Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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What is global theater? or, What does new media studies have to do with performance studies?
No full textThis piece summarizes some key historical points of connection between new media studies and performance studies, beginning with Marshall McLuhan's concept of telecommunications networks as constitutive of a global theater. In combination with Kurt Lancaster's and Francesca Coppa's theories of fan works as performances, the global theater model can yield new insights into the nature and purpose of Internet fan fiction and fan fiction archives
Performance and performativity in fandom
No full textEditorial overview of Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 18, special issue, "Performance and Performativity in Fandom.
Simblr famous and SimSecret infamous: Performance, community norms, and shaming among fans of "The Sims"
No full textThis essay explores the way fandom is performed on Tumblr by fans of the games series The Sims (Electronic Arts, 2000), as well as how the LiveJournal site SimSecret attempts to regulate and shame Tumblr behavior. Through interviews and surveys with fans and through content analysis, I examine the way in which Tumblr lends itself to particular performance norms in terms of its aesthetics, content tagging, and interactivity. I explore how fans also call out other fans for behaviors they do not approve of and how some of this shaming is connected to wider discourses surrounding the pleasures of fans, particularly teenaged female fans, often deemed to be excessive, inappropriate, or overly dramatic
The products of intertextuality: The value of student adaptations in a literature course
No full textThe essay explores a pedagogy of adaptation that focuses on examining intertextuality and engaging students in textual production through the creation of an adaptation. The paper discusses the success of assigning an adaptation project in an upper-level, third-year literature course taught at a small university. It examines student adaptations of writings by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Mary Shelley, and Ben H. Winters and of existing film adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and Frankenstein. I link student projects to critical concepts such as re-vision and multimodality, and disciplines such as literary studies and the digital humanities. I also analyze how the projects reflect students' interests in popular culture and fandom
Zombie walks and the public sphere
No full textThis brief essay considers the phenomenon of zombie walks from a personal perspective, exploring the experience and practice of collaborative cosplay, as well as some of the theoretical and political implications of this widespread practice
Watching "Dallas" again 3: Reassessing Ien Ang's "Watching Dallas"
No full textThis audience reception project performs an audience study of the first season of the new Dallas (2012–14). It draws on Ien Ang's Watching Dallas ([1982] 1985) to analyze the production of irony and nostalgia. We observe that the blend of ironic viewing and nostalgia results in a more ironic, reflective nostalgia, in contrast to a more serious restorative type of nostalgia
Writing the pregnant man
No full textThis article explores how an online community of female fans of Harry Potter creates and maintains scientific and medical knowledge of a novel reproductive technology, male pregnancy. In an effort to illuminate the mechanisms of fandom, I show how fandom participants collectively work to ensure the maintenance of standards for fan products and in doing so also selectively reinforce particular tropes about how male pregnancy is portrayed. Fans' validation of some male pregnancy variations over others results in a fascinating yet recognizable set of fictional reproductive technologies that both queer and accommodate normative gender and sexuality roles
Doctor Who–themed weddings and the performance of fandom
No full textCoinciding with the 50th anniversary of the science fiction/fantasy TV series Doctor Who (1963–1986, 1996, 2005–), 50 couples chose to marry, renew vows, and engage in civil partnerships during a mass Doctor Who–themed wedding in London. By using Doctor Who fandom as a case study, I explore how fans are able to construct, define, and maintain their identity in wedding culture by the meaning they ascribe to objects present in the wedding performance. By using the concept of weddings as performance narratives, I describe how fans are able to tell the story of their experience and identification with fandom, but because not everyone identifies with fandom, fans must communicate this narrative in a highly selective manner, choosing details that both satisfy their identities as fans and make sense to a diverse audience of fans and nonfans alike. In doing so, fans are negotiating this identity within the heteronormative structure of wedding culture. The presence of the wedding ceremony reveals that fan identity and performance, despite seeming subversive to mainstream, are actually influenced and shaped by these traditional spaces and rituals
Fans of Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
No full textOn April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in what was then the deadliest school shooting in American history. Despite causing a national panic and serving as a flash point for larger narratives on bullying, gun control, and media violence, both boys have gained active online fans. These fandoms dedicated to the Columbine shooters are widely referred to as dark examples of Internet communities, while the fans are also frequently denigrated as unstable and violent outcasts. Such dark online fandoms are yet to permeate mainstream culture or to challenge the preexisting perception of these communities as breeding grounds for the next wave of school shooters. While studies have covered the types of fans and their myriad interests, the field remains focused on more conventional examples of fan communities. In an effort to challenge and expand the object of focus when we study fandom, this qualitative study examines Columbine fans and their activity in order to understand the dominant motives they appear to have for engaging with and around such controversial figures and then concludes by exploring how this community might help us reflect more broadly on our concept of fandom. Redeeming these fans as part of diverse and complex communities of social relevance can demonstrate how even a dark fandom such as that of these Columbine shooters provides valuable cultural insights and benefits the field of fan studies
Toward new horizons: Cosplay (re)imagined through the superhero genre, authenticity, and transformation
No full textI identify and explore connections between cosplay and costuming practices characterizing the superhero genre. Utilizing the concepts of authenticity, context, and transformation, I open a dialogue between these cultural texts and interrogate and rearticulate the spaces and surfaces of cosplay. I work with cosplay as a simultaneous performance—as source character and as member of the cosplaying community. Analysis permits the presentation of three interconnected assertions. First, cosplay is readable as an embodied reception of the unstable modes of identity worked within the superhero genre. Second, cosplay, although conventionally sited and treated within fandom, is also performed within spaces away from organized fandom, notably on screens (industry costuming) and streets (copycats or real-life superheroes). Cosplay can thus be reconceptualized as a spectrum of intersecting behaviors rather than as a limited fan practice. Third, the idea of transformation does not adequately reflect the actuality of performing as a source character. I assert and demonstrate instead that cosplay exemplifies a moment of what I have termed embodied translation, where cosplayers transfer the source character from a limitless fictional landscape to their delimited physical one. Such creative consideration complicates and troubles our current understandings of cosplay and commences the project of reconceptualizing this most complicated and manifold practice