Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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A connected country: Sweden—Fertile ground for digital fandoms
No full textWe discuss the spread of fans and fandoms within Sweden. With a specific focus on fan fiction and video games, we describe Swedish fan activities in relation to the fact that Sweden is a connected country—that is, a highly technologically developed society. We also describe fan activities in relation to the fact that the level of English-language proficiency is high among Swedish children and teenagers
Fannish tattooing and sacred identity
No full textPleasure is an important motivation for fans to adopt texts. Fannish tattoos function to demonstrate affective investments in a text; they are also a performance of fandom and an example of sacred fan identity. Like engaging in cosplay or wearing clothing that features logos, fannish tattoos mark people as fans of a text. Furthermore, the more obscure the logo or fannish reference, the more performative the tattoo. Fannish tattoos help to construct a sacred fan identity. The sacred experience (as theorized by Émile Durkheim and his concept of the totem) is imbued with meaning through choices that set it aside from the mundane. Within the context of fannish tattoos, fan affect gains similar significance
"Work/text" by Cynthia W. Walker
No full textReview of Cynthia W. Walker. 2015. Work/text: Investigating "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." New York: Hampton Press, 2013. Hardcover, 37.95 (379p) ISBN 978-1612891217
Watching "Dallas" again 2: Locating viewing pleasures—An audience study of the new "Dallas"
No full textThis audience reception project performs a study of the first season of the new Dallas (2012–14) in terms of its lack of ironic viewing, which relegates the show to a restorative form of nostalgia
"Understanding fandom," by Mark Duffett
No full textReview of Mark Duffett. Understanding fandom: An introduction to the study of media fan culture. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Hardcover, 29.95 (360p) ISBN 978-1441166937
Patti Smith: Aging, fandom, and libido
No full textThis essay traces a lifelong fandom of Patti Smith in light of issues of aging, femininity, and libido. It also considers the paucity of transformative images in Western mass culture and its fandoms of aging women. Personal narrative is brought into play, fans' experiences throughout the life cycle are referenced, and gender issues are emphasized
Real body, fake person: Recontextualizing celebrity bodies in fandom and film
No full textComparisons between real person fan fiction (RPF) and film or television texts dramatizing real people have been made in debates over the ethics of RPF as a fan practice. In an effort to direct the scholarly focus on RPF from these ethical issues to the texts themselves, I propose examining the similarities between the textual process of adapting real people to fictional characters on both the cinema screen and the computer screen. This paper examines the work RPF writers do in appropriating the various bodies of their celebrity subjects: the fragmented intertextual body of the star image, and the celebrity's physical body as a signifier of star image and status as a real person in the world. I argue that the fannish textual process of adapting real public figures to fictional contexts shares a common element with adapting public figures to the screen in the biopic: both work to recontextualize the public self of a celebrity through the representation of a fictionalized or speculated private self. To illustrate this, I will be engaging with a case study of The Social Network (2010) fandom through works in its kink meme, and how the adaptations of textual bodies are at work in fictionalized fan writing about real actors performing in the Hollywood fictionalized film about real tech entrepreneurs
Slash fandom, sociability, and sexual politics in Putin's Russia
No full textRussian slash practices are much more than a protest subculture—a reductionist term that implies an unchanging isolation from other public realms. The political significance of slash practices on the Russian-language Internet, Runet, is more effectively understood by examining how slash and slashers travel from fannish to other public spaces to shape everyday political conversations about sexual politics in Russia
My football fandoms, performance, and place
No full textIn this personal essay, the author discusses negotiation of identity in the various spaces of football fandom
Watching "Dallas" again 1: Doing retro audience research
No full textThis essay and the audience reception projects it introduces alleviate the desperation of seeking the television audience by recourse to Ien Ang's influential book, Watching Dallas ([1982] 1985). Within the context of a unit on audience research in a master's-level course on media, two groups of students explored the possibilities of remixing Ang in the present digital media landscape via informants' comments on the first season of the new series of Dallas (2012–14). Discourses of nostalgia circulate within and around the text, as well as the project itself. Retro audience research generates not only data about the affective memories and critical reflections of informants but also insights into research methods and the production of new nostalgic subjects