So, a little bit of a different post today! Fanhackers will always be about making Fan Studies scholarship more accessible, but Fan Studies encompasses a whole lot of other methodologies and disciplines. This post will be the first of a
On fan culture and activism…
Fan culture offers a history of appropriation and critical engagement with pop culture that could inform broader activist strategies toward increased visibility and collective identity formation. Brough, Melissa M., and Sangita Shresthova. 2011. ‘Fandom Meets Activism: Rethinking Civic and Political
There is a general sense, from the language of industry-side people in big presentations or casual conversations, that the attendees [of San Diego Comic-Con] are “true believers,” supernerds who love — or will love — every scrap of geeky pop culture that comes their
GIFs in general comprise single looped images, but fans often create more complex GIF sets, which are “sets of images, sometimes animated, sometimes not, arranged in a grid of sorts to communicate as a whole” that have “evolved primarily on
Yet it is precisely users’ inability to establish effective boundaries on Tumblr that has led to the ongoing and still hotly contested diversification of fandom participation and expression. Tumblr-enabled fandom cross-fertilization—what Matt Hills (2015) calls transfandom—has contributed to the growth
The next stage of social TV is here. Drawing on promotional discourses, I argue that Facebook and Twitter’s shift from distributors of television network programming to their own original content is a natural extension of industry practice, but not a
As television outlets have proliferated through cable and streaming services, programming, both for adults and teens, has increasingly explored controversial and sensitive issues. Simultaneously, online fandom and social media engagement surrounding television has also proliferated, thus raising questions as to
This all raises the question: are there right and wrong ways to watch a television series? I am reminded of Immanuel Kant’s belief, outlined in his Critique of Judgment (1790), that when we consume art, we do so under the
This hugeness of the companies—the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing—is the thing that fans still and most radically misunderstand. This is even more the case with movies than with television shows. Movies, as projects, are
Over the course of three seasons, Sleepy Hollow’s dedicated fan base used social media to launch an intersectional critique and urge change in the industry. Their efforts involved writing fan fiction, calling out stereotypical representations, and boycotting the show. While