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
My love is a work song
Fandom is fandom because of fans’ activities and participation. The fandom object can be any canon, we could argue then. Descriptions of typical canons still emerge. Sometimes they originate from what is already the result of fannish beheaviour. Indeed, Pearson
Fandom Friendships: A Zine Release!
Fandom Friendships: A Zine explores and honors friendships made and sustained through fandom. The zine was open to contributions from anyone and solicited contributions last year. Contributors were asked questions like: Just some of what this compilation includes tells the story of:
Fanworks and Seriality
“The flexible transmedia seriality of fan works becomes obvious in those which have “escaped” fan culture to become mainstream successes. Mainstream audiences often attempt to retroactively build a baseline to make sense of fan works’ narrative and aesthetic experimentation; yet,
The Classics of Fan Studies: Matt Hills – Fan Culture
The classic of fan studies I want to introduce today is a theoretical overview of the discipline from 2002. Indeed, in Fan Culture, Matt Hills explores the different theories of fan culture and the methodologies that had been used by
Fan Archiving, Part 2
Fans’ archive building and archive maintenance constitute attempts to prove to the future that particular queer and female ways of being and making existed. If fan archivists did not carefully assemble such proof, women and queer fans’ digital collective actions
Fan Archiving, Part 1
Achille Mbembe states that archives confer status on their contents, and on the culture and society that produced those contents: “The archive … is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the end, results in the granting
Fannish proximity across time and space
Sedgwick wrote on the transformative potential of queer reading practices in ways that, to me, also describe fannish modes of attachment: “I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects,
Fan Labor and the Promise of Representation
“While it might seem self-evident that online patterns are repeated in offline spaces, it is vital to note that these exclusions occur within spaces already marked by the language of representation and inclusion. That is, queer fans of color are
Fan production of counterknowledge through set reporting
Fans challenge the informational, brand control of media producers by discovering and circulating unofficial news, gossip, rumours and photos of on-set filming. [Matt] Hills discusses the phenomenon of fan “set reporting”, whereby audiences tweet, blog and upload their photos and