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
Your Fill
In this past calendar year, we kept telling you about research we found interesting. Now, a prompt for you: what has been the meta, research paper, book, any text discussing fandom that caught your attention this year? Was it related
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,
Platforms and Fan Experiences
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about platforms and the way in which they influence fan experiences. As a consistent lurker, I have been on Tumblr for more than a decade, and more recently on Twitter for the past
The Classics of Fan Studies: Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse – Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet
Today, I’m going to talk about a book that I always recommend to people who want to discover fan studies: Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet which is a collection of essays around fandoms edited
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
The Classics of Fan Studies: Camille Bacon-Smith – Enterprising Women
The next work in our exploration of the classics of fan studies is Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. It was published in the same year as Textual Poachers and the two have often
An Intimate Sound–Podfic and Confluence
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about podfic, i.e.., audio versions of fanfic, read out aloud. Podfic, as an audio-based medium, sits at the confluence of disability accessibility, performance, and of course, simply being a new form of narrative