While the omegaverse opens up possibilities of playing with gender and sexuality in new and interesting ways, the stories overwhelmingly focus on pairings between two white men, effectively foreclosing their progressive potential and recentering whiteness. Further, omegaverse stories often exist
Meet the Volunteer: Else/Xun
Hi! *waves* I’m Else/Xun (they/it), a new Fanhackers mod writing from London. I use the names, Else and 旬, interchangeably and at times together. I speak Mandarin, English and a hybrid of both, as well as a little bit of
Naatu Naatu–Not My Oscar Win
Much before Naatu Naatu won the Oscars for Best Song, Screen Junkies made an honest trailer for RRR. It was the first time I’d seen an Indian film—a non-Bollywood, South-Indian film at that—take up western media attention, at least on
Theorization of the Racialized Fan
”…I posit that the unexamined yet assumed whiteness of media fan spaces has allowed for successive theorizations about their workings to have now solidified into accepted histories. This positioning now forces any consideration of racial dynamics within those spaces to
Meet the Volunteer: Shyamala
Hello, hello! I (she/her/hers) am Shyamala—feel free to rhyme that with Pamela—and I am the latest Fanhackers recruit. Armed with a B.A. from the Global South, an M.A. in English Lit and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, I’ve been writing
On the legitimization of fic and romance
The transparency of fan fiction and romance as repetitions, as proliferations of shared sources, permits texts in these genres, so frequently disparaged for being all the same, to register greater differences between them than texts that purport to stand alone.
On 50 Shades and Publishing Fic
When [E.L] James erased her fan fiction from online fan archives, she deleted a part of the cultural heritage of her fellow fans to the detriment of their community, and she denied the explicitly communal nature of the authorship of
Framing Fanfiction
Fan fiction tends to foreground the communal: it depends on the interaction between readers and writers, and it often creates its own infrastructures, all of which throw into relief fan fiction’s social features. I’d even go so far as to
On Female Fandom & Gift Culture…
In female fandom’s gift culture, gifts correlate to aspects of the self, such as time or talent. This sort of exchange turns one role of woman and gift on its head: the woman is still the gift, but now she
Let’s Talk Fandom & Politics
With the state of the world being what it currently is, what better time to talk fandom and politics? The newest special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures does just that: The essays in this issue contribute not only to