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
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,
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
Fanfiction and Assemblage
“A commercially published novel is multiply produced—editors, agents, designers, marketers, literary sources, and market demands, all have their parts to play—but it comes to readers as a discrete book‐shaped entity with a single authored name. It is Carry On by
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
Fandom isn’t just fandom. It’s an institution where many people learn a lot about life since they tend to get into it from a young age. And if fandom itself isn’t capable of recognizing when it’s going wrong because desire
It is a common assumption that illicit distribution of video footage from live events negatively affects those who have paid for a ticket by reducing the value of their experience, particularly visible when commercial organizations restrict this practice. However, the
Much of the debate surrounding “Rebel Girl” centers on the question of whether or not someone can be a political fan in the same way one can be a sports fan or media fan. In an essay on youth activism,
The Yogscast are a group of online Let’s Players who produce YouTube videos in which they play video games, joke with one another, and sometimes engage in long-form storytelling. Some members of the Yogs have been friends for a decade,
Fan debates that spiral out of control used to be called wank, ostensibly because it was seen as self-aggrandizing with no particular goal except for an anonymous emotional release on the internet, and it was labelled and described as such