized, self-indulgent path toward youth and beauty at the expense of institutional or social change
The digital fandom of Na'vi speakers
No full textFew academic studies have focused on the fans of created or constructed languages. One reason behind this may be the popular impression, intensified by the media, that speakers of these languages are obsessed fans or fanatics. In this essay, I use data from a survey conducted in summer 2011 to determine who is learning to speak Na'vi (a language constructed for the alien race in the 2009 film Avatar), how they are learning the language, and why they are learning the language. I also address the questions of how important community is to fandoms, as well as whether virtual fandoms constitute communities. Na'vi speakers are a digital fandom as well as a speech community, and Na'vi speakers are developing shared social norms and culture via their use of the Na'vi language
"Fan studies," edited by Alice Chauvel, Nicolle Lamerichs, and Jessica Seymour
No full textReview of Alice Chauvel, Nicolle Lamerichs, and Jessica Seymour, editors. Fan Studies: Researching Popular Audiences. Freeland, Oxfordshire, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, £7.95 ISBN 978-1-84888-279-9
African American acafandom and other strangers: New genealogies of fan studies
No full textBecause scholars have paid insufficient attention to race in fan studies, a new genealogy of fan studies is needed, one that includes different kinds of primary and secondary texts that have explored responses of black fans. There is a rich history of black fan criticism and acafandom that has never been seen as such but that both complements and complicates current definitions and paradigms in fan studies. Discussions of fan otherness, antifandom, and fan ambivalence explore the difference that the inclusion of African American cultural criticism would make to both canonical scholarship and more recently published work in the field
Online Italian fandoms of American TV shows
No full textThe Internet has changed media fandom in two main ways: it helps fans connect with each other despite physical distance, leading to the formation of international fan communities; and it helps fans connect with the creators of the TV show, deepening the relationship between TV producers and international fandoms. To assess whether Italian fan communities active online are indeed part of transnational online communities and whether the Internet has actually altered their relationship with the creators of the original text they are devoted to, qualitative analysis and narrative interviews of 26 Italian fans of American TV shows were conducted to explore the fan-producer relationship. Results indicated that the online Italian fans surveyed preferred to stay local, rather than using geography-leveling online tools. Further, the sampled Italian fans' relationships with the show runners were mediated or even absent
Audience reaction movie trailers and the Paranormal Activity franchise
No full textThis article addresses the concept and growing practice of audience reaction movie trailers, specifically for films in the horror genre. Popularized by the Paranormal Activity series of films, these trailers primarily utilize green night-vision video footage of a movie theater audience reacting to the film being advertised, yet also consist of webcam recordings of screaming fans, documentary-style B-roll footage of audiences filing into preview screenings with high levels of anticipation, and close-up shots of spectator facial expressions, accompanied by no footage whatsoever from the film being advertised. In analyzing these audience-centric promotional paratexts, my aim is to reveal them as attempting to sell and legitimize the experiential, communal, and social qualities of the theatrical movie viewing experience while at the same time calling for increased fan investment in both physical and online spaces. Through the analysis of audience reaction trailers, this article hopes to both join and engender conversations about horror fan participation, the nature of anticipatory texts as manipulative, and the current state of horror gimmickry in the form of the promotional paratext