Your Go-To Piece of Criticism: Mel Stanfill

This week’s “Go-To” piece of criticism comes to us from Mel Stanfill – currently the editor of Transformative Works and Cultures and author of books such as Fandom is Ugly (NYU 2024) and Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans (U Iowa 2019).  Their choice: Cathy Cohen’s 1997 article, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Mel also sent us a picture of their own, well-loved copy! –FC

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Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437–65.

I often say Cathy Cohen changed my life. Reading “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” in grad school was the first time I really got how intersectionality worked—how structures of inequality create stratification even within marginalized groups.

That has been essential to my thinking about how fans—although they may be treated as weird by the mainstream, although they may be women, although they may be queer—show that there are “varying degrees and multiple sites of power distributed within all categories” (p. 439), and particularly how fans’ marginalization along some axes often suppresses attention to fandom racism.

–Mel Stanfill, Associate Professor in the Texts & Technology Program, University of Central Florida

Transcription of Excerpt:

Despite the possibility invested in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, I argue that a truly radical or transformative politics has not resulted from queer activism. In many instances, instead of destabilizing the assumed categories and binaries of sexual identity, queer politics has served to reinforce simple dichotomies between heterosexual and everything “queer.” An understanding of the ways in which power informs and constitutes privileged and marginalized subjects on both sides of this dichotomy has been left unexamined.

I query in this essay whether there are lessons to be learned from queer activism that can help us construct a new politics. I envision a politics where one’s relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades. I’m talking about a politics where the nonnormative and marginal position of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens, for example, is the basis for progressive transformative coalition work. Thus, if there is any truly radical potential to be found in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, it would seem to be located in its ability to create a space in opposition to dominant norms, a space where transformational political work can begin.

Emergence of Queer Politics and a New Politics of Transformation

Theorists and activists alike generally agree that it was in the early 1990s that we began to see, with any regularity, the use of the term “queer.”1 This term would come to denote not only an emerging politics, but also a new cohort of academics working in programs primarily in the humanities centered around social and cultural criticism (Morton 121). Individuals such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss, and Michael Warner produced what are now thought of as the first canonical works of “queer theory.” Working from a variety of postmodernist and poststructuralist theoretical perspectives, these scholars focused on identifying and contesting the discursive and cultural markers found within both dominant and marginal identities and institutions which prescribe and reify “heterogendered” understandings and behavior.2 These theorists presented a different conceptualization of sexuality, one which sought to replace socially named and presumably stable categories of sexual expression with a new fluid movement among and between forms of sexual behavior (Stein and Plummer 182).

Through its conception of a wide continuum of sexual possibilities, queer theory stands in direct contrast to the normalizing tendencies of hegemonic sexuality rooted in ideas of static, stable sexual identities and behaviors. 

Posted: Francesca Coppa

While print fan fiction does exist by way of fanzines, print-on-demand services, and fanbinding (the practice of printing out and binding fan fiction DIY-style), the vast majority of fan fiction is only found in digital formats. However, some participants indicated some level of separation between reading fan fiction and fiction and spoke about them as though they were entirely different hobbies. This distinction in the participants’ preferences for the format of their reading materials could be acting as a separation: print for fiction and digital for fan fiction may help them to keep their two reading hobbies distinct.

Miller, J. Nicole. “Information-Seeking Behaviors of Young Adult Readers of Fiction and Fan Fiction.” In “Fandom Histories,” edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby S. Waysdorf, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2245

Your Go-To Piece of Criticism: Suzanne Scott

Today’s Go-To Piece of Criticism comes from Suzanne Scott, and it’s a wonderful quote from a book that is not cited enough, I think, in fan studies, despite being an absolutely critical underpinning of the field.  Girls and Subcultures by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber shifted the whole field of subculture studies, which previously really only talked about male subcultures because those were the ones that were visible in public space:  bikers, mods, rockers, Teddy boys, punks etc. It was McRobbie and Garber who pointed out that female subcultures tended to operate very differently….  Suzanne Scott herself is one of the most significant scholars to build on this work: her book Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU 2019) looks at the ways in which women and girls are still seen and treated differently when they do fandom.  –FC

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“The objective and popular image of a subculture as encoded and defined by the media is likely to be one which emphasizes the male membership, male ‘focal concerns,’ and masculine values. […] Female invisibility in youth subcultures then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle, for a variety of reasons.”

“It might be suggested that girls’ culture of the time operated within the vicinity of the home, or the friends’ home. There was room for a great deal of the new teenage consumer culture within the confines of the girls’ bedrooms. Teenage girls did participate in the new public sphere afforded by the growth of the leisure industries, but they could also consume at home, upstairs in their bedrooms.” 

From “Girls and Subcultures” by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1977)

I view much of fan studies as a direct response to McRobbie and Garber’s call to arms, course correcting the “structured secondariness” of women in accounts of subcultural participation by centering the practices of girls and women in the field.  Despite being written in response to a very specific moment in the development of media subcultures and scholarly accounts of them, I return to McRobbie and Garber’s essay again and again, finding it newly resonant and inspiring each time. Most recently, I was drawn back to their discussion of the ways that girls’ participation in and expression of subcultural identities might be contained to their bedrooms in an effort to theorize high end cookware aimed at aging and affluent fans and domestic spaces like the kitchen as an emergent space for fannish expression.  The authors push us to think broadly about how identity (situated at a specific sociocultural moment) shapes reception within subcultural communities. They also pointedly prompt us to think about how our positionality as scholars shapes the work we produce, demanding that we be attentive to the less visible but nonetheless vibrant practices of media consumption that escapes our immediate view as researchers, and cautioning us against the “vicious cycle” of erasure that not moving outside of one consistent account of a community can perpetuate. 

– Suzanne Scott, Associate Professor
(University of Texas at Austin, Department of Radio-Television-Film)

Posted: Francesca Coppa

Fiction and Fragmented Non-Fiction

This post touched on how the ephemera of fandom could be considered for archiving. This is elaborated by scholars in fandom studies as a direct result of how transformative works and cultures are already structured.

Those who enter a fandom learn the culture of the fans through their fiction: the fanon explanations, the subtextual relationships that are made text, the rereading and rewriting of source texts into something nurtured and expanded upon. Those new participants who enter the fandom are inspired by what they read, learn from what they read, and build upon it, creating complex and ever-deepening interpretations that are shared with those who came before and after them. 

Versaphile. 2011. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.


But if we want to take seriously the possibility that ephemeral conflict and online sex might function to undermine dominant sexual, gendered, racialized, and economic ways of being, both on- and off-line, we cannot restrict fannish politics to the easily archivable. 

Lothian, Alexis. 2011. “An Archive of One’s Own: Subcultural Creativity and the Politics of Conservation.” In “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0267.

Let us take a step back now and look at how the fragmented non-fiction ephemera and the fiction appear together in the various structures of fandom spaces. (Some of the quotes focus on structures that appear or fade away with time due to various reasons. If you are interested in these reasons and a diachronic look in more detail, let me know.)

One structural attribute is how differentiated the fictional works themselves are. This is related to the preference for a central archive as opposed to smaller, specific ones or vica versa, the existence and type of tagging systems and search functions. What the most of us are familiar with is probably Archive of Our Own with its centralisation, tag wrangling and sophisticated search and filter. On the other hand, we can have a big, central archive, without effective ways to search inside them. When fandom studies discusses a fannish identity or fannish culture independent of the source material, these archives and communities are frequently discussed.

Readers could easily find a wealth of stories, and there was little fragmentation within the fandom for a single source material. One downside of these large comprehensive fandom archives was the difficulty for the reader to find desired content without robust categorization and search. 

Versaphile. 2011. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.

These fandoms all fit comfortably within the genres of shows typically attractive to media fans, but the late 1990s were distinguished by the crossover between traditional media fandoms and other kinds of fandoms, namely comics, celebrities, music, and anime. These intersections would quickly have a profound effect on traditional media fandom.

Coppa, Francesca. 2006. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 41–60. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.

Smaller, separate archives would seemingly create separate cultures.

 However, the ease of creation also produced a great deal of audience fragmentation: while the new platform allowed for a more tailored fannish experience where a fan could focus on a list dedicated to a minor pairing or a particular story trope, the segmentation prevented a more common fannish consensus. Many mailing lists were perceived—not only to outsiders, but even to many inside observers—to cover the same interests. For fans, it often became necessary both to join multiple groups to keep up with new stories and to cross post to multiple groups to gain exposure. Many groups used privacy controls to block access to nonmembers, and membership could depend upon moderator approval. 

Versaphile. 2011. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.

However, we see the practice of creating fannish spaces that are not limited to one fandom but incorporate fanworks from these smaller, more specialized archives. Rec lists interpreted as tools of archiving or canonisation are certainly fascinating.

With a consistent repository for stories, recommendation sites and bookmarking services such as Delicious can be used to create targeted subsets of fan fic, just as themed miniarchives do, compensating for the findability problems that even the most well-indexed archives suffer.

Versaphile. 2011. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.

However, it became common practice for authors to link back to their own journals rather than mirroring their stories in the community space, making those communities little more than collections of announcements, rather than any sort of central archive.

Versaphile. 2011. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.

Then, the non-fandom specific, non-fiction elements of fandom are mixed together with transformative works.

In the early ’00s, fandom expanded into the blogsphere, and its widespread and enthusiastic adoption has had interesting consequences for the fan-created space. Whereas Usenet, ListServs, newsgroups, and bulletin boards all focus on a particular fan topic – a television program, for example – people who blog are just that: people (who are fans) who blog. As a result, individual journals become a mix of fannish and other topics about that fandom, thus including not only fiction, fan art, and commentary on the source text, but also real-life (RL) rants, political discussion, and nonfannish musings.

Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson. 2006. “Introduction: Work in Progress.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 5–32. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

 Yet (the Fandom Wank community) too facilitates long-term preservation of fan cultural practices, aggregating histories through an endless succession of in-jokes and links. These ephemeral traces are likely to include fannish creations that are tangential or irrelevant, and sometimes oppositional, to the texts, both initial and archontic, around which they cluster. Yet the flows—the institution, destruction, and resurfacing of digital archives on the fly—produce the experiential politics of online fan culture.

Lothian, Alexis. 2011. “An Archive of One’s Own: Subcultural Creativity and the Politics of Conservation.” In “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0267.

Further observing fannish spaces, this is not only by necessity or circumstance but by a marked preference. The difference is if they can mix together in the same space, on the same platform or if they create a network. Mapping this is what awaits fans, researchers and archivists alike.

Author: Szabo Dorottya

Your Go-To Piece of Criticism: Matt Hills, Part 3

Today’s post is the last of three go-to pieces of criticism suggested by Matt Hills: his first was for fan studies generally; his second, for Doctor Who, and today we get his last.  –FC

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Lastly, if I had to absolutely and artificially name just one title that has cut across a huge swathe of my work since it was published (and formed the basis of an entire book of mine responding to its ideas — Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event from 2015) then it would probably come down to this, in terms of the sheer number of times that I’ve cited it and built on its ideas…

One Quote to Rule Them All, Perhaps:

different contexts of delivery and the paratexts that often provide such contexts expand the text, in the process offering different possibilities for its valuation. If “aura” is the sense of a text’s authenticity and authority—which, by nature, could never be an actual, uncontested quality of a text, only a discursively constructed value—while Benjamin focuses on how reproduction can lessen aura, surely we might explore ways in which reproduction might change the text, add context, “tradition,” and “presence,” and thereby increase aura.

         The Two Towers DVDs wrap the film in aura; housed in an attractive, high-quality box, the discs are filled with explicit and implicit grabs at the title of “Work of Art.”  (Gray 2010: 97)

It’s from Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts by Jonathan Gray (2010). Not really a fan studies book per se, but it sometimes gets treated as such, I feel. And Martin Barker (2017) wrote a journal article on how the concept of the “paratext” had become vital to fan studies in the wake of Gray’s intervention. In a sense, this work might encapsulate the first two academic texts that I’ve mentioned above – both of them are really about how fans consume, interpret, and commune with paratextual materials such as comic-con souvenirs or official magazines. Gray’s scope is very wide-ranging, taking in industry “hype” as much as fan-created paratexts, but I think that his ahead-of-the-curve turn to paratextuality continues to be indispensable for theorising fandom in our social media-framed, platformised, and algo-ridden present, where fans are constantly navigating, negotiating and creating (as well as trying to tune out, evade, or viscerally reject) worlds and whorls of proliferating paratextual matter comprising of widely differing cultural politics.   

— Matt Hills (Honorary Professor at the University of Bristol, and previously Professor of Fandom Studies at Huddersfield University).

Poster: Francesca Coppa

On fanwork’s fleeting nature

Last time, in this post, we talked about fanwork’s immortality. To discuss its fleeting nature is not to discount that argument. Fanworks are no mayflowers, blooming once and then nevermore. Maybe they are mirages, light reflecting back in the most delicate patterns, but only visible when looked at from certain angles.

While, for the philosophy of unfinished works (those unfinished Works In Progresses that one can filter out on with Archive of Our Own’s search and filter functions are not exclusively meant here), one can turn to Derrida or Mark Fisher, for example, as immortality was in the context of conversation, this rumination is in relation to a work on library practices, Fan fiction in the library.

The papers discusses what librarians in training have to say on the question, with at least one pointing out the difficulty of archiving works that has change in its very nature. Online collections are mentioned but online collections need to either freeze moments in time or can only be for the present moment. A collection of a series of snapshots can serve as a diachronic approach, while an extensive, context-sensitive process would provide a synchronous image. To truly capture a mirage, maybe we need both the time, the angle of the viewer and the light and the object it mirrors. But in reality, most of the time, we can rely on the the sighter’s travelogue.

By now, there are certainly many good practices concerning the conservation of fanworks’, which would, as any conservation will rely on the conservationist’s priorities. So what are some things that you would want to preserve in fandoms and what approach would capture that best?

Price, Ludi, and Lyn Robinson. 2017. “Fan Fiction in the Library.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.1090.

Poster: Szabo Dorottya

Your Go-To Piece of Criticism: Matt Hills, Part 2

As I noted in my last post, the wide-ranging mind of Matt Hills could not be constrained to a single quote.  Last week, he gave us a quote for fan studies; this week, he gives us his go-to piece of criticism for thinking about Doctor Who, about which he has both written a monograph Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-first Century  (2010), and co-edited a collection of essays, Adventures Across Space and Time: A Doctor Who Reader.  (2023) – FC

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An Indicative Quotation for studying Doctor Who:

The ‘merchandised reading’ of Who in the 1970s was wildly uneven. Often aimed at primary school children, comic strips, jigsaws, books and toys reworked the programme as a very basic adventure story, shearing it of its themes and complexities. The Doctor would routinely be referred to as ‘Doctor Who’ as if it were the character’s name (it is not, that is the title of the programme). In/on merchandise, the programme might be referred to as Dr. Who… whereas the televised version has never used the contracted form. The Doctor would also be shorn of his ethical nature, routinely blowing up or killing aliens without a thought or scruple. Daleks, themselves often reduced to the status of simple killer robots, would be depicted in garish primary colours which rarely bedecked their on-screen counterparts. (Booy 2012: 13)

In terms of work on Doctor Who, then, I have a soft spot for Miles Booy’s (2012) Love & Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present. This analyses what it has meant to be a UK-based Doctor Who fan across a period of time that largely coincides with my own experience of the fandom, focusing on tie-in and spin-off publications rather than the central text, and covering fan-consumed materials that are surprisingly rarely theorised and discussed, such as the original Doctor Who Weekly comic that became today’s Doctor Who Magazine via a series of metamorphoses. Booy’s work is great for reminding us, and reminding me, how much of fandom can still be about specialist, niche or licensed publications as well as fanfic and fan art and so on.       

— Matt Hills (Honorary Professor at the University of Bristol, and previously Professor of Fandom Studies at Huddersfield University).

On fanwork’s immortality

One of the earliest paper on the information behaviour of fans points to the ephemerality of fanworks as why librarians are (yet) uninterested in cataloging them.

The do-it yourself image of this information has also been a factor contributing to its being regarded as ephemeral and not important or a subject for serious consideration.

Hart, Chris, Michael Shoolbred, David Butcher, and David Kane. 1999. “The Bibliographical Structure of Fan Information.” Collection Building 18 (2): 81–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01604959910265869.

That fanworks are ephemeral could and will be argued – first maybe by the fanbinders among other fans and aca-fans (I personally think that when we send out another golden disc of human culture to aliens, it should at least include My Immortal).

Coker, Catherine. 2017. “The Margins of Print? Fan Fiction as Book History.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.1053.

Buchsbaum, Shira Belén. 2022. “Binding Fan Fiction and Reexamining Book Production Models.” In “Fandom Histories,” edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby Waysdorf, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2129.

Jacobs, Naomi, and JSA Lowe. 2024. “The Design of Printed Fan Fiction.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 43. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2547.

Kennedy, Kimberly. 2022. “Fan Binding as a Method of Fan Work Preservation.” In “Fandom Histories,” edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby S. Waysdorf, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2107.

But let us entertain this premise just for now, to reveal what other reasons we could have for the preservation for fanworks.

Since we have been discussing fannish taxonomies in earlier posts, too, such as this, this, this and this, it must be clear that fans themselves will work to preserve fanworks. Even if we were not interested in fanworks themselves, the practices which are already in use are certainly relevant to information science.

Additionally, fandom signifiers are famously hard to decipher if removed from their primary context. Without detailed work dedicated to preserving this context as intact as possible, the aliens would have a hard time understanding the adventures of Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way.

Dym, Brianna, and Casey Fiesler. 2020. “Ethical and Privacy Considerations for Research Using Online Fandom Data.” In “Fan Studies Methodologies,” edited by Julia E. Largent, Milena Popova, and Elise Vist, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 33. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1733.

So what are some other reasons preserving and categorising fanworks can be important?

Your Go-To Piece of Criticism: Matt Hills, Part 1

Matt Hills is a fan studies and media scholar of really wide breadth, expertise, and versatility, author of the classic fan studies text Fan Cultures (2002) as well as a number of subsequent monographs: How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (2005),The Pleasures of Horror (2005), Triumph of a time lord (2010), Blade Runner (2011) Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event (2015)  – he’s also one of the editors of Transatlantic Television Drama (2019),  the Doctor Who reader Adventures Across Space and Time (2023), and Theatre Fandom (2025) as well as a prolific writer of essays and book chapters on a broad swath of fandoms, practices, and cult classics: Star Wars, Veronica Mars, Torchwood, Sherlock, Buffy, Lord of the Rings, and more.

When I asked Matt to give me a go-to piece of criticism, he agonized, wanting different quotes for different areas of his scholarly repertoire. Could he do more than one?  Sure he could do more than one! – far be it for me to contain the wide-ranging mind of Matt Hills. 😀

So we’ll get three quotes from Matt, starting today with his quote for fan studies.  –FC

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Any go-to citation would have changed over the years for me, and could also have been linked to a specific book project or set of journal articles/chapters that I was working on. If I think about the main areas that I publish in — fan studies and work on Doctor Who (not always about Who fans, but often) — then I’d select the following…

An Indicative Quotation for Fan Studies:

Participation in geek culture, like many leisure activities, presupposes access to at least some material or cultural commodities. For example  if you want to garden, you need seeds and tools; if you want to play music, you need instruments and perhaps sheet music; if you want to go bird-watching, you need a pair of binoculars (Keat 2000, 144). Russell Keat calls these objects “equipment-goods.” They are commodities whose consumption enables the pursuit of some practice, rather than being a pleasurable end in itself. Cultural goods can also be considered equipment-goods for at least some of their consumers: comic book fans need comics and gamers need games, just like birdwatchers need their binoculars. In our society, the production and distribution of these goods are principally orchestrated through markets. Markets not only supply practitioners with needed equipment-goods but also generate a livelihood for the people who make and distribute them – after all, even the most committed individuals can only volunteer so much of their time and personal financial resources. Yet the interests of producers, intermediaries, and consumers do not always match. (Woo 2018: 132–133)

I’ve gone back a lot very recently to Getting A Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture (2018) by Benjamin Woo. It’s such a rich empirical study, and so well theorised (it reminds me of when I first read Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers in that regard). I find it useful for the extent to which it acknowledges how geek culture is built out of commodities (collectables and assorted merch) and relationships to commercial venues/spaces, while also recognising the community but also the sociality of fandom. I think as a study it will end up reaching far beyond the contexts of its initial fieldwork and analysis.

— Matt Hills (Honorary Professor at the University of Bristol, and previously Professor of Fandom Studies at Huddersfield University).

Transformative and participatory information behaviours – for starters

The premise of fandom studies is that fannish works and cultures are distinctive. So, in this case, fannish information behaviours are distinctive. One way, specifically that they are distinctive is that

fanworks, in both physical and digital form, are seen to take a central place in the information environment;

Price, L.; Robinson, L. (2017). ‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities. Journal of Information Science, 43(5), 649-664. doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2020-0089

It is not the primary source that takes central space in fannish information systems but transformative works, this transformation being the unique way fans alter the information. (That the information is altered is in itself not in opposition to general information behaviours. Organisation and dissemination, for example, can also be framed as alteration of data without considering any other processes.)

In the same research, there were some statements that the majority of fans participating in the experiment agreed on:

Fans collect information for other fans in the form of creating rec lists, link lists, wikis, tutorials, guides, etc.

Other fans are an important discovery tool and source of information.

Certain fans act as information sources or gatekeepers for the wider fan community.

Price, L.; Robinson, L. (2017). ‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities. Journal of Information Science, 43(5), 649-664. doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2020-0089

These statements also place fandom (other fans, fanworks as in rec lists, fan community) in the focus of these information behaviours. If we squint, we can also catch the participatory nature of fandoms, that of the active consumer: here are the tutorials and guides you can follow, here are the lists leading you to further information and here are the fanworks where you have to place together how it builds on canon yourself.

There is an old joke in humanities where a professor proclaims something to be a social construct. The audience finds that a really interesting starting point and urges them to keep talking. They say, no, that was the conclusion. So, let us start here and continue with the scholarship the researchers of both fandom studies and information sciences have provided us with.