Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
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852 research outputs found
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Vidding and the oppositional gaze: The pleasures of critique
No full textWhat's the same and what's different about a fan studies field built on bell hooks rather than on Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley, or Lisa Lewis? As a visual art practice, vidding in particular would have a reckoning
"Missandei deserves better": A case study on loving Blackness through critical fan fiction:
No full textMissandei is one of the only recurring Black characters on Game of Thrones (2011–19); her death is just one example of Black characters being used as tools to propel white characters' narrative arcs. This case study traces how fans center Black characters in response to Missandei's death, with critical fans, both Black and non-Black, intervening when fandoms and popular culture texts uphold whiteness
Communing with the mulberry: Grafting person to plant in Shakespeare’s fandom
No full textWilliam Shakespeare's mulberry tree, which he allegedly planted and raised in the early seventeenth century in his garden in Stratford-upon-Avon, is a peculiar site in which material culture, ecology, and fan studies collide. I seek to understand the entanglements of fandom, fan identity, antifandom, and environment by analyzing the trajectory of Shakespeare's mulberry as a relic or souvenir imbued with the Bard's legacy. Bardolatry is sustained by (and, through antifandom, threatens) the landscape that embodies and is embodied by Shakespeare's fans
Diversifying the field: Fan studies as a big tent
No full textEditorial for TWC No. 43 (September 15, 2024)
Analyzing an archive of allyish distributed mentorship in "Speak" fan fiction comments and reviews
No full textYoung adult sexual assault narrative Speak (1999), by Laurie Halse Anderson, has inspired a small yet significant fandom, especially across two key platforms: Archive of Our Own (AO3) and FanFiction.net (FFN). The responses to fan fiction inspired by Speak demonstrate compelling discourses—celebratory, critical, vulnerable, and pedagogic—that also show evidence of significant allyish distributed mentorship in the Speak fandom archive. These comments and reviews demonstrate how digital spaces can be generative sites for feminist consciousness building around the topic of sexual trauma and rape culture, precisely because Speak fans produce, rewrite, and connect testimonies, both real and fictive
"The Shakespeare multiverse: Fandom as literary praxis," by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes
No full textValerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, editors, The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis. New York: Routledge, 2022, paperback, 41.49, ISBN 978-0-429-28950-7; hardcover, $180, ISBN 978-0-367-25734-
Players, production and power: Labor and identity in live streaming video games
No full textThousands flock to sites like Twitch or YouTube to create new, transformative media by playing video games. Streaming is a massive, monetized industry and practice, with a spectrum of streamers: hobbyists, full-time creators, and celebrities. I orient streaming as a type of fannish production, both commercial and noncommercial, that allows gamers to create new media products and make money doing so. Broadening understandings of fannish labor to include streaming provides new opportunities for insight that benefit the field. I review current trends in streaming research, discussing potential new research directions beneficial to cross-disciplinary fan studies. I focus on studies that foreground power and inequality (rarer, to date), arguing that intersectional research, methodological diversity, and increased attention to power hierarchies is imperative. Focusing on the relationship between power and streamers' lived experiences complements existing attention to power in fan cultures
Anti-Shakespeare shrews: Women, sexism, and talking back to the Bard in Upstart Crow and All Is True
No full textBen Elton's Upstart Crow (2016–18) is a popular BBC sitcom about Shakespeare's early years as a writer, while Elton's All Is True (2018) is a somber biopic about Shakespeare's retirement to his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Elton's biofictions place a fictionalized historic Shakespeare in direct contact with female antifans—his wife, daughters, and female friends—to broach the contemporary concern of gender equality. In each of Elton's texts, antifans expose Shakespeare's sexism and investment in the patriarchal status quo. However, despite the depth of the antifans' antipathy, Shakespeare antifandom sometimes emerges as ambivalent. A third text, teen comedy St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009), centers its plot on Shakespeare and his antifans but offers a different spin on both
Disrupting and restorying horror tropes through fan engagements with the interactive video game Until Dawn
No full textUntil Dawn is a popular horror video game critiqued for its perpetuation of pervasive horror stereotypes around gender, race, and mental illness. Drawing from methods of multisited affinity space ethnography, we followed a group of cosplayers as they live streamed Until Dawn together before cosplaying characters from the franchise at New York Comic Con. Tracing uptake across fans' live streaming interactions and cosplaying encounters as well as across digital texts like social media posts and fan fiction in the wider fandom, we explore the extent to which fans collectively disrupt or restory problematic elements from the video game. We found extensive engagement with gender and mental illness across communities, contexts, and modalities, with some critique of Indigenous appropriation. This analysis reveals both cohesive trajectories of uptake around communal restorying with respect to certain problematic aspects of the source text as well as complex and varied possibilities for critical interpretation across fan work modalities
"Fandom, the next generation," edited by Bridget Kies and Megan Connor
No full textBridget Kies and Megan Connor, editors, Fandom, the Next Generation. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2022, paperback, 70, ISBN 9781609388348